Philadelphia Project

The Philadelphia Project, also known as the Philadelphia Experiment or Project Rainbow, was a naval military experiment which attempted to make the Navy Destroyer Escort USS Eldrigde become invisible, teleport and travel through time. This event took place sometime around July and October, 1943, at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.

Assassin's Creed
This experiment is mentioned in an e-mail to Warren Vidic, from Alan Rikkin, where he told Vidic of Subject 12's Animus sessions, which indicated that the ship did indeed manifest in a future state for approximately 18 minutes. He continued to say that enough data had been found to repair the original artifact, though Administration had refused to move on with the project, citing paradox concerns. He finished by saying that any object with the capability to manipulate time must be contained, thus it had been moved to a secure storage location.

First test
The idea behind the experiment was Einstein's Unified Field Theory, which would apparently enable the Navy to use large electrical generators to bend light around an object so that it could become completely invisible. The test was moderately successful, with witnesses reporting seeing a "greenish fog" where the ship had been. Though the side effects were quite substantial, reports ranged from members of the crew feeling nausea, suffering from mental disorders, being physically embedded to metal parts of the ship or completely vanishing.

Second test
Despite the serious failures of the first test, a second one was undertaken a few months later. This test was far more successful than the previous, not only did the ship become completely invisible, but it also teleported to Norfolk, Virginia, over 200 miles away in a flash of blue light, and sat there for a short time in full sight of the crew of the USS Andrew Furuseth, before reappearing at the original site. It was also said that the ship traveled back in time for ten seconds.

Inaccuracies and contradictions
This story is widely regarded as a hoax, with the U.S. Navy denying all accusations of any experiment, as well as many aspects of the story contradicting facts about the USS Eldrigde and the known laws of physics. The ship was not commissioned until 27 August, 1943, and remained in a New York City port until September, dismissing it's possibility of being at the project site for the first test. As for the second test, the ships logs indicate that it was in the Bahamas at the time, miles away from Philadelphia. When the media got a hold of the story and started looking for sources through key witnesses, many of them turned out to either be lying or suffering from long term mental illnesses. Finally in 1999, a reunion of Navy veterans who had served on the USS Eldrigde told a newspaper that the ship had never actually made port in Philadelphia. Despite this evidence, people still think the experiment took place, believing that logs and records were falsified, and that people were brainwashed to keep them from speaking the truth.

Trivia

 * Shortly before his death in 1943, Nikola Tesla supposedly claimed to have completed some kind of a "Unified Field Theory", though it was never published.