So it turns out, that the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Eldridge is believed to be the first significant object successfully (or pseudo-successfully, I guess) "cloaked". Cloaking is a fictional process in which an object, usually something epic like a spaceship or a tank - is rendered invisible to the electromagnetic spectrum. So yeah, lets totally defy physics and inivisble a fucking ship, we'll see how that goes.
So, the Navy decided, based on something called the "Unified Field Theory", to use electrical generators to bend light around the object in order to make invisible. The story goes, that a test in July of 1943, resulted in the Eldridge being almost completely cloaked, with witnesses reporting a green fog appearing in its place.
But this is where it becomes awesome. It is said that when the ship reappeared, sailors were actually embedded in the metal of the ship, including one sailor who ended up on a deck level below that where he began, with his hand embedded in a steel girder. At that point, it is said that the experiment was altered at the request of the Navy, with the new objective being solely to render the Eldridge invisible to radar. Unfortunately for me, none of these claims have been officially substantiated.
This whole thing, popularly referred to as "The Philadelphia Experiment" or "Project Rainbow", has been surpressed/disproved/abandoned over the years, but remains a point of discussion & debate for conspiracy theorists to this day. I'm totally going to break into Area 51 one day, and do some snooping around for myself... Then we'll see what's what.
