Sightings - The Montauk Project: The Chilling Story That Inspired STRANGER THINGS

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

New York, 1982: Venture inside the story that inspired stranger STRANGER THINGS as a desperate father searches for his missing son and uncovers a supernatural conspiracy buried under an abandoned military base. Sightings is a REVERB and QCODE Original. Find us on instagram @sightingspod⁠ Thanks to this week's sponsor MEUNDIES! Visit ⁠⁠meundies.com/sightings⁠⁠ to grab some cozy holiday loungewear. Use promo code SIGHTINGS for up to 50% off! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Television shows love to blur the line between truth and imagination. We call it fiction, but what if some of those stories come from somewhere real? Before there was stranger things, there were whispers of a secret base, a humming machine, and children who vanished after being chosen for something. something special. Maybe art doesn't imitate life after all. Maybe it remembers it. Welcome to sightings, the series that takes you inside the world's most mysterious supernatural events. Each episode brings you a thrilling story that puts you at the center of the action, followed by a discussion that dives into the accounts that inspired the story and our takes on them.

I'm a cloud. And I'm Brian, and today we're diving into the allegedly true story of the Montauk project, which was the inspiration for the pop culture phenomenon, Stranger Things. So follow us to 1982, where one man is desperately trying to find his missing son. This is a story of telepathy, government secrets, strange monsters, and a mystery that grows deeper with each new twist and turn. Find out how on this episode of Sightings. New York Times tip line. May 18th, 19. 18th, 19.m. 1117 a.m. Hi. Hello. Hi. I hope I've reached the right place. The lady on the switchboard said I could leave a message here and someone at the times would maybe pass it on to Metro

or Long Island or whoever runs those columns with the pictures, you know, of missing kids. So I'm calling about my son, James Carrington. He's 12. Oh, I'm Mike Carrington, his father. Do you need me to spell that? Anyway, it's been three days now. The cops think he just ran away, but I know he wouldn't. I mean, he's only 12. He doesn't hate me yet. He's my best bud. But I'm sorry, let me try to focus and just be concise, linear for you here.

We know he went missing on his walk to school because he never showed up there. I led some detectives through his route. We talked to everyone, and unfortunately, no one saw anything. But there's some things that might sound crazy, I know. My wife doesn't even want me to talk about it. She says, I'm making it worse, but I can't just sit here while James is out there somewhere, so I'm calling you because something more is going on here. Because my boy was, he's different.

You understand? He... How do I say this? He has a second sense. like something more, and I know how this sounds, but he's always, he'd always know when someone was calling before the phone rang. He'd know what I was thinking before I said it. His grandmother joked that he was tuned like radio, and there's more than that, lots more, but, and I'm sure people can just try to explain it away if they wanted to accept. Except, you can't explain away

the last several weeks. So James comes home with this letter about a gifted program, this thing for smart kids to go one day a week. Not a different school, exactly, but something else like enrichment, extracurricular. And we thought it would be good for him. But a few nights after his first week, he started getting nightmares. Like not kid nightmares, but way worse. Dark stuff. He'd wake up choking on air, screaming about this chair, this machine humming and something about Humpty Dumpty? And I don't know, it still doesn't make sense to me, but it terrified him completely.

He'd wet the bed even. And at first we thought it was just a phase, puberty, maybe, but we never thought it was connected to this gifted thing. I mean, it's a school. They were reading novels, damn it. Sorry, just... The night before he went missing, the nightmares went to a whole other level.

There's more about this Humpty Dumpty, that chair, but also there was something about this place, this facility. He said he saw an American flag patch and, oh God, what was it? Something else. Um, the point is the next morning he was gone. Vanished. Taken. I don't know. Because that's what I'm getting at. My son didn't run away. He was taken and it has something to do with this program with Humpty Dumpty, a humming chair and the American flag. So, I don't know, military, government. I know how that sounds, but I just, I just feel it. They have my boy. They took my boy and... Message time limit reached. New York Times tip line. May 18th, 1982. 102. 104 p.m.

Hi, it's Mike Carrington again. Sorry, I got cut off by the message thing, but I took some time to think to collect and I'm going to be calmer and clearer, I promise. I haven't made some notes because I didn't tell you everything and I even remembered some more. And I know, I know this will sound insane, but please, just listen. So I said James had those nightmares, but there was more than that. and right at the height of his terror, the lights in the hall outside his bedroom would flicker. Every night, same thing.

Then the night before he disappeared, this airplane, he has this model airplane we made together just paint and plastic, but at the height of his nightmare, I saw it lift up on its own and hover in the air above the shelf. I swear it. And then, and when I was writing everything down, I remembered it, the thing that I couldn't remember from the last call. But that last night, he was saying something about a tower.

So an American flag and a tower, this giant tower made of metal with rooms and equipment below it. And that's where the hum came from, he said. And I can't believe I forgot it because I know a tower like that. There's only one on Long Island I've ever seen, and that's the radar tower, the one at the air station at Montauk. See, I've never even taken James de Montauk, but he knew it. Why did he know it? Is that where he is, where he's been taken? I mean, I have nothing else to go on here, but it has to mean something, right? I swear on my life. On my son's life. I'm not a nut case. I've never called a newspaper. in my life, but if you just print my phone number and mention the gifted class and the

disappearance and the tower, if you put that where people can see it, maybe some other parents will read it and realize their kids had something in a nightmare, and maybe they'll know where James is. I know, maybe I'm grasping at straws, but straws are all I got, so please, Just print something New York Times May 20th 19802 214 a.m.

Hi, yeah, it's Mike Carrington, the guy with the missing kid. I called a few days back and I know you guys get a lot of calls so I'm not mad that nothing's been printed yet But I'm going to pay phone in Montauk, and something happened, something that'll bust this whole thing wide open. And, oh, here, sorry, let me go back a little bit. Okay, so yesterday I got a call from a woman who saw one of the flyers I put up in putting on flyers all over town. And she said her daughter disappeared two months ago.

Casey Fleming, there was an article in the Times about it. I checked. But this woman, her name was Dawn. She met me at a diner in Medford and we started talking and you wouldn't believe this, but her daughter and my son, same gifted program, different schools, different districts even, but same things, same nightmares, same abilities. I don't know what you want to call it, but Dawn said, oh, it was the word of telekinesis, like mind control, mind stuff.

So we started comparing notes about what our kids said during their nightmares. And there too. Same thing. Humpty Dumpty. The chair, the hum, the tower. Dawn hadn't realized it was the tower in Montauk, but when I described it to her, she said it sounded exactly like what her daughter said. So we called the number for the air station. But the person who answered was at this nationwide switchboard and said Montauk station closed in January, which seemed a little too convenient, you know. So Don and I drove out there last night to Monty. talk and yeah there's fencing all around the station it all looked deserted all right but we needed proof and we were gonna get it so we parked in the brush right next to the fence and we watched and wouldn't you know it there were unmarked trucks going in and out of there every two hours and though we couldn't fully see it it looked like they were heading straight for that radar tower and so I finally decided to get out of the car to get a closer look and then the second the second I step out this flashlight blasts on me and we're

swarmed by security guys. Now, you tell me, why is a deserted airbase swarming with security? So these guys, they don't cuff us or anything, they just ask us if we could step inside to answer some questions. And of course, we said, yeah, they were leading us right where we wanted to go. So we followed as they checked our IDs and had us wait in this office building with just rows of empty desks that looked so empty that it had to be staged.

And after, I don't know, 15 minutes of us waiting, this man named Commander Reese, R-E-E-E-S-E, came in and apologized for all the trouble but asked what we were doing outside a decommissioned military station after midnight, which I could have asked him the exact same question. But that's what I'm getting out here, and that's why I'm calling you. Now, I wasn't quite sure how to answer that, but Dawn blurted out. Our kids had run away, and we thought they might be hiding out here because they'd talked about that big radar town. And it's funny, the way Reese reacted? He softened like he understood. He said when he saw our IDs, he realized he'd heard about our kids on the local news. He was a parent himself and couldn't imagine what we were going through.

But he assured us his security team was the only one still on that station. Now I guess he could tell that we didn't believe him, so he offered to show us the radar building. And we didn't object. didn't object. So he walked us over to that massive tower and the square concrete building below it. He unlocked the door, and indeed, the place looked spotless, just rows of unused equipment and neatly labeled boxes of abandoned supplies. He walked us from one empty room to another, then back to the door we came in. And I could tell that Dawn was defeated, and honestly I was too.

But then I saw it. He was on a box labeled electrical supply. and the only reason I noticed was because its color stood out. It was a bright colored children's book, a book about Humpty Dumpty. I didn't say a word. I just followed Reese out, and as soon as we were off station property, I came here to this phone booth

because they have my son, I know they do. Why else would James have been talking about Humpty Dumpty and the tower unless he'd been there, unless he... Message time limit reached. It's the matcha or the three ensemble Cephora of the fates that I've been to deniches who energize all the time? Mm, it's the ensemble.

The form of standard and mini-regruped? Hello, Ben. And the embellage, too beau, who is practically pre to donate? And I know that I'd love these summer Fridays and Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez. I'm, I'm sure. The most ensemble, the Caddle of Despera

Cepora, the first offender Fridays, Rare Beauty, Way, Cifora collection, and other parts of Quick, procure you these formats, mini, regrouped for a better quality price,

in line on C4A. or in magazine. New York Times tip line. May 22nd, 1989, 982,

947 p.m. Hi, it's Mike Carrington again. I don't know if anyone's even listening to these, but I hope you are and if someone is,

please save this because we're going back to that radio tower and I just need somebody to have a record in case. something happens to us um so after i got cut off uh i think i was explaining to you the humpy dumpty book that i saw at the radar tower um dawn and i uh dawn was with me the whole time don and i

we went back to that diner that we first met at to just figure out what we're going to do next and this guy approaches us he says his name's paul marsh and he knew that we'd been watching montauk air station because he was watching montauk air station and he said he definitely desperately needed to talk to us. So Paul says he's an electrical engineer from Bayshore who worked for a defense contractor, just a normal life, normal job, except about six months ago,

he started having these dreams, really vivid ones, like more memories than anything, he said. And in these dreams, he seemed to be working at Montauk Air Station. He'd see himself in these underground rooms filled with massive coils and huge computer systems and this chair. Yeah, a chair in a shielded room surrounded by receivers and transmitters. But in these dreams, he wasn't just visiting or seeing it.

He was working at the station. He was running the experiments there, and he was running the experiments on kids. Young kids, maybe 10 or 12. And here's the bizarre thing. Paul has no actual memory of any of this. He's never worked at Montauk as far as he knows. He's never even been inside that station. But his dreams were so detailed

that he became convinced they were real somehow, like he was living a life he just couldn't remember. Honestly, at that point, I didn't know what to think. So I pulled out a picture of James, and I showed it to Paul. He said James was one of the kids. from his dreams. And Dawn asked what they were doing to these kids,

and Paul said he didn't know exactly, but in his dreams, he was monitoring their brainwaves, and the kids would sit in the chair, and somehow their thoughts would manifest on computer screens. And even weirder objects would appear out of nowhere, as if conjured from thin air, pencils, cups, things like that. But Paul said they kept putting. pushing the kids harder, trying to conjure more and more elaborate objects.

So, now you've got three of us, okay? You've got three people who know something is happening at this station. Three people who have been called crazy, been told to stop asking questions, and been told to stay away. Now, Paul thinks he can get us inside. He remembers stuff from his dreams, door locations, security rotations, schedules, and he drew us a map of the underground levels, five floors of them. hidden beneath that radar tower. And I know somewhere down there is James and I'm going

to get him. We're going back tonight. All three of us, we're going to find those underground levels. We're going to find our kids and we're going to get them out. So if anything happens to us, I need this recording to exist. Someone has to know where we went and why. New York Times tip line. May 23rd, 1982. I don't even know where to start. I'm shaking so bad I can barely hold this phone. Um, okay, uh, it's me, Mike Carrington. We made it out, barely.

And we part, um, by the dunes and we crawled under a fence, uh, where it was sagging a little bit. No one came after us. I don't know why there weren't any patrols. We made our way towards the radar tower. And the closer we got, the more we heard this hum, the same sound James described during his nightmares. The radar dish wasn't moving, and eventually we realized that that hum was somehow coming from beneath it.

So we kept moving. We reached the building, same one we went in before. We broke a handle to get inside. The room looked exactly like it did earlier, same rows of equipment and boxes. I found the same box, again, the one marked, electrical supplies with the Humpty Dumpty book in it, it was still in there. But this time I picked it up, and inside, written in shaky pencil or two words, help me.

And it was James's handwriting. I know it. I would know it anywhere. He'd been there, and he'd held that book, and he left me a message. So we kept moving through the rooms, looking for some way down deeper, but Paul said something was wrong, that everything felt off compared to his dreams. And then we heard a pop and then a scream. We followed the sound to the back of one room. There was this section of wall that wasn't quite flush with the rest and he pulled it aside to reveal a door.

Not a regular door, but something else. It was metal, heavy, like from a fallout shelter or something and it had this panel next to it that glowed red. I mean, I'd never seen anything like this before. But Paul said he'd seen it in his dreams and he put his hand on that panel, and the door opened to reveal a stairwell leading down. And immediately, as soon as the door opened, that hum was louder, and then gunshots, more of them, and screams.

So something was happening down there. I pray it didn't involve James. At this point, Dawn was getting pretty spooked and wanted to turn back, but I couldn't. So we kept going, and at the bottom of the stairs, there's just a few flights. By my guess, there's this hallway. and it was just wild. There were red lights flashing, armed men running in panic, and I could feel the floor shake as something approached.

God, I don't even know how to describe it other than to say it was a monster. There was a monster down there, and it had to hunch because the ceiling was too low, and it was covered in gross hair, I think, but I can't be sure because it moved so fast. And soldiers were firing at it, and then it roared. And then the lights all just burst overhead. And in the dark, two soldiers grabbed us and started pushing us up the stairs, shouting at us,

telling us to run, to get out of there. And they just kept pushing until we were out of the building entirely. And they ran back inside. And, I mean, we were not. armed or prepared so I knew we couldn't go back we couldn't so we ran back to the fence to the car and now to pay phone here but I know what I saw something is happening under Montauk Air Station I don't know what all I do know is they've got our kids down there they got James down there and I'm not

not giving up until I get him back. I don't care what it takes. I don't care if they lock me up or call me insane or if you write an article or you don't write an article, I don't care anymore, but I'm getting James back. You understand that? I'm... Message time limit reached. Sightings will be back just after this. McLeod, the holidays are coming up, and that is the only time the year that adults can get away with matching outfits. So McLeod, well, you wear matching... jams with me. Absolutely. Good. Because meundies has their new match me collection. You can match

undies with your partner. You can coordinate PJs for the family photo or you can go festive with your friend group. Point is, meundies makes it fun, easy, and ridiculously cozy to look good this holiday. Their prints are awesome. Their fabric is next level soft. And I think you'll want to be caught in matching loungeware all season long. I love my meyundies. They're soft. They're soft. They're breathable. But best of all, right now, you can get up to 50% off at meundies. So knock out all your holiday gifting needs today with meundies. Just get everybody underwear. They're like, wow, you had a theme this year. To get exclusive holiday deals up to 50% off, go to meundies.com slash sitings and enter promo code, sitings. That's meundies.com slash sitings, promo code, sitings for

up to 50% off. Yay! Jingle bells, jingle bells, the undies all the way. Welcome back to sightings, Brian, I don't know if I've ever heard a stranger thing than this story. Look what you did there. I'm so proud of myself. Yeah, it is an absolutely crazy story.

What I think I love about it, though, is that you can see the threads connecting what allegedly happened in Montauk with the world and the characters of Stranger Things. And fun fact, Stranger Things was originally titled Montauck. Really? I didn't know that. Stranger Things is a better title. I agree. I agree. But, yeah, the Duffer Brothers who created Stranger Things were inspired by this wild tale of all these weird things allegedly going on at this military installation on the foreign. of Long Island. Obviously, they moved the story to the Midwest and made a bunch of other changes and things like that. But Stranger Things and the story that you read are based a lot on... On the actual accounts. Yeah. And for good reason, after... Okay, well, I think for the purposes of this discussion, I should probably come right out and let our audience know... I haven't watched Stranger Things. Oh, you're fired.

I'm sorry. I haven't watched it. Okay. I just, like, it just kept building and, like, it kept becoming a bigger and bigger deal, and then I felt too farther and farther behind and until I was just like, well, I guess I missed it. Oh, well. I'll go back, especially now. So actually, Brian, your story is my first real exposure to the events of the Montauk project. And it's awesome.

So now I'm like, well, of course, of course they made a TV show out of this. It's got everything. It does. So just to be crystal clear, well, first of all, let me say I am a stranger things fan. All of you listening, I hope you are too. Well, it's important that one of us are. It is. Otherwise, we wouldn't be doing this.

But as many of you probably know, season five is coming out very, very soon. So I hope you all enjoy that. But just to come clean myself, I did make up the character that you read and the circumstances surrounding his missing sun, like the whole gifted program, things like that. Oh, okay. But as we'll see in this discussion, you know, all of the element. that I pulled into the story and which stranger things pulls into their story.

You know, things like the telepathic kid, the monster on the loose, and then other things that were just in my story, like the second lives of Paul, the character, in the story. All of that stuff that happened in the story was based on the accounts that came out in the 1990s.

And it all kind of started with this book that was published called The Montauk Project Experiments in Time. Before we get into the details, though, and getting into all the wild things that this book talks about, I think it's helpful to probably set the scene because Montauk Air Station is obviously very different than the world of Stranger Things, but it is a real place. And for those of you who are, I guess,

are unfamiliar with Long Island geography, Montauk is a town on the very, very furthest eastern tip of Long Island. I've been there. It's really pretty. There's a lighthouse, and there's also this decommissioned airbase. It was built in 1942 as under the name Camp Hero for coastal defense during World War II. And it was reactivated then during the Cold War for radar tracking. And that famous tower that showed up in the story, that tower is real. It's one of 12 that have been installed around the United States. It's like 100 feet or 90 feet tall.

It's big. It's metal. You can see it in the show art, guys. Okay, cool. As we heard in the story, the base officially closed in the 1980s. But there are legends of unusually tight security that have been hanging out around the base for years afterwards. It's also worth noting unrelated to the story.

There's reports and legends of weird stuff happening in Montauk completely separate from stuff that was in the book. Things like weird storms that would come out of nowhere. Weird animal stampedes. What? Through town, yeah. And just other weird stuff like that has been happening, which kind of create this whole allure of mystery surrounding Montauk a little bit, I guess. The wild giraffes of Montock? I think it's more like birds and, uh,

Like goats and dogs and things like squirrel. Yeah, I'd love to see a squirrel stampy. Squirrel stampid. But I guess to really understand what's going on here and understand, I guess, the profound influence that this hell had on Stranger Things, we've got to really dive into this book. So, Montauk Project, experiments in time.

Wait, okay, so experiments in time, it didn't seem like there was any time travel in your story, and as far as I'm aware, there's not time travel and stranger things? There's not, and there was. But this story has a little bit of everything, everything from telekinesis to time travel to monsters coming out of portals, things like that. Portals. Yeah.

The guy he wrote this book, his name was Preston Nichols. He was an electrical engineer. He claims that in 1971, he received a grant to study telepathy. And while he was working with a bunch of psychics on Long Island, he noticed that they would all lose their abilities at about the same time every day. And he guessed that this was because of some kind of electromagnetic interference or something like that. And can you guess where he attracted to, McLeod? Montock. Absolutely.

So he went to Montauk. He realized that whatever was happening at this radar base was influencing the psychic abilities of the people he was working with. But that's not all. It turns out he may have had more of a connection to that base than he thought. So I got to jump forward a little bit in time to make this all make sense. But eventually he met up with this guy named Duncan. Duncan Cameron. And both of them in the late 80s, I guess, or early 90s, started having, of being at the base in like the late 70s and early 80s. Okay. And what's interesting is in Duncan's case, it was as a test subject. But for Preston Nichols, he was a scientist who was apparently running the experiments there.

Okay. So is Preston, the author of this book is sort of your stand, is Paul your stand in for Preston kind of or inspiration? Yes, because they were both having these weird dreams and realizing, oh, my gosh, am I leading a double life here, where I'm like an engineer in my day job by day, and then at night I'm somehow running these experiments. So in these visions or dreams, what were they doing specifically at the Montauk base? It seems like their experiments involved some kind of a chair. So the chair was a thing from this book story, okay. Absolutely. It was surrounded by electromagnetic coils that somehow fed off of energy from the radar dish or something like that. You got like Professor X vibes.

What was it called, the, like, dome that he would sit inside? I totally get that vibe, too. This seems a lot more traumatizing, though, than that. Yes, yes. A little darker. Yeah, the goal ostensibly seemed to have been to amplify the psychic abilities of test subjects. Very Professor X. Ultimately, though, manipulate reality.

So test subjects like Duncan could just visualize an object, like a baseball or an apple or something like that. And it would just materialize in front of them. machine is running. Okay. But when they turn the machine off, everything just vanished. So that's kind of interesting. But then things get a little bit more out there than that, even. We've got portals through time and space. So in the early 80s, apparently they were amplifying the psychic energy of these test subjects to create wormholes of some kind. And this is out there even for me, but it includes apparently a portal to 1933, which happens to be the Philadelphia experiment, which we already did an episode on.

Oh, it's all coming full circle. Yeah. So they claimed that they linked up with the USS Eldridge that was the ship that went missing in 1943 when they turned on all these machines. I don't know what to make of all that because apparently they also went to Mars and did a whole bunch of other stuff using these portals that they created. Oh, my God. Yeah. Wow. This is a lot, and I have so many questions piling up in my little question pile brain.

But so I'm starting to see some connections to what I know about Stranger Things, portals and stuff and telekinesis. But Stranger Things was a lot about kids. And this story that you wrote was a lot about kids. Where did the kids figure in to this book? It was after the book was published, a couple men came forward and claimed that they were kidnapped as children and experimented on at Montauk. They basically, like, tortured the kids to try and break their minds so they could be reprogrammed to be sleeper. agents or something like that. I mean, I'm thinking very much of 11, uh, the character from

Stranger Things who's played by Millie Bobby Brown. Oh, gotcha. You know, who's been like brought up to be this psychic weapon. Yeah. I mean, like I feel like I've, I feel like I've, I feel like I've, sorry, again, if I'm taking us off course, because I feel like this spider webs in so many directions, but I, like, I feel like I'm aware loosely of stories about the government trying to develop, like, telekinetic powers and like, you know, mind reading stuff in around the 60s, 70s or whatever. Yes. So there was something called MK Ultra. MK Ultra, okay.

It was less about like telepathy, though, and more about mind control in a way. Okay. And what they were doing was like dosing subjects with loads of like LSD and other psychotropic drugs and things like that in order to try and break them down and study their minds and figure out how to. Gotcha. Like make like sleeper agents sort of. It was more like a what can we do with this? kind of thing. But there is one more thing before we kind of dive into whether the novel could have actually happened or not that happened in the book and in the story that you read

and in Stranger Things and that is of course a monster. Right. Yes. Thank you. So did a monster go on the loose and Montauk? Was this before after the squirrel stampede? It might have been related. I'm not sure. But yes, a monster allegedly did go on the loose in Montauk right before the base. There's a monster a muck. And Mon Talk. So according to the book and to Duncan, the psychic guy, they say that Duncan was either tricked into or somehow manifest this monster who came through one of the portals that his brain created. You know, and it wreaked havoc on this underground base. Well, I don't really know what to think about this.

Is there anything beyond what is starting to form, for me, a narrative of like two guys got. together and started hashing out some kind of like fun crazy stories together and then wrote a book. So there's sort of some corroborating evidence here. And then there's also a lot of big question marks. You're right that the core of this story, and I guess it's the core of Stranger Things, is really based on the word of Preston and Duncan and what they claim happened at this base. It's interesting to know that they never claimed anything about kids. That only came afterwards from two other guys who you could see that as they're validating their story in a way. Or you could see it as they're kind of piling it on and looking for attention.

Right. In the 90s, apparently, there was a teenager who snuck onto the base and explored it with a VHS camera. Okay. And when he was there, he found a whole bunch of underground bunkers, a mysterious vault-like door. And this is kind of interesting. He found receipts for, like, huge, $60,000 food purchases a month at this base. But the thing is that those receipts were all dated after the base had closed. Okay.

Which implies that something was going on at this base after they officially closed the base. Right. And then, of course, as it appeared in the story, there were weird security forces at the base all the time, even though it was just a decommission radar base. Right. Aside from that, though, none of this in any way, shape, or form has been verified. There's nothing to validate the kind of the portals and the whatever. The portal and the telekinesis and the child abductions and all that kind of stuff, none of that's been verified. Okay, but it does sound like there's some interesting evidence to indicate that there was some kind of secret project going on there.

I think it's entirely possible, yes. But again, like there's no reports of mass amounts of kids going missing in Long Island or things like that. And also of note, Preston, the author of the book, his own history. doesn't necessarily check out with the things that he claims in the book. He claims he has an engineering degree from the University of Tampa. There is no record of that happening. He also makes a whole bunch of claims that are way too well to even try to incorporate into the story. For instance, he claims that the Montauk project was, I guess, so under wraps that they had to finance it using Nazi gold, which I guess cool, I guess.

They also claimed that Duncan, the psychic he was with, was actually born in the early 20th century and somehow traveled through time to 1983. Okay. The thing that jumped with me the most was one of the guys who claimed he was abducted by as a kid claims that hundreds of thousands of other kids were abducted and processed at Montauk. That's a lot of kids. Which there is obviously no record of having vanished in any way, shape, or form. Yeah. Yeah. The Preston, the author of this book, also went on to write some more books with ridiculous titles referencing Nazis and things like that and Montauk, obviously. And he readily admits that he fictionalized some of the elements of those books. Whether or not he fictionalized elements of the first book remains to be... He hasn't copped to that. He hasn't copped to that, necessarily. So that's kind of what we have to work with here. So given that, though, I just let's get a read.

from you, where are you on all this? Because it's a pretty wild story and I can see obviously why it became a show like Stranger Things because it just has all the elements of cool stuff. But do you think it actually happened? I don't have any reason to believe based on what I've learned like today.

I don't have any reason to believe that like this guy Preston is necessarily telling the truth and isn't just telling a fantastical tale. I do find compelling the idea that there was something going on at Montauk. You know, I could believe, like, a security force being at a decommissioned base,

that actually still tracks for me because it's still government property. And, like, they wouldn't just want people, you know, wandering in there, like random teenagers with cameras. But the receipts for all the food dating then, I mean, it's possible that that teenager could have kind of, I assume this was after the book came out. Yeah, this was in the mid-90s. So, you know, you know, it's, it's. possible that that teenager could have been

adding to the story kind of but again then it's like well then how did how are people getting in and out like unseen you imagine that you would still need a lot of people running a facility like that $60,000 in food that means a lot of people are being fed no that's that's absolutely

valid I can imagine that they could have been running some kind of program and there was probably always whispers of it around town and maybe that's something that Preston picked up on and it's just like oh what could be happening there let me write a book about it and just spun this whole tale Were there any, like, press junkets or anything for Preston and this guy, Duncan? Like, where are they now?

Like... So, both Duncan and Preston passed away in 2018, 2019, give or take. They are not affiliated with Stranger Things. Stranger Things, to my knowledge, does not credit the Montauk Project book or any of that for it. It just kind of took the lore that it established and ran with it without directly... Then directly crib it, sort of. Yeah. But I think more than whether or not it's plausible or not, kind of like with the Dulcy Bay story we had a few weeks ago, what's exciting to me about this is, number one, it's a fantastically cool story. And it has an even more compelling, you know, emotional core because you've got people with missing kids in this one that layers on top of just, you know, random military experiments going on. But I also think it's just a really cool example of how you can see a story snowballing from.

oh, there's a weird base at the end of Montauk that might be open to, oh, let me build on that and write this whole story about monsters and time travel and telekinesis and things like that, to, oh, where you want to do a television show that's kind of nostalgic in 80s feeling, why not kind of use Montauk's lore as a launching point? And now we have Stranger Things, which is probably one of the, if not the most popular television series in the world right now, you know, one of them. And I think a lot of people just don't realize that it was based on what's allegedly a true account. But I mean, like, true or not plausible or not, I'm so glad that this story exists because it's fascinating and kind of like mind expanding and kind of just gives me that kind of tingly feeling of like excitement. Absolutely, absolutely. And so I had so much fun writing this one as well. So listeners, though, we'd love to hear what you think. If you love Stranger Things, let us know about it.

If you think the Montauk Project is a load of hooey, let us know that, too. Yeah, if there's some important evidence that you feel like we missed that you're aware of. Let us know that as well, for sure. Find us on Instagram at sightings pod or leave us a message on Spotify. We love reading those. So, Brian, do we have any supernatural turkeys in store for us next week? We're taking next week off for the Thanksgiving holiday. Oh, thank goodness. Daddy needs some stuffing.

But we will be back in December with some of our very favorite ghost, alien, and creature stories. So I'm not going to say any more than that. Perfect for the season. Once again, we all know Santa is a ghost alien. We'll leave you with that, listeners. We'll see you in two weeks. Same time, same place right here on sightings. Enjoy your Thanksgiving.

Sightings is hosted by McLeod Andrews and Brian Sigley. Produced by Brian Sigley, Chase Kinzer, and McLeod Andrews, written by Brian Sigley. Music by Mitch Bain. Mixing and mastering by Pat Kicklighter of Sundial Media. Artwork by Nuno Sarnatus. For a list of this episode sources, check out our website at sightingspodcast.com. Sightings is presented by reverb and cue code. If you like the show, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, so you're first to hear new

every week. And if you know other supernatural fans, tell them about us. We'd really appreciate it.