 Dana Scully ( Gillian Anderson ) and Fox Mulder ( David Duchovny ) visit the ship 's sole surviving crew member , Lt. Harper , who has been quarantined at the Bethesda Naval Hospital . Scully finds that Harper , despite being in his twenties , has aged to the point of being unrecognizable . Mulder explains that the Ardent vanished at the 65th parallel , a location with a history of ship disappearances . Mulder believes that a " wrinkle in time " exists there , and that the Ardent was the subject of government experimentation related to the Philadelphia Experiment from World War II . 
