Friday Meanderings: The X-Files, The Philadelphia Experiment, & Dyatlov Pass
These past few weeks have been a bit rough in la casa de Lau. We've been riding the waves of a persistent flu, passing it back and forth like some cursed family heirloom. Perhaps at times I’ve felt like a zombie or the damned resident of a ghost ship, long lost at sea.
And while I’m usually the kind of person who reads my way through illness, this time, the fever had other plans. When my mind’s foggy and my body’s aching, I tend to reach for comfort—nostalgia, mystery, and a healthy dose of the bizarre. So, naturally, I found myself deep in a rewatch of The X-Files.
Now, I could easily fill a book with musings on Mulder, Scully, the beautiful weirdness of their adventures, and my own arguments for why the “creature-of-the-week” episodes are way better than the larger government conspiracy story arc, but it was one particular episode in season 2 that caught me in the right kind of fever dream: Død Kalm.
In this episode, the agents investigate a derelict Navy ship adrift in Norwegian waters. The surviving crew members are mysteriously aged beyond their years, their bodies breaking down as though time itself is off-kilter. Mulder, in true Mulder fashion, proposes a wild idea—that the ship has been subjected to a kind of temporal disturbance, not unlike the legendary Philadelphia Experiment.
Which brings us here—to a strange little intersection of pop culture, conspiracy beliefs, and real-world mystery. But we’re not gonna stop at just ghost ships and beliefs in secret military experiments using out-of-this-world technology. Thinking about the Philadelphia Experiment also brings to mind for me the Dyatlov Pass Incident. You’ll see why that’s a heck of a stretch if you read on.
Død Kalm: Maritime Mystique
“Død Kalm,” which translates roughly to “Dead Calm,” draws on a long tradition of ghost ship stories—vessels found drifting at sea, abandoned without clear explanation.
Ghost ships sit at the eerie crossroads of maritime lore, horror and mystery, and science fiction. These vessels—abandoned yet somehow still afloat—embody the ultimate uncanny object. We expect ships to be full of noise, crew, and movement. When they're silent, when the decks creak under no one's footsteps and the lights flicker with no hands to maintain them, the imagination runs wild. Ghost ship stories hail from those feelings of mystery and uncertainty in the vastness of the ocean, mysterious ideas around unknown causes of disaster, and concepts of divine or supernatural punishments.
There are many examples of real-world myths as well as the ghost ship trope in various stories. Here’s just a small smattering of examples:
The Mary Celeste: The real-world benchmark for ghost ship stories. The Mary Celeste sailed out from port on 7 November of 1872, but less than a month later, on 5 December, it was spotted adrift by a ship that was following a similar path and had left later. The crew of the ship, Dei Gratia, sent his crew to offer support, and instead they found an enduring mystery in maritime history. The ship’s crew of 10 was gone, most of their supplies were still there, but the only single lifeboat was gone. Ideas have ranged from piracy by the Dei Gratia (the captain and crew were suspected of killing the other crew to claim the rights to the insurance value of the ship), perhaps abandonment of ship out of fear of sinking (though the crew was never seen again, so they would have been lost at sea), mutiny could have led to some killing the others and then escaping on the lifeboat, and, of course, some have suggested supernatural ideas like ghosts and demons. We may never know!
The Flying Dutchman: The quintessential story of a legendary and mysterious ship appearing from the mist and bringing damnation upon sailors should they be boarded. The phantom ship is doomed to sail forever. Often seen as an omen of doom. It appears in literature (a similar phantom ship appears in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), in opera (Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer), and the more recent Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has added their own spin on the story.
SS Baychimo: A derelict ship that suffered a series of incidents, leading to the remnants of its crew to wait out a blizzard with an encampment on ice near the ship in November of 1931. Three days later, the blizzard had passed, but the ship was gone. The sailors assumed it had sunk where it was moored in the ice. But then the strangeness came: the ship was repeatedly sighted over decades, drifting without crew. At times it was even boarded, but no other ship that came upon it had the ability (nor funding) to salvage it. It was last seen floating in 1969. It became a kind of real-life wandering myth.
Film—Event Horizon (1997): Hey, spaceships count in the ghost ship lore as well, friends! And Event Horizon is one of the best for sci-fi horror onboard a cursed ship returned from some realm of pain and evil. I have a longstanding belief that they really messed up on the editing: if you watch some of the cut scenes, there’s some more really dark and cerebral stuff, but they chose instead to keep in more of the hokey and campy stuff. Still, a fantastic film!
Video Game Series—Dead Space: This is PEAK “ghost ship in space” sci-fi horror. The first game centers on the USG Ishimura, a derelict spaceship where a search and rescue crew who show up immediately become stuck onboard (as tends to be the trope). The Ishimura is both a morgue drifting in the void replete with the most atrocious of apparent acts as well as being a haunted house filled with alien-possessed human-derived zombie creatures. The perfect blend of body horror, existential dread, and technological breakdown. The stories explore a lot of concepts in horror, religion, mythology, impacts of alien artifacts on society, and are full of terror, jump scares, and the sinister. I once started the game up at a friend’s house for a “show and play” video game night and he screamed and jumped up and turned off his system about 5 minutes in, relaying that he can’t do jump scares or dark video game imagery. It remains the only series of games that have legit had me in a panic when playing late at night with the lights off.
(There are so many examples in literature, film, and in real-life, so please let me know in the comments below if you have another example you think is worthy of sharing!)
The X-Files episode is no different.
In Død Kalm, Mulder and Scully board the derelict U.S.S. Ardent and discover the horrifying results of rapid aging among the crew. As their investigation unfolds, hypotheses range from contaminated water to cosmic anomalies. But what makes the episode memorable is its atmosphere—salt-crusted decay, creaking metal, and the creeping realization that time itself may be breaking down.
It’s no surprise, then, that Mulder links this to the Philadelphia Experiment (which probably served as one of the key inspirations for the writers).
The U.S.S. Eldridge and the Philadelphia Experiment
The story of the Philadelphia Experiment has all the ingredients of a classic conspiracy belief: secret military research, unexplained phenomena, dubious eyewitnesses, and enough holes in the plot that the story *should* sink before it ever gets a chance to swim. And, yet, the idea continues on in popular culture.
According to the legend, in 1943 the U.S. Navy attempted to render the destroyer escort USS Eldridge invisible to radar—and accidentally teleported it. Some versions of the story claim crew members were fused into the ship’s hull. Others say the ship briefly vanished from Philadelphia and reappeared in Norfolk, Virginia, for a few minutes before suddenly warping back again.
There is, of course, no credible evidence that this ever happened.
The story originates from a single individual named Carl Allen (or Carlos Allende), who sent letters to UFO researchers in the 1950s claiming to have witnessed the experiment (along with a wide range of other supernatural and technologically advanced things for which there remains no other evidence). The Navy has consistently denied that such an experiment ever took place, and historians point out that the timelines don’t match, the physics don’t work, and there is no known record of anyone from the actual ship itself reporting anything similar.
And yet, the myth lives on—perhaps because it’s just so good.
The idea of the Philadelphia Experiment taps into deep fears about unchecked government power, the manipulation of reality, and the fragility of the human body when exposed to forces we don’t understand. It’s no wonder The X-Files writers leaned into it so hard (even if, like much of the fodder for the show, it was based more on mythology than any substantial scientific idea)/
The Dyatlov Pass Incident and a Devilish Crossover
If the Philadelphia Experiment is the sea-bound ghost of American military paranoia, the Dyatlov Pass Incident is its snowy Soviet cousin.
In 1959, nine experienced hikers disappeared in the Ural Mountains. Their bodies were later discovered with bizarre injuries: missing eyes and tongues, internal trauma without external wounds, and tents ripped from the inside. It’s one of those bizarre stories that is just so mysterious, it’s fun to listen to podcasts and read about it late at night. We don’t know what happened (and might never know). The hikers appeared to have stopped and made camp in a terrible spot (even though they were all experienced in mountaineering), they appear to have cut their tent open from the inside and ran out into the night with almost none of their supplies, and then their bodies were found separated and mangled in ways that to this day have left researchers uncertain of what could have befallen them.
Hypotheses have ranged from a faulty cook stove to fear of an avalanche for explaining why they left (but nothing else). Other ideas presented have included infrasound-induced panic and mania as well as even secret weapons tests. Some have suggested that they were killed by local indigenous people for trespassing.
While more rational explanations have emerged in recent years (such as a specific type of slab avalanche combined with hypothermia and disorientation), the mystery remains fertile ground for the strange and speculative. And that brings us to The Devil’s Pass—a 2013 found-footage horror film that attempts to tie the Philadelphia Experiment and Dyatlov Pass together.
The movie suggests that a Soviet teleportation experiment gone wrong tore a hole in space-time, leading to monstrous consequences in the Russian wilderness.
It’s a stretch. But also kind of horrifically fun for some late night jump scares (if you’re into that kind of thing—I get that some of my readers may have stopped reading by now if they’re not into sci-fi horror, ghost stories, or anything touching on the creepy).
Why We Keep Coming Back
The idea of coming upon a derelict ship or experiencing bizarre phenomena in the wild remains popular in storytelling. I personally think it’s fantastic fodder for sci-fi stories set in space (what happens if we come upon a long abandoned alien spaceship in our own solar system or one day set foot on an alien world?). And it’s fun for writers to tie those ideas in with others like the Philadelphia Experiment and secret Soviet technological experimentation. It all makes for stories that can be mysterious, terrifying, and alluring.
There’s something oddly comforting about these stories, too, though. They remind us that the world—no matter how mapped or measured—still contains mysteries. That our trust in science and government, while well-founded, isn’t absolute (or, at least, shouldn’t be—question everything!). And that sometimes, the scariest ghosts aren’t dead sailors or Cold War secrets—but the creeping sense that something isn’t quite right beneath the surface.
So next time you're under the weather, maybe revisit an old episode of The X-Files. Let yourself drift a little into that liminal space between truth and fiction, between history and hallucination. And remember: the truth may be out there, but so are the best stories.