The Montauk Project: The Government Project that Inspired Stranger Things

We’ve covered enough weird stuff on this channel to know that a lot of the time, there’s a kernel of truth around which the whole story develops. We also know that government conspiracies are so popular because there’s a heck of a lot of shady experimental stuff being done in real life that we will probably never hear about. So yes, we’re heading deep into the secret bunkers here but we’ll meet a familiar face along the way who just might turn the whole thing on its head.

Some Background

On Montauk Point, New York, sits a state park that used to house an active US military base and air force station. Nowadays you can wander around the park, taking in the scenery, checking out the abandoned radar tower and possibly contracting Lyme disease from the ticks in the area. Many people are drawn to the site because of the mysterious story that started coming out in the 1980s about secret government experiments that were being conducted on people, including young children. Under the ground of Camp Hero, which is what the base was actually called—a bit on the nose if you ask me—was a network of tunnels and rooms where scientists and military high-ups were experimenting with mind control, psychic espionage and inter-dimensional travel.

If this is all sounding a bit “Stranger Things” to you, then you are correct. Initially pitched with the name “Montauk”, the mysterious story was the original jumping off point for the Duffer Brothers’ Netflix juggernaut but production issues had them changing the location to Indiana and calling it “Stranger Things” instead. Anyway, back in Montauk, all kinds of stuff was going on.

Radars were set up in the late 1940s and early 50s as early warning systems and in 1960 a massive AN/FPS-35 radar was built that’s still a well known landmark today. Hugely powerful and apparently set up with countermeasures to resist any electronic interference, it messed with local residents’ tv reception and reportedly gave people headaches. Could it also have been used as some sort of psychic or mind-entering device?

Let’s leave all that until a bit later on. The Montauk Air Force Station was decommissioned in 1981 and was eventually turned over to New York’s Parks and Rec where it was opened as the Camp Hero State Park in 2002. But was that all there was to it?

The Story of the Montauk Project

And here we go. The general story of the so-called Montauk Project goes a little something like this:

Deep underground in a secret set of labs, subjects, in large part runaway or vulnerable children and young people, were broken down with so much psychological, physical and pharmaceutical abuse that they became totally compliant and the lab staff could effectively program them to do whatever they wanted them to. With the help of devices such as a chair that helped focus telepathic energy, these subjects were able to see through the eyes of other people elsewhere on the planet, manifest physical objects from their minds and even open up portals in space and time. Pretty handy, eh?

Hundreds of subjects were used, many being lured or kidnapped from the streets, and those that weren’t lost in space and time or killed and disposed of, were subjected to intense memory manipulation so they wouldn’t be able to remember what was done to them.

There was one person in particular who possessed extra-strong psychic abilities and one day, after some other people working on the project agreed it had gone too far, he was given the signal to let rip. In the Montauk Chair, as it was called, he conjured a beast from his mind which manifested somewhere in the labs, laying waste to anything it could find until the only thing left to do to get rid of it was to totally destroy all the equipment and radar needed to carry out the experiments. Finally, after everything was smashed up, the beast vanished and the project was ended. In 1984, after crack military teams had removed anything worth salvaging from the site, the underground area was filled in with cement.

Ok, so all that sounds a little far-fetched but is there anything worth extracting from it? Why yes, those little kernels of truth that we mentioned in the beginning do exist even in a tale as odd as this, so let’s get into those before decoding this story any further.

MK ULTRA

Zoicks, have the US Government ever been up to some shady things! In the 1950s, the CIA started a project called MK Ultra which lasted for at least 10 years and was totally classified and top secret. This was for good reason because it turned out that they were illegally experimenting on people and giving them mind-altering drugs with the aim of controlling their minds.

In a 1977 hearing about the project, Senator Inouye kicked things off by saying “It should be emphasized that the programs that are of greatest concern have stopped and that we are reviewing these past events in order to better understand what statutes and other guidelines might be necessary to prevent the recurrence of such abuses in the future. We also need to know and understand what is now being done by the CIA in the field of behavioral research to be certain that no current abuses are occurring.” See? Abuses.

Greatest concern. It was really bad stuff! The hearing only came about because the CIA left some incriminating documents lying around after having destroyed everything else pertaining to Project MK Ultra in the early 70s.

The project wasn’t confined to a single location either, it was carried out across North America, with US and Canadian citizens becoming test subjects to see how far drugs and psychological techniques could go in controlling someone’s mind. According to the hearing, some of the stuff they were investigating included:

• “Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipients would be discredited in public”
• “Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol”
• and conversely: “materials which will promote the intoxicating effects of alcohol.”
• “Materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness.”
• “Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so called ‘brain-washing’.” Wow, dibs on not getting that one.
• Also, creepily: “Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.”
• “Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia etc.”
• “A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.”

You may be wondering how and why anyone would volunteer to go through tests like this. Well, that’s why the project was so contentious. A lot of the test subjects had no real idea why they were there and were unwittingly dosed with drugs such as LSD for experimental purposes. Many were people from marginalized areas of society such as the homeless, sex workers and the terminally ill.

They didn’t have the knowledge, means or strength to fight against what was happening to them and the hearing concluded that the MK Ultra project demonstrated a “fundamental disregard for the value of human life.”

OK, so that’s MK Ultra in a very tiny nutshell, but the point of that story was to show that the US Government has been proven to use unwitting people as guinea pigs for experiments involving mind-altering drugs in very secretive conditions. It happened with MK Ultra, so why couldn’t it have gone a step further a couple of decades later with Project Montauk?

Camp Hero

There are some bona fide odd things about the remains of the air force station and military base. According to the legend, the underground rooms were filled in with cement so no-one would be able to get in there. The remaining buildings are off-limits to park visitors, with many boarded up doors and entrances warning people not to trespass and to beware of falling objects etc. There are also many suspicious looking manhole covers and concrete slabs in the ground dotted around all over the place.

Manhole covers, sure, people might have needed to get underground for non-suspicious reasons. But random slabs of concrete in otherwise grassy areas? This seems like something has been purposefully concealed. People have checked the official blueprints for the site and they don’t show any subterranean buildings.

Christopher Garetano who made a documentary called “Montauk Chronicles” in 2015, has checked out the park hundreds of times and has never been given permission to do any kind of excavating under the ground. He did manage to use geophysical equipment to take some readings, though, and according to the results from the electronic resistivity imagery, it showed a large man-made structure under the ground. As no-one’s allowed to actually do any digging around the base, though, I guess we’re not likely to find out if this is true or not. His doc is also currently rated as a 4 on IMDb—make of that what you will.

Also, while the base was supposedly totally decommissioned by the early 80s, a man called Brian Minnick and some friends went poking around before it officially became a state park in 2002. They found rooms decorated with psychedelic patterned wallpaper, sealed off entry ways and bills from the late 1980s for massive food orders of thousands of dollars a month, years after the base was supposedly closed down. Does this indicate that people were still secretly working away down there?

So maybe stranger things were afoot at Camp Hero after all. But were they quite as strange as the story says? Let’s take it back to the beginning and, as usual with a lot of these stories, most of the information in the legend can be traced back to one source. But this one also has an interesting co-contributor.

Preston B. Nichols

Introducing Mr. Preston B. Nichols! If we follow the story of the Montauk Project backwards, all the details about the equipment, the portals and the manifested beast come from his 1992 book “The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time” which was written “with Peter Moon” which was apparently a pen name for someone called Vince Barbarick. Yes, his pen name was more realistic sounding than his actual name. And he’s not the interesting co-contributor we just mentioned, you’ll need to wait a bit for him.

Anyway, the text of “The Montauk Project” is available online and, quite frankly, it’s a gripping read. It starts with Nichols, an electrical engineer, immediately jumping in to how he started getting interested in metaphysics in the 1970s and started working with psychics to get electromagnetic readings from them or something. He noticed that they all experienced a strange mindblock or jam at the same time every day and he eventually managed to trace the source of this block to the radar at the Montauk base.

He couldn’t make any headway with his investigations but did visit the site in 1984 after it was decommissioned. He found some weird equipment and eventually managed to get an appointment with the base’s caretaker.

On subsequent visits, he met a man who recognized him, although Nichols had no idea who this man was. Another stranger then turned up at his house, claiming Nichols had been his boss. Nichols started investigating what had been happening at Montauk, hearing stories of strange weather occurrences from the locals. Then another stranger turned up who was the key in Nichols’s story.

This man, calling himself Duncan Cameron, knew plenty about the Montauk base and when Nichols actually took him there, it was like a floodgate opened in Cameron’s brain, his memory was unlocked and all this information came pouring out of his mouth. I’m going to leave Mr. Cameron here for a minute, spewing out his knowledge of secret projects and jump forward a bit in Preston’s story.

It turns out that not only was Preston B. Nichols also suffering from a severely repressed memory, he had actually been existing on two different time tracks or realities for years! He found this out when, amongst other things, he found Band-Aids on his hands and didn’t remember going to the nurse’s office. He had apparently got the bruises and abrasions while he was moving stuff around in his other reality. Now it’s all sounding a bit like the show “Severance”, which was very good by the way, well worth a watch.

Anyway, Nichols eventually managed to enter the alternate reality when he was consciously in the “real” one and found out that he was an assistant project director on the Montauk base. What was happening to his body when he was in the other reality, I have no idea, and his real-world job was not on the Montauk base so god knows how he was going between the two. Instead of using this guy on the Montauk Project, then erasing his memories and sending him back to work at his other office every day, why didn’t they just employ two different people?

I skipped through the next part of Nichol’s book as it was boring and complicated stuff about how to potentially activate alternate realities but then got to a good bit when he gave a possible source for the financing for Project Montauk—it was Nazi gold, yeah! In a theory that’s somewhat lacking in detail or evidence, Nichols writes:

I do not have documented evidence myself of the financing but have been told by my Montauk acquaintances that the original money came courtesy of the Nazis. In 1944, an American troop train went through a French tunnel carrying 10 billion dollars worth of Nazi gold. This train was dynamited in the tunnel while carrying 51 G.I.s(….) I’ve been told this gold eventually showed up at Montauk, and it was 10 billion dollars of gold priced then at $20 an ounce.

This was the equivalent of almost 200 billion dollars in today’s currency. It was used to finance the project initially and for years to come.

I mean, that’s a bigger leap than I make in some of these episodes.

Nichols then goes on to detail how the “Montauk Chair” was created. This started as a mind reading machine and then got turned into a transmitter, amplifying peoples’ psychic abilities and eventually enabling them to transmit across realities. Despite working on the project himself, Nichols wasn’t sure what technology was being used in the mind-reading chair. In his book, he speculates that aliens from Sirius might have given a helping hand.

OK, finally I’ve come to the crux. I have purposefully kept a large detail out of the story as, if you can imagine, it makes it even less believable than it has been up to this point. If you haven’t already, take a look at our episode on the Philadelphia Experiment as it’s now making a huge cameo in the Montauk Project story.

And that familiar face I mentioned at the start? Well, in the Philadelphia Experiment story, a US military ship supposedly undergoing a test to make it invisible to enemy detection actually turned invisible for reals and also teleported itself over a hundred miles away before reappearing with all the crew melded in with the ship etc.

There was a movie made loosely based on this and in the 80s, a man called Al Bielek saw it and it suddenly unlocked a whole set of repressed memories. He remembered that he and his brother had been on the USS Eldridge—the ship that vanished—and had jumped off just as the experiment was beginning. They had entered some kind of time vortex and had found themselves hundreds of years in the future.

Luckily he made his way back and onto the paranormal presentation circuit. Good for you, Al. Well, guess what?

According to Nichols, the stuff that was happening in Montauk in the early 80s actually managed to rip a hole back in time to the Philadelphia Experiment in 1943. Thus was a sort of wormhole created between the two times. ANNNNNDDDDD not only were Al Bielek and his bro on the Eldridge, the Duncan Cameron we left babbling away a couple of pages ago was none other than Bielek’s brother.

Apparently, Bielek’s recovered memory meant that he realized his true identity was that of “Ed Cameron” and his brother was this “Duncan Cameron”.

So yeah, if this wasn’t unbelievable enough, the story of the Philadelphia Experiment plays a massive part in the story of the Montauk Project. If you haven’t seen the other episode—spoiler alert—it’s pretty clear that the whole Philadelphia Experiment tale sprung from the mind of a man called Carl M. Allen. So this then really calls into question every single thing Nichols writes in his book.

The dedication in “The Montauk Project” is even given as “This book is dedicated to the memory of the crew of the USS Eldridge and to those who gave their life at Montauk.” I mean, if you’re going to do some kind of conspiracy theory spin-off, at least do one that’s a bit more credible than the bloody Philadelphia Experiment.

Back to the story then, for no other reason than it’s pretty entertaining. Nichols writes that various time portals were opened to anchor the main one that ran from 1943 to 1983. What I’m not sure about is how they actually created the 1943 one. Was the Philadelphia Experiment the result of the time portal that they opened back to 1943? Or did doing the Philadelphia experiment in 1943 create it? I think we can agree that most conspiracy theories don’t like getting bogged down in the details so let’s carry on.

Nichols describes how participants in the Montauk Project were sent through these various portals to wander around for a bit while recording video and being able to hear radio transmissions from their handlers. Unluckily, Nichols was always manning the switch to open these portals so unfortunately could never see or hear much of what these time travelers were experiencing. Such a shame. He does say there was a huge library of videos but he was never able to watch any of them. Bummer.

All new time travelers were sent forward in time to the same place in 6037 AD which was apparently a ghost town with a big gold horse statue in the middle. Nichols used the horse as the image for the front cover of his book. In 1981 or 1982, the Montauk researchers finally succeeded in getting people to travel to Mars! Maybe this was the inspiration behind the StarGate movie and shows? That’s for you, Simon, heard you’re a fan.

There are pyramids on Mars that aren’t natural formations, you see, and, oh, I’ll let Nichols tell you what happened as it’s easier than trying to explain it myself:

The directors of the Montauk Project knew that there was a colony on Mars. It is more than likely that they were a part of the conspiracy. Mars was interesting to the Montauk researchers because they had realized that there was an old technology there. They knew somebody had built the pyramids and face on Mars. These were not natural formations.

According to the information that my associates and I have dug up, the people who were living on the surface of Mars could not get to the underground area beneath the pyramid. The entrances were either sealed over or simply couldn’t be found. In fact, it appeared that the big pyramid was sealed better then the pyramid at Giza.

OK, care to divulge what this research was that you had dug up to prove there were people living on the surface of Mars? No? OK, carry on then, Mr. Nichols:

Despite all the expensive and fancy technology that was available, the pyramid could not be penetrated. The scientists at Montauk decided the best approach would be to ‘project’ right into the center of the Martian underground. The newly-discovered Montauk technology gave them the wherewithal to use a spatial warp to get inside. They wanted to get into the underground caverns. These were thought to be set up and administered by a very old civilization.

And then what? And then what?

Using the time portals, Mars had been scoured for live inhabitants. Researchers had to push back about 125,000 years before they could find any. I don’t know what they found out or what they did with the information. Duncan has tried to access this information, but it is deeply buried and difficult to contact.

What! Again, a thoroughly scientifically amazing breakthrough but there’s no payoff for us poor shlubs reading the story.

Thankfully, it wasn’t long after this that Nichols and some colleagues started having misgivings about the whole thing and its potential effect on the planet. He doesn’t seem to feel any guilt towards the alleged hundreds of unwilling or kidnapped victims used to do the experiments, some of whom he mentioned earlier as literally floating about totally lost in time and space. Anyway, big psychic brain Duncan Cameron is used to manifest a big hairy monster to destroy the base on the 12th of August 1983 and both ends of the time portal end up having to be disabled to get the beast to disappear. Nichols writes:

After the bizarre occurrences of August 12, 1983, the Montauk base virtually emptied. The power was restored but lights were left on with everything in disarray. Most of the personnel were eventually rounded up, debriefed, and brainwashed accordingly.

And that’s more or less that. There were a few other characters popping up every so often also claiming to be one of the so-called “Montauk Boys” that had experienced horrible abuse at the hands of the research team but they don’t really add anything else to the story. As we’ve been decoding as we went along, I don’t really think there’s much need for a big debunking section at the end.

I did want to add that at the start of his book, Nichols actually writes: “This work is being presented as non-fiction as it contains no falsehoods to the best knowledge of the authors. However, it can also be read as pure science-fiction if that is more suitable to the reader.” Errrrrr, way to stick to your convictions there, Nichols and Moon.

And this is only the first book in a series of 5 that these guys wrote about Montauk! So we have “The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time”, then comes “Montauk Revisited: Adventures in Synchronicity”, next up is “Pyramids of Montauk: Explorations in Consciousness”, doing well with the subtitles here, aren’t they? The last two in the series are only tangentially linked to Montauk, being “Encounter in the Pleiades: An Inside Look at UFOs” and lastly “The Music of Time”—no subtitle!—where “Preston Nichols comes forwards and reveals his hidden role in the recording industry”.

Seriously, how many time tracks was this guy on?

Conclusions

There are still many people today making documentaries and doing research on what might have gone on at Montauk. It’s interesting to speculate that there might well have been secret stuff going on as it was hardly unprecedented at the time. It would definitely be worth digging into if it ends up uncovering horrible abuses carried out by the CIA or more evidence of possible mind control research they were up to.

However do we believe that portals were opened to the past and future and even to Mars? Personally, no I do not believe this. The entire time portal and mind-power aspect of the Montauk Project story comes from Preston B.

Nichols’ book with no other corroborating accounts or evidence to support him. Anyone else coming forward to also claim they were involved can be written off as knowingly making it up for fun or notoriety, or just seeing it as an answer for other unresolved issues they may have, probably to do with repressed trauma or PTSD.

The whole Philadelphia Experiment link is bizarre and to me just makes it seem even more ludicrous rather than making it any more believable. It’s like me saying the Tooth Fairy exists because I saw her hanging out with the Easter Bunny. Al Bielek’s insertion into the story also seems totally odd. He just seems to go wherever the winds of the latest conspiracy thing are blowing him but I guess everyone needs a hobby.

So congrats to Preston B. Nichols for cracking the urban legend code with this one and spawning a whole raft of entertaining shows such as StarGate, Stranger Things and Severance into the bargain. The base may no longer be functioning but the story of the Montauk Project lives on.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Montauk Project?

The Montauk Project is a conspiracy theory involving secret government experiments conducted at Camp Hero, an air force station on Montauk Point, New York. The story claims that scientists and military personnel experimented with mind control, psychic espionage, and inter-dimensional travel using young children and vulnerable individuals as subjects.

What is the connection between the Montauk Project and Stranger Things?

The Montauk Project served as the original inspiration for the Netflix series Stranger Things. The Duffer Brothers initially planned to set the show in Montauk but changed the location to Indiana due to production issues.

What was the purpose of the AN/FPS-35 radar at Camp Hero?

The AN/FPS-35 radar was built in 1960 as an early warning system. It was known for its powerful signals, which reportedly interfered with local TV reception and caused headaches in residents. Some theories suggest it may have been used for psychic or mind-entering devices.

What was MK Ultra, and how does it relate to the Montauk Project?

MK Ultra was a CIA project in the 1950s that involved illegal experiments on people using mind-altering drugs to control their minds. The Montauk Project is often compared to MK Ultra due to its alleged use of unwitting subjects for mind control experiments.

What evidence supports the existence of underground facilities at Camp Hero?

Christopher Garetano, who made a documentary called Montauk Chronicles, used geophysical equipment to detect a large man-made structure beneath the ground. Additionally, visitors have found psychedelic wallpaper, sealed entryways, and bills from the late 1980s, suggesting ongoing activity after the base was decommissioned.

Who is Preston B. Nichols, and what is his role in the Montauk Project story?

Preston B. Nichols is an electrical engineer who wrote the book The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, which details his alleged involvement in the secret experiments at Camp Hero. He claims to have experienced repressed memories and time travel, but his story is largely considered a work of fiction.

What is the Philadelphia Experiment, and how does it relate to the Montauk Project?

The Philadelphia Experiment is a conspiracy theory involving a U.S. Navy ship that allegedly disappeared and reappeared elsewhere, with crew members melded into the ship. Preston B. Nichols claims that the Montauk Project created a time portal linking to the Philadelphia Experiment, but this connection is widely discredited.

What is the Montauk Chair, and what was its purpose?

The Montauk Chair was a device allegedly used in the Montauk Project to focus telepathic energy, allowing subjects to see through others’ eyes, manifest physical objects, and open portals in space and time. Its existence is purely speculative and based on Preston B. Nichols’ book.

What happened on August 12, 1983, according to the Montauk Project story?

On August 12, 1983, a powerful psychic named Duncan Cameron allegedly manifested a beast that destroyed the Montauk base. This event led to the deactivation of the time portal and the end of the Montauk Project, according to Preston B. Nichols’ account.

What is the current status of Camp Hero?

Camp Hero was decommissioned in 1981 and later turned into Camp Hero State Park, which opened in 2002. The park features abandoned radar towers and restricted areas, with many visitors drawn to the site by the Montauk Project conspiracy theory.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Montauk Project: The Government Project that Inspired Stranger Things
• Hero image source by WeaponizingArchitecture / openverse, by-sa.