Disturbing History - The Real Stranger Things?

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

What if Stranger Things wasn't science fiction?  What if the show that became one of the biggest cultural phenomena of the last decade started as a real story, set in a real place, about a real abandoned military base on the eastern tip of Long Island. In this episode, we walk the full length of one of the strangest legends in modern American folklore.The Montauk Project. A claimed black operation hidden beneath a decommissioned Air Force radar station, involving mind control, time travel, psychic experimentation, kidnapped children, and a creature that supposedly tore through reality on August 12th, 1993. We start where the story actually begins, with the documented history of Camp Hero. A coastal defense base built in nineteen forty-two and disguised as a quiet New England fishing village, complete with fake churches, fake gables, and concrete bunkers buried in the bluff. We trace its life from sixteen-inch naval rifles aimed at German U-boats, to its rebirth as a Cold War radar station, to the giant AN/FPS-35 antenna that still stands rusting on the Montauk skyline today.We talk about why that antenna kept turning long after the base was officially shut down on the thirty-first of January, nineteen eighty-one, and how the gap between the official record and the lived experience of the locals became the soil that grew the Montauk Project legend.From there, we walk back to the alleged Philadelphia Experiment of October 1943.The story of the USS Eldridge, the green fog, the sailors fused into the steel, and the strange letter writer named Carlos Allende whose handwritten annotations ended up reprinted by the United States Navy in the so-called Varo Edition. We talk about Morris K. Jessup, the researcher whose suspicious 1959 death gave the legend its first martyr. We unpack how that earlier story became the seed for what came next.Then we get to the heart of it. Preston Nichols, the Long Island electronics engineer who claimed in his 1992  book that he had recovered memories of working at a hidden facility beneath Camp Hero.The Montauk Chair, an alleged piece of equipment built to amplify human psychic ability. Duncan Cameron, the man who supposedly sat in that Chair and opened doors in time. Al Bielek, who claimed his real name was Edward Cameron and that he had jumped off the deck of the Eldridge in 1943  and landed in1983. The Montauk Boys, an alleged generation of kidnapped young men programmed as living weapons. And the beast that Duncan supposedly summoned out of his own subconscious, the creature that ended the project in1893, that anyone who has watched Stranger Things will recognize the moment it's described.We then turn to the Duffer brothers, the twin filmmakers from Durham, North Carolina, who pitched their now-legendary series to Netflix under the working title Montauk. We walk through how Hawkins is Camp Hero, how Eleven is the Montauk Boy you're allowed to feel sorry for, how the Demogorgon is the creature Duncan supposedly summoned, and how the Upside Down is the realm Nichols claimed they pierced through. We also touch on Christopher Garetano's two thousand and fifteen documentary Montauk Chronicles, which sat the alleged participants down on camera and let them tell their own stories at length.Throughout, we keep an honest line between what is verified, what is claimed, and what is folklore. We walk through the actual documented history of American government experimentation on its own citizens. MK Ultra. The Holmesburg Prison experiments. The Montreal experiments at McGill conducted by Donald Ewen Cameron. The radiation experiments. Tuskegee. The work the United States government has admitted to, that gave a story like the Montauk Project the soil it needed to grow in 1992. And we talk about why the legend persists, why folklore matters even when it isn't literally true, and what it tells us about the country we live in that a story like this one continues to resonate.If you have ever wanted to understand exactly where Stranger Things came from, this is the conversation. The radar tower is still up there. The bunkers are still sealed. The state park is open this weekend. The story is still humming.For show updates, episode archives, and the free newsletter, visit paranormalworldproductions.com. To get in touch, write to [e-mail] a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. What if Stranger Things was a true story? Not the show. Not the kids on bikes. Not the Christmas lights blinking out a message on the wall. Not the soundtrack that's probably already playing in your head while I say the words.

I mean the bones of it. The thing underneath. A secret government laboratory tucked into a small American town. Children with abilities they were never supposed to have. A door cracked open between worlds, a monster that came through it. What if all of that, or even a piece of it, started somewhere real? That's the strange corner of the story we're walking into tonight. Because before Hawkins, Indiana ever existed in a writer's room or on a television screen, two brothers named Matt and Ross Duffer were pitching a show called Montauk. They named it after a place, a real place. A point at the eastern tip of Long Island where the road just runs out of land, where the ocean takes over, where there's a lighthouse from George Washington's Day still standing

on the cliff. They named it that because they had been reading about something. Something that, depending on who you ask, is either the most disturbing classified operation in American history, or one of the strangest, most elaborate conspiracy theories ever stitched together by human hands. A story about a decommissioned air base, about a secret weapon hidden in plain sight, about young men taken in the night, about a chair that read your mind, about time travel, about a portal,

and about a creature that crawled up out of the unconscious of a man strapped into a machine and tore the place apart before someone finally pulled the plug. The Montauk Project. Tonight, I want to tell you the whole thing, the geography of it,

the history that's actually documented, the story that grew up around it, the men who claim they lived through, through it. The skeptics who say none of it ever happened. And the way that story, sometime in the early 2010s, fell into the hands of two young filmmakers from North Carolina who looked at it and saw a show. I'm not going to tell you what to believe. I never do that. I'll tell you what's verified and what's claimed and where the evidence sits and where the gaps are. Some of this you can stand on. Some of it you can't. Some of it I can't tell you whether it happened or didn't, because nobody can.

The men who said they were there are mostly gone now. The base they pointed to is a state park you can walk through this weekend if you want to. The radar tower they said sat at the heart of it is still up there on the bluff, rusting, visible for miles, refusing to be torn down. You can drive to it. You can stand at the foot of it. That part is real. What happened underneath it?

That's what we're here for. So pour the coffee or the bourbon, whichever kind of night you're having, and settle in. Because we're going to start where these stories almost always start. Not with the mystery. Not with the monster. We're going to start with the ground itself

and the war that brought the government there in the first place. Because to understand what people say happened at Montauk, you have to understand why the United States military ever went to Montauk to begin with. And that part. That part isn't a conspiracy at all. That part is just history. Long Island stretches east from New York City,

for about 120 miles. If you live somewhere else in the country, you might not have a clear picture of what it actually looks like. So let me give it to you. Picture a long, low fish of land, tapering to two narrow forks at its eastern end. The South Fork is the one that ends in Montauk.

By the time you've gotten that far out from the city, the strip malls and the freeways are long behind you. The land thins. The trees get smaller. They get bent sideways, leaning, west, pushed by the constant wind off the ocean. The Atlantic is on one side of you, and the Long Island Sound is on the other, and the air is salt all the time.

At the very end of that fork, sticking out into the sea like the tip of a finger, sits the village of Montauk, population a few thousand in winter, many times that in summer, a working fishing village for most of its history, before it got expensive. Charter boats, surfcasting, a few good seafood places. A lighthouse on the cliff at the very tip, commissioned by President George Washington in 1792, still throwing its light across the dark water more than two centuries later. Now, just before you reach that lighthouse, just shy of the very end of the land, there's a chunk of bluff and forest along the south-facing coast that for 40 years was completely closed off to the American public.

Fenced, guarded, not on most maps. The locals knew. The locals always know. They knew there were soldiers there. They knew there were antennas there. They knew there were buildings down in the trees that nobody talked about. But the average American, even the average New Yorker, had no idea what was sitting at the eastern edge of Long Island.

That place was Camp Hero. Camp Hero is real. I want to be very direct about that, because as we get further into this story, the line between what's real and what's claimed is going to get blurry. And I want to plant a flag now. Camp Hero existed. It still exists. The buildings are still there. You can walk through them this weekend. Most of it is now Camp Hero State Park, open to the public in 2002. The other piece, a smaller chunk, is still federal property, controlled by the United States Air Force, still technically active, although what's active about it is a question without a public answer.

The Army built it during the early years of the Second World War. Construction started in 1942. The war was on. German U-boats were prowling off the East Coast in numbers most Americans today would not believe. And the United States military was in a panic about the possibility that German warships could shell American cities from the Atlantic. So they put a coastal defense battery at the eastern end of Long Island. Big guns. 16-inch naval rifles.

The kind designed to put a shell through the armor of a battleship. Two of them, mounted in heavy concrete bunkers buried deep in the bluff, where the recoil of a fired round would shake the soil for half a mile. But here's the part that already starts to feel like fiction. The Army was worried that any obvious military installation at the tip of Long Island would draw German attention from the sea. So they camouflaged the entire base. They built it to look like a quiet New England fishing village.

The barracks were dressed up with peaked roofs and fake gables to look like beach cottages. The mess hall was made to look like a church, complete with a fake steeple and stained glass paint on the windows. The gymnasium was disguised as a small town meeting hall. There were buildings out there that, from a passing ship at sea, looked like a sleepy little hamlet of fishermen and their families. It was all a stage set. Underneath, it was a fortress. That part is document. Photos exist. Records exist.

Visit the state park today and you can still see some of those big. buildings, half restored, half falling apart, with their churchy facades and their thick concrete bones underneath the wood paneling. The peaked roof on the chapel that wasn't a chapel still has a steeple painted on. The whole place was a lie told to the ocean. I want to sit with that detail for a second, because if you've ever taken the time to read about military deception during the Second World War, you know the United States and Britain and the Soviets all did things like this on a scale modern people have a hard time imagining. There were inflatable rubber tanks dressed up as armored divisions in southeast England before the D-Day invasion. There were entire fake air bases

built out of plywood. There were studio-trained set designers turned loose on the war effort by both sides. So in one sense, the camouflaged camp hero was nothing exceptional. It was a small piece of a very large pattern. The American military in 1942 was perfectly comfortable building a fake church on a cliff to fool a German submarine commander looking through a periscope. But there's something about that fact when you stand there that doesn't

quite leave you alone. Because the church is still there and the steeple is still painted on and the bunkers underneath are still there. And the war the church was built to deceive ended a long time ago. The deception outlived the deceiver. And nobody

really has ever come along to take it down. Walk through that part of the park on a foggy morning and you can see exactly how the trick was meant to work. From a distance, it almost still works. When the war ended, the big guns came out. Coastal artillery wasn't going to be the future. The future was rockets and radar and the long, cold, paranoid stare of the next war. So Camp Hero was reborn.

By the late 1950s, it had been turned over to the Air Force and rebuilt as a radar station. part of the semi-automatic ground environment system. Sage for short, a continent-wide air defense network designed to detect Soviet bombers crossing the pole. And in 1960, the Air Force put up the antenna that defines the Montauk skyline to this day. It was called the A-N-slash FPS-35. It was, at the time, one of the most powerful long-range radars ever built. The dish was the size of a small office building. It sat on top of a steel frame tower that rose more than 100 feet above the trees.

From the right angle on a clear day, you could see it from the deck of a fishing boat 15 miles offshore. It looked like nothing else on the coast. It looked, frankly, like something out of a science fiction film. People who grew up out there remember the way it would make a low, aching sound when it turned. A deep, mechanical groan you felt in your teeth. It tracked Soviet aircraft. That was its declared mission. And in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that was a serious mission,

because the United States genuinely believed that World War III could begin with a wave of Soviet bombers coming over the Arctic, and the radar belt was the first line of defense. By the late 1970s, that mission was already obsolete. Bombers had been replaced by intercontinental ballistic missiles. You don't need a giant ground radar to spot an ICBM. You need satellites, and the United States had. those. Camp Hero stopped being strategically necessary around 1980. The Air Force decommissioned it. The official records say the base was closed on the 31st of January, 1981, deactivated,

mothballed, and eventually transferred to the state of New York. That's the official story. Here's where it gets a little strange. Because the antenna up on the bluff, all 40 tons of it, was not removed when the base shut down. The Air Force decided that taking the dish, off its tower, given its size, was more trouble than it was worth. So the A-N-slash-F-PS-35 was, in the official phrase, abandoned in place. The motors and electronics that drove its rotation were taken out, but the dish itself was deliberately left free to turn in the wind, so that a storm wouldn't tear it loose from its bearings. For years afterward, locals walking along the bluff or driving past on the highway would see it slowly spinning up there, slowly groaning.

slowly creaking, even though the base was supposed to be dead. The official explanation was the wind. The legend that grew up around it had a different explanation. The Air Force's answer, when anybody pressed, was that the antenna was simply turning with the breeze. The radar finally rusted to a stop sometime in the years that followed, and today it sits frozen on its tower, too corroded to move. Although locals will tell you that on certain nights, when the wind dropped,

you could still hear something humming in the trees out there. There were Freedom of Information Act requests filed in the years that followed. Most of them came back with redactions. Some of them came back with non-responses, which is its own kind of answer. Researchers who tried to dig deeper than the official record found that the paper trail for the latter years of Camp Heroes' life, the years between roughly 1970 and the supposed shutdown,

was unusually thin. There were budget line items that didn't fully account for. There were personnel rosters that read strangely. None of that, taken alone, proves anything. But together, it adds up to a picture that is just slightly off. A picture that doesn't quite line up with a quiet little radar station, winding down toward retirement. Now, people will tell you a lot of things in places like Montauk.

Coastal towns where the winters are long and the bars are warm, and the stories build up in the corners like sand. So you have to be careful what you do with stories like that. But that ambiguity, that strange gap between the official record and the lived experience of the people who lived next to that base, is the soil that grew the Montauk Project legend. Right there. In that gap. If you grew up in eastern Long Island in the 1970s and 80s,

you knew somebody who had a story. A cousin who said his friend had wandered up there as a teenager and gotten chased off by men in plain clothes carrying weapons they had no business carrying. A neighbor who said the lights in his house would go strange when the radar turned. A guy at the bar who said his uncle had worked there in the 60s, briefly, and would never talk about what he saw. Almost none of that, on its own, means anything. Most of it is the ordinary fog of small-town gossip about a place nobody could get into. But there's a lot of it.

And then, in 1992, a man named. named Preston Nichols published a book. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Before we get to Preston Nichols, though, we need to back up. Because the Montauk project, as Nichols would tell it, didn't begin at Montauk. It began nearly 40 years earlier in a Philadelphia shipyard on a humid October day in the middle of the Second World War, with a destroyer escort called the USS Eldridge. If you know anything about the Philadelphia experiment, you might already see where this is going.

If you don't, settle in, because this is one of the strangest legends in 20th century American folklore, and to understand what people claim happened at Montauk, you have to understand what people claim happened in Philadelphia first. The official version, the one the United States Navy will tell you to this day,

is simple. It didn't happen. The other version, the one that is spread for the better part of a century through paperback books and late-night radio shows, and now the deepest reaches of the internet. Go something like this. In October of 1943, the Navy was working on a way to make ships invisible to enemy radar, not invisible in any science fiction sense, just radar invisible, hidden from German detection.

They were degossing hulls, wrapping them in cable, running massive electrical currents through them to cancel out their magnetic signature so that German and the German. magnetic mines wouldn't sense them. That part is documented. That part is real. DeGossing was a real practice. You can read about it in any decent naval history book. The legend goes that on October 28th, 1943, the Navy did something more than that. The legend says they wired the Eldridge with a system designed to bend not just radar waves, but light itself. They threw the switch, and the Eldridge, with its full crew aboard, became literally invisible, not just a radar, to the naked eye. There was a green fog where the ship had been, and then the ship was gone.

According to the story, it didn't just go invisible. It teleported. It vanished from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and reappeared hundreds of miles away at the Norfolk Virginia Naval Anchorage. Witnesses on a nearby merchant ship, the SS Andrew Furoseith, are said to have seen it materialize out of nothing, sit there for a few minutes, and then vanish again, before reappearing back in Philadelphia. When the crew came off the ship, the legend says, they were not the same men who had walked aboard. Some were missing. Some had gone insane. Some, the most famous detail of the legend, were said to have been physically fused with the steel of the hull, an arm sticking out of a bulkhead, a face fused into a deck plate. Men who had passed partway through

the metal of the ship while it was dematerialized, and then materialized back into the world, locked into the steel forever. That's the legend. I want to be very, very clear. There is no credible documentary evidence that any of this happened. The USS Eldridge's logbooks have been examined. They placed the ship in the New York Navy Yard at Brooklyn on the dating question, not in Philadelphia. The records show the Eldridge had spent the previous month in Bermuda on its first shakedown cruise, returned to New York in mid-October and never stopped in Philadelphia at all between her commissioning in August 1943 and the end of that year. The men who served on the Eldridge, the one still alive when researchers started asking, said the same thing. We were never in Philadelphia. We never disappeared. We never

saw any green fog. They held a reunion in March of 1999 in Atlantic City, 15 of them in attendance, and gave a public statement to the Philadelphia Inquirer saying so. So where did the story come from? It came from a man named Carlos Alende, or possibly Carl Allen. Even his name is uncertain. In the mid-1950s, Alendi started writing letters to a UFO researcher named Morris K. Jessup. Jessup had recently published a book called The Case for the UFO. Allende's letters told a wild story about a Navy experiment he claimed to have witnessed from the

deck of a merchant ship, about a destroyer vanishing into a green fog, about sailors fused into metal, about other men, he wrote, who had simply walked through walls afterward, unable to control whether they were solid or not. The letters were rambling, written in odd handwriting, with strange annotations. Some of them switched between three different colored pens, with what looked like three different handwritings, in a way that suggested either three different writers passing the same document around, or one man playing three different parts. Jessup read them with a mix of fascination and unease. He couldn't tell whether he was being told a true secret by a witness, or being toyed with by an unstable man with a vivid imagination.

He tried to write back. The return addresses Alinda gave him would lead nowhere when investigators followed them later. So did, apparently, somebody at the Office of Naval Research, who have eventually got hold of an annotated copy of Jessup's book, marked up in what appeared to be three different hands, and ordered a small print run of the annotated edition for internal circulation. That print run, called the Varo Edition, is real. It exists. I own a copy of it myself. You can find scans of it online.

The Navy has acknowledged that it was produced. What the Navy has consistently denied is that any of the experiments described in those annotations ever happened. happened. The story of the Varro edition itself is one of the strangest pieces of this whole legend. It's named for the Varro Manufacturing Company in Texas, the contractor that physically printed the copies for the Office of Naval Research. The print run was small, around 127 copies according to most accounts. The book was distributed inside the Navy into a small number of researchers. And the obvious question, the one nobody from the Navy has ever satisfactorily answered is why? Why would the Office of Naval Research take the time and the money to

typeset, print, and circulate, an annotated UFO book filled with the rantings of an unidentified letter writer if the underlying claims were absurd? Why bother? There are a lot of letter writers in the world. Most of them don't get the United States Navy to publish a special edition of their work. The defenders of the official position will tell you the Navy was simply curious about the annotations and wanted to study them. They'll say the print run was a kind of internal research artifact, nothing more. The defenders of the alternative position will tell you the Navy was rattled, that the annotations, whoever wrote them,

contained details about something the Navy had not declassified, and that someone in the Office of Naval Research wanted those details quietly contained inside a small group of cleared people. I cannot tell you which of those is correct. I can tell you the Varro edition exists, and that the existence of an officially produced Navy artifact, no matter how minor, sitting at the center of a story the Navy says never happened, is an oddity. A small one, probably, but an oddity.

In 1959, Morris Jessup was found dead in his car in a park in Florida of carbon monoxide poisoning, officially a suicide. Unofficially, in conspiracy circles, the first martyr of a story that has refused to die for more than seven decades. The friends Jessup had been talking to in the days before his death said he had been agitated. They said he had told them he was getting close to something. They said he had been planning to publish a follow-up book that would lay out everything he had learned. That book was never written, or if it was written, it was never found. His suicide note, by some accounts, was unusually short.

By other accounts, there was no note at all. The line between fact and folklore on Jessop's death starts. blurring almost immediately, the way it always does in stories like this, and you have to be careful not to wander too far across it. That's the Philadelphia experiment as the public came to know it, a naval legend with one named witness whose actual identity was never solidly established, no documentation, no corroborating crew members, and a suspicious dead researcher. By the 1970s, the story had been written up in paperback. In 1979, Charles Burley, the same writer who had popularized the Bermuda Triangle,

co-authored a book called The Philadelphia Experiment with William Moore. The book sold well. In 1984, Hollywood made it into a feature film, also called The Philadelphia Experiment, in which two sailors get blown out of 1943 and end up in 1984. The film is, to be honest, kind of a fun watch. None of it is documented. All of it is legend.

But here's where things get interesting for our purposes. because in 1990, a man named Al Bialik went on a radio show and claimed that he had been one of the sailors aboard the Eldridge. He said his real name was Edward Cameron, that he had been on the deck when the field went on, that he and his brother Duncan had jumped overboard and landed not in the water, but in the future. Specifically, he said, in 1983, at a place called Montauk, that was the link. That was the claim that married the Philadelphia Experiment legend to the Montauk, legend and made them, in the minds of believers, two halves of the same story. The man who told that bigger story, who pulled it all together into a single narrative

and put it on the shelves of bookstores around the country, was not Al-Bi-Aleck. It was a man named Preston Nichols. Nichols was born in 1946 on Long Island. He was an electronics engineer by training. He worked for years in the defense and aerospace industry, doing legitimate technical work. He held degrees, he held jobs, he was by the accounts of people who knew him, a smart and capable man. He had a particular interest in radio and electromagnetism. He owned a personal collection of vintage radio equipment that filled a house. He could talk for hours about antenna

theory, about waveform propagation, about the kind of esoteric corners of electrical engineering most people don't know exist. The part of his life that's verifiable lines up with the picture of a working engineer with a deep, almost obsessive interest in the way invisible electromagnetic fields shape the physical world. He was also, by his own account, a man with a problem. The problem was that there were chunks of his life that didn't add up, periods of time he couldn't account for, memories that surfaced in fragments, and that didn't fit with where he had supposedly been, or what he had supposedly been doing. He told people later that he had become aware of the discrepancies after a series of conversations with friends in which he had described certain events

from his past, only to have those friends look at him strangely and say no, that didn't happen. You were with us that weekend. In the 1980s, Nichols said, he started recovering memories, memories of a second life he'd been living, a life that ran on parallel rails to his ordinary one, a life in which he said he'd been working at Camp Hero. Now I want to pause here and be honest with you. The recovered memory movement of the 1980s is, looking back, not a great chapter in American psychological history. A lot of recovered memories of that era have not aged well.

Many of them turned out to be the products of suggestive therapy, leading questions, and the very human ability to construct vivid false memories under the right conditions. The science on that is settled. Recovered memory, as a method, is unreliable. I'll come back to that. I want it on the table. But Preston Nichols was certain. He believed what was coming back to him.

And what was coming back to him, in his account, was extraordinary. He said that beneath the supposedly decommissioned camp hero, in tunnels and bunkers most people didn't know existed. The United States government had run an experimental program for decades. He said the program had grown out of the same research that produced the Philadelphia experiment. He said the technology used in 1943 had been refined. expanded, weaponized, and pushed into territory that the men who had started the project never imagined. He said the project had several names. Project Phoenix was one. The Montauk project was the

umbrella term. He said it had been a black program, meaning a program funded outside of normal congressional oversight, off the books entirely. He said the men running it were not strictly answerable to the United States government in any conventional sense. He said they were testing weapons. Weapons that worked on the human mind. Weapons that worked on time. Weapons that worked on the boundary between what we call reality and whatever lies past it. And he said the heart of the operation was a chair. The Montauk chair, as Nichols described it, was a piece of equipment designed to amplify human psychic ability. The idea, as he laid it out, was that certain rare individuals had the latent capacity to manifest physical effects through pure thought.

To bend reality in small ways by force of will. The chair, surrounded by an array of electronics tied into the radar system overhead, was built to take that latent ability and crank it up by orders of magnitude. To take a person who could on his best day, slightly nudge a coin, and turn him into a person who could while wired into the chair, manifest objects out of empty air. The first time I read this, I'll be honest with you. I laughed. It sounds absurd on its face. It's the kind of thing that, if you'd never heard of it before,

you'd assume was somebody working out a fan fiction novel during a long winter. But once you start reading Nichols' material, you realize he had a lot of detail, a lot of specific, technical, electrical engineering language about how the system was supposed to work, about the power draw of the radar tower above, about the frequencies he claimed were used, about the way the chair was supposed to be coupled into the antenna array up on the bluff. None of which proves a thing about whether any of it ever happened. But it does tell you that whoever was telling this story had thought it through pretty carefully. Whether he had lived it or whether he had constructed it,

he had built a coherent technical world for it to live in. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. In Nichols' account, the man who sat in the chair most often was Duncan Cameron. Duncan Cameron in this story was the brother of Edward Cameron, the man who would later go by the name Al Baileck. Both brothers, Nichols said, had been involved in the Philadelphia experiment. Both brothers, Nichols said, had been pulled forward in time during the events of October

1943. Both brothers, Nichols said, had ended up at Montauk. The way Beelich told his own story, on talk radio shows and at conferences in the 1990s, was almost operatic. He said he had been born Edward Cameron in 1916. He said he had served in the Navy during the Second World War. He said he had been on the deck of the Eldridge when the experiment was conducted. He said when the field went on, he and his brother Duncan, who was also aboard, panicked.

They jumped. They expected to land in the water. Instead, he said, they fell upward into the future. They landed at Montauk in the year 1983. Duncan stayed there. Edward, by his account, eventually had his memories of all of it suppressed by the men running the project, was sent back into ordinary American life, was given a new identity as a man named Al Bialik, and lived a normal life for 40 years before his memories began to surface in the late 1980s.

Then, the story went. He tracked down his brother. Duncan by Baylick's account had aged out of the project, his physical body wearing down from repeated psychic trauma. The men running Montauk, Beelick said, had transferred Duncan's consciousness into a younger body, the body of one of the Cameron brothers' own younger relatives, in order to extend his service. The Duncan Cameron walking around in the 1990s, in this version of the story,

was a man housing the soul of a Second World War sailor inside the body of a young man. I want to be honest with you. There comes a point somewhere in this part of the legend, where the story starts to bend so far past anything you can take as a literal account that even sympathetic researchers tend to back away. The transferred consciousness version of Duncan Cameron, the time-jumping older brother, the entire elaborate generational saga of the Cameron family, has the architecture of a science

fiction epic, not a witness account. Beelick would later contradict himself in interviews. Specific details would shift between tellings. Dates wouldn't line up. The men who tried, in good faith to verify pieces of his identity, like military records for an Edward Cameron born in 1916, ran into problems. The records that should have existed didn't. The records that did exist didn't quite match. But Bylick, until his death in 2011, never recanted. Whatever he believed about his own life, he believed it all the way to the end. And he and Nichols together were the two voices around which the entire Montauk project legend was built. Duncan Nichols said had a particular gift, a psychic sensitivity unlike anything the project had ever measured. When you sat Duncan

in the chair and ran the equipment, you could do things you couldn't do with anybody else. You could manifest physical objects on the floor of the laboratory. You could pull images out of his mind and project them onto a screen. You could, if you pushed it, do things to the very fabric of space and time inside the building. You could open holes. This is where the Montauk story stops being interesting in the way that government conspiracy stories are interesting, and starts being interesting in the way that ancient folklore is interesting. Because what Nichols was describing, when you boiled it all the way down, was magic. It just had wires running out the back of it. It was the same story human beings have been telling each other since we lived in caves.

There is a chamber. In the chamber there is a person, of unusual gifts. When the right rituals are performed, the chamber opens onto another world, and what is in that other world can come into ours. Nichols said they did this, repeatedly. He said they used Duncan in the chair to open windows in time, forward and backward.

He said they sent men through. He said they ran what amounted to a regular service, like a subway line between the basement of Camp Hero and other points in history. He said most of the men who went through never came back. He said they could open windows in space too. To other places. To places in this universe. Maybe he said to places not in this universe. And he said that on August 12, 1983, something went wrong. That date is important to the legend. August 12th, 1983. By Nichols' account, that was the day

the project ended. Not because the funding was cut. Not because Congress found out. Not because got arrested. By his account, the project ended that day because Duncan Cameron, sitting in the chair, was pushed too far. Something inside him cracked, and what came up out of his unconscious, what he manifested into the laboratory that day, was a creature. Nichols described it as an enormous beast, hairy, aggressive, the size of a house. He said it tore through the laboratory and rampaged across the base, smashing equipment, destroying buildings, creating physical damage on a scale that should have been impossible to cover up. He said it took everything they had to stop it. They couldn't.

The only way they could stop it, he said, was to shut down the chair. Cut Duncan out of the system. Severed the connection between his mind and the equipment that was amplifying it. When they did, the beast vanished. Like a film cut. There was nothing left of it. The story I just told you about the Beast is not the only piece of the Montauk Project legend. But it is the piece that anyone who has watched Stranger Things will recognize the fastest.

A creature manifested by a young person under extreme psychic strain, breaking through into reality, threatening to destroy the facility that summoned it. If you've seen the show, you don't need me to draw the line. The line draws itself. We'll get back to that. But there's another piece of the legend we have to talk about, and it is darker than the beast, and it is more disturbing, because it concerns children, the Montauk boys.

In Nichols' telling and in the telling of several men who later came forward to back his account, the project did not just run on adult psychics like Duncan Cameron. The project, they said, also ran on children, specifically on teenage boys. In Nichols' account, the project had identified a particular psychological and biological profile that made certain young men ideal subjects for the kind of work the chair did. Most of them were between the ages of 12 and 20. Most of them, he said, came from troubled backgrounds, foster homes, institutional care, boys who had been moved around their whole lives, boys whose absences would not be noticed quickly,

boys whose claims, if they ever made any, would be easy to dismiss. He said they were taken to Montauk, that they were trained, that they were programmed, that techniques developed in the United States military and intelligence communities research into mind control were used on them at industrial scale to break down their resistance, install false memories, and then send them back into ordinary life as sleeper agents. Walking, talking weapons. He said there were thousands of them. This is by far the most accusatory piece of the entire Montauk Project legend.

It is also the piece that has done the most damage to people's actual lives, because it has occasionally been used to explain very real personal trauma, in a way that mixes together genuine victimization with elaborate science fiction overlay. I want to be careful about that. There are real survivors of real military and intelligence community programs in this country. I'll come back to that. The mind control claims of the 1950s and 60s were, in some cases true. Documented, admitted to by the United States government.

We'll get there. What I'm telling you now is what Nichols and his collaborators claimed. The Montauk Boys, in their account, were a generation of kidnapped, brainwashed young men used as living experiments by a black project at the eastern tip of Long Island. They claimed names. They claimed survivors. Two of them, Stuart Swardlow and another alleged participant who has appeared under various names over the years, came forward in the 1990s and gave their own accounts.

Their accounts elaborated on Nichols. They added detail. They added more names. They added a wider conspiracy. In Swardlow's telling, the boys were broken in stages. First came the abduction, often from a foster placement or a state institution. Then came the isolation, days or weeks of sensory deprivation, no human contact, no light. Then came the chemical phase, drugs administered by IV, drugs in food, drugs in drinking water,

designed to soften the boundary between conscious and unconscious mind. Then came the programming with carefully designed traumatic episodes used to install dissociative states. Each state given a trigger word that could later activate it. By the time the process was complete, in this account, you had a young man whose conscious self had no memory of what had been done to him, but whose hidden selves could be called forward by a single phrase whispered into a phone. If any of that sounds eerily familiar, it should. because the broad outline of what Swardlow described is, allowing for a lot of fictional dressing, very close to what was actually attempted in M.K. Ultra in the 1950s.

The science of what works and what doesn't on the human mind is now better understood. The CIA's own conclusion, eventually, was that you could not reliably build a Manchurian candidate. The mind, even under extreme abuse, didn't compartmentalize the way the project had hoped. But that was the goal, and the program ran for 20 years trying to get there. So when somebody comes forward in the 1990s, claiming a more advanced version of that work was conducted on him as a child. You cannot dismiss the underlying premise as fantasy. The premise had been pursued by professionals with a real budget on American citizens, well within living memory. How much of that you find credible is going to depend on a lot of things,

on how much weight you give to the recovered memory movement of that era, on how you feel about the phenomenon of detailed personal testimony arriving in coordinated waves, with each new witness expanding the cannon laid down by the previous one, on the absence in all of it of a single document, a single photograph, a single piece of physical evidence that would put a foot on the ground for any of these specific claims. I'll give you my own take on it, briefly, and then I'll move on. The Montauk Boys' story, taken at face value, would be one of the worst crimes in American history. If even a fraction of it were true, it would dwarf M.K. Ultra.

It would be a multi-decade kidnapping operation conducted on American children by an unaccountable arm of the United States military. The fact that no whistleblower has ever produced documentation of it. That no journalist has ever found a paper trail. That no court case has ever surfaced a survivor whose claims could be physically corroborated. weighs on me. It weighs on me a lot. I don't say that to disrespect anybody who genuinely believes themselves to be a survivor. I say it because after 16 years in law enforcement, I have a deep instinct about the difference between a story that grew up around real trauma and a story that grew up around something else. And the Montauk Boys story, the way it has

unfolded, has never sat with me the way I think it would sit with me if it were straight. That said, I can't prove it didn't happen. Nobody can. That's the country we're in with this story. Around the alleged chair, the alleged boys, the alleged portals, Nichols layered a wider mythology. He said the project was tied to a network of similar facilities around the country and around the world. He said the technology had been provided in part by non-human intelligences.

He said the men running the project answered to entities that did not, in any meaningful sense, work for any government. He said that what happened on August 12, 1983 at Montauk did not just affect Camp Hero. He said it cracked something. He said it left a thinning, a soft spot in the fabric of reality at that location. He said weird things had been happening in the woods around Camp Hero ever since. Some of the locals, if asked, will tell you they agree with that last part. Some of the locals will tell you Preston Nichols was a salesman with a gift for an audience. Both, if you've spent any time around small American towns, can be true at the same time.

In 1992, Nichols and his co-author Peter Moon published the book that introduced this whole world to the public. It was called The Montauk Project, Experiments in Time. It was followed by a string of sequels, each one bigger and stranger than the last. Montauk revisited, Pyramids of Montauk, Encounter in the Pliades. The books built up a Montauk universe, the way a comic book franchise builds up a universe, with characters, factions, mythology, and contradictions. By the late 1990s, you could attend a Montauk conference, buy a Montauk t-shirt, listen to Montauk-themed AM radio.

The story had become its own ecosystem. It was in that ecosystem that two young filmmakers, growing up in Durham, North Carolina, found it. Matt and Ross Duffer were born in 1984. identical twins children of the home video age they grew up watching Stephen Spielberg films on VHS and reading Stephen King paperbacks and tearing through every horror movie they could get their hands on at the local rental shop stay tuned for more disturbing history we'll be back after these messages by the time they were teenagers they were already making short films in their backyard by the time they

were in their late 20s they had broken into Hollywood as television writers working on a series called Wayward Pines for M. Knight-Sharmelon, and they were trying, like every young writer in Hollywood, to find their own show. They had a concept they were working on. Childhood in the early 1980s, a small American town, a government laboratory at the edge of it, a girl with strange powers, a creature from another world, a group of kids who set out to find a missing friend. In the original pitch, that town was Montauch. They actually named the show, Montauk. They walked it into Netflix under that title. They had been reading about the Montauk project, the stories Nichols had told, the books, the testimony, the legend. They were specifically

drawing from it, the idea of a secret government lab in a small coastal town, the idea of children with psychic abilities being experimented on, the idea of a portal to another dimension being torn open by one of those children, the idea of a creature coming through. All of that came directly out of the Montauk legend. They have said as much, in interviews, multiple times. Netflix bought the show. Then the production reality kicked in. Filming a series in Montauk during the East Coast winter,

on the actual eastern tip of Long Island, was going to be extremely expensive and extremely cold. Tax incentives in Georgia were extremely generous. The creative call was made to relocate the story. The town moved from Long Island to Indiana. The name moved from Montauk to Hawkins. The show was renamed Stranger Things. Almost everything else, structurally, stayed.

Hawkins National Laboratory is Camp Hero. Walk through it in your mind. A government facility on the edge of a small American town. Most of the locals don't really know what goes on there. Officially closed for one purpose, secretly active for another. Buried experimental work happening in places the public is not allowed to go. That is, point for point, the description of Camp Hero in the Nichols mythology. Eleven is the Montauk Boys, a child taken young, raised inside the program, used as a living

instrument by men in lab coats, trained to extend her mind beyond the limits of normal human experience, strapped into a chair in a sensory deprivation tank, asked to reach out and find things and bring them back. The first time you watch the show, the visual of her in that tank, electrodes on her temples, eyes closed, breathing slow, while men around her watch monitors, is so close to the Nichols chair that I genuinely don't know how the Duffer brothers expected anybody not to see it. They weren't hiding it. They were saying out loud with their pictures. This is the story we're retelling. The Demogorgon is the beast that Duncan Cameron supposedly summoned. A creature pulled out of a young person's mind under extreme psychic pressure.

manifested into our world, breaking through into reality at the location of the experiment. The demigorgon doesn't come up out of an ordinary place. It comes through a hole that 11 cracked open during a session in the lab. That's the August 12th, 1983 story, slightly redressed. The upside down is the other side of that hole, the realm beyond. The place the portals in the Montauk legend supposedly opened onto. A dim, decaying, parallel varieg. version of our own world, full of things that should not be there. If you go back and re-watch

Stranger Things Now, knowing the source material, the experience is genuinely strange. It plays differently. You see the seams. You see the bones. You see the choices the duffers were making to fictionalize what they had been reading. Hawkins is Montauk in a wig. Hawkins Lab is Camp Hero with the lights on and the cameras allowed inside. Eleven is the Montauk boy you're allowed to feel sorry for. The demigorgon is the beast they finally got to put on screen. There are smaller details too, once you know where to look. The presence of Soviet operatives lurking in the background of the Hawkins program. In Nichols' Telling, the Montauk project had Soviet counterparts, mirror programs running on the other side of the iron curtain, with their own psychics and their own

portals, occasionally tangling with each other across dimensions. In Stranger Things, by season three, The Russians have a parallel facility in the basement of a shopping mall, complete with their own attempt to crack open the gate. The visual language of the Hawkins Gate, that rippling, organic, almost membrane-like opening between worlds, traces back through more than one decade of paperback science fiction. But in its specific framing as something a child opens by reaching out with her mind under technological amplification, it traces directly to the Montauk chair.

The Papa figure of Dr. Brenner, the lab-dered, director who treats 11 with a mix of paternal warmth and total cold-blooded utility is recognizable from the Nichols literature too. The men running the project in his telling were not cartoon villains. They were professional researchers who had spent decades working with these subjects, who had developed real bonds with them, who had also been willing when the science demanded it to push the children to the edge of psychological collapse and beyond. Brenner is that archetype, dramatized for television. The line in the show where he tells 11, Papa is here. Papa loves you. Lands the way it lands because it's the same emotional manipulation Nichols

and Swardlow described in book after book as the core technique used on the Montau boys. Make the child love the man who is hurting him. Make the abuse indistinguishable in the child's own mind from love. The Duffer brothers, to their credit, have never tried to hide them. this. Asked about it directly, they have said yes. They were drawing on the Montauk project mythology. They have said they understood that the legend was a legend, that they were using it as a creative starting point rather than as a documentary subject. They have said they wanted to capture the feeling of an era when stories like that could spread, when the boundary between what was secret and what was strange could feel thin. But they have also deliberately kept the original

word in their work. The original working title document still circulates online. It is labeled Montauk at the top. Stranger Things, the show that has become a cultural event that has launched careers and broken records and sold a billion dollars in merchandise is, in its own private origin story, called Montauk. If you want to go further down this rabbit hole, by the way, there's a documentary worth watching.

In 2015, a filmmaker named Christopher. Garatano released a film called Montauk Chronicles. He had spent more than 10 years interviewing the alleged participants. Preston Nichols, Al Belich, Stuart Swardlow, Duncan Cameron. He sat with them, on camera, and let them tell their own stories and their own words, at length, without much interruption. The film does not take a strong position on whether to believe them. It just lets you watch them. It lets you hear them. It lets you make your own evaluation. about whether you are watching men who lived through something extraordinary, men who deceived themselves into believing they had,

men who deceived others, or some mixture of all three. Garitano's film is uncomfortable to watch, not because it's gory or sensational, because the men in it are so quiet about what they're saying. Bayelik, an old man by the time the film was made, talks about jumping off the deck of the Eldridge in 1943, the way another man might talk about a long-ago, Christmas morning. Nichols in his cluttered house full of vintage radio gear lays out the

technical architecture of the Montauk chair as if he were explaining a stereo system. Swerdlow describes being a child subject in the program with the affect of a man describing a long bad illness he survived a long time ago. None of them performs, none of themselves. If you hadn't told me what the film was about, and you'd just shown me the interviews cold, I wouldn't have been able to tell you whether what I was watching was the most elaborate and quietly spoken hoax in American conspiracy history, or the closest thing we have to a witness record of one of the worst classified projects ever conducted. I've watched it twice. I still don't know. I want to step back now and put on a different hat. The hat I usually wear when I'm working on a true crime case,

or when I'm walking through a piece of historical research that involves the United States government. I want to look hard, and I want to look fair. At what we actually know and what we don't. The United States government in the second half of the 20th century ran experiments on human beings that, when they were finally exposed, shocked even Americans who thought they had no illusions left. That part is documented. It's not theory.

It's the public record. Project M.K. Ultra, officially run by the Central Intelligence Agency from 1953 to 1973, dozed unwitting American citizens with LSD, subjected them to psychological torture, attempted to develop reliable methods of mind control, and conducted experiments in cities including New York and San Francisco. Some of the victims were prostitutes whose clients were dosed without their knowledge. Some were prisoners. Some were psychiatric patients. Some were ordinary people who had simply taken a job that turned out to be a front for a CIA program. The records of M.K. Ultra were destroyed in 1973 on the orders of CIA, Director Richard

Helms. Most of what we know today comes from a small number of financial records that escape that purge and from sworn testimony before the United States Senate during the Church Committee hearings of 1975. The director of M.K. Ultra, a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb, sat in front of the Senate and described, in the calmest possible voice, work that read like a horror novel. That's real. You can pull the transcripts. Read what they were actually doing. They had a project where they ran a brothel in San Francisco, staffed it with prostitutes paid by the agency, dose the Johns with LSD,

and watched them through a one-way mirror. They had a project where they tried to use sustained chemical and psychological torture to break a person's personality down to nothing, and then build a new personality on top of the wreckage. They had a project where they paid academic psychiatrists in respected institutions to treat patients with electroconvulsive therapy at levels far beyond accepted medical limits in order to see whether you could erase a person's memory completely

and reprogram them from a blank slate. That last one was conducted at McGill University in Montreal by a doctor named Ewan Cameron, whose name is almost certainly an unrelated coincidence with the Cameron brothers of the Montauk legend, but a coincidence that becomes interesting once you start noticing it. Cameron, the McGill psychiatrist, would put patients into a chemically induced coma for weeks at a time,

He would play tape loops of his own voice into their ears, sometimes the same phrase repeated for 16 hours a day, in the belief that the message would be installed below the level of conscious memory. He called the process psychic driving. The patients, many of them women suffering from postpartum depression or anxiety disorders who had simply gone to a respected hospital for help, came out of his care with their personalities permanently damaged. Some never recovered the ability to function. Some lost the ability to recognize their own children. Some decades later sued the CIA. The agency settled. The Holmesburg Prison Experiments conducted by the University of Pennsylvania

in cooperation with the United States Army at a Philadelphia prison. Exposed prisoners to dioxins, hallucinogens, radioactive materials, and chemical warfare agents. They ran for over two decades. The prisoners were paid pensions. many were not informed in any meaningful sense of what they were taking. We've covered that one before on the show. Operation C-Spray. Operation Big Itch.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The Atomic Energy Commission's deliberate dosing of pregnant women with radioactive isotopes without their knowledge in the 1940s. Project Bluebird. Project Artichoke. The Edgewood Arsenal experiments where American soldiers were subjected to chemical warfare agents and tests their commanders described to them as ordinary occupational health screenings. The list goes on. The fact pattern is consistent. American citizens, often poor, often institutionalized,

often non-white, sometimes children, used as test subjects without consent for decades, by agencies that lied about it, destroyed records about it, and only admitted to a fraction of it when forced. This is the context in which the Montauk Project story landed in 1992. If you ask me why a story like the Montauk Project found such a wide audience in the early 1990s, the answer is in part because the United States government had spent the previous 20 years confirming that the unthinkable wasn't unthinkable at all. By 1992, the average American who paid attention had heard about M.K. Ultra. About the radiation experiments. About Tuskegee. The instinct to say the government would never do that was no longer instinctive.

The instinct now was, well, what else didn't they tell us? Into that gap, stepped Preston Nichols. Now, none of that by itself makes the Montauk project true. A story being plausible in light of confirmed government misconduct is not the same thing as that story actually being true. A lot of things are plausible. Most of them didn't happen. The work of an honest researcher is to keep your hand on the line between what's documented,

what's testified to, but unverifiable, and what's pure folklore. Those are three different categories. The Montauk Project, in my view, lives almost entirely in the second and third. What's documented about Camp Hero? The base existed. It was a coastal artillery installation, then a radar station, then officially decommissioned, then transferred to the state. stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after these messages. The radar tower really did keep going around for some time after the official shutdown date, and the Air Force never gave a fully convincing public explanation of why. The base really does have underground bunkers. Some of them still sealed. Some of those bunkers are not on any public map. What's testified to, but unverified. Preston Nichols claims about working there.

Al Belich's claims about being edicts claims about being edicts. Cameron, the time-traveling sailor from the Eldridge, Stuart Swardlow's claims about being a Montauk boy. None of these has ever been corroborated by physical evidence, by documents that pass scrutiny, or by independent witnesses with their own stories that aren't already drawing on Nichols' published work. What's folklore? The beast that Duncan Cameron supposedly summoned. The thousands of Montauk boys. The portals to other worlds. The non-human intelligence supposedly providing the technology. The connections to 1943 and the USS Eldridge.

Honest research keeps those categories separate. It doesn't promote testimony into evidence just because the testimony is detailed or vivid. It doesn't promote folklore into testimony, just because the folklore feels right. The reason this matters to me is that there are real victims of real American government misconduct, alive and aging and dying with their stories untold.

and every time a fantastic story like the Montauk Boys catches the public imagination, it sucks oxygen out of the room. It makes it easier for the actual MK Ultra Survivor, the actual radiation experiment victim, to be lumped in with the wilder claims and dismissed altogether. That's the cost of conspiracy as entertainment. I'm not saying don't enjoy the story. I'm saying enjoy it knowing what it is.

There's a CODA I should mention, because it's the one thing about Montauk that broke into the wilder wider American public consciousness for a moment. And most people who heard about it never connected it to the project legend. In July of 2008 on a beach called Ditch Plains, just a few miles from Camp Hero, three young women found a dead animal washed up on the sand. It was hairless. It was bloated.

It had what looked like a hooked beak. It looked in the photographs they took like nothing they had ever seen. The photos went viral in the slow mailing list way that things still went viral in 2008, before social media was really what it is now. The press picked it up. It got a name. The Montauk Monster. It was almost certainly a raccoon. A raccoon's body in advanced decomposition, with the soft tissue around the skull rotted away to expose the underlying bone, gives you a profile that does not look like a raccoon at all. Veterinary pathologists who looked at the photos set as much almost immediately. The hooked beak,

the hairlessness, the bloated proportions are all consistent with normal decomposition of a small mammal that had been in saltwater for some period of time. But for about a week in the summer of 2008, the corner of the internet that had grown up reading Preston Nichols had a field day. Of course, something washed up at Montauk. Of course it didn't look like anything natural. They've been opening portals over there for 60 years. Things come through. It became a meme. Then it faded. Carcass was never recovered for a proper examination, which doesn't help. But the Montauk Monster of 2008, even most committed believers will tell you, was almost certainly

just a dead raccoon at a bad angle. The legend has bigger fish to fry. Camp Hero today is open to the public. It is one of the loveliest state parks in the New York system. Hundreds of acres of pine forest, ocean bluffs, coastal scrub, hiking trails. The bunkers are still there. Some are open to walk through. Most are sealed shut, with thick doors, no windows, no signs explaining what's inside or what isn't.

Local guides will tell you about the official history, the coastal artillery, the sage radar station. They will tell you about the architecture of the disguised buildings, about the fake church and the fake fishing village. They will not generally tell you about the project, not because they don't know, because they're tired of the questions. The radar tower still stands. They were going to tear it down years ago. The locals petitioned. The structure was designated a historical landmark. It still rises out of the trees like a relic from a different planet.

Birds nest in the dish. The steel is rusting. On a quiet morning when the wind is right, you can stand at the foot of it and look up and feel exactly the way you imagine you're supposed to feel. Small, watched. Not entirely sure where you are. Anyone who's been there will tell you that the place has a feeling.

I won't tell you what that feeling means. Atmospherics aren't evidence. A coastal cliff with a giant rusting radar tower above an abandoned military base will always have a feeling. That's what those places do. That's what those places are for. That's how human beings respond to that combination of geography and architecture and history. But the feeling is real. So what do we do with all of this?

what do we do with a story that has, at its base, a real military installation, real declassified documents about American mind control programs, real ambiguity about a radar that wouldn't stop turning, real testimony from real people who live next to that fence, and saw things they couldn't explain. And on top of that base, a tower of claims layered up over decades by men who couldn't always keep their stories straight, that grew so tall that it eventually came down through a crack in the ceiling and landed in a softer fictionalized form on a streaming service watched by hundreds of millions of people. What do we do with that? I think there are a few ways to hold it. You can hold it as a literal account. You can decide that Preston Nichols was telling

the truth, that Al Belich was telling the truth, that the thousands of Montauk boys really existed, that Duncan Cameron really did summon a beast in 1983, and that the United States government has been quietly running a black operation at Camp Hero since the close of the Second World War. You're entitled to make your own evaluation, the same way I'm entitled to make mine. I don't see the documentation. I think the testimony has too many internal problems. I think the story has the shape of a built thing, not a remembered thing. But I've been wrong before in my life, and I'll probably be wrong again. You can hold it as pure fabrication. You can decide that Nichols was either a froniber,

or a deluded man, that everyone who came after him was riffing on his fiction, that there is no there there, and that the only Montauk that ever existed was a fishing village with an unusually big antenna at the edge of it. If you hold it that way, I think you're closer to the truth. I think most of the specific claims in the Montauk Project legend collapse under examination. I think a lot of the apparent corroboration was retroactive, with later witnesses building on details laid down by earlier ones. But I don't think the story is nothing. I think the story is something.

I think what it is, is folklore, American folklore, Cold War folklore. Folklore in the same family as the disappearance of Flight 19 in the Bermuda Triangle, the lights at Skinwalker Ranch, the men in black at the edge of the desert.

These stories are not factually true. Most of them, if you press hard enough, fall apart. But they're not like. lies, exactly. They're the way a culture works out, in the dark, what it suspects about itself. The Montauk Project legend is the United States in the second half of the 20th century, telling itself a story about what its own government might be capable of doing in a place nobody is allowed to look. It's a folk story about secrecy and power and children and the price

of weapons that work on the human mind. It's about all the secrets we already know to be true, dressed up in the costume of all the secrets will never confirm. It's a sermon in a way, with a lab coat where the robe should be. The Duffer brothers understood that. I think that's why their show works the way it does. They didn't try to film a documentary about the Montauk Project. They took the emotional truth of the legend, the feeling of it, the dread and the wonder of it,

and they made a story for the rest of us out of it. A story about kids on bikes and a girl with a shaved head in a creature in a basement. They translated something from the language of conspiracy into the language of childhood. They made it bearable. They made it beautiful. They made it the kind of thing you can sit on a couch

and watch with your own kids, while what it was originally describing, if it ever existed, would be unwatchable in any form. That's a magic trick, and it deserves credit. But underneath the magic trick is still the older story, the colder one. The radar tower at the eastern end of Long Island, The bunkers that nobody opens.

The men who came back from somewhere with memories they couldn't carry. And the country that, when it does open up about its past, has to admit that, yes, it did some of these things. Maybe not at Montauk. Maybe nowhere near Montauk. But somewhere. To somebody. With permission from the men in the right offices.

When I drive out to that part of Long Island, when I go to walk the trails at Camp Hero, I don't go expecting to feel a portal over. opening at my feet. I don't go expecting to see the beast. I go because I think there's something worth doing and standing at the actual location where a story like that grew. To put your hand on the cold concrete of a real bunker. To look up at a real decommissioned radar dish. To remember that the country you live in has a basement and that the basement is bigger than the part of the house we usually live in. And that some of what's down there is true and some of what's down there is

folklore, and you don't always get to know which is which. I think about Preston Nichols sometimes. He died in 2018, in his late 60s, in his house full of vintage radio equipment, surrounded by the books and the broadcasts and the conferences that had defined the second half of his life. Whatever he was, he was committed. Whatever he had seen or thought he had seen, or constructed, or remembered, he carried it with him until the end. He never recanted. He never recanted. He never recanted. He never softened. He never got rich enough off his books to make you suspect a long con. He just kept telling the same story, in the same way, for almost three decades. That's not proof of anything. Liars can be consistent. Sincerely deluded people can be consistent. But it weighs. The way

persistence always weighs. I think about Al Bullock, too. The same is true for him. Whatever was happening inside that man's head, he died inside the story he had told. He never got out from under it. Neither did Duncan Cameron. Neither did Stuart Swerdlow. Whatever you decide their testimony is worth, you have to grant them this. They lived inside their story. They believed it.

The believing of it cost them something. The Montauk Project, as Preston Nichols told it, almost certainly didn't happen. Stranger Things, as the Duffer brothers told it, definitely didn't happen. But the impulse that drives both stories is the oldest impulse there is. to wonder what's behind the door, to wonder who's on the other side, and to listen on a quiet night, on a coastal cliff, in the wind off the ocean, for the sound of a machine that's supposed to be turned off, but is still humming somewhere down in the dark. If you ever find yourself out at the eastern end of Long Island, take an afternoon, drive past the lighthouse, park at the state park entrance, walk into the trees. The radar tower is up there. the way it always has been.

The bunkers are down in the bluff, the way they always have been. The ocean is right there, the way it always has been. You'll have a feeling. I promise you you'll have a feeling. Whether that feeling means anything is between you and the place.

Thanks for spending this time with me. Take care of yourselves. Take care of the people around you. And the next time somebody puts on stranger things, and the lights flicker, and the kids get on their bikes, and that synth score kicks in. You can tell them something most people don't know.

They almost called it Montauk, and now you know the reason why.