What If Stranger Things Really Happened? – The Montauk Project
Part one of a special two-part series on the myths, legends, and true(?) stories that inspired Stranger Things. We’re focusing on The Montauk Project, an alleged secret government program that carried out human experiments in an underground base on Long Island, NY between 1971 and 1983. Get ready for stories of time travel, dimensional portals, psychic spying, and interdimensional bigfoot, and how they all tie into Netflix’s hit show.
Stranger Things was sold under the working title Montauk, and before producers switched the setting to a small town in Indiana, season one was going to take place at the eastern end of Long Island. The Duffer brothers based Stranger Things, at least partially, on “real” stories (some more real than others).
MK Ultra is specifically referenced a couple times in the show, and it is implied that Eleven’s superpowers are the result of MK Ultra experiments. MK Ultra was a very real CIA program that ran from 1953–1973. The military was seeking mind control substances, or a type of truth serum to convince prisonersto reveal secrets during interrogations. Part two of this episode focuses on MK Ultra.
This part focuses on the Montauk Project. The Montauk Project is never directly referenced in Stranger Things, but the concept of kidnapping children for secret experiments, and of manifesting monsters from another dimension that get loose and wreak havoc on an unsuspecting town are almost certainly borrowed from Montuak Project legends.
The Montauk Project (1971–1983)
Allegedly, the United States government conducted a series of secret projects at Camp Hero on Montauk, Long Island. Their purpose was to develop psychological warfare techniques and exotic research realting to time travel.
Some of the strange activity spilled over into the town of Montauk as well. There were reports of snow in the middle of August and hurricane force winds that came out of nowhere. People reported thunderstorms, lightning, and hail under unusual circumstances. Montauk citizens also told stories of animals coming into the town en masse and sometimes crashing through the windows.
According to Preston Nichols, the U.S. government kidnapped more than 100,000 people, mostly young men, for use in human experiments. There was also a portal that allowed one to travel throughout space and time, a device that allowed psychics to physically manifest objects from their minds, and an abundance of secret alien technology.
The Montauk Project stories come primarily from three men: Preston Nichols, Al Bilek, and Stewart Swerdlow. Preston Nichols claims to have worked at Montauk. Al Bilek took a very different route to Montauk. His story actually begins with the Philadelphia Experiment. He and his brother, Duncan jumped off the ship during its time/dimensional travel and ended up in Montauk in the 1980s. Stewart Swerdlow was allegedly one of the unwilling participants in the Montauk experiments.
It’s not clear if these stories are true, and Nichols himself states in the opening chapter of his book, “Whether you read this as science fiction or nonfiction you are in for an amazing story”. Either way, it’s clear that the story influenced the Duffer Brothers when they wrote Stranger Things.
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