Friday, September 13, 2013

Carlos Allende, the most mysterious man

Carlos Allende was an enigmatic man who wittingly or unwittingly propelled the bizarre whispers of the Philadelphia Experiment into a wider public knowledge some decades ago. I had vaguely heard of him, due to my interest in conspiracy theories and the paranormal, but just now became enthralled after reading Berlitz's book about the Philadelphia Experiment.

The more Allende tried to disappear, the more he was hunted. The Navy published a book of his strange marginalia, or gloss-writing in a copy of Morris Jessup's UFO book. He seemed to be an unhinged outsider--but apparently the U.S. Navy was concerned about too many connections he drew to their advanced scientific projects.

Obviously I had to google him, to see what his fate had been. He died in Greeley, Colorado, in the summer of 1986. Allende had written about Albert Einstein's work on the Unified Field Theory, speculating that the physics had been applied by the Navy. (The Phili-Experiment was supposed to have been concerned with invisibility fields and teleportation.)

I can't really get my head around Unified Field Theory (unifying electromagnetism, gravity, and space-time), but I am struck with space intersecting with time. In the mid 80s I saw a fair amount of Greeley, the unprepossessing town where Allende lied low in his final years. In those years I attended the University of Denver, and often took the Greyhound bus to my grandparents in Laramie, Wyoming, spending some weekends. The bus would almost always be waiting or passing through dusty, frozen Greeley in the wee hours. The town was a transit point, a naked lightbulb lonely train whistle night town, a place in between, a netherworld passed through.  I was always happy to arrive at my destination, to drink buttermilk and hear a gentle tick of a clock on the bed stand.