Well, the Philadelphia Experiment did exist... the government did try to make warships invisible. But did they really warp out and reappear? I think possibly something did go wrong... maybe too much radiation was involved, and some people did burn up and some were exposed to high level of radiations, which could possibly have caused them to go insane. Or maybe the effects were so bad from the radiation (you ever see some of the effects from nuclear detonations? people's shadows actually get burned into buildings), and the crews that saw it couldn't comprehended it properly, and just started rumors. Maybe the ship was invisible for 5 seconds, and the crew didn't know what was going on, so assumed it disappeared... and started such rumors "the ship just disappeared, and when it came back, men were on fire".
