Came the final and fatal day, 12th of August 1943. Went out into the harbor again. Everybody was a little shaky, and my brother and myself particularly. So we went out on station, the orders came to throw the switch, to fire the equipment. For about 60 to 70 seconds everything looked okay. They had their radar invisibility, you could still see the ship, an outline.
Then there was a blue flash and the ship disappeared totally.
At that point of course von Neumann panicked. The ship disappeared completely, they didn’t know what happened to it. About four hours later the ship reappeared in the harbor, in the same location where it had been. It was quite obvious when it reappeared that something was wrong. They shipped a crew out, a crew on a launch, because they still had no response to radio signals. They had indications that something was very seriously wrong. They could already see this because the antenna superstructure was broken. So out went the crew and they went and boarded the ship and found the following:
Two men embedded in the steel decks; two men embedded in steel bulkheads; the fifth man with his hand embedded in the steel bulkhead — he lived, they chopped his hand off. Gave him an artificial hand. People running around totally bananas, and really insane, out of it. People who were appearing and disappearing. A few who were on fire, if you remember the biblical story about the bush that burned without being consumed. They had men like this. And everybody was seriously disoriented. The only people who escaped this disorientation were those who were below decks, that also included my brother and myself. That’s where the very interesting part of the story comes in.
