The legend says the USS Eldridge vanished in a green fog in 1943, teleported hundreds of miles, and left sailors fused into steel. This episode investigates not whether the Navy broke the laws of physics, but how an impossible horror story became an indestructible modern myth, tracing it back to an anonymous package and a deeply troubled mind.

The discussion follows the bizarre annotated UFO book mailed to the Office of Naval Research, the letters from Carl Allen, and how military bureaucracy accidentally lent the hoax an aura of legitimacy. It then dismantles the timeline with the ship's own logs and reveals the mundane realities behind the legend, from degaussing against magnetic mines to a secret canal route and an underage sailor slipping out a tavern's back door.

• The Happy Easter package and the three fictional margin-writin ...