h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The thing that always got me about the Philidelphia Experiment was the choice of the ship involved. The Eldridge was a Destroyer Escort - DE-173 - and if you wanted to do a ship experiment at that time, a DE would be a perfect platform. It's small enough and common enough not to attract undue attention, but large enough to mount electronic equipment, and carries enough crew to provide a decent cross-section of medical cases for judging the physiological impacts of any electronic testing. Also, they were mass produced in vast numbers - it would probably have been easier to get one free for testing than would be the case with a larger ship.
I am inclined to think that the Philidephia Experiment story is true up to a point - they probably did some sort of electronic testing (perhaps into radar jamming) on the Eldridge, it could have had ill effects on the crew and the whole project was rendered impractical. But I'm not sure how far that testing went. Maybe an early form of "active stealth".
Funnily enough, I was reading that everything that eye-witnesses saw in the experiment - as opposed to to stuff they conjectured - could be explained if the US Navy were using high-frequency sirens to create an artificial cloud bank around the ship. Sounds painful.