In 1943, the United States Navy and several other government financed groups began conducting many series of experiments that were designed to be used as "secret weapons" during the Second World War. One of these experiments has been attributed to the Department of Naval Research and was primarily focused on the ability of achieving radar invisiblity. The way in which these experiments proceeded were that, by directly involving electromagnetics, and utilizing the so-called "Unified Field Theory", scientists were able to manipulate electromagnetic waves in order to achieve this desired goal.


The hopeful outcome was that by effectively manipulating electromagnetic waveleangths, U.S. ships, and aircraft might become "invisible" to enemy radar; these experiments were actually the preperatory groundwork for today's stealth technology. They had been running a series of small scale tests which seemed to prove the theory workable, and the experiments finally reached a peak aboard a ship of the Destroyer Class, the USS Elderidge. Huge electromagnetic generators were installed in one of the forward turrets, and once enabled, they created an electromagnetic bottle around the ship. What happened next is the material of which legends are born.


When the Elderidge was launched into the Philadelphia Naval Yard, and the generators were turned on, the electromagnetic bottle in effect "sealed" around the ship and it did in fact become radar invisible. There was one suprising side effect however, the ship also became physically invisible before vanishing from the time-space continuum. When the ship returned, the state of the crew was even more shocking. Most of the men were drivin into insanity, presumably from the electromagnetic effect of the displacement field. There were others though, who were in even worse condition and those were the men who had been moving about while the ship was in "Hyperspace" and had now been fused with the solid structures of the ship. These experiments were officially designated as the Rainbow Project, informally, it became known as the Philadelphia Experiment.


This side effect was sufficient to have the Rainbow Projects terminated, and the Manhattan Project, the construction of the Atomic Bomb was born.


The stealth technology of the Rainbow Projects sat on the shelf for a good many years before being picked up again in either the late 40's, or early 50's. This was done by those who had enacted the original experiments, but now there were going to be two areas of research. One was going to be the technical aspect of manipulating the electromagnetic bottle, the other was going to be the human element, in which studies were conducted to examine why the bottle effect was sufficient to induce insanity.