The spine-chilling Hawkins National Laboratory from Netflix’s Stranger Things is inspired by the creepy, real-life Camp Hero military base set on the craggy tip of Montauk in Long Island, New York.
Preston Nichols, author of The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time (1992), fueled conspiracy theories about Camp Hero when he wrote about supposed time travel and kidnapped children who endured mind-altering experiments during the Cold War.
Yikes. But even if Nichols’ book is wrong, something unsettling does appear to have unfolded at the now-abandoned base.So what’s fact and what’s fiction? Here are five things you should know about the stranger-than-life Camp Hero and the Montauk Project conspiracy theory.
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The spine-chilling Hawkins National Laboratory from Netflix’s Stranger Things is inspired by the creepy, real-life Camp Hero military base set on the craggy tip of Montauk in Long Island, New York.
Preston Nichols, author of The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time (1992), fueled conspiracy theories about Camp Hero when he wrote about supposed time travel and kidnapped children who endured mind-altering experiments during the Cold War.
Yikes. But even if Nichols’ book is wrong, something unsettling does appear to have unfolded at the now-abandoned base.So what’s fact and what’s fiction? Here are five things you should know about the stranger-than-life Camp Hero and the Montauk Project conspiracy theory.
Montauk Project conspiracy theory followers believe the US government conducted a series of projects at Camp Hero to develop psychological warfare techniques and research paranormal activity, time travel, mind control, and contact with extraterrestrial life.
Christopher Garetano, the New Yorker behind the 2014 documentary Montauk Chronicles, investigated allegations brought by three men who claim they were brainwashed and forced to take part in experiments at Camp Hero in the 1970s and ‘80s. Garetano also employed a geophysicist to analyze the ground underneath the old base and found evidence of large structures not recorded on official maps.
“Forget all the alien and MKUltra crap,” Garetano told the New York Post. “I think there was some type of experimentation out there using kids or teenagers, maybe runaways from New York.”
Camp Hero’s radio tower was built to warn Americans of a nuclear attack
2. The nuclear conspiracy theory
New York’s state parks system now owns the abandoned property - known alternately as Fort Hero, Montauk Air Force Base, and Camp Hero - which dates back to the Revolutionary War and boasts panoramic views of the Atlantic Ocean. At one point, the base was disguised as a fishing village with Cape Cod-style houses.
A SAGE radar tower was erected at the base to provide a 30-minute warning in the event of a nuclear attack. The antennae reportedly emitted up to 425MHz when operational, a frequency strong enough to interfere with the neighbors’ TV sets. Could it have also affected their thoughts? No one is certain.
Paul Fagan, a local, scoured the National Archives in Manhattan and believes the US may have also secretly buried a nuclear reactor at the site in the 1950s and leaked wild conspiracy theories to deflect from what they were doing.
3. The Philadelphia Experiment
Intriguingly, the Montauk Project intersects with another legendary conspiracy theory: the 1943 Philadelphia Experiment where the US military supposedly created technology that could render naval ships invisible to enemy radar.
A man named Al Bielek saw a B-movie based on the theory, The Philadelphia Experiment, in 1988 and said he experienced déjà vu. Bielek claimed he then unlocked repressed memories involving time travel and his involvement in both the Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Project, indicating a connection between the two.
Brookhaven National Laboratory records particles emerging from sub-atomic collisions
4. A portal into another dimension?
In Stranger Things, the secretive Hawkins Lab is backed by the US Department of Energy. In real life, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, about 60 miles from the Montauk base, is run by the US Department of Energy. Both are home to an inter-dimensional portal-vortex, or as the Stranger Things crew refers to it, a ‘gate’ into a different dimension, reports the Long Island Press.
The coincidences don’t stop there, according to the newspaper: “They’re both steeped in mystery. They’re both off-limits to the public and well-protected against trespassers. They both feature mind-blowing facilities and equipment that are literally rewriting everything the scientific community understands about cosmic matter, the creation of this universe, nano-particles, time, space and so much more we can only begin to comprehend it all.”
In the late 1960s, equipment from Brookhaven was moved to Camp Hero and installed in an underground bunker. According to conspiracy theorists, Camp Hero may have been closed above ground, but everything underground remained the property of the Air Force and may still be operational.
5. Aliens
Camp Hero was officially shut down in 1981, but that hasn’t stopped the hoards poking around, searching for traces of the aliens supposedly held in underground bunkers connected by a labyrinth of tunnels. The site fires the imagination much like Nevada’s Area 51, which is a test site for the world’s most advanced espionage programs and (if the conspiracy theorists are right), a hub for aliens.
The former military base in Long Island, New York has also become a magnet for people convinced it is home to an underground laboratory where spaceships - and perhaps even extraterrestrials - are hidden away.
So far, no aliens have been found… but the truth may still be out there.
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