The Montauk Project legend

In 1992 Preston Nichols, an electrical engineer from Long Island, and writer Peter Moon published The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time. They claimed that at Camp Hero, a former Army coastal defense post that became Montauk Air Force Station, a secret program had used a giant radar antenna and psychic subjects to experiment with mind control and, by the early 1980s, to open tunnels through time. The story said boys had been abducted for the experiments, that the work continued the Philadelphia Experiment of 1943, and that it ended in 1983 when a psychic subject summoned a monster that destroyed the base.¹

Camp Hero was real. It housed a long range radar from the 1950s, part of the Cold War air defense network, and closed in 1981, leaving its large antenna and bunkers abandoned behind fences. That mix of secrecy and ruins made the legend plausible to many readers, and sequels and online communities expanded it. No document, witness outside the circle of its authors, or physical evidence supports the experiments. The site became Camp Hero State Park in 2002, and the Duffer brothers' television series Stranger Things began as a pitch titled Montauk.¹²