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DID THE USS ELDRIDGE extraordinary conclusions? And why did these writers leave their readers with the impression that the ship had effectively been translated into another realm—possibly even meeting UFO entities during this trip— when other, more mundane explanations were staring them in the face? I went back to my own correspondence with Carl Allen to find the answer. He had written to me for the first time on June 28, 1967, 183 DEATH OF AN ASTRONOMER drove the disturbed astronomer into even deeper emotional turmoil. Yet all attempts by him and by the Navy to locate Carlos Allende failed. Jessup was described by his friend, Dr. Ivan Sanderson, as "an ebul- lient enthusiast . . . almost too enthusiastic and confident of his theo- ries," who seemed to "suddenly doubt everything" after corresponding with Allende. Late in 1958 Jessup had dinner with Sanderson in New York, turned over much of his material to him for safekeeping "in case anything should happen to me," and made several comments indicating his deep state of distress. He went back to Florida, where he eventually took his own life. DISAPPEAR? The single element that may have attracted the interest of the Navy researchers in the whole affair was probably the description given by the enigmatic Carlos Allende of a massive experiment to make a ship, the USS Eldridge (DE 173), vanish from the Philadelphia Navy Yard through a series of magnetic manipulations—an episode that still exerts considerable fascination on audiences across the country. Capitalizing on this fascination, two writers published a book about the incident in 1979, concluding: It is intriguing to conceive the possibility that an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Navy may have accidentally managed to pass through a doorway into another world. (The Philadelphia Experiment, Grosset & Dunlap, p. 160.) What was it about the Allende revelations that drove them to such