I asked my father if he knew anything about the experiment. I remember he had mentioned it once many years ago, long before the movie. He said that he remembers hearing something about a ship vanishing into thin air only to appear simultaneously in several different parts of the world at the same time. At the time he thought it was just fanciful scuttlebutt. That sort of thing only hapened in "Flash Gordon" or "Buck Rogers". When he began to hear stories, as has been said, of men fused into bulkheads, he began asking questions of friends of his who were closely working with things of such matters. While they couldn't get much information, one, a fellow named Marcellino (I think his first name was 'John') told him about rumors of a crazy-sounding time-travel or teleporting experiment that went horribly awry. That, unfortunately, was all he could get without drawing too much attention. Whether or not this was the Philadelphia Experiment, this account was not relayed as having been from a past life, but from a current one.
John Marcellino, it should be noted, died in the early 1960s as a result of exposure to radiation suffered during an atomic experiment, of which both he and my father were part.