On a summer afternoon in 1752, as storm clouds gathered over Philadelphia and rain spattered the city, writer, diplomat, inventor, scientist and all-around polymath Benjamin Franklin did not seek shelter inside as so many others did. Rather, he saw an opportunity to conduct an experiment that he had been planning for some time. He prepared a kite, but rather than a paper kite, this one was a silken handkerchief stretched over crossed sticks, making it more likely to withstand the wind and the rain of the storm, and he attached to the kite a house key. Most Americans are very familiar with this experiment, but in its countless retellings, it has become a historical myth, with many claiming that, in conducting it, Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity. In truth, electricity had been a recognized form of energy for more than a thousand years. In fact, numerous scientists had studied the nature and effects of static electricity, going all the way back to 546 BCE, when Thales of Miletus (Thay-leez of Meal-le-tus) produced electricity by rubbing wool against amber. The purpose of Franklin’s experiment, rather, was just to prove the electrical nature of lightning. This was a popular theory at the time, winning French scientists accolades for their speculation on the topic, based on the observation that lightning appeared to be attracted to spikes, or high points, a fact about which Franklin himself had formerly been skeptical. The design of his kite experiment, however, clearly demonstrates how much was known about the conduction of electricity. Franklin attached a wire to the top of his kite, and made sure that the twine was wet, so that the lightning, or “electrical fire” as he called it, would be conducted from the wire at the kite’s tip down to the key at the end of the twine, which would collect the charge. And to protect himself from the electricity, at the end of the wet twine, where the key was tied, he attached another string, this one of silk, which he did his best to keep dry, for he held the other end of it. At the conclusion of his experiment, he was able to charge a rudimentary capacitor, called a Leyden jar. He published the details of the experiment, and thus the myth was born. Some other mythical aspects of the experiment have to do with where he stood, with some accounts describing him being in a field, when in fact he explicitly described standing in a doorway so as to keep his silken tether dry. Other versions have it that he climbed the spire of Christ Church to conduct the experiment, but this is a corruption. In fact, he intended to use the spire on Christ Church for his experiment, but at the time the church had no such steeple. Franklin even financed its construction by organizing a lottery, but it would not be built until a couple years after he went ahead with the experiment using a kite instead of a steeple to reach the height necessary. And lastly, most tellings of the story have it that the key-adorned kite was struck by lightning. If that were the case, Benjamin Franklin would very likely have been killed. In fact, the year after, a similar experiment in Russia did end up electrocuting the physicist conducting it. Rather, in Franklin’s experiment, the wire collected the ambient electricity in the storm cloud and conducted it to the key. This experiment, which for a long time was referred to as the Philadelphia Experiment, really happened and was rather momentous in the study of electricity and meteorological phenomena, but like other real incidents in history, it has gathered myths over time. In contrast, today, the term “The Philadelphia Experiment” is used mostly to refer to another momentous scientific achievement around 200 years later. The difference is, this one never really happened. However, it too has evolved into numerous historical myths, including wild conspiracy claims that our government has abducted children for psychic experimentation, opened portals in time-space, and brought actual monsters into our world.

I described this series as an exploration of the historical and pseudo historical basis of the Netflix series Stranger Things, and it is here that we veer into the decidedly pseudohistorical. Some may protest that the topics I’ve been covering, MK-Ultra human experimentation and CIA-sponsored studies of anomalous mental phenomena, were not the actual basis of the series. Rather, the creators of Stranger Things were inspired not by history but by 80s science-fiction, and this is certainly the case. One of the great pleasures of watching the series is in identifying each bit of homage that they’ve woven into it. But we can see that one of the biggest influences on the show, Steven King’s Firestarter, was itself influenced by the intelligence projects I’ve been discussing. The novel clearly references MK-Ultra drug trials as well as CIA efforts to develop a psychic asset in its premise about a scientific intelligence agency that gives test subjects psychic powers by dosing them with a psychoactive drug. Certainly the first season of Stranger Things, which has government agents chasing after a little girl with psychokinetic powers, owes much to King’s novel and its film adaptation. However, it has been reported that the show’s creators certainly were inspired by the real-life urban legend of the Montauk Project, which I will be discussing in this episode. The original name of the series was actually Montauk, and a couple of years after the series premiere, the creators were sued for plagiarism by a man who claimed to have pitched them a feature film called The Montauk Project, about an abducted child, secret experiments in a military installation, and an inter-dimensional monster. Eventually the lawsuit was withdrawn, either because the case was weak or because the plaintiff was paid handsomely to drop the charges. Regardless, these facts are enough to confirm that the story of the Montauk Project, a wild and thoroughly debunked tale that continues to be believed by many fringe researchers and paranormal conspiracy theorists, was the principle basis for the show Stranger Things. However, before we can even begin to approach the story of the Montauk Project, we must first examine the legend of the Philadelphia Experiment, which would become the bedrock upon which the later legend was built.

Promotional material produced to help sell the concept of Stranger Things, made to look like a dog-eared Steven King paperback, with the original title: Montauk. Via ScreenCraft

The legend began in 1952, when Morris K. Jessup, a UFO researcher, received a letter from someone calling himself Carlos Allende, who took issue with Jessup’s urging of legislators to fund research aimed at completing Einstein’s Unified Field Theory as a means of developing antigravity propulsion and advancing space travel technology. Over the next year, Jessup received more than 50 letters from Allende, who claimed that, contrary to common knowledge, Albert Einstein actually had completed his Unified Field Theory and had used it while working with the Navy on a top secret experiment. For any other lay person, like myself, the Unified Field Theory was the idea that all the forces of nature, specifically the field equations of relativistic gravitation and electromagnetism, must be connected and thus should be describable with a single, integrated theory. This notion obsessed Einstein, who indicated in a 1923 Nobel lecture that he “cannot rest content with the assumption that there exist two distinct fields totally independent of each other by their nature.” He worked on unification for the last thirty years of his life, even poring over his notes on his deathbed, but he never achieved a working theory. Some say this is because he was simply ahead of his time, as back then, only two subatomic particles were known, whereas now we’ve discovered several others. Also, only the two fundamental forces of nature he was trying to unify were recognized, but now we recognize two others, the so-called strong and weak nuclear forces at work inside of atoms. Others will say that Einstein was simply not keeping up with the vanguard of physics in his day because he had rejected quantum mechanics, or they will say he had simply strayed too far from physical reality in his mathematical theories, which more and more had to involve theoretical dimensions in order to work. Today, it’s thought that string theory, which likewise requires the theoretical existence of numerous dimensions, may eventually lead to the Theory of Everything that Einstein sought, though string theorists too have been criticized for straying too far from physical reality and not producing testable theories. However, according to Morris K. Jessup’s mysterious correspondent, Carlos Allende, Einstein actually did complete his unified theory and tested it at a Naval shipyard in Philadelphia, in 1943, when he managed to make a naval destroyer, the U.S.S. Eldridge, disappear. According to Allende, as part of the war effort, Einstein was applying his unified theory in an effort to make the warship invisible, but as an unforeseen result of the experiment, the destroyer was teleported to Norfolk, Virginia, and back again. Allende knew about this because he had witnessed it. He had been a merchant mariner aboard a shipping vessel at the time, and he had seen strange equipment brought aboard the Eldridge, such as transmitters and generators, as well as what appeared to be a Tesla coil that that was wrapped around the entire vessel. Before the ship disappeared, he claimed to have seen it become enveloped in a bright green haze. Over the course of his many letters, Allende described the experiment in greater detail, explaining that sailors aboard the Eldridge became disoriented, that when the vessel reappeared in Norfolk, some crew members’ bodies had physically fused with the solid matter of the ship’s bulkheads, and that some had disappeared entirely.

In the spring of 1957, the year after Jessup had received the increasingly strange letters from Allende, agents from the Office of Naval Research contacted him. They had in their possession a volume of Jessup’s 1955 book, The Case for the UFO, that had been anonymously sent to them annotated by what appeared to be three different people using different colored ink. Something in the annotations, which implied knowledge about the propulsion technology of UFOs and suggested Jessup was too close to figuring out the truth, had interested the agents, and of course this helps fuel conspiracy theories about official cover-ups. When Jessup read the annotations, he found their technical jargon similar to that of Allende and showed the officers Allende’s letters. According to the story, these Naval investigators went to the Pennsylvania return address that appeared on the letters, but found only an abandoned farmhouse. Afterward, the Navy seems to have lost interest—or maybe they had never been all that interested at all?—but Morris K. Jessup grew more and more obsessed. The legend almost died with him, however, when Jessup committed suicide in 1959 without publishing anything about the Philadelphia Experiment. However, Allende would not let it die. He began writing further letters to UFO researcher Jacques Vallee almost a decade later, and word of the strange story spread throughout the UFO researcher community. In 1968, a book was published, and suddenly the Allende Letters, and copies of the annotated Jessup book—called the Varo edition, after the company that made 127 reproductions of it—became nearly mythical among UFO researchers. These conspiracy theorists variously speculate that Jessup was actually murdered—even though there is evidence of his psychological distress before his suicide, resulting from a failed marriage and poor health after an automobile accident—and that Carlos Allende, who remained in hiding for his entire life, posting letters from various locations in America and Mexico, was actually an extra-terrestrial. Then in 1979, the story of the Philadelphia Experiment really reached prominence in the public imagination when a widely read paranormal writer, Charles Berlitz, who had previously popularized the idea of the Bermuda Triangle, teamed up with UFO researcher Bill Moore to write a book about it. Listeners of the show should recognize those names, as Moore and Berlitz were the duo who later popularized the legend about the Roswell Incident, and Moore would eventually be made a pawn in the UFO disinformation games of Rick Doty, helping to torment Paul Bennewitz and propagate the hoax Majestic 12 documents. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I invite you to listen to my three-part series UFO Disinfo, released last year around this time. Moore, who also apparently corresponded with the mysterious Carlos Allende, expanded on the mythology. The experiment was code-named Project Rainbow, Berlitz and Moore wrote, and the research into invisibility may have applied Einstein’s Unified Field Theory, but Einstein’s theory had been completed by Townsend Brown, an inventor of questionable background and character who claimed to have developed in the 1920s an antigravity thrust technology, called the Biefeld-Brown effect, that today is recognized as a misunderstanding of the ionic or coronal wind phenomenon. Furthermore, according to Berlitz and Moore, the application of this unified field technology toward invisibility was developed by mathematician and Manhattan Project collaborator John Von Neumann. Of course, exactly how Townsend’s “electro-gravitation” might have produced invisibility, let alone achieved teleportation, is, unsurprisingly, not exceedingly clear.

Carlos Allende’s story was, of course, dubious from the start. For example, if he had seen the ship disappear and reappear in Philadelphia, how did he know where it had teleported to? And why was there no record of the event from other witnesses? Even if no others on Allende’s ship had seen it, the sudden disappearance of a destroyer, which would have displaced around 2,000 tons of water, would have been noticed simply because of the resulting turmoil in the waters, as it would have created massive waves that would have crashed through the naval shipyard. In fact, ship logs and naval records indicate that the ship may not have even been in Philadelphia in October 1943, and in 1999, sailors who had served on the Eldridge reunited and said the ship never docked there. And in 1994, in an article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, UFO researcher Jacques Vallee writes about an interview he conducted with one Edward Dudgeon, who had been a sailor aboard the U.S.S. Engstrom, which had been docked at the Philadelphia Naval shipyard in October 1943. Dudgeon revealed rational explanations for everything Carlos Allende might have observed if he really were there, watching the strange activities on the destroyers in the Navy yard at the time. They had indeed been loading unusual high-tech equipment onto destroyers that night. These included new sonar devices as well as new depth charge launchers, and rather than being wrapped in Tesla coils, they were being wrapped in high-voltage cables to alter the ships’ magnetic signatures, making them more difficult for magnetic torpedoes to target. It was a process known as degaussing, and it sometimes produced no smell of ozone, as Allende described. It’s even possible that Allende may have overhead a sailor saying something about how it would make them invisible, not to the naked eye or even to radar, but to torpedos. As for the green haze, this was a common enough occurrence at sea, a weather phenomenon called St. Elmo’s Fire, caused by electrical discharge, which we might assume to have been pronounced by the degaussing process. And Dudgeon even offered an explanation for the disappearance of whatever ship Allende had seen and believed was the Eldridge, as well as its appearance in Norfolk and reappearance at Philadelphia in too short a time for such a journey. According to Dudgeon, who actually claimed the Eldridge was there in Philadelphia, which does conflict with other reports, a destroyer leaving the Philadelphia shipyard one night, appearing in Norfolk shortly thereafter, and then reappearing back in Philadelphia would have seemed impossible to a merchant marine, as their ships would have to take a 2-day trip to the harbor entrance, but the destroyers were able to take the Chesapeake-Delaware Canal, an inland channel, that would make such a short trip possible, and necessary, as Norfolk was where such ships were loaded with ammunition. Therefore, it is somewhat understandable that such a tall tale might be told by a merchant marine who saw the destroyers loaded up with secret anti-submarine technology and witnessed the unusual and definitely classified process of degaussing the ships, and who may have seen the ships engulfed in a strange kind of green fire during the process, and who later that evening noticed a ship had departed but the next morning saw it was present again, and perhaps even later heard through the grapevine that the same ship had been at Norfolk in the middle of the night, a round trip that would have seemed to him impossible to complete in so short a time if he were unaware of the shortcut naval warships were taking between the two Navy yards.

It is impossible, though, to give Allende the benefit of the doubt and suggest he may have actually been there and seen something that he honestly mistook for a ship teleporting. From the beginning, in his correspondence with Jessup, there was evidence that he was perpetrating a hoax. How, for example, could a merchant marine aboard a separate ship have even known all the particulars he claimed to know, down to Einstein’s involvement and his secret completion of the Unified Field Theory? And what else but an elaborate hoax could explain his annotation of Jessup’s book, in which he pretended to be three different people, or rather beings, engaged in a conversation in the margins about mere humans and their inability to grasp the explanations of various paranormal phenomena. The only rational alternative to it being a hoax is it being the product of mental illness. In 1969, though, Carlos Allende, or a man claiming to be him, appeared at the Arizona office of APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, and confessed that his letters and annotations in the Varo edition of Jessup’s book had been a hoax. Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz chose not to believe this, though, and Allende later recanted. However, a year after the Berlitz-Moore book, Carlos Allende was discredited once and for all. In 1980, researcher Robert Goerman, who happened to live in the Pennsylvania town Allende had given in his return address, decided to look into it. Apparently little serious research had been done to track down Allende, as the address previously said to have been a vacant farmhouse was not vacant at all, and Goerman was pretty easily able to locate the estranged parents and siblings of Carlos Allende, whose real name, it turned out, was Carl Allen. In fact, it further turned out he knew the man’s father pretty well, and the family was only too willing to share stories about the eccentric drifter he had grown up to be, showing Goerman all the letters Carl had sent home over the years, in which he bragged about being the author of books that he had merely scribbled in, including not just Jessup’s book but Berlitz and Moore’s as well. The portrait that emerged from Goerman’s interviews was of a mischief-maker possessed of a gifted intellect. According to the Allen family, Carl had squandered his potential and had nothing to show for his life but a widely-believed urban legend. That legacy, however, continued on strong even after his discrediting in 1980, with a feature film dramatizing the story of the Philadelphia Experiment in 1984 executive produced by horror master John Carpenter, whose work, including his self-composed synth scores and the 1982 classic The Thing, has been paid extensive homage by the series Stranger Things. Indeed, this film adaptation of Berlitz and Moore’s book seems to have gone on to inspire the next clever fabricators of urban legend who came along, or rather, if they are to be believed, the movie just jogged their erased memories.

Carl Allen, AKA Carlos Allende, fabricator of the Philadelphia Experiment Hoax.

Around 1988, a videotape called The Truth about the Philadelphia Experiment began circulating in ufology and fringe belief circles. The video featured three men talking to a small audience in a private Long Island residence while they shared a slide show projected onto a bedsheet. Underground tapes like these sold for $20-$30 a pop and were copied and shared among likeminded conspiracy theorists who felt like such videos made them privy to secrets of which the sheeple were blissfully unaware, and it was through such independently produced and disseminated media that misinformation and hoaxes were spread before the advent of the modern Internet in the 1990s. In the video, the three men, Preston Nichols, Duncan Cameron, and Al Bielek, spoke about how they had recovered long repressed memories about their involvement with outlandish secret government experiments after viewing the film The Philadelphia Experiment. Preston Nichols claimed that he had been working in the 70s and 80s as a microwave engineer on Long Island but began moonlighting at nearby Montauk Airbase, ostensibly to work on their radar equipment. But he had recovered memories, he said, of his involvement with a series of bizarre experiments in an underground bunker at Camp Hero, a military installation that was at the time officially abandoned. According to the mythos, John Von Neumann, who Berlitz and Moore had claimed was instrumental in the development of the technology used in the Philadelphia Experiment, had gone on to further develop the electrogravitic field technology and apply it to some completely different purposes. Using technology contributed by Nicola Tesla for the Philadelphia Experiment, Von Neumann supposedly designed a chair that amplified and relayed human thoughts to a computer, which through some hocus pocus field technology then materialized that thought into reality. They could think of a can of beer and then it would appear, so real they could drink it. What does this have to do with the Philadelphia Project, you may be asking? Well, so the story goes, the participants used this technology that brought into reality whatever the person in the chair thought about, in conjunction with weather manipulation technology that allowed the opening of vortices, to open wormholes through space and time. Exactly 40 years after the Philadelphia Experiment, they opened one such wormhole and became linked to the field that had teleported the Eldridge from Philadelphia to Norfolk and back. Enter Al Bielek and Duncan Cameron, who claimed to be sailors aboard the Eldridge who leapt overboard during the experiment and landed in Camp Hero, 40 years in the future. Through an astonishing coincidence, Bielek and Cameron were not just any sailors. Bielek was a brilliant scientist-engineer who had been closely involved with the technical aspects of the Philadelphia Experiment, so he went to work at Montauk in the 1980s, and Cameron just so happened to be a gifted psychic, making him the perfect operator of the Montauk chair. All three of them claimed to have only recently remembered these events, after having seen the 1984 film, because they’d had their memories wiped by CIA brainwashing techniques. This is perhaps the least outlandish aspect of their story, but as we saw in part one of this series, it too is hard to credit, since the CIA failed to ever develop any such targeted amnesia effects. But however convoluted and unbelievable the story already sounds, strap in, because it only gets more tortuous and preposterous from here.

In the 1990s, terrestrial radio became a major channel for the spread of such hoaxes and conspiracy claims, and the biggest purveyor was Art Bell, host of Coast to Coast. Al Bielek and Preston Nichols appeared numerous times on Art Bell’s program to promote their claims and, of course, to sell copies of their tape, or of the series of books, co-authored by one Peter Moon, that Nichols began to self-publish in 1992. Over the course of these retellings, as the Montauk Mythos was revealed, or coalesced, or evolved, or was sporadically improvised—however you want to look at it—it grew more and more sensational. Al Bielek claimed to be a man out of time, whose identity had been rewritten. He was actually Ed Cameron, he said, and Duncan was his brother, but over the course of their time travel experiments at Montauk, he had gone back and forth in time and had even been age regressed into a 1-year-old’s body to have his identity erased, which seems far too elaborate a plan to get rid of him when the shadowy group running the Montauk Project could have just had him killed. It conveniently accounts, however, for there being no record of either Cameron on the Eldridge and also explains why there is no evidence that he, Al Bielek, had ever earned the advanced degrees in science and engineering he claimed to possess. As for who that shadowy Montauk group was, as with much of the story, this changed over time. It was a secret government operation a lá Mk-Ultra, involving Nazi scientists recruited via Operation Paperclip, performing experiments on psychic test subjects. Or rather, it was the project of a secret Nazi order that had survived the fall of the Third Reich and, funded by Nazi gold, sought to bring the Reich back through manipulation of the timeline. But then again, it used technology not just developed by Tesla and Einstein, but by extra-terrestrials who had signed a secret treaty with the U.S. government. The projects undertaken with the teleportation and time travel technology developed were equally wide-ranging and fantastical. For example, they claimed to have teleported to a facility beneath the pyramids on Mars in order to deactivate a defense grid that prevented aliens from entering the Solar System, and they described a plot to go back in time, assassinate Jesus Christ with a pistol, steal his blood, clone it, transfuse it into Duncan Cameron and then have him arrive on a flying saucer to Earth, the idea being that when scientists tested his DNA against traces on the Turin Shroud, they would have successfully faked the Second Coming. As with much of the mythos, these supposedly brilliant scientists seem to lack a fundamental grasp of much of the technical claims they make, for example, a blood transfusion does not change one’s DNA. But we will look at the plausibility and logical flaws involved with their story shortly. To conclude, we should point out the parts of their meandering mythology that seem to have inspired Stranger Things. According to the books, the Nazis or aliens or Nazi aliens behind the project began abducting children in the 1970s to experiment on them, torturing them and either uncovering their innate psychic abilities or cultivating them. Finally, in an act of resistance to the project, Bielek’s psychic brother, Duncan, used the thought-form-generating chair to bring a monster into being, and as this monster rampaged through Camp Hero, they ended up having to destroy the lab’s equipment to make it dematerialize, resulting in the end of the Montauk Project. Here we see all the seeds of the Netflix series Stranger Things, from missing children, to experiments on abducted psychic children, to the opening of portals with the power of the mind and the drawing of a monster into our reality. But as we will see, and as you should already be able to discern, the show was not based on anything real. It was inspired by a work of fiction that is even more far-fetched than the show is, and that only masqueraded as a true story.

As I started to write this section of the episode, which the entire series has built up to, it occurred to me… do I really need to debunk so absurdly ridiculous a conspiracy claim? Is it not enough to stick my thumb toward some of the most outrageous claims these people have made and just shrug? It feels embarrassing to even dignify the story of the Montauk Project by putting effort into disproving it, like it’s beneath me. However, if I were to share it without demonstrating its clear falsehood, I would be engaging in the same kind of media amplification that allows hoaxes like these to spread and achieve the status of legend. So here we go. It should be enough to point out that the burden of proof is on those making the claims, and as they are extraordinary claims, according to the Sagan standard, they require extraordinary evidence, but none has ever been provided. Oh, it’s been promised, though. For the remainder of his life, until his death in 2007, Al Bielek assured the public that he was working on a definitive book that would demystify the science behind all the experiments he claimed to have been involved with, but unsurprisingly, this world-shattering treatise on teleportation and time travel never appeared, nor is there any indication that he ever penned an academic article that he attempted to get published in a scholarly journal, or that he ever made an effort to demonstrate any of his claims to a bona fide scientist. Oh but he sure made the time to coauthor a book on “UFO conspiracies” with paranormal writer Brad Steiger. Likewise, when asked in an interview why Preston Nichols didn’t publish anything regarding the secret scientific advancements he was always on about being privy to, he hand waved the question by saying there was no market or audience for that. I’ll just point out, first, that there would obviously be a massive market for such a scientific breakthrough, including any number of private corporations that would jump at the chance to patent such technology, and second, Nichols was tacitly confessing here that he was in the business of promoting paranormal conspiracy theory because there is an audience and market for that. As for the credibility of the men, consider Bielek, who has been caught in errors both logical and technical and then simply changes his story. Even if you were to believe his claim that his true identity was erased, along with evidence of his higher learning, one fundamental lie about his background has been discovered. He claimed to have never heard of the Philadelphia Experiment before seeing the film and recovering his memories, but UFO researchers have revealed that they had known Bielek since the early 1960s and known him to be obsessed with UFOs and with the Philadelphia Experiment, even owning and sharing a copy of the annotated Varo edition of Morris Jessup’s The Case for the UFO (something Bielek himself eventually conceded), so it’s pretty clear that his entire story is founded on a fundamental lie. As for Preston Nichols, discrediting him takes us to darker places. After the publication of Nichols’ books, when he would speak about Montauk on the paranormal circuit, men began to approach him saying they thought maybe they had been Montauk boys and had their memory erased. Preston encouraged them in their beliefs, meeting with them privately to “deprogram” them of their falsified memories. Numerous participants in these deprogramming sessions, including Nichols himself, describe how he touched the subjects’ bodies with his hands in something like the Mesmeric stroking I recently described in my Blind Spot exclusive minisode on Mesmerism and hypnosis. But more than that, it has been established that Preston Nichols convinced these men that in order to deprogram them, he had to masturbate them, while applying some kind of electromagnetic radiation—a well-known pseudoscientific alternative medicine called radionics. At the end of this bizarre journey, then, it becomes strikingly clear that these men perpetrated an elaborate hoax to make money off of the famously credulous UFO conspiracy theorist community, and at least one of them, Preston Nichols, used his mystique to take sexual advantage of numerous men.

So there we have it, the dark heart of the source material for the Netflix series Stranger Things. I greatly enjoy the show, and I’ll say that I’m far better able to suspend my disbelief while watching it than I am while reading about the Montauk Project. It is very strange to think that it was likely inspired by this outlandish conspiracy claim that has been used to molest its adherents. So after all, we might say that the series Stranger Things is not based on any real history, since the elements of real history it uses were present in the fiction that inspired it, and the story of the Montauk Project is also fiction. Indeed, the books that established and expanded the Montauk mythos, including those written by Preston Nichols and Peter Moon, as well as later books written only by Peter Moon, and books written by Stewart Swerdlow, one supposed Montauk boy who underwent the handsy deprogramming of Preston Nichols and then claimed to have recovered his memories about Montauk, all of them are published by Sky Books, Peter Moon’s publishing house, and all of them are officially categorized as fiction despite their claims to authenticity. In fact the Sky Books slogan is “Where science fiction meets reality.” However, if you visit their website, you’ll be directed to their sister website, The Time Travel Education Center, and if you dig in there, you’ll feel like you stumbled on the web presence of a cult. And that’s essentially what it is. In fact, it has quite a lot in common with that other, more famous conspiracy-addled, Internet-based cult, Qanon. Like it, the Montauk cult has become a breeding ground for baseless conspiracy delusion. Qanon’s habit of trying to integrate all conspiracy theories has been remarked on before, including by myself in my series on Illuminati conspiracy claims. Like them, Preston Nichols, Peter Moon, and Stewart Swerdlow have brought every conceivable conspiracy theory into the fold, managing to weave in legendary artifacts like the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, and the Spear of Destiny, and enigmatic figures like John Dee, L. Ron Hubbard, Aleister Crowley, and Jack Parsons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one talking point of Qanon was being spread by Stewart Swerdlow long before the purported revelations of Q, as Swerdlow was known to claim that the Montauk boys were tortured in order to extract that sweet adrenochrome from their pineal glands… never mind that adrenochrome is derived from the adrenal glands, which are nowhere near the pineal gland. One wonders if Al Bielek ever would have made such an elementary error as this. Really, this is representative of the general devolution of hoaxery that we see today. Whereas thirty years ago, one had to be a clever and convincing storyteller capable of spinning an intricate yarn and firehosing technobabble on live radio, today we have conspiracy influencers like Canada’s Qanon Queen Romana Didulo who just uploads videos in which she claims to be “the only visible leader on this planet,” suppressed by, who else, pedophile globalists, and she still finds dupes to eat it up, turning their sometimes violent ire on whoever she targets, be it healthcare workers for administering vaccines or police for enforcing business closures and masking. Honestly, it’s this nauseating reality today that makes me so nostalgic for my childhood in the 1980s, and for stories like Stranger Things, in which an innocent but savvy group of kids overcome the machinations of bumbling but no less nefarious adults.

Stranger Things Have Happened - Part Three: The Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Project

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