What Is Philadelphia Experiment II?
Philadelphia Experiment II, sometimes written as Philadelphia Experiment 2, is an American science fiction action film released on November 12, 1993. It was directed by Stephen Cornwell, written by Kevin Rock and Nick Paine from a story by Kim Steven Ketelsen, and distributed by Trimark Pictures. It runs 97 minutes.
It is a direct sequel to The Philadelphia Experiment (1984), but it does not feel like a simple continuation. The cast is entirely new, and only two characters carry over: David Herdeg, the hero, and Professor Jim Longstreet, who directed the original experiment. Where the first film followed a man stranded decades from home, the sequel swerves into alternate history, imagining a United States conquered after Germany wins World War II.
The numbers tell a story of their own. The film reportedly cost about $5 million, and its recorded box office gross is just $2,970, a figure that points to an extremely limited theatrical run.
The Plot: From a Quiet California Life to a Nazi 1993
Spoilers follow for the whole film.
A hero worn down by ordinary life
Nine years after his jump through time, David Herdeg is a widower. He married Allison Hayes, and they had a son, Benjamin, but Allison has died. David’s business is failing, Ben is skipping school, and the bank is threatening to foreclose on the house. Professor Longstreet keeps offering financial help and urging David to rejoin the Navy. David refuses.
He is also suffering painful episodes. Longstreet insists they are just stress. They are not.
Mailer’s teleporting bomber
Meanwhile, an engineer named William Mailer is working with technology derived from the Philadelphia Experiment. Mailer is the son of Friedrich Mahler, a Nazi scientist who worked on a project similar to the American one. His goal is military: teleport a bomber into enemy airspace, strike without warning, and pull it back out before anyone can respond.
He demonstrates the idea by beaming a model plane across a room. The panel is interested, but Longstreet, who supplied Mailer’s equipment on the condition that it be used only for testing, persuades them not to back it. Mailer’s tests, it turns out, are what trigger David’s seizures. When David learns Longstreet has lied to him, he packs to leave California.
Mailer, determined to prove himself, teleports a real F-117 Nighthawk. The aircraft never comes back.
The world changes
David collapses in agony and watches reality shift around him. Ben disappears. He finds himself in a radically altered 1993 and is soon running from an armed military unit. A resistance leader named Jess rescues him and explains the new history: Germany won the war, and America is about to mark 50 years under Nazi rule.
The turning point was a futuristic aircraft called the Phoenix, which dropped atomic bombs on Washington, D.C., and other East Coast targets, forcing the Allies to surrender. The Phoenix was later destroyed in an explosion. Mahler claimed to have built it, then became a figure of ridicule when he could not build another.
The Phoenix, of course, was Mailer’s F-117. Mailer had aimed it at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and it got there, but it also slipped backward through time, carrying a nuclear payload. Mahler found it and took the credit.
Back to 1943
In this timeline, Longstreet leads the resistance. He recruits David to travel back and stop the Phoenix, which only David can do because his earlier trip through time has given his blood unusual properties. Mailer exists here too, as a Nazi administrator who has developed time travel technology of his own and knows exactly who David is.
The resistance raids Mailer’s base. David is captured and Mailer takes a vial of his blood, but David escapes and goes back in time, with Mailer close behind. Both arrive in 1943 on the night before the Phoenix’s mission. Mailer finds his father and tries to warn him; Mahler replies that he has no son. While they talk, David destroys the aircraft.
As David heads for the portal, Mailer shoots and wounds him. Before Mailer can finish the job, David shoots and kills Mahler, and the paradox wipes Mailer from existence. David crawls through the portal into a restored 1993 and finds Ben at a Little League game. In a final grace note, Jess is now the mother of one of Ben’s teammates.
Philadelphia Experiment II Cast and Crew
The cast of Philadelphia Experiment II is anchored by three performances, with Gerrit Graham doing double duty as father and son.
| Role | Actor | Who they are in the story |
|---|---|---|
| David Herdeg | Brad Johnson | The time-displaced sailor from the first film, now a struggling single father |
| Dr. William Mailer / Friedrich Mahler | Gerrit Graham | The ambitious engineer and his Nazi scientist father |
| Jess | Marjean Holden | Leader of the underground resistance in the altered timeline |
| Benjamin Herdeg | John Christian Graas | David’s son, erased by the timeline shift |
| Professor Longstreet | James Greene | Director of the original experiment; resistance leader in the new timeline |
| Decker | Cyril O’Reilly | Supporting role |
| Logan | Geoffrey Blake | Supporting role |
| Scotch | Lisa Robins | Supporting role |
Behind the camera, Ronn Schmidt handled cinematography, Nina Gilberti edited, and Gerald Gouriet composed the score. Producers included Mark Amin, Douglas Curtis, Paul Hellerman and Mark Levinson.
Casting Graham in both villain roles is the film’s sharpest idea. The scene where Mailer meets his father and is coldly rejected only works because the same face sits on both sides of the conversation, and it sets up the ending: the son is undone by the death of the father he could never impress.
How Does Time Travel Work in the Sequel?
The sequel’s time rules are the part of the story viewers argue about most. The original film moves David forward from 1943 to 1984; the sequel asks a different question: what happens when the same kind of technology changes the past itself?
In Philadelphia Experiment II, history can be rewritten
When the F-117 lands in 1943, the present is overwritten. David, because of his earlier exposure, is the one person who notices: he experiences the change as a physical seizure and keeps his memories of the old world. Everyone else, including Longstreet and Mailer, simply lives in the new history.
That gives the film three working rules:
- Changes to the past overwrite the present. There is no parallel universe; the old 1993 is gone until someone fixes it.
- Time travel leaves a mark on the body. David’s blood carries the effects of his first journey, which is why Mailer wants a sample and why the resistance needs David.
- Paradoxes erase people. Killing Mahler before his son is born removes Mailer instantly.
The holes viewers point out
The ending leans on what is usually called the grandfather paradox: if you go back and prevent your own existence, who traveled back in the first place? The film invites a cousin of that question. If Mailer is erased, he never sends the F-117, so the Phoenix never exists, so the Nazi 1993 never happens, so nobody needs to go back. The movie sidesteps this by treating the corrected timeline as the one that sticks, a convention plenty of time travel stories use.
There is a second wrinkle. Mailer exists in both timelines, as an American engineer in one and a Nazi official in the other, and is the son of Mahler in each. The story never fully explains how he grew up so similarly in such different worlds, beyond the implication that the family line was always there. If you watch it as a pulpy thriller rather than a physics lecture, these gaps fade. If you watch it as a puzzle, they are part of the fun.
The idea of one person remembering a world everyone else has forgotten also echoes modern talk about altered memories, explored in our look at popular Mandela effect examples, and broader questions about memory and perception gathered under consciousness and the mind.
Where the Story Comes From: The Wartime Legend
Philadelphia Experiment II is fiction built on fiction built on a legend. Understanding the layers helps.
At the bottom sits a story about a secret US Navy experiment during World War II, retold for decades in books, rumor and word of mouth, with details that shift from one telling to the next. No reliable record shows that such an experiment took place, and the story is best treated as a legend rather than history.
The 1984 film took that rumor and turned it into a time travel story, which is where David Herdeg comes from. The 1993 sequel then followed the first film’s internal logic rather than the legend itself, inventing a German counterpart project, a stealth jet and an occupied America. For the full background on the ship and the claims around it, see USS Philadelphia Experiment: Eldridge Legend and 1984 Film.
| Element | Status |
|---|---|
| A 1993 sequel film, directed by Stephen Cornwell, released by Trimark | Documented |
| The F-117 Nighthawk as a real stealth aircraft | Documented |
| A secret wartime Navy experiment behind the story | Legend; unproven |
| A man sent through time from 1943 to 1984 | Invented for the 1984 film |
| A Nazi teleportation program, the Phoenix, and an occupied America | Invented for the sequel |
The legend belongs to a wider family of wartime and Cold War rumors about secret technology, which you can follow through conspiracy theories, examined. Kindred tales of experiments in time, including the stories covered in The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, show how the idea kept mutating long after the war. And the notion of ships vanishing without explanation has its own long history at sea, as in the mysterious Bermuda Triangle.
Is Philadelphia Experiment II Worth Watching?
A fair answer depends on what you bring to it.
The case for
- A big premise. A modern stealth jet becoming a superweapon in 1943 is a genuinely memorable hook, and the Nazi-occupied 1993 gives the film a strong second act.
- Pace. At 97 minutes, it moves quickly from domestic drama to dystopia to a wartime raid.
- Graham’s double role. The father-son scene in 1943 gives the climax real weight.
- A human center. David’s motivation is simple and relatable: he wants his son back.
The case against
- Budget limits. On roughly $5 million, the alternate America is shown more through a few sets and armed patrols than through a fully built world.
- Familiar beats. Resistance fighters, a hero who alone remembers, a race to the past: much of it will feel borrowed to anyone raised on time travel films.
- Tone shift. The sequel leans hard into straightforward action. Viewers who loved the strangeness of the original’s premise may find the sequel thinner.
Within the Philadelphia Experiment movies, the sequel works best as a companion piece. Watch the 1984 film first so David’s history means something, then treat Philadelphia Experiment II as a scrappy what-if that takes the original’s idea in a wilder direction.
Common Mix-ups About Philadelphia Experiment II
A few errors come up again and again in discussions of the film.
- Calling it a remake. Philadelphia Experiment II is a sequel. It continues David Herdeg’s story nine years later rather than retelling the 1943 events.
- Assuming the original actors returned. The cast is entirely new. Herdeg and Longstreet return as characters, played by Brad Johnson and James Greene.
- Thinking the Phoenix was a German invention. In the story, the Phoenix is Mailer’s F-117 from 1993. Mahler only found it and claimed the credit, which is why he could never build a second one.
- Mixing up Mailer and Mahler. Mailer is the son, the American engineer and later the Nazi official. Mahler is the father, the 1943 scientist. Gerrit Graham plays both.
- Taking the plot as history. The Phoenix, the German program and the occupied America are invented. The legend underneath them is itself unproven.
- Thinking the stealth jet was meant to go back in time. In the story, Mailer was aiming for Ramstein Air Base in his own present. The trip to 1943 was the accident that changed everything.
Why Philadelphia Experiment II Still Draws Viewers
More than three decades on, Philadelphia Experiment II survives for the same reason the legend does: it asks what happens when a secret experiment slips its leash. The wartime rumor imagined a military secret too strange to admit. The 1984 film imagined a man lost between decades. The sequel imagines an entire country lost to a single mistake.
It is not a polished film, and it does not pretend to be. But its central image, a father who alone remembers the world as it should be, fighting to drag it back, gives the story a pull that its budget cannot fully explain. For viewers who love the strange history behind the Philadelphia Experiment movies, it is a curious chapter worth knowing.
If you want to keep following the threads, the rest of the journal has more cases and legends, and the Troubled Minds Vault collects long-form conversations about the unexplained from the radio show’s archive.
Questions and answers
Was there a remake of the Philadelphia Experiment?
Philadelphia Experiment II is often mistaken for a remake, but it is a sequel. It picks up David Herdeg's story nine years after the 1984 film and builds an alternate history plot around a stealth fighter lost in time. Only two characters return, Herdeg and Professor Longstreet, and both are played by different actors. The time travel premise and the 1943 starting point are carried over from the original.
Is Philadelphia Experiment II based on a true story?
No. The plot is invented: the Phoenix, the German teleportation program and the Nazi-ruled 1993 were all created for the film. It continues the story of the 1984 movie, which drew on a wartime legend about a secret US Navy experiment. That legend is itself unproven, so the sequel sits two steps away from anything documented. The only real hardware at its center is the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter.
Is Philadelphia Experiment II a good movie?
It depends on what you want. Philadelphia Experiment II is a modest, fast-paced 1993 action thriller with a striking premise: a Nazi-ruled America created by a time-displaced stealth jet. Its ideas are bigger than its $5 million budget, and the plot borrows familiar time travel beats. Fans of low-budget nineties sci-fi tend to enjoy it; viewers wanting the eerie tone of the original may find it thinner.
What was the original Philadelphia Experiment?
The phrase refers first to a legend about a secret US Navy experiment during World War II, a story that has circulated for decades through books and rumor and is widely treated as unproven. It also names the 1984 film The Philadelphia Experiment, in which sailor David Herdeg is transported through time from 1943 to 1984. The 1993 sequel continues that film's story rather than the legend itself.
Who plays David Herdeg in Philadelphia Experiment II?
Brad Johnson plays David Herdeg, the sailor who was thrown from 1943 into 1984 in the first film. In the sequel he is a widowed father living in California in 1993, struggling with a failing business and a son named Benjamin. Gerrit Graham plays a dual role as the villain Dr. William Mailer and his father, the Nazi scientist Friedrich Mahler, and Marjean Holden plays the resistance fighter Jess.
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