The Real Stranger Things?

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Some stories were never meant to be told, Others were
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buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing
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history peels back the layers of the past to uncover
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the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never
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supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments
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that sound more like fiction than fact.
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This is history they hoped you'd forget.
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I'm Brian, Investigator, author and your guide through the dark
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corners of our collective memory. Each week, I'll narrate some
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of the most chilling and little known tales from history
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that will make you question everything you thought you knew.
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And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us,
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and sometimes we have to disturb history itself just to
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get to the truth. If you like your facts with
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the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull
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up threads others leave alone, you're in the right place.
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History isn't just written by the victory. Sometimes it's rewritten
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by the disturbed. What if Stranger Things was a true story?
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Not the show, not the kids on bikes, not the
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Christmas lights blinking out a message on the wall, not
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the soundtrack. That's probably already playing in your head while
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I say the words, I mean the bones of it,
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the thing underneath a secret government laboratory tucked into a
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small American town, children with abilities they were never supposed
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to have, a door cracked open between worlds, a monster
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that came through it. What if all of that, or
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even a piece of it started somewhere real. That's the
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strange corner of the story we're walking into tonight. Because
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before Hawkins, Indiana ever existed in a writer's room or
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on a television screen, two brothers named Matt and Ross
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Duffer were pitching a show called mon Talk. They named
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it after a place, a real place, a point at
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the eastern tip of Long Island, where the road just
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runs out of land, where the ocean takes over, where
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there's a lighthouse from George Washington's day, still standing on
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the cliff. They named it that because they had been
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reading about something, something that, depending on who you ask,
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is either the most disturbing classified operation in American history
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or one of the strangest, most elaborate conspiracy theories ever
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stitched together by human hands. A story about a decommissioned airbase,
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about a secret weapon hidden in plain sight, about young
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men taken in the night, about a chair that read
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your mind, about time travel, about a portal, and about
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a creature that crawled up out of the unconscious of
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a man strapped into a machine and tore the place
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apart before someone finally pulled the plug. The Montauk Project. Tonight,
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I want to tell you the whole thing, the geography
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of it, the history that's actually documented, the story that
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grew up around it, the men who claim they live
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through it, the skeptics who say none of it ever happened,
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and the way that story, sometime in the early twenty
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tens fell into the hands of two young filmmakers from
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North Carolina who looked at it and saw a show.
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I'm not going to tell you what to believe. I
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never do that. I'll tell you what's verified and what's claimed,
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and where the evidence sits and where the gaps are.
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Some of this you can stand on, some of it
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you can't.
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Some of it.
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I can't tell you whether it happened or didn't, because
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nobody can. The men who said they were there are
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mostly gone now. The base they pointed to is a
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state park you can walk through this weekend if you
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want to the radar tower they said sat at the
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heart of it is still up there on the bluff, rusting,
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visible for miles, refusing to be torn down. You can
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drive to it, you can stand at the foot of it.
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That part is real. What happened underneath it, That's what
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we're here for. So pour the coffee or the bourbon,
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whichever kind of night you're having, and settle in, because
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we're going to start where these stories almost always start,
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not with the mystery, not with the monster. We're going
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to start with the ground itself and the war that
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brought the government there in the first place. Because to
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understand what people say happened at Montauk, you have to
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understand why the United States military ever went to Montauk
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to begin with. And that part, that part isn't a
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conspiracy at all. That part is just history. Long Island
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stretches east from New York City for about one hundred
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and twenty miles. If you live somewhere else in the country,
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you might not have a clear picture of what it
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actually looks like. So let me give it to you.
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Picture a long, low fish of land tapering to two
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narrow forks at its eastern end. The south fork is
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the one that ends in Montalk. By the time you've
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gotten that far out from the city, the strip, malls
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and the freeways are long behind you. Thins, the trees
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get smaller, they get bent sideways, leaning west, pushed by
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the constant wind off the ocean. The Atlantic is on
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one side of you, and the Long Island Sound is
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on the other, and the air is salt all the time.
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At the very end of that fork, sticking out into
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the sea like the tip of a finger, sits the
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village of Montauk, population a few thousand in winter, many
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times that in summer, a working fishing village for most
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of its history, before it got expensive charter boats, surf casting,
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a few good seafood places. A lighthouse on the cliff
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at the very tip, commissioned by President George Washington in
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seventeen ninety two, still throwing its light across the dark
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water more than two centuries later. Now, just before you
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reach that lighthouse, just shy of the very end of
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the land, there's a chunk of bluff and forest along
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the south facing coast that, for forty years was completely
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closed off to the American public, fenced, guarded, not on
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most maps. The locals knew. The locals always know. They
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knew there were soldiers there, they knew there were antennas there,
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They knew there were buildings down in the trees that
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nobody talked about. But the average American, even the average
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New Yorker, had no idea what was sitting at the
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eastern edge of Long Island. That place was Camp Hero.
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Camp Hero is real. I want to be very direct
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about that, because as we get further into this story,
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the line between what's real and what's claimed is going
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to get blurry. And I want to plant a flag. Now,
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Camp Hero existed. It still exists. The buildings are still there.
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You can walk through them this weekend. Most of it
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is now Camp Hero State Park, open to the public
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in two thousand and two. The other piece, a smaller chunk,
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is still federal property, controlled by the United States Air Force,
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still technically active, although what's active about it is a
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question without a public answer. The Army built it during
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the early years of the Second World War. Construction started
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in nineteen forty two. The war was on German U
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boats were prowling off the East coast, and numbers most
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Americans today would not believe, and the United States military
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was in a panic about the possibility that German warships
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could shell American cities from the Atlantic, so they put
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a coastal defense battery at the eastern end of Long Island.
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Big guns sixteen inch naval rifles, the kind designed to
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put a shell through the armor of a battleship. Two
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of them mounted in heavy concrete bunkers buried deep in
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the bluff, where the recoil of a fired round would
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shake the soil for half a mile. But here's the
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part that already starts to feel like fiction. The army
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was worried that any obvious military installation at the tip
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of Long Island would draw German attention from the sea,
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so they camouflaged the entire base. They built it to
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look like a quiet New England fishing village. The barracks
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were dressed up with peaked roofs and fai gables to
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look like beach cottages. The mess hall was made to
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look like a church, complete with a fake steeple and
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stained glass paint on the windows. The gymnasium was disguised
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as a small town meeting hall. There were buildings out
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there that from a passing ship at sea looked like
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a sleepy little hamlet of fishermen and their families. It
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was all a stage set. Underneath it was a fortress.
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That part is document photos exist, records exist. Visit the
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state park today and you can still see some of
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those buildings, half restored, half falling apart, with their churchy
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facades and their thick concrete bones underneath the wood paneling.
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The peaked roof on the chapel that wasn't a chapel
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still has a steeple painted on. The whole place was
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a lie told to the ocean. I want to sit
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with that detail for a second, because if you've ever
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taken the time to read about military deception during the
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Second World War, you know the United States and Britain
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and the Soviets all did things like that on a
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scale modern people have a hard time imagining. There were
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inflatable rubber tanks dressed up as armored divisions in Southeast
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England before the D Day invasion. There were entire fake
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air bases built out of plywood. There were studio train
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set designers turned loose on the war effort by both sides,
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So in one sense, the camouflaged Camp Hero was nothing exceptional.
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It was a small piece of a very large pattern.
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The American military in nineteen forty two was perfectly comfortable
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building a fake church on a cliff to fool a
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German submarine commander looking through a periscope. But there's something
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about that fact when you stand there, that doesn't quite
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leave you alone, because the church is still there, and
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the steeple is still painted on, and the bunkers underneath
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are still there, And the war the church was built
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to deceive ended a long time ago. The deception outlived
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the deceiver, and nobody really has ever come along to
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take it down. Walk through that part of the park
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on a foggy morning, and you can see exactly how
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the trick was meant to work. From a distance. It
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almost still works. When the war ended, the big guns
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came out, Coastal artillery wasn't going.
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To be the future. The future was rockets.
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And radar and the long, cold, paranoid stare of the
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next war. So Camp Hero was reborn. By the late
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nineteen fifties, it had been turned over to the Air
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Force and rebuilt as a radar station part of the
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Semi Automatic Ground Environment system SAGE for short, a continent
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wide air defense network designed to detect Soviet bombers crossing
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the pole, and in nineteen sixty the Air Force put
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up the antenna that defines the Montauk skyline to this day.
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It was called the A N Slash FPS thirty five.
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It was at the time one of the most powerful
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long range radars ever built. The DISH was the size
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of a small office building. It sat on top of
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a steel framed tower that rose more than than one
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hundred feet above the trees. From the right angle on
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a clear day, you could see it from the deck
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of a fishing boat fifteen miles off shore. It looked
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like nothing else on the coast. It looked, frankly, like
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something out of a science fiction film.
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People who grew up out there.
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Remember the way it would make a low aching sound.
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When it turned a deep mechanical groan, you felt in
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your teeth. It tracked Soviet aircraft. That was its declared mission,
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and in the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties,
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that was a serious mission, because the United States genuinely
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believed that World War III could begin with a wave
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of Soviet bombers coming over the Arctic, and the radar
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belt was the first line of defense. By the late
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nineteen seventies, that mission was already obsolete. Bombers had been
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replaced by intercontinental ballistic missiles. You don't need a giant
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ground radar to spot an ICBM, you need satellites, and
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the United States had those. Camp Hero stopped being strategically
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necessary area around nineteen eighty the Air Force decommissioned it.
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The official records say the base was closed on the
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thirty first of January nineteen eighty one, deactivated, mothballed, and
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eventually transferred to the state of New York. That's the
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official story. Here's where it gets a little strange, because
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the antenna up on the bluff, all forty tons of it,
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was not removed when the base shut down. The Air
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Force decided that taking the dish off its tower, given
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its size, was more trouble than it was worth, so
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the an slash FPS thirty five was in the official
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phrase abandoned in place. The motors and electronics that drove
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its rotation were taken out, but the dish itself was
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deliberately left free to turn in the wind so that
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a storm wouldn't tear it loose from its bearings. For
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years afterward, locals walking along the bluff or driving past
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on the highway would see it slowly spinning up there,
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slowly groaning, slowly creaking, even though the base was supposed
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to be dish. The official explanation was the wind. The
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legend that grew up around it had a different explanation.
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The Air Force's answer, when anybody pressed was that the
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antenna was simply turning.
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With the breeze.
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The radar finally rusted to a stop sometime in the
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years that followed, and today it sits frozen on its tower,
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too corroded to move, although locals will tell you that
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on certain nights when the wind dropped, you could still
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hear something humming in the trees out there. There were
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Freedom of Information Act requests filed in the years that followed.
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Most of them came back with redactions. Some of them
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came back with non responses, which is its own kind
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of answer. Researchers who tried to dig deeper than the
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official record found that the paper trail for the latter
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years of Camp Hero's life, the years between roughly nineteen
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seventy and the supposed shutdown was unusually thin. There were
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budget line items that didn't fully account for. There were
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personnel rosters that read strangely. None of that, taken a loan,
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proves anything, but together it adds up to a picture
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that is just slightly off, a picture that doesn't quite
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line up with a quiet little radar station winding down
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toward retirement. Now, people will tell you a lot of
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things in places like Montalk coastal towns where the winters
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are long and the bars are warm, and the stories
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build up in the corners like sand. So you have
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to be careful what you do with stories like that.
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But that ambiguity, that strange gap between the official record
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and the lived experience of the people who live next
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to that base, is the soil that grew the Montauk
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Project legend. Right there in that gap. If you grew
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up in eastern Long Island in the nineteen seventies and eighties,
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you knew somebody who had a story. A cousin who
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said his friend had wandered up there as a teenager
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and gotten chased off by men in plain clothes carrying
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weapons they had no business carrying. A neighbor who said
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the lights in his house would go strange when the
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radar turned a guy at the bar who said his
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uncle had worked there in the sixties briefly and would
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never talk about what he saw. Almost none of that
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on its own means anything. Most of it is the
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ordinary fog of small town gossip about a place nobody
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could get into.
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But there's a lot of it.
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And then in nineteen ninety two, a man named Preston
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Nichols published a book Stay tuned for more disturbing history.
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We'll be back after these messages. Before we get to
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Preston Nichols, though, we need to back up, because the
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Montalk Project, as Nichols would tell it, didn't begin at Montalk.
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It began nearly forty years earlier in a Philadelphia shipyard
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on a humid October day in the middle of the
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Second World War, with a destroyer escort called the USS Eldridge.
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If you know anything about the Philadelphia experiment, you might
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00:15:55.399 --> 00:15:58.919
already see where this is going. If you don't settle in,
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because this is where one of the strangest legends in
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twentieth century American folklore. And to understand what people claim
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happened at Montauk, you have to understand what people claim
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happened in Philadelphia. First, the official version, the one the
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United States Navy will tell you to this day, is simple,
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it didn't happen. The other version, the one that has
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spread for the better part of a century through paperback
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00:16:21.639 --> 00:16:25.000
books and late night radio shows and now the deepest
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reaches of the Internet, go something like this. In October
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of nineteen forty three, the Navy was working on a
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way to make ships invisible to enemy radar. Not invisible
293
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in any science fiction sense, just radar invisible, hidden from
294
00:16:40.200 --> 00:16:44.720
German detection. They were degaussing hulls, wrapping them in cable,
295
00:16:45.279 --> 00:16:48.360
running massive electrical currents through them to cancel out their
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magnetic signature so that German magnetic minds wouldn't sense them.
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That part is documented. That part is real. Degaussing was
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a real practice. You can read about it in any
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00:16:59.600 --> 00:17:03.639
decent naval history book. The legend goes that on October
300
00:17:03.679 --> 00:17:07.079
twenty eighth, nineteen forty three, the Navy did something more
301
00:17:07.119 --> 00:17:10.319
than that. The legend says they wired the Eldridge with
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00:17:10.359 --> 00:17:13.519
a system designed to bend not just radar waves but
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00:17:13.680 --> 00:17:17.599
light itself. They threw the switch and the Eldridge, with
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00:17:17.680 --> 00:17:21.839
its full crew aboard, became literally invisible, not just a
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radar to the naked eye. There was a green fog
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where the ship had been, and then the ship was gone.
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00:17:29.240 --> 00:17:33.240
According to the story, it didn't just go invisible, it teleported.
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00:17:33.880 --> 00:17:37.920
It vanished from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and reappeared hundreds
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00:17:37.960 --> 00:17:42.559
of miles away at the Norfolk, Virginia Naval Anchorage. Witnesses
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00:17:42.599 --> 00:17:46.359
on a nearby merchant ship, the SS Andrew Furisth, are
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00:17:46.400 --> 00:17:49.359
said to have seen it materialize out of nothing, sit
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00:17:49.440 --> 00:17:52.480
there for a few minutes, and then vanish again before
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00:17:52.519 --> 00:17:56.359
reappearing back in Philadelphia. When the crew came off the ship,
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the legend says, they were not the same men who
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00:17:59.319 --> 00:18:03.880
had walked aboard. Some were missing, some had gone insane. Some,
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00:18:04.359 --> 00:18:07.000
the most famous detail of the legend, were said to
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00:18:07.039 --> 00:18:09.599
have been physically fused with the steel of the hull,
318
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an arm sticking out of a bulkhead, a face fused
319
00:18:13.920 --> 00:18:17.119
into a deck plate. Men who had passed part way
320
00:18:17.119 --> 00:18:19.799
through the middle of the ship while it was dematerialized
321
00:18:20.160 --> 00:18:23.400
and then materialized back into the world, locked into the
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00:18:23.440 --> 00:18:27.200
steel forever. That's the legend. I want to be very
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00:18:27.319 --> 00:18:31.119
very clear. There is no credible documentary evidence that any
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00:18:31.119 --> 00:18:35.400
of this happened. The USS Eldridge's log books have been examined.
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00:18:35.720 --> 00:18:37.799
They placed the ship in the New York Navy Yard
326
00:18:37.839 --> 00:18:42.119
at Brooklyn on the dating question, not in Philadelphia. The
327
00:18:42.200 --> 00:18:44.839
record show the Eldridge had spent the previous month in
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00:18:44.880 --> 00:18:48.480
Bermuda on its first shakedown cruise, returned to New York
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00:18:48.519 --> 00:18:51.559
in mid October, and never stopped in Philadelphia at all
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between her commissioning in August nineteen forty three and the
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00:18:54.799 --> 00:18:58.039
end of that year. The men who served on the Eldridge,
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00:18:58.240 --> 00:19:01.480
the ones still alive when researchers started asking, said the
333
00:19:01.480 --> 00:19:05.880
same thing. We were never in Philadelphia. We never disappeared.
334
00:19:06.359 --> 00:19:08.279
We never saw any green fog.
335
00:19:09.200 --> 00:19:09.720
They held a.
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00:19:09.680 --> 00:19:12.680
Reunion in March of nineteen ninety nine in Atlantic City,
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00:19:13.119 --> 00:19:16.079
fifteen of them in attendance, and gave a public statement
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00:19:16.079 --> 00:19:19.559
to the Philadelphia Inquirer saying, so, so, where did the
339
00:19:19.559 --> 00:19:22.880
story come from? It came from a man named Carlos
340
00:19:22.920 --> 00:19:27.480
Allende or possibly Carl Allen, even his name is uncertain.
341
00:19:28.599 --> 00:19:31.559
In the mid nineteen fifties, Alindi started writing letters to
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00:19:31.640 --> 00:19:33.839
a UFO researcher named Morris K.
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00:19:34.079 --> 00:19:34.519
Jessup.
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Jessup had recently published a book called The Case for
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00:19:38.000 --> 00:19:41.920
the UFO. Alindi's letters told a wild story about a
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00:19:42.000 --> 00:19:44.680
navy experiment he claimed to have witnessed from the deck
347
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of a merchant ship, about a destroyer vanishing into a
348
00:19:48.279 --> 00:19:52.920
green fog, about sailors fused into medle, about other men,
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00:19:52.960 --> 00:19:56.680
he wrote, who would simply walked through walls afterward, unable
350
00:19:56.720 --> 00:20:00.960
to control whether they were solid or not. Letters were rambling,
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00:20:01.279 --> 00:20:05.799
written in odd handwriting with strange annotations. Some of them
352
00:20:05.839 --> 00:20:09.319
switched between three different colored pens with what looked like
353
00:20:09.400 --> 00:20:12.960
three different handwritings in a way that suggested either three
354
00:20:13.000 --> 00:20:16.880
different writers passing the same document around, or one man
355
00:20:17.000 --> 00:20:20.519
playing three different parts. Jessup read them with a mix
356
00:20:20.559 --> 00:20:24.440
of fascination and unease. He couldn't tell whether he was
357
00:20:24.480 --> 00:20:27.400
being told a true secret by a witness or being
358
00:20:27.440 --> 00:20:30.599
toyed with by an unstable man with a vivid imagination.
359
00:20:31.519 --> 00:20:35.240
He tried to write back. The return addresses Alinda gave
360
00:20:35.319 --> 00:20:38.920
him would lead nowhere when investigators followed them later, So
361
00:20:39.119 --> 00:20:42.839
did apparently somebody at the Office of Naval Research, who
362
00:20:42.880 --> 00:20:46.160
eventually got hold of an annotated copy of Jessop's book
363
00:20:46.599 --> 00:20:49.000
marked up in what appeared to be three different hands,
364
00:20:49.359 --> 00:20:52.119
and ordered a small print run of the annotated edition
365
00:20:52.200 --> 00:20:56.599
for internal circulation. That print run, called the Varro Edition,
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00:20:57.039 --> 00:21:02.160
is real. It exists of it myself. You can find
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00:21:02.200 --> 00:21:05.480
scans of it online. The Navy has acknowledged that it
368
00:21:05.519 --> 00:21:09.079
was produced. What the Navy has consistently denied is that
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00:21:09.119 --> 00:21:12.559
any of the experiments described in those annotations ever happened.
370
00:21:13.400 --> 00:21:15.720
The story of the Varro Edition itself is one of
371
00:21:15.759 --> 00:21:19.240
the strangest pieces of this whole legend. It's named for
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00:21:19.279 --> 00:21:23.599
the Varro Manufacturing Company in Texas, the contractor that physically
373
00:21:23.599 --> 00:21:27.160
printed the copies for the Office of Naval Research. The
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00:21:27.200 --> 00:21:30.559
print run was small, around one hundred and twenty seven copies.
375
00:21:30.559 --> 00:21:34.319
According to most accounts, the book was distributed inside the
376
00:21:34.400 --> 00:21:37.480
Navy and to a small number of researchers, and the
377
00:21:37.559 --> 00:21:40.960
obvious question, the one nobody from the Navy has ever
378
00:21:41.000 --> 00:21:45.480
satisfactorily answered, is why why would the Office of Naval
379
00:21:45.519 --> 00:21:48.359
Research take the time and the money to typeset, print,
380
00:21:48.400 --> 00:21:52.160
and circulate an annotated UFO book filled with the rantings
381
00:21:52.160 --> 00:21:56.200
of an unidentified letter writer If the underlying claims were absurd,
382
00:21:57.000 --> 00:21:59.680
why bother. There are a lot of letter writers in
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00:21:59.680 --> 00:22:02.079
the world world. Most of them don't get the United
384
00:22:02.119 --> 00:22:04.720
States Navy to publish a special edition of their work.
385
00:22:05.640 --> 00:22:07.880
The defenders of the official position will tell you the
386
00:22:07.960 --> 00:22:11.200
Navy was simply curious about the annotations and wanted to
387
00:22:11.240 --> 00:22:14.279
study them. They'll say the print run was a kind
388
00:22:14.319 --> 00:22:18.640
of internal research artifact, nothing more. The defenders of the
389
00:22:18.680 --> 00:22:21.799
alternative position will tell you the Navy was rattled that
390
00:22:21.880 --> 00:22:25.799
the annotations, whoever wrote them, contained details about something the
391
00:22:25.880 --> 00:22:29.279
Navy had not declassified, and that someone in the Office
392
00:22:29.319 --> 00:22:32.960
of Naval Research wanted those details quietly contained inside a
393
00:22:33.000 --> 00:22:36.200
small group of cleared people. I cannot tell you which
394
00:22:36.200 --> 00:22:38.839
of those is correct. I can tell you the Varro
395
00:22:39.039 --> 00:22:42.559
Edition exists, and that the existence of an officially produced
396
00:22:42.640 --> 00:22:46.000
Navy artifact, no matter how minor, sitting at the center
397
00:22:46.039 --> 00:22:49.119
of a story the Navy says never happened, is an oddity,
398
00:22:49.759 --> 00:22:54.319
a small one, probably, but an oddity. In nineteen fifty nine,
399
00:22:54.400 --> 00:22:56.599
Morris Jessup was found dead in his car in a
400
00:22:56.640 --> 00:23:02.200
park in Florida of carbon monoxide poisoning, officially a suicide,
401
00:23:02.279 --> 00:23:05.920
unofficially in conspiracy circles. The first martyr of a story
402
00:23:05.960 --> 00:23:08.680
that has refused to die for more than seven decades.
403
00:23:09.480 --> 00:23:11.799
The friends Jessup had been talking to in the days
404
00:23:11.839 --> 00:23:15.359
before his death said he had been agitated. They said
405
00:23:15.400 --> 00:23:17.400
he had told them he was getting close to something.
406
00:23:18.200 --> 00:23:20.200
They said he had been planning to publish a follow
407
00:23:20.279 --> 00:23:22.440
up book that would lay out everything he had learned.
408
00:23:23.039 --> 00:23:25.920
That book was never written, or if it was written,
409
00:23:26.279 --> 00:23:30.079
it was never found. His suicide note, by some accounts,
410
00:23:30.319 --> 00:23:33.880
was unusually short. By other accounts, there was no note
411
00:23:33.880 --> 00:23:37.720
at all. The line between fact and folklore on Jessop's
412
00:23:37.759 --> 00:23:41.720
death starts blurring almost immediately, the way it always does
413
00:23:41.759 --> 00:23:44.440
in stories like this, and you have to be careful
414
00:23:44.480 --> 00:23:46.200
not to wander too far across it.
415
00:23:47.200 --> 00:23:48.839
That's the Philadelphia.
416
00:23:48.240 --> 00:23:51.759
Experiment, as the public came to know it, a naval legend,
417
00:23:51.759 --> 00:23:55.799
with one named witness whose actual identity was never solidly established,
418
00:23:56.279 --> 00:24:01.559
no documentation, no corroborating crew members, and the suspicious dead researcher.
419
00:24:02.400 --> 00:24:05.000
By the nineteen seventies, the story had been written up
420
00:24:05.039 --> 00:24:09.480
in paperback. In nineteen seventy nine, Charles Burlitz, the same
421
00:24:09.519 --> 00:24:13.039
writer who had popularized the Bermuda Triangle, co authored a
422
00:24:13.039 --> 00:24:16.720
book called The Philadelphia Experiment with William Moore. The book
423
00:24:16.799 --> 00:24:20.640
sold well. In nineteen eighty four, Hollywood made it into
424
00:24:20.680 --> 00:24:24.759
a feature film, also called The Philadelphia Experiment, in which
425
00:24:24.799 --> 00:24:27.400
two sailors get blown out of nineteen forty three and
426
00:24:27.480 --> 00:24:30.559
end up in nineteen eighty four. The film is, to
427
00:24:30.599 --> 00:24:33.279
be honest, kind of a fun watch. None of it
428
00:24:33.359 --> 00:24:36.839
is documented, all of it is legend. But here's where
429
00:24:36.880 --> 00:24:40.799
things get interesting for our purposes, Because in nineteen ninety
430
00:24:41.000 --> 00:24:43.680
a man named al Byelec went on a radio show
431
00:24:43.680 --> 00:24:45.480
and claimed that he had been one of the sailors
432
00:24:45.480 --> 00:24:49.279
aboard the Eldridge. He said his real name was Edward Cameron,
433
00:24:49.559 --> 00:24:51.079
that he had been on the deck when the field
434
00:24:51.160 --> 00:24:53.799
went on, that he and his brother Duncan had jumped
435
00:24:53.839 --> 00:24:58.640
overboard and landed not in the water, but in the future. Specifically,
436
00:24:58.680 --> 00:25:02.440
he said in nineteen eight three at a place called Montalk.
437
00:25:03.039 --> 00:25:03.799
That was the link.
438
00:25:04.480 --> 00:25:07.680
That was the claim that married the Philadelphia Experiment legend
439
00:25:07.680 --> 00:25:10.880
to the Montalk legend and made them in the minds
440
00:25:10.880 --> 00:25:14.160
of believers, two halves of the same story.
441
00:25:14.480 --> 00:25:17.240
The man who told that bigger story, who pulled it all.
442
00:25:17.119 --> 00:25:19.599
Together into a single narrative and put it on the
443
00:25:19.640 --> 00:25:21.279
shelves of bookstores.
444
00:25:20.720 --> 00:25:21.559
Around the country.
445
00:25:22.079 --> 00:25:26.599
Was not Albi elect It was a man named Preston Nichols.
446
00:25:27.039 --> 00:25:29.880
Nichols was born in nineteen forty six on Long Island.
447
00:25:30.240 --> 00:25:33.359
He was an electronics engineer by training. He worked for
448
00:25:33.480 --> 00:25:37.680
years in the defense and aerospace industry, doing legitimate technical work.
449
00:25:38.240 --> 00:25:41.720
He held degrees, he held jobs. He was, by the
450
00:25:41.759 --> 00:25:45.160
accounts of people who knew him, a smart and capable man.
451
00:25:45.960 --> 00:25:49.799
He had a particular interest in radio and electromagnetism. He
452
00:25:49.839 --> 00:25:53.160
owned a personal collection of vintage radio equipment that filled
453
00:25:53.160 --> 00:25:56.519
a house. He could talk for hours about antenna theory,
454
00:25:56.920 --> 00:26:00.920
about waveform propagation, about the kind of sa zoteric corners
455
00:26:00.920 --> 00:26:04.799
of electrical engineering most people don't know exist. The part
456
00:26:04.839 --> 00:26:07.359
of his life that's verifiable lines up with the picture
457
00:26:07.400 --> 00:26:10.599
of a working engineer with a deep, almost obsessive interest
458
00:26:10.920 --> 00:26:15.000
in the way invisible electromagnetic fields shape the physical world.
459
00:26:15.799 --> 00:26:18.160
He was, also, by his own account, a man with
460
00:26:18.240 --> 00:26:21.279
a problem. The problem was that there were chunks of
461
00:26:21.279 --> 00:26:24.200
his life that didn't add up. Periods of time. He
462
00:26:24.240 --> 00:26:28.200
couldn't account for memories that surfaced in fragments and that
463
00:26:28.279 --> 00:26:31.119
didn't fit with where he had supposedly been or what
464
00:26:31.200 --> 00:26:34.799
he had supposedly been doing. He told people later that
465
00:26:34.880 --> 00:26:37.599
he had become aware of the discrepancies after a series
466
00:26:37.640 --> 00:26:40.759
of conversations with friends in which he had described certain
467
00:26:40.759 --> 00:26:43.519
events from his past, only to have those friends look
468
00:26:43.559 --> 00:26:47.200
at him strangely and say, no, that didn't happen. You
469
00:26:47.279 --> 00:26:50.960
were with us that weekend. In the nineteen eighties, Nicol
470
00:26:51.039 --> 00:26:54.799
said he started recovering memories, memories of a second life
471
00:26:54.880 --> 00:26:57.799
he had been living, a life that ran on parallel
472
00:26:57.880 --> 00:27:00.920
rails to his ordinary one, a life in which he
473
00:27:01.000 --> 00:27:04.160
said he had been working at Camp Hero. Now I
474
00:27:04.200 --> 00:27:07.000
want to pause here and be honest with you. The
475
00:27:07.039 --> 00:27:10.279
recovered memory movement of the nineteen eighties is looking back,
476
00:27:10.680 --> 00:27:13.400
not a great chapter in American psychological history.
477
00:27:14.200 --> 00:27:14.640
A lot of.
478
00:27:14.599 --> 00:27:18.200
Recovered memories of that era have not aged well. Many
479
00:27:18.200 --> 00:27:20.880
of them turned out to be the products of suggestive therapy,
480
00:27:21.400 --> 00:27:25.240
leading questions, and the very human ability to construct vivid,
481
00:27:25.279 --> 00:27:29.079
false memories under the right conditions. The science on that
482
00:27:29.200 --> 00:27:33.880
is settled. Recovered memory as a method is unreliable. I'll
483
00:27:33.880 --> 00:27:36.160
come back to that. I want it on the table.
484
00:27:36.880 --> 00:27:40.119
But Preston Nichols was certain he believed what was coming
485
00:27:40.160 --> 00:27:42.799
back to him, and what was coming back to him,
486
00:27:43.079 --> 00:27:46.960
in his account, was extraordinary. He said that beneath the
487
00:27:47.000 --> 00:27:51.240
supposedly decommissioned Camp hero In tunnels and bunkers most people
488
00:27:51.279 --> 00:27:54.640
didn't know existed, the United States government had run an
489
00:27:54.680 --> 00:27:58.640
experimental program for decades. He said the program had grown
490
00:27:58.680 --> 00:28:01.799
out of the same research that produced the Philadelphia experiment.
491
00:28:02.599 --> 00:28:05.640
He said the technology used in nineteen forty three had
492
00:28:05.640 --> 00:28:10.440
been refined, expanded, weaponized, and pushed into territory that the
493
00:28:10.480 --> 00:28:13.839
men who had started the project never imagined. He said
494
00:28:13.880 --> 00:28:17.960
the project had several names. Project Phoenix was one. The
495
00:28:18.039 --> 00:28:21.440
Montauk Project was the umbrella term. He said it had
496
00:28:21.440 --> 00:28:24.799
been a black program, meaning a program funded outside of
497
00:28:24.880 --> 00:28:29.200
normal congressional oversight, off the books entirely. He said the
498
00:28:29.240 --> 00:28:32.079
men running it were not strictly answerable to the United
499
00:28:32.079 --> 00:28:35.720
States government in any conventional sense. He said they were
500
00:28:35.759 --> 00:28:40.440
testing weapons, weapons that worked on the human mind, weapons
501
00:28:40.440 --> 00:28:43.720
that worked on time, weapons that worked on the boundary
502
00:28:43.759 --> 00:28:47.319
between what we call reality and whatever lies passed it.
503
00:28:47.759 --> 00:28:50.000
And he said the heart of the operation was a chair.
504
00:28:50.720 --> 00:28:53.960
The Montauk Chair, as Nichols described it, was a piece
505
00:28:54.000 --> 00:28:58.599
of equipment designed to amplify human psychic ability. The idea,
506
00:28:58.720 --> 00:29:01.720
as he laid it out, is that certain rare individuals
507
00:29:01.720 --> 00:29:05.640
had the latent capacity to manifest physical effects through pure thought,
508
00:29:06.519 --> 00:29:10.079
to bend reality in small ways by force of will.
509
00:29:11.079 --> 00:29:14.240
The chair, surrounded by an array of electronics tied into
510
00:29:14.279 --> 00:29:17.599
the radar system overhead, was built to take that latent
511
00:29:17.680 --> 00:29:21.400
ability and crank it up by orders of magnitude, to
512
00:29:21.440 --> 00:29:24.319
take a person who could, on his best day, slightly
513
00:29:24.400 --> 00:29:27.160
nudge a coin and turn him into a person who could,
514
00:29:27.480 --> 00:29:31.440
while wired into the chair, manifest objects out of empty air.
515
00:29:32.480 --> 00:29:34.960
The first time I read this, i'll be honest with you,
516
00:29:35.480 --> 00:29:39.119
I laughed. It sounds absurd on its face. It's the
517
00:29:39.240 --> 00:29:41.640
kind of thing that, if you'd never heard of it before,
518
00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:45.279
you'd assume with somebody working out a fan fiction novel during.
519
00:29:45.079 --> 00:29:45.759
A long winter.
520
00:29:46.359 --> 00:29:49.400
But once you start reading nichols material, you realize he
521
00:29:49.480 --> 00:29:53.039
had a lot of detail, a lot of specific technical
522
00:29:53.119 --> 00:29:56.559
electrical engineering language about how the system was supposed to work,
523
00:29:57.400 --> 00:30:00.839
about the power draw of the radar tower above, about
524
00:30:00.839 --> 00:30:04.039
the frequencies he claimed were used, about the way the
525
00:30:04.160 --> 00:30:06.839
chair was supposed to be coupled into the antenna array
526
00:30:06.960 --> 00:30:09.880
up on the bluff, none of which proves a thing
527
00:30:09.920 --> 00:30:12.880
about whether any of it ever happened. But it does
528
00:30:12.960 --> 00:30:15.680
tell you that whoever was telling this story had thought
529
00:30:15.680 --> 00:30:19.000
it through pretty carefully. Whether he had lived it or
530
00:30:19.039 --> 00:30:21.720
whether he had constructed it, he had built a coherent
531
00:30:21.799 --> 00:30:24.559
technical world for it to live in. Stay tuned for
532
00:30:24.680 --> 00:30:31.799
more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. In
533
00:30:31.880 --> 00:30:34.440
Nichol's account, the man who sat in the chair most
534
00:30:34.480 --> 00:30:38.599
often was Duncan Cameron. Duncan Cameron, in this story was
535
00:30:38.640 --> 00:30:41.799
the brother of Edward Cameron, the man who would later
536
00:30:41.839 --> 00:30:45.680
go by the name al By Elect. Both brothers, Nichol said,
537
00:30:45.920 --> 00:30:50.279
had been involved in the Philadelphia Experiment. Both brothers, Nichol said,
538
00:30:50.480 --> 00:30:52.599
had been pulled forward in time during the events of
539
00:30:52.640 --> 00:30:56.920
October nineteen forty three. Both brothers, Nichol said, had ended
540
00:30:57.000 --> 00:31:00.559
up at Montauk. The way Beelick told his own story
541
00:31:00.720 --> 00:31:03.480
on talk radio shows and at conferences in the nineteen
542
00:31:03.559 --> 00:31:07.359
nineties was almost operatic. He said he had been born
543
00:31:07.480 --> 00:31:11.000
Edward Cameron in nineteen sixteen. He said he had served
544
00:31:11.000 --> 00:31:13.839
in the Navy during the Second World War. He said
545
00:31:13.839 --> 00:31:15.559
he had been on the deck of the Eldridge when
546
00:31:15.599 --> 00:31:17.000
the experiment was conducted.
547
00:31:17.720 --> 00:31:18.119
He said.
548
00:31:18.119 --> 00:31:20.559
When the field went on, he and his brother Duncan,
549
00:31:20.759 --> 00:31:24.839
who was also a board, panicked. They jumped. They expected
550
00:31:24.839 --> 00:31:28.160
to land in the water. Instead, he said, they fell
551
00:31:28.240 --> 00:31:31.799
upward into the future. They landed at Montauk in the
552
00:31:31.839 --> 00:31:36.440
year nineteen eighty three. Duncan stayed there. Edward, by his account,
553
00:31:36.519 --> 00:31:39.000
eventually had his memories of all of it suppressed by
554
00:31:39.000 --> 00:31:42.359
the men running the project, was sent back into ordinary
555
00:31:42.400 --> 00:31:45.400
American life, was given a new identity as a man
556
00:31:45.480 --> 00:31:48.359
named al By Elk, and lived a normal life for
557
00:31:48.359 --> 00:31:51.559
forty years before his memories began to surface in the
558
00:31:51.599 --> 00:31:55.759
late nineteen eighties. Then the story went he tracked down
559
00:31:55.759 --> 00:31:59.319
his brother Duncan, by Baylick's account, had aged out of
560
00:31:59.359 --> 00:32:03.599
the project, his physical body wearing down from repeated psychic trauma.
561
00:32:04.440 --> 00:32:07.839
The men running mon talk, Belick said, had transferred Duncan's
562
00:32:07.839 --> 00:32:10.839
consciousness into a younger body, the body of one of
563
00:32:10.839 --> 00:32:14.240
the Cameron brother's own younger relatives, in order to extend
564
00:32:14.240 --> 00:32:18.039
his service. The Duncan Cameron walking around in the nineteen
565
00:32:18.119 --> 00:32:21.240
nineties in this version of the story was a man
566
00:32:21.359 --> 00:32:24.640
housing the soul of a Second World War sailor inside
567
00:32:24.720 --> 00:32:27.400
the body of a young man. I want to be
568
00:32:27.440 --> 00:32:30.359
honest with you. There comes a point somewhere in this
569
00:32:30.440 --> 00:32:33.000
part of the legend where the story starts to bend
570
00:32:33.079 --> 00:32:35.640
so far past anything you can take as a literal
571
00:32:35.680 --> 00:32:40.200
account that even sympathetic researchers tend to back away. The
572
00:32:40.279 --> 00:32:44.839
transferred consciousness version of Duncan Cameron, the time jumping older brother.
573
00:32:45.400 --> 00:32:49.640
The entire elaborate generational saga of the Cameron family has
574
00:32:49.680 --> 00:32:53.640
the architecture of a science fiction epic, not a witness account.
575
00:32:54.359 --> 00:32:58.640
Bielick would later contradict himself in interviews. Specific details would
576
00:32:58.680 --> 00:33:03.119
shift between tellings, dates wouldn't line up. The men who
577
00:33:03.200 --> 00:33:06.079
tried in good faith to verify pieces of his identity,
578
00:33:06.640 --> 00:33:10.160
like military records for an Edward Cameron born in nineteen sixteen,
579
00:33:10.720 --> 00:33:14.880
ran into problems. The records that should have existed didn't,
580
00:33:15.440 --> 00:33:19.440
the records that did exist didn't quite match. But by look,
581
00:33:19.759 --> 00:33:23.759
until his death in twenty eleven, never recanted whatever he
582
00:33:23.799 --> 00:33:26.440
believed about his own life. He believed it all the
583
00:33:26.440 --> 00:33:29.680
way to the end, and he and Nichols together were
584
00:33:29.680 --> 00:33:33.359
the two voices around which the entire Montauk Project legend
585
00:33:33.440 --> 00:33:37.799
was built. Duncan Nichols said, had a particular gift, a
586
00:33:37.839 --> 00:33:42.279
psychic sensitivity unlike anything the project had ever measured. When
587
00:33:42.279 --> 00:33:44.680
you sat Duncan in the chair and ran the equipment,
588
00:33:45.079 --> 00:33:47.319
you could do things you couldn't do with anybody else.
589
00:33:48.119 --> 00:33:51.279
You could manifest physical objects on the floor of the laboratory.
590
00:33:51.920 --> 00:33:54.200
You could pull images out of his mind and project
591
00:33:54.200 --> 00:33:57.319
them onto a screen. You could, if you pushed it,
592
00:33:57.680 --> 00:34:00.000
do things to the very fabric of space and time
593
00:34:00.319 --> 00:34:03.839
inside the building. You could open holes. This is where
594
00:34:03.839 --> 00:34:06.440
the Montauk story stops being interesting in the way that
595
00:34:06.480 --> 00:34:10.360
government conspiracy stories are interesting, and starts being interesting in
596
00:34:10.400 --> 00:34:13.920
the way that ancient folklore is interesting. Because what Nichols
597
00:34:14.000 --> 00:34:16.480
was describing when you boiled it all the way down
598
00:34:17.079 --> 00:34:20.000
was magic. It just had wires running out.
599
00:34:19.880 --> 00:34:21.199
The back of it.
600
00:34:21.199 --> 00:34:23.360
It was the same story human beings have been telling
601
00:34:23.440 --> 00:34:26.679
each other since we lived in caves. There is a chamber.
602
00:34:27.320 --> 00:34:29.960
In the chamber, there is a person of unusual gifts.
603
00:34:30.760 --> 00:34:33.880
When the right rituals are performed, the chamber opens onto
604
00:34:33.920 --> 00:34:37.039
another world, and what is in that other world can
605
00:34:37.079 --> 00:34:41.880
come into ours. Nichols said they did this repeatedly. He
606
00:34:41.920 --> 00:34:44.480
said they used Duncan in the chair to open windows
607
00:34:44.480 --> 00:34:48.400
in time forward and backward. He said, they sent men through.
608
00:34:49.119 --> 00:34:51.800
He said they ran what amounted to a regular service,
609
00:34:52.159 --> 00:34:54.920
like a subway line between the basement of Camp Hero
610
00:34:55.119 --> 00:34:58.079
and other points in history. He said, most of the
611
00:34:58.119 --> 00:35:00.639
men who went through never came back. He said they
612
00:35:00.679 --> 00:35:04.760
could open windows in space two to other places, to
613
00:35:04.880 --> 00:35:08.920
places in this universe, maybe, he said, to places not
614
00:35:09.119 --> 00:35:12.519
in this universe. And he said that on August twelfth,
615
00:35:12.719 --> 00:35:17.039
nineteen eighty three, something went wrong. That date is important
616
00:35:17.079 --> 00:35:22.360
to the legend. August twelfth, nineteen eighty three. By Nichol's account,
617
00:35:22.360 --> 00:35:24.840
that was the day the project ended. Not because the
618
00:35:24.840 --> 00:35:28.559
funding was cut, not because Congress found out, not because
619
00:35:28.599 --> 00:35:32.199
anybody got arrested. By his account, the project ended that
620
00:35:32.280 --> 00:35:35.679
day because Duncan Cameron, sitting in the chair, was pushed
621
00:35:35.719 --> 00:35:39.480
too far. Something inside him cracked, and what came up
622
00:35:39.480 --> 00:35:42.960
out of his unconscious what he manifested into the laboratory
623
00:35:43.000 --> 00:35:46.719
that day was a creature. Nichols described it as an
624
00:35:46.880 --> 00:35:51.320
enormous beast harry, aggressive, the size of a house.
625
00:35:52.159 --> 00:35:52.760
He said it.
626
00:35:52.639 --> 00:35:57.039
Tore through the laboratory and rampaged across the base, smashing equipment,
627
00:35:57.400 --> 00:36:01.039
destroying buildings, creating physical damage on a scale that should
628
00:36:01.039 --> 00:36:04.000
have been impossible to cover up. He said, it took
629
00:36:04.039 --> 00:36:07.800
everything they had to stop it. They couldn't. The only
630
00:36:07.840 --> 00:36:09.960
way they could stop it, he said, was to shut
631
00:36:10.039 --> 00:36:14.000
down the chair, cut Duncan out of the system, sever
632
00:36:14.119 --> 00:36:16.719
the connection between his mind and the equipment that was
633
00:36:16.760 --> 00:36:20.880
amplifying it. When they did, the beast vanished like a
634
00:36:20.880 --> 00:36:24.280
film cut. There was nothing left of it. The story
635
00:36:24.320 --> 00:36:26.079
I just told you about the Beast is not the
636
00:36:26.119 --> 00:36:29.320
only piece of the Montauk Project legend, but it is
637
00:36:29.400 --> 00:36:32.400
the piece that anyone who has watched Stranger Things will
638
00:36:32.440 --> 00:36:36.639
recognize the fastest, a creature manifested by a young person
639
00:36:36.719 --> 00:36:41.480
under extreme psychic strain, breaking through into reality, threatening to
640
00:36:41.480 --> 00:36:45.079
destroy the facility that summoned it. If you've seen the show,
641
00:36:45.360 --> 00:36:47.920
you don't need me to draw the line. The line
642
00:36:48.000 --> 00:36:51.559
draws itself. We'll get back to that. But there's another
643
00:36:51.599 --> 00:36:53.920
piece of the legend we have to talk about, and
644
00:36:54.000 --> 00:36:56.440
it is darker than the Beast, and it is more
645
00:36:56.480 --> 00:37:02.519
disturbing because it concerns children. The mantas in Nichols telling
646
00:37:02.559 --> 00:37:04.679
and in the telling of several men who later came
647
00:37:04.719 --> 00:37:07.679
forward to back his account, the project did not just
648
00:37:07.800 --> 00:37:11.760
run on adult psychics like Duncan Cameron. The project, they said,
649
00:37:12.079 --> 00:37:17.519
also ran on children, specifically on teenage boys. In Nichols's account,
650
00:37:17.559 --> 00:37:21.639
the project had identified a particular psychological and biological profile
651
00:37:22.079 --> 00:37:24.960
that made certain young men ideal subjects for the kind
652
00:37:24.960 --> 00:37:28.199
of work the chair did. Most of them were between
653
00:37:28.199 --> 00:37:31.320
the ages of twelve and twenty. Most of them, he said,
654
00:37:31.599 --> 00:37:37.079
came from troubled backgrounds, foster homes, institutional care boys who
655
00:37:37.119 --> 00:37:40.639
had been moved around their whole lives. Boys whose absences
656
00:37:40.639 --> 00:37:43.880
would not be noticed quickly. Boys whose claims, if they
657
00:37:43.920 --> 00:37:47.559
ever made any, would be easy to dismiss. He said,
658
00:37:47.599 --> 00:37:50.239
They were taken to mond talk, that they were trained,
659
00:37:50.599 --> 00:37:53.920
that they were programmed, that techniques developed in the United
660
00:37:53.960 --> 00:37:58.119
States military and intelligence communities research into mind control were
661
00:37:58.199 --> 00:38:01.840
used on them at industrial scale to break down their resistance,
662
00:38:02.280 --> 00:38:05.679
install false memories, and then send them back into ordinary
663
00:38:05.719 --> 00:38:09.599
life as sleeper agents, walking talking weapons.
664
00:38:10.280 --> 00:38:11.800
He said there were thousands of them.
665
00:38:12.280 --> 00:38:15.079
This is by far the most accusatory piece of the
666
00:38:15.239 --> 00:38:19.239
entire Montauk Project legend. It is also the piece that
667
00:38:19.280 --> 00:38:22.920
has done the most damage to people's actual lives because
668
00:38:22.960 --> 00:38:26.280
it has occasionally been used to explain very real personal
669
00:38:26.320 --> 00:38:30.119
trauma in a way that mixes together genuine victimization with
670
00:38:30.239 --> 00:38:34.039
elaborate science fiction overlay. I want to be careful about
671
00:38:34.039 --> 00:38:37.599
that there are real survivors of real military and intelligence
672
00:38:37.639 --> 00:38:40.760
community programs in this country. I'll come back to that
673
00:38:41.679 --> 00:38:44.559
the mind control claims of the nineteen fifties and sixties
674
00:38:44.599 --> 00:38:48.960
were in some cases true, documented, admitted to by the
675
00:38:49.079 --> 00:38:50.159
United States government.
676
00:38:50.519 --> 00:38:51.159
We'll get there.
677
00:38:51.960 --> 00:38:53.920
What I'm telling you now is what Nichols and his
678
00:38:54.000 --> 00:38:58.719
collaborators claimed the Montauk Boys in their account where a
679
00:38:58.760 --> 00:39:03.119
generation of kidnapped, brainwashed young men used as living experiments
680
00:39:03.159 --> 00:39:05.920
by a black project at the eastern tip of Long Island.
681
00:39:06.440 --> 00:39:11.679
They claimed names. They claimed survivors, two of them, Stuart Swerdlow,
682
00:39:11.760 --> 00:39:15.159
and another alleged participant who has appeared under various names
683
00:39:15.159 --> 00:39:18.119
over the years, came forward in the nineteen nineties and
684
00:39:18.199 --> 00:39:22.440
gave their own accounts. Their accounts elaborated on Nichols. They
685
00:39:22.440 --> 00:39:27.039
added detail, they added more names, They added a wider conspiracy.
686
00:39:27.920 --> 00:39:31.519
In Swordlow's telling, the boys were broken in stages. First
687
00:39:31.599 --> 00:39:34.519
came the abduction, often from a foster placement or a
688
00:39:34.559 --> 00:39:39.039
state institution. Then came the isolation, days or weeks of
689
00:39:39.079 --> 00:39:43.880
sensory deprivation, no human contact, no light. Then came the
690
00:39:43.960 --> 00:39:49.199
chemical phase, drugs administered by IV drugs and food drugs
691
00:39:49.199 --> 00:39:53.000
in drinking water, designed to soften the boundary between conscious
692
00:39:53.039 --> 00:39:57.800
and unconscious mind. Then came the programming, with carefully designed
693
00:39:57.800 --> 00:40:02.679
traumatic episodes used to install associative states, each state given
694
00:40:02.719 --> 00:40:06.039
a trigger word that could later activate it. By the
695
00:40:06.079 --> 00:40:09.079
time the process was complete, in this account, you had
696
00:40:09.119 --> 00:40:11.880
a young man whose conscious self had no memory of
697
00:40:11.920 --> 00:40:14.440
what had been done to him, but whose hidden selves
698
00:40:14.480 --> 00:40:17.719
could be called forward by a single phrase whispered into
699
00:40:17.760 --> 00:40:21.880
a phone. If any of that sounds eerily familiar, it should,
700
00:40:22.719 --> 00:40:26.760
because the broad outline of what Swordload described is allowing
701
00:40:26.800 --> 00:40:29.920
for a lot of fictional dressing very close to what
702
00:40:30.000 --> 00:40:33.440
was actually attempted in MK Ultra in the nineteen fifties.
703
00:40:34.239 --> 00:40:36.360
The science of what works and what doesn't on the
704
00:40:36.440 --> 00:40:41.360
human mind is now better understood. The CIA's own conclusion,
705
00:40:41.480 --> 00:40:45.679
eventually was that you could not reliably build a Manchurian candidate.
706
00:40:46.599 --> 00:40:51.000
The mind, even under extreme abuse didn't compartmentalize the way
707
00:40:51.039 --> 00:40:53.960
the project had hoped, but that was the goal, and
708
00:40:54.000 --> 00:40:56.840
the program ran for twenty years trying to get there.
709
00:40:57.599 --> 00:41:00.719
So when somebody comes forward in the nineteen nineties claiming
710
00:41:00.760 --> 00:41:03.400
a more advanced version of that work was conducted on
711
00:41:03.480 --> 00:41:07.000
him as a child, you cannot dismiss the underlying premise
712
00:41:07.079 --> 00:41:11.320
as fantasy. The premise had been pursued by professionals with
713
00:41:11.400 --> 00:41:15.519
a real budget on American citizens well within living memory.
714
00:41:16.039 --> 00:41:18.360
How much of that you find credible is going to
715
00:41:18.400 --> 00:41:21.239
depend on a lot of things, On how much weight
716
00:41:21.320 --> 00:41:23.920
you give to the recovered memory movement of that era,
717
00:41:24.719 --> 00:41:27.719
on how you feel about the phenomenon of detailed personal
718
00:41:27.760 --> 00:41:32.280
testimony arriving in coordinated waves, with each new witness expanding
719
00:41:32.320 --> 00:41:35.360
the cannon laid down by the previous one. On the
720
00:41:35.440 --> 00:41:38.360
absence in all of it of a single document, a
721
00:41:38.400 --> 00:41:41.960
single photograph, a single piece of physical evidence that would
722
00:41:41.960 --> 00:41:43.760
put a foot on the ground for any of these
723
00:41:43.760 --> 00:41:47.599
specific claims. I'll give you my own take on it briefly,
724
00:41:48.000 --> 00:41:51.719
and then I'll move on the Montauk Boy's story. Taking
725
00:41:51.800 --> 00:41:54.119
at face value would be one of the worst crimes
726
00:41:54.159 --> 00:41:57.719
in American history. If even a fraction of it were true,
727
00:41:57.920 --> 00:42:01.199
it would dwarf MK Ultra. It would be a multi
728
00:42:01.239 --> 00:42:05.679
decade kidnapping operation conducted on American children by an unaccountable
729
00:42:05.800 --> 00:42:09.000
arm of the United States military. The fact that no
730
00:42:09.079 --> 00:42:13.159
whistleblower has ever produced documentation of it, that no journalist
731
00:42:13.239 --> 00:42:16.199
has ever found a paper trail, that no court case
732
00:42:16.239 --> 00:42:19.280
has ever surfaced, a survivor whose claims could be physically
733
00:42:19.280 --> 00:42:23.039
corroborated weighs on me. It weighs on me a lot.
734
00:42:24.039 --> 00:42:27.320
I don't say that to disrespect anybody who genuinely believes
735
00:42:27.360 --> 00:42:30.880
themselves to be a survivor. I say it because, after
736
00:42:30.960 --> 00:42:34.119
sixteen years in law enforcement, I have a deep instinct
737
00:42:34.159 --> 00:42:36.639
about the difference between a story that grew up around
738
00:42:36.679 --> 00:42:40.000
real trauma and a story that grew up around something else.
739
00:42:40.800 --> 00:42:43.920
And the Montauk Boy's story the way it has unfolded
740
00:42:44.199 --> 00:42:45.960
has never sat with me the way I think it
741
00:42:46.000 --> 00:42:48.920
would sit with me if it were straight. That said,
742
00:42:49.639 --> 00:42:53.159
I can't prove it didn't happen. Nobody can. That's the
743
00:42:53.199 --> 00:42:56.719
country we're in with this story. Around the alleged chair,
744
00:42:57.119 --> 00:43:02.320
the alleged boys, the alleged portals, Nichols layered a wider mythology.
745
00:43:02.360 --> 00:43:04.599
He said the project was tied to a network of
746
00:43:04.639 --> 00:43:08.679
similar facilities around the country and around the world. He
747
00:43:08.719 --> 00:43:11.480
said the technology had been provided in part by non
748
00:43:11.599 --> 00:43:15.440
human intelligences. He said the men running the project answered
749
00:43:15.480 --> 00:43:18.760
to entities that did not, in any meaningful sense work
750
00:43:18.840 --> 00:43:22.679
for any government. He said that what happened on August twelfth,
751
00:43:22.760 --> 00:43:26.280
nineteen eighty three, at Montauk did not just affect Camp Hero.
752
00:43:27.039 --> 00:43:30.280
He said it cracked something. He said it left a thinning,
753
00:43:30.679 --> 00:43:34.159
a soft spot in the fabric of reality at that location.
754
00:43:35.079 --> 00:43:37.320
He said, weird things had been happening in the woods
755
00:43:37.320 --> 00:43:41.360
around Camp Hero ever since. Some of the locals, if asked,
756
00:43:41.639 --> 00:43:44.440
will tell you they agree with that last part. Some
757
00:43:44.519 --> 00:43:46.639
of the locals will tell you Preston Nichols was a
758
00:43:46.679 --> 00:43:50.079
salesman with a gift for an audience. Both if you've
759
00:43:50.079 --> 00:43:53.400
spent any time around small American towns can be true
760
00:43:53.679 --> 00:43:56.880
at the same time. In nineteen ninety two, Nichols and
761
00:43:56.880 --> 00:43:59.840
his co author Peter Moon published the book that introduced
762
00:43:59.840 --> 00:44:03.159
the whole world to the public. It was called The
763
00:44:03.239 --> 00:44:07.599
Montalk Project Experiments in Time. It was followed by a
764
00:44:07.639 --> 00:44:12.039
string of sequels, each one bigger and stranger than the last.
765
00:44:12.280 --> 00:44:18.039
Montalk revisited Pyramids of Montalk, encountering the pliadies. The books
766
00:44:18.039 --> 00:44:21.079
built up a Montalk universe the way a comic book
767
00:44:21.159 --> 00:44:26.519
franchise builds up a universe with characters, factions, mythology, and contradictions.
768
00:44:27.000 --> 00:44:30.280
By the late nineteen nineties, you could attend a Montalk conference,
769
00:44:30.639 --> 00:44:34.599
buy a Montalk t shirt, listen to Montalk themed am radio.
770
00:44:35.519 --> 00:44:38.519
The story had become its own ecosystem. It was in
771
00:44:38.519 --> 00:44:41.920
that ecosystem that two young filmmakers growing up in Durham,
772
00:44:41.960 --> 00:44:45.760
North Carolina found it. Matt and Ross Duffer were born
773
00:44:45.840 --> 00:44:50.159
in nineteen eighty four, identical twins, children of the home
774
00:44:50.280 --> 00:44:54.119
video age. They grew up watching Steven Spielberg films on
775
00:44:54.199 --> 00:44:58.000
VHS and reading Stephen King paperbacks and tearing through every
776
00:44:58.039 --> 00:45:00.440
horror movie they could get their hands on at the
777
00:45:00.480 --> 00:45:03.639
local rental shop. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.
778
00:45:04.159 --> 00:45:05.800
We'll be back after these messages.
779
00:45:09.639 --> 00:45:12.000
By the time they were teenagers, they were already making
780
00:45:12.039 --> 00:45:15.199
short films in their backyard. By the time they were
781
00:45:15.199 --> 00:45:17.880
in their late twenties, they had broken into Hollywood as
782
00:45:17.920 --> 00:45:21.360
television writers, working on a series called Wayward Pines for
783
00:45:21.519 --> 00:45:25.079
m Night Shyamalan, and they were trying, like every young
784
00:45:25.079 --> 00:45:28.599
writer in Hollywood, to find their own show. They had
785
00:45:28.599 --> 00:45:31.960
a concept they were working on childhood in the early
786
00:45:32.039 --> 00:45:36.519
nineteen eighties. A small American town, a government laboratory at
787
00:45:36.559 --> 00:45:39.960
the edge of it, a girl with strange powers, a
788
00:45:40.000 --> 00:45:43.079
creature from another world, a group of kids who set
789
00:45:43.119 --> 00:45:46.440
out to find a missing friend. In the original pitch,
790
00:45:46.920 --> 00:45:50.960
that town was Montalk. They actually named the show Montalk.
791
00:45:51.719 --> 00:45:54.719
They walked it into Netflix under that title. They had
792
00:45:54.719 --> 00:45:58.320
been reading about the Montalk project, the stories Nichols had told,
793
00:45:58.719 --> 00:46:03.440
the books, the testimony, the legend they were specifically drawing
794
00:46:03.480 --> 00:46:06.519
from it. The idea of a secret government lab in
795
00:46:06.559 --> 00:46:10.079
a small coastal town, the idea of children with psychic
796
00:46:10.079 --> 00:46:13.519
abilities being experimented on, the idea of a portal to
797
00:46:13.559 --> 00:46:16.360
another dimension being torn open by one of those children,
798
00:46:16.800 --> 00:46:20.079
the idea of a creature coming through. All of that
799
00:46:20.119 --> 00:46:23.360
came directly out of the Montalk legend. They have said
800
00:46:23.400 --> 00:46:27.960
as much in interviews multiple times. Netflix bought the show.
801
00:46:28.639 --> 00:46:32.320
Then the production reality kicked in. Filming a series in
802
00:46:32.400 --> 00:46:35.760
Montalk during the East Coast winter on the actual eastern
803
00:46:35.800 --> 00:46:39.000
tip of Long Island was going to be extremely expensive
804
00:46:39.039 --> 00:46:43.679
and extremely cold. Tax incentives in Georgia were extremely generous.
805
00:46:44.239 --> 00:46:47.760
The creative call was made to relocate the story. The
806
00:46:47.760 --> 00:46:51.239
town moved from Long Island to Indiana, the name moved
807
00:46:51.280 --> 00:46:55.559
from Montalk to Hawkins, the show was renamed Stranger Things.
808
00:46:56.079 --> 00:47:01.280
Almost everything else structurally stayed hawk And It's national laboratory
809
00:47:01.360 --> 00:47:04.719
is Camp Hero. Walk through it in your mind. A
810
00:47:04.760 --> 00:47:07.679
government facility on the edge of a small American town.
811
00:47:08.599 --> 00:47:11.000
Most of the locals don't really know what goes on there.
812
00:47:11.559 --> 00:47:16.440
Officially closed for one purpose, secretly active for another, buried
813
00:47:16.480 --> 00:47:19.559
experimental work happening in places the public is not allowed
814
00:47:19.639 --> 00:47:23.480
to go. That is point for point. The description of
815
00:47:23.519 --> 00:47:27.400
Camp Hero in the Nichols Mythology eleven is the mon
816
00:47:27.480 --> 00:47:31.880
Talk Boys. A child taken young, raised inside the program,
817
00:47:32.400 --> 00:47:34.960
used as a living instrument by men in lab coats,
818
00:47:35.760 --> 00:47:38.639
train to extend her mind beyond the limits of normal
819
00:47:38.719 --> 00:47:43.400
human experience. Strapped into a chair in a sensory deprivation tank,
820
00:47:43.840 --> 00:47:46.400
ask to reach out and find things and bring them back.
821
00:47:47.280 --> 00:47:49.639
The first time you watch the show, the visual of
822
00:47:49.679 --> 00:47:53.719
her in that tank electrodes on her temples, eyes closed,
823
00:47:54.159 --> 00:47:57.840
breathing slow while men around her watch monitors. Is so
824
00:47:58.000 --> 00:48:00.880
close to the Nickels chair that I genuinely don't know
825
00:48:00.920 --> 00:48:03.599
how the duffer brothers expected anybody not to see it.
826
00:48:04.239 --> 00:48:07.199
They weren't hiding it. They were saying out loud with
827
00:48:07.280 --> 00:48:11.159
their pictures. This is the story we're retelling. The Demo
828
00:48:11.239 --> 00:48:15.000
Gorgan is the beast that Duncan Cameron supposedly summoned, a
829
00:48:15.039 --> 00:48:17.920
creature pulled out of a young person's mind under extreme
830
00:48:18.000 --> 00:48:22.840
psychic pressure, manifested into our world, breaking through into reality
831
00:48:22.880 --> 00:48:26.360
at the location of the experiment. The dema Gorgon doesn't
832
00:48:26.360 --> 00:48:29.079
come up out of an ordinary place. It comes through
833
00:48:29.119 --> 00:48:31.559
a hole that eleven cracked open during a session in
834
00:48:31.599 --> 00:48:36.000
the lab. That's the August twelfth, nineteen eighty three story,
835
00:48:36.440 --> 00:48:39.920
slightly redressed. The upside down is the other side of
836
00:48:39.920 --> 00:48:43.639
that hole, the realm beyond the place. The portals in
837
00:48:43.679 --> 00:48:48.760
the Montauk legend supposedly opened onto a dim, decaying, parallel
838
00:48:48.880 --> 00:48:51.639
version of our own world, full of things that should
839
00:48:51.679 --> 00:48:54.559
not be there. If you go back and rewatch stranger
840
00:48:54.599 --> 00:48:59.320
things now, knowing the source material, the experience is genuinely strange.
841
00:49:00.079 --> 00:49:03.880
It plays differently. You see the seams, you see the bones,
842
00:49:04.360 --> 00:49:07.239
you see the choices the Duffers were making to fictionalize
843
00:49:07.239 --> 00:49:10.800
what they had been reading. Hawkins is Montalk in a wig.
844
00:49:11.239 --> 00:49:14.079
Hawkins Lab is camp hero with the lights on and
845
00:49:14.119 --> 00:49:18.159
the cameras allowed inside. Eleven is the Montalk boy you're
846
00:49:18.199 --> 00:49:21.719
allowed to feel sorry for. The Demigorgon is the beast
847
00:49:21.719 --> 00:49:25.599
they finally got to put on screen. There are smaller details, too,
848
00:49:26.000 --> 00:49:29.039
once you know where to look, the presence of Soviet
849
00:49:29.119 --> 00:49:32.800
operatives lurking in the background of the Hawkins program. In
850
00:49:32.920 --> 00:49:37.559
Nichol's telling, the Montalk Project had Soviet counterparts mirror programs
851
00:49:37.639 --> 00:49:40.039
running on the other side of the Iron Curtain, with
852
00:49:40.119 --> 00:49:43.880
their own psychics and their own portals, occasionally tangling with
853
00:49:43.960 --> 00:49:48.519
each other across dimensions in Stranger Things. By season three,
854
00:49:48.760 --> 00:49:51.280
the Russians have a parallel facility in the basement of
855
00:49:51.320 --> 00:49:54.280
a shopping mall, complete with their own attempt to crack
856
00:49:54.320 --> 00:49:57.800
open the gate. The visual language of the Hawkins Gate,
857
00:49:58.079 --> 00:50:03.119
that rippling organic, almost like opening between worlds, traces back
858
00:50:03.159 --> 00:50:06.400
through more than one decade of paperback science fiction, but
859
00:50:06.559 --> 00:50:09.559
in its specific framing as something a child opens by
860
00:50:09.599 --> 00:50:14.000
reaching out with her mind under technological amplification, it traces
861
00:50:14.039 --> 00:50:18.039
directly to the Montauk Chair, the Papa figure of doctor Brenner,
862
00:50:18.280 --> 00:50:20.599
the lab director who treats eleven, with a mix of
863
00:50:20.639 --> 00:50:25.199
paternal warmth and total cold blooded utility, is recognizable from
864
00:50:25.199 --> 00:50:28.880
the Nichols literature too. The men running the project, in
865
00:50:28.960 --> 00:50:33.320
his telling, were not cartoon villains. They were professional researchers
866
00:50:33.360 --> 00:50:36.320
who had spent decades working with these subjects, who had
867
00:50:36.320 --> 00:50:39.320
developed real bonds with them, who had also been willing
868
00:50:39.360 --> 00:50:42.079
when the science demanded it to push the children to
869
00:50:42.119 --> 00:50:45.840
the edge of psychological collapse and beyond. Brenner is that
870
00:50:46.039 --> 00:50:50.199
archetype dramatized for television. The line in the show where
871
00:50:50.199 --> 00:50:54.599
he tells Eleven, Papa is here, Papa loves you lands
872
00:50:54.639 --> 00:50:57.559
the way it lands because it's the same emotional manipulation
873
00:50:57.719 --> 00:51:01.400
Nichols and Swordlow described in books after book as the
874
00:51:01.400 --> 00:51:05.400
core technique used on the Montalk Boys. Make the child
875
00:51:05.480 --> 00:51:08.280
love the man who is hurting him, make the abuse
876
00:51:08.360 --> 00:51:13.639
indistinguishable in the child's own mind from love. The Duffer brothers,
877
00:51:13.679 --> 00:51:17.199
to their credit, have never tried to hide this. Asked
878
00:51:17.239 --> 00:51:20.679
about it directly, they have said, yes, they were drawing
879
00:51:20.719 --> 00:51:24.519
on the Montalk Project mythology. They have said they understood
880
00:51:24.559 --> 00:51:27.199
that the legend was a legend, that they were using
881
00:51:27.239 --> 00:51:30.079
it as a creative starting point rather than as a
882
00:51:30.079 --> 00:51:33.679
documentary subject. They have said they wanted to capture the
883
00:51:33.679 --> 00:51:36.360
feeling of an era when stories like that could spread,
884
00:51:36.960 --> 00:51:39.360
when the boundary between what was secret and what was
885
00:51:39.400 --> 00:51:44.039
strange could feel thin. But they have also deliberately kept
886
00:51:44.079 --> 00:51:47.840
the original word in their work. The original working title
887
00:51:47.920 --> 00:51:51.880
document still circulates online. It is labeled Montalk At the
888
00:51:51.920 --> 00:51:56.239
top Stranger thinks, the show that has become a cultural event,
889
00:51:56.639 --> 00:51:59.519
that has launched careers and broken records and sold a
890
00:51:59.559 --> 00:52:04.960
billion merchandise is in its own private origin story called
891
00:52:05.039 --> 00:52:05.559
mon Talk.
892
00:52:06.559 --> 00:52:07.320
If you want to go.
893
00:52:07.239 --> 00:52:09.639
Further down this rabbit hole, by the way, there's a
894
00:52:09.679 --> 00:52:14.639
documentary worth watching. In twenty fifteen, a filmmaker named Christopher
895
00:52:14.679 --> 00:52:19.119
Garretano released a film called Montauk Chronicles. He had spent
896
00:52:19.159 --> 00:52:24.320
more than ten years interviewing the alleged participants, Preston Nichols, Albelick,
897
00:52:24.840 --> 00:52:29.719
Stuart Swerdlow Duncan Cameron. He sat with them on camera
898
00:52:30.079 --> 00:52:32.800
and let them tell their own stories in their own words,
899
00:52:33.159 --> 00:52:36.960
at length, without much interruption. The film does not take
900
00:52:37.000 --> 00:52:39.719
a strong position on whether to believe them. It just
901
00:52:39.800 --> 00:52:42.840
lets you watch them, It lets you hear them, It
902
00:52:42.960 --> 00:52:45.800
lets you make your own evaluation. About whether you are
903
00:52:45.840 --> 00:52:49.679
watching men who lived through something extraordinary, men who deceived
904
00:52:49.679 --> 00:52:53.800
themselves into believing they had, men who deceived others, or
905
00:52:53.840 --> 00:52:58.559
some mixture of all three. Garatano's film is uncomfortable to watch,
906
00:52:59.119 --> 00:53:02.280
not because it's gore or sensational, because the men in
907
00:53:02.320 --> 00:53:06.280
it are so quiet about what they're saying. Bailik, an
908
00:53:06.320 --> 00:53:08.880
old man by the time the film was made, talks
909
00:53:08.880 --> 00:53:11.280
about jumping off the deck of the Eldridge in nineteen
910
00:53:11.320 --> 00:53:13.920
forty three the way another man might talk about a
911
00:53:13.960 --> 00:53:17.639
long ago Christmas morning. Nichols, in his cluttered house full
912
00:53:17.679 --> 00:53:21.079
of vintage radio gear, lays out the technical architecture of
913
00:53:21.079 --> 00:53:24.719
the Montauk chair as if he were explaining a stereo system.
914
00:53:24.960 --> 00:53:28.039
Swordload describes being a child subject in the program with
915
00:53:28.119 --> 00:53:31.000
the affect of a man describing a long, bad illness
916
00:53:31.079 --> 00:53:34.480
he survived a long time ago. None of them performs,
917
00:53:34.920 --> 00:53:37.840
none of themselves. If you hadn't told me what the
918
00:53:37.880 --> 00:53:40.800
film was about, and you just shown me the interviews, cold,
919
00:53:41.199 --> 00:53:42.920
I wouldn't have been able to tell you whether what
920
00:53:42.960 --> 00:53:46.119
I was watching was the most elaborate and quietly spoken
921
00:53:46.199 --> 00:53:50.039
hoax in American conspiracy history or the closest thing. We
922
00:53:50.119 --> 00:53:52.360
have to a witness record of one of the worst
923
00:53:52.400 --> 00:53:57.239
classified projects ever conducted. I've watched it twice. I still
924
00:53:57.280 --> 00:53:59.599
don't know. I want to step back now and put
925
00:53:59.639 --> 00:54:02.280
on a differ and hat, the hat I usually wear
926
00:54:02.320 --> 00:54:04.760
when I'm working on a true crime case or when
927
00:54:04.800 --> 00:54:07.840
I'm walking through a piece of historical research that involves
928
00:54:07.840 --> 00:54:10.559
the United States government. I want to look hard and
929
00:54:10.599 --> 00:54:13.159
I want to look fair at what we actually know
930
00:54:13.320 --> 00:54:16.320
and what we don't. The United States government in the
931
00:54:16.360 --> 00:54:19.639
second half of the twentieth century ran experiments on human
932
00:54:19.679 --> 00:54:23.719
beings that, when they were finally exposed, shocked even Americans
933
00:54:23.760 --> 00:54:27.519
who thought they had no illusions left. That part is documented.
934
00:54:27.880 --> 00:54:32.519
It's not theory, it's the public record. Project mk Ultra,
935
00:54:32.800 --> 00:54:36.079
officially run by the Central Intelligence Agency from nineteen fifty
936
00:54:36.079 --> 00:54:40.679
three to nineteen seventy three, dosed unwitting American citizens with LSD,
937
00:54:41.280 --> 00:54:45.719
subjected them to psychological torture, attempted to develop reliable methods
938
00:54:45.719 --> 00:54:49.159
of mind control, and conducted experiments in cities including New
939
00:54:49.280 --> 00:54:52.960
York and San Francisco. Some of the victims were prostitutes
940
00:54:52.960 --> 00:54:56.760
whose clients were dosed without their knowledge, Some were prisoners,
941
00:54:57.159 --> 00:55:01.400
some were psychiatric patients were ordinary people who had simply
942
00:55:01.440 --> 00:55:03.480
taken a job that turned out to be a front
943
00:55:03.719 --> 00:55:07.960
for a CIA program. The records of mk Ultra were
944
00:55:08.000 --> 00:55:11.480
destroyed in nineteen seventy three on the orders of CIA
945
00:55:11.960 --> 00:55:15.679
director Richard Hilms. Most of what we know today comes
946
00:55:15.719 --> 00:55:19.800
from a small number of financial records that escaped that purge,
947
00:55:19.840 --> 00:55:23.480
and from sworn testimony before the United States Senate during
948
00:55:23.480 --> 00:55:27.480
the Church Committee hearings of nineteen seventy five. The director
949
00:55:27.519 --> 00:55:31.280
of mk ULTRA, a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb, sat in
950
00:55:31.280 --> 00:55:34.920
front of the Senate and described, in the calmest possible voice,
951
00:55:35.320 --> 00:55:37.159
work that read like a horror novel.
952
00:55:37.880 --> 00:55:38.440
That's real.
953
00:55:38.920 --> 00:55:42.079
You can pull the transcripts read what they were actually doing.
954
00:55:42.760 --> 00:55:44.639
They had a project where they ran a brothel in
955
00:55:44.679 --> 00:55:48.440
San Francisco, staffed it with prostitutes paid by the agency,
956
00:55:48.920 --> 00:55:52.039
dosed the johns with LSD, and watched them through a
957
00:55:52.039 --> 00:55:55.000
one way mirror. They had a project where they tried
958
00:55:55.039 --> 00:55:58.559
to use sustained chemical and psychological torture to break a
959
00:55:58.559 --> 00:56:01.920
person's personality down to nothing and then build a new
960
00:56:01.960 --> 00:56:05.440
personality on top of the wreckage. They had a project
961
00:56:05.480 --> 00:56:10.119
where they paid academic psychiatrists in respected institutions to treat
962
00:56:10.119 --> 00:56:14.199
patients with electro convulsive therapy at levels far beyond accepted
963
00:56:14.239 --> 00:56:16.840
medical limits in order to see whether you could erase
964
00:56:16.840 --> 00:56:20.599
a person's memory completely and reprogram them from a blank slate.
965
00:56:21.400 --> 00:56:24.519
That last one was conducted at McGill University in Montreal
966
00:56:24.960 --> 00:56:28.199
by a doctor named Ewan Cameron, whose name is almost
967
00:56:28.239 --> 00:56:31.400
certainly an unrelated coincidence with the Cameron brothers of the
968
00:56:31.440 --> 00:56:34.880
Montauk legend, but a coincidence that becomes interesting once you
969
00:56:34.920 --> 00:56:39.400
start noticing it. Cameron, the McGill psychiatrist, would put patients
970
00:56:39.400 --> 00:56:42.239
into a chemically induced coma for weeks at a time.
971
00:56:43.000 --> 00:56:45.199
He would play tape loops of his own voice into
972
00:56:45.239 --> 00:56:49.239
their ears, sometimes the same phrase, repeated for sixteen hours
973
00:56:49.239 --> 00:56:51.400
a day, in the belief that the message would be
974
00:56:51.480 --> 00:56:55.199
installed below the level of conscious memory. He called the
975
00:56:55.239 --> 00:56:59.679
process psychic driving. The patients, many of them women suffering
976
00:56:59.679 --> 00:57:03.239
from poe, mostpartum depression or anxiety disorders, who had simply
977
00:57:03.280 --> 00:57:06.239
gone to a respected hospital for help, came out of
978
00:57:06.280 --> 00:57:10.639
his care with their personalities permanently damaged. Some never recovered
979
00:57:10.639 --> 00:57:14.239
the ability to function, some lost the ability to recognize
980
00:57:14.280 --> 00:57:19.360
their own children, some decades later sued the CIA. The
981
00:57:19.440 --> 00:57:23.719
agency settled. The Holmesburg Prison Experiments, conducted by the University
982
00:57:23.719 --> 00:57:27.119
of Pennsylvania in cooperation with the United States Army at
983
00:57:27.159 --> 00:57:33.639
a Philadelphia prison, exposed prisoners to dioxins, hallucinogens, radioactive materials,
984
00:57:33.639 --> 00:57:37.320
and chemical warfare agents. They ran for over two decades.
985
00:57:37.760 --> 00:57:41.039
The prisoners were paid pennies. Many were not informed in
986
00:57:41.119 --> 00:57:44.559
any meaningful sense of what they were taking. We've covered
987
00:57:44.559 --> 00:57:48.719
that one before on the show Operation Sea Spray, Operation
988
00:57:48.880 --> 00:57:53.960
Big Itch, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Atomic Energy Commission's
989
00:57:53.960 --> 00:57:58.199
deliberate dosing of pregnant women with radioactive isotopes without their
990
00:57:58.239 --> 00:58:04.159
knowledge in the nineteen forty Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke, the
991
00:58:04.280 --> 00:58:08.079
Edgewood Arsenal experiments, where American soldiers were subjected to chemical
992
00:58:08.079 --> 00:58:11.920
warfare agents and tests their commanders described to them as
993
00:58:12.079 --> 00:58:16.760
ordinary occupational health screenings. The list goes on. The fact
994
00:58:16.760 --> 00:58:23.199
pattern is consistent. American citizens, often poor, often institutionalized, often
995
00:58:23.239 --> 00:58:27.559
non white, sometimes children used as test subjects without consent
996
00:58:27.960 --> 00:58:32.280
for decades by agencies that lied about it, destroyed records
997
00:58:32.320 --> 00:58:34.719
about it, and only admitted to a fraction of it
998
00:58:34.760 --> 00:58:38.199
when forced. This is the context in which the Montalk
999
00:58:38.280 --> 00:58:42.039
Project story landed in nineteen ninety two. If you ask
1000
00:58:42.119 --> 00:58:44.800
me why a story like the Montalk Project found such
1001
00:58:44.800 --> 00:58:48.239
a wide audience in the early nineteen nineties, the answer
1002
00:58:48.280 --> 00:58:51.119
is in part because the United States government had spent
1003
00:58:51.159 --> 00:58:55.159
the previous twenty years confirming that the unthinkable wasn't unthinkable
1004
00:58:55.239 --> 00:58:58.800
at all. By nineteen ninety two, the average American who
1005
00:58:58.800 --> 00:59:03.320
paid attention had heard about Ultra, about the radiation experiments,
1006
00:59:03.800 --> 00:59:07.880
about Tuskegee. The instinct to say the government would never
1007
00:59:07.960 --> 00:59:12.920
do that was no longer instinctive. The instinct now was, well,
1008
00:59:13.360 --> 00:59:17.079
what else didn't they tell us into that gap? Stepped
1009
00:59:17.119 --> 00:59:17.960
Preston Nichols.
1010
00:59:18.639 --> 00:59:18.960
Now.
1011
00:59:19.280 --> 00:59:23.320
None of that by itself makes the Montalk Project true.
1012
00:59:23.360 --> 00:59:26.800
A story being plausible in light of confirmed government misconduct
1013
00:59:27.199 --> 00:59:30.639
is not the same thing as that story actually being true.
1014
00:59:30.679 --> 00:59:33.679
A lot of things are plausible, most of them didn't happen.
1015
00:59:34.519 --> 00:59:36.800
The work of an honest researcher is to keep your
1016
00:59:36.800 --> 00:59:40.280
hand on the line between what's documented, what's testified to
1017
00:59:40.760 --> 00:59:46.159
but unverifiable, and what's pure folklore. Those are three different categories.
1018
00:59:46.519 --> 00:59:49.920
The Montalk Project, in my view, lives almost entirely in
1019
00:59:49.960 --> 00:59:53.559
the second and third What's documented about Camp Hero.
1020
00:59:54.119 --> 00:59:56.559
The base existed. It was a coastal.
1021
00:59:56.320 --> 01:00:01.199
Artillery installation, then a radar station, then officially decommissioned, then
1022
01:00:01.239 --> 01:00:04.519
transferred to the state. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.
1023
01:00:05.039 --> 01:00:11.599
We'll be back after these messages. The radar tower really
1024
01:00:11.639 --> 01:00:14.039
did keep going around for some time after the official
1025
01:00:14.039 --> 01:00:17.119
shutdown date, and the Air Force never gave a fully
1026
01:00:17.119 --> 01:00:21.360
convincing public explanation of why the base really does have
1027
01:00:21.480 --> 01:00:25.280
underground bunkers, some of them still sealed. Some of those
1028
01:00:25.320 --> 01:00:28.800
bunkers are not on any public map. What's testified to
1029
01:00:29.239 --> 01:00:34.599
but unverified Preston nichols claims about working there, Albelix claims
1030
01:00:34.599 --> 01:00:38.960
about being Edward Cameron, the time traveling sailor from the Eldridge,
1031
01:00:39.039 --> 01:00:42.920
Stuart Swerdlow's claims about being a mon talk boy. None
1032
01:00:42.960 --> 01:00:46.239
of these has ever been corroborated by physical evidence, by
1033
01:00:46.280 --> 01:00:50.079
documents that pass scrutiny, or by independent witnesses with their
1034
01:00:50.119 --> 01:00:53.800
own stories that aren't already Drawing on Nichol's published work,
1035
01:00:54.719 --> 01:00:59.360
What's Folklore, The Beast that Duncan Cameron supposedly summoned the
1036
01:00:59.440 --> 01:01:04.000
thousands of montalk Boys, the portals to other worlds, the
1037
01:01:04.039 --> 01:01:08.760
non human intelligence is supposedly providing the technology, the connections
1038
01:01:08.800 --> 01:01:13.119
to nineteen forty three, and the USS Eldridge honest research
1039
01:01:13.239 --> 01:01:17.440
keeps those categories separate. It doesn't promote testimony into evidence
1040
01:01:17.559 --> 01:01:21.199
just because the testimony is detailed or vivid. It doesn't
1041
01:01:21.199 --> 01:01:25.199
promote folklore into testimony just because the folklore feels right.
1042
01:01:26.039 --> 01:01:28.119
The reason this matters to me is that there are
1043
01:01:28.159 --> 01:01:32.719
real victims of real American government misconduct alive and aging
1044
01:01:32.800 --> 01:01:35.880
and dying with their stories untold. And every time a
1045
01:01:35.920 --> 01:01:39.840
fantastic story like the Montalk Boys catches the public imagination,
1046
01:01:40.320 --> 01:01:43.320
it sucks oxygen out of the room. It makes it
1047
01:01:43.360 --> 01:01:47.400
easier for the actual MK Ultra survivor the actual radiation
1048
01:01:47.519 --> 01:01:50.719
experiment victim, to be lumped in with the wilder claims
1049
01:01:50.719 --> 01:01:54.719
and dismissed altogether. That's the cost of conspiracy as entertainment.
1050
01:01:55.239 --> 01:01:58.280
I'm not saying don't enjoy the story. I'm saying enjoy
1051
01:01:58.320 --> 01:02:01.280
it knowing what it is. There's a coda I should mention,
1052
01:02:01.800 --> 01:02:04.440
because it's the one thing about Montalk that broke into
1053
01:02:04.480 --> 01:02:07.840
the wider American public consciousness for a moment, and most
1054
01:02:07.840 --> 01:02:10.360
people who heard about it never connected it to the
1055
01:02:10.360 --> 01:02:13.960
project legend. In July of two thousand and eight, on
1056
01:02:14.000 --> 01:02:16.719
a beach called Ditch Planes, just a few miles from
1057
01:02:16.760 --> 01:02:20.280
Camp Hero, three young women found a dead animal washed
1058
01:02:20.360 --> 01:02:23.760
up on the sand. It was hairless, it was bloated.
1059
01:02:24.440 --> 01:02:27.360
It had what looked like a hooked beak. It looked
1060
01:02:27.400 --> 01:02:30.400
in the photographs they took like nothing they had ever seen.
1061
01:02:31.280 --> 01:02:34.400
The photos went viral in the slow mailing list way
1062
01:02:34.440 --> 01:02:36.920
that things still went viral in two thousand and eight,
1063
01:02:37.480 --> 01:02:40.480
before social media was really what it is now. The
1064
01:02:40.519 --> 01:02:44.159
press picked it up. It got a name, the Montalk Monster.
1065
01:02:45.000 --> 01:02:48.719
It was almost certainly a raccoon. A raccoon's body in
1066
01:02:48.800 --> 01:02:52.440
advanced decomposition, with the soft tissue around the skull rotted
1067
01:02:52.480 --> 01:02:55.920
away to expose the underlying bone, gives you a profile
1068
01:02:55.960 --> 01:02:59.639
that does not look like a raccoon at all. Veterinary
1069
01:02:59.639 --> 01:03:03.119
pathilogists who looked at the photos set as much almost immediately.
1070
01:03:03.880 --> 01:03:07.639
The hooked beak, the hairlessness, the bloated proportions are all
1071
01:03:07.679 --> 01:03:11.159
consistent with normal decomposition of a small mammal that had
1072
01:03:11.199 --> 01:03:14.119
been in salt water for some period of time, but
1073
01:03:14.199 --> 01:03:16.239
for about a week in the summer of two thousand
1074
01:03:16.280 --> 01:03:18.679
and eight, the corner of the Internet that had grown
1075
01:03:18.760 --> 01:03:22.039
up reading Preston Nichols had a field day. Of course,
1076
01:03:22.079 --> 01:03:25.159
something washed up at Montauk. Of course it didn't look
1077
01:03:25.199 --> 01:03:28.480
like anything natural. They've been opening portals over there for
1078
01:03:28.559 --> 01:03:33.079
sixty years. Things come through. It became a mean, then
1079
01:03:33.119 --> 01:03:37.159
it faded. The carcass was never recovered for a proper examination,
1080
01:03:37.719 --> 01:03:41.239
which doesn't help. But the Montauk Monster of two thousand
1081
01:03:41.280 --> 01:03:44.480
and eight, even most committed believers will tell you, was
1082
01:03:44.559 --> 01:03:47.480
almost certainly just a dead raccoon at a bad angle.
1083
01:03:48.199 --> 01:03:51.559
The legend has bigger fish to fry. Camp Hero today
1084
01:03:51.639 --> 01:03:53.800
is open to the public. It is one of the
1085
01:03:53.840 --> 01:03:57.199
loveliest state parks in the New York system. Hundreds of
1086
01:03:57.239 --> 01:04:01.880
acres of pine forest, ocean bluffs, coastal scrub, hiking trails.
1087
01:04:02.639 --> 01:04:05.519
The bunkers are still there, Some are open to walk through.
1088
01:04:06.199 --> 01:04:09.719
Most are sealed shut with thick doors, no windows, no
1089
01:04:09.880 --> 01:04:14.159
signs explaining what's inside or what isn't. Local guides will
1090
01:04:14.159 --> 01:04:17.679
tell you about the official history, the coastal artillery, the
1091
01:04:17.719 --> 01:04:21.400
Sage radar station. They will tell you about the architecture
1092
01:04:21.440 --> 01:04:24.440
of the disguised buildings about the fake church and the
1093
01:04:24.440 --> 01:04:28.039
fake fishing village. They will not generally tell you about
1094
01:04:28.039 --> 01:04:31.760
the project, not because they don't know, because they're tired
1095
01:04:31.800 --> 01:04:35.599
of the questions. The radar tower still stands. They were
1096
01:04:35.639 --> 01:04:39.079
going to tear it down years ago, the locals petitioned
1097
01:04:39.519 --> 01:04:43.719
the structure was designated a historical landmark. It still rises
1098
01:04:43.719 --> 01:04:46.039
out of the trees like a relic from a different planet.
1099
01:04:46.679 --> 01:04:50.480
Birds nest in the dish. The steel is rusting. On
1100
01:04:50.519 --> 01:04:52.880
a quiet morning, when the wind is right, you can
1101
01:04:52.880 --> 01:04:54.719
stand at the foot of it and look up and
1102
01:04:54.760 --> 01:04:59.719
feel exactly the way you imagine you're supposed to feel, small, watched,
1103
01:05:00.280 --> 01:05:03.559
not entirely sure where you are. Anyone who's been there
1104
01:05:03.559 --> 01:05:06.760
will tell you that the place has a feeling. I
1105
01:05:06.800 --> 01:05:10.559
won't tell you what that feeling means. Atmospherics aren't evidence.
1106
01:05:11.239 --> 01:05:14.360
A coastal cliff with a giant, rusting radar tower above
1107
01:05:14.360 --> 01:05:18.440
an abandoned military base will always have a feeling. That's
1108
01:05:18.440 --> 01:05:21.440
what those places do, that's what those places are for.
1109
01:05:22.079 --> 01:05:25.400
That's how human beings respond to that combination of geography
1110
01:05:25.440 --> 01:05:29.159
and architecture and history. But the feeling is real. So
1111
01:05:29.239 --> 01:05:31.400
what do we do with all of this. What do
1112
01:05:31.440 --> 01:05:33.960
we do with a story that has at its base
1113
01:05:34.400 --> 01:05:39.679
a real military installation, real declassified documents about American mind
1114
01:05:39.719 --> 01:05:44.559
control programs, real ambiguity about a radar that wouldn't stop turning,
1115
01:05:45.199 --> 01:05:47.880
real testimony from real people who live next to that
1116
01:05:47.960 --> 01:05:51.639
fence and saw things they couldn't explain. And on top
1117
01:05:51.679 --> 01:05:55.000
of that base a tower of claims layered up over
1118
01:05:55.079 --> 01:05:58.000
decades by men who couldn't always keep their stories straight,
1119
01:05:58.519 --> 01:06:01.039
that grew so tall that it antually came down through
1120
01:06:01.039 --> 01:06:04.000
a crack in the ceiling and landed in a softer,
1121
01:06:04.159 --> 01:06:08.199
fictionalized form on a streaming service watched by hundreds of
1122
01:06:08.239 --> 01:06:11.559
millions of people. What do we do with that? I
1123
01:06:11.559 --> 01:06:13.719
think there are a few ways to hold it. You
1124
01:06:13.760 --> 01:06:16.599
can hold it as a literal account. You can decide
1125
01:06:16.599 --> 01:06:19.880
that Preston Nichols was telling the truth, that Albelick was
1126
01:06:19.920 --> 01:06:23.920
telling the truth, that the thousands of Montauk Boys really existed,
1127
01:06:24.440 --> 01:06:27.360
that Duncan Cameron really did summon a beast in nineteen
1128
01:06:27.400 --> 01:06:30.360
eighty three, and that the United States government has been
1129
01:06:30.440 --> 01:06:33.719
quietly running a black operation at Camp Hero since the
1130
01:06:33.760 --> 01:06:37.079
close of the Second World War. You're entitled to make
1131
01:06:37.119 --> 01:06:41.159
your own evaluation the same way I'm entitled to make mine.
1132
01:06:41.239 --> 01:06:44.480
I don't see the documentation. I think the testimony has
1133
01:06:44.519 --> 01:06:47.920
too many internal problems. I think the story has the
1134
01:06:47.960 --> 01:06:51.519
shape of a built thing, not a remembered thing. But
1135
01:06:51.559 --> 01:06:54.239
I've been wrong before in my life, and I'll probably
1136
01:06:54.239 --> 01:06:57.599
be wrong again. You can hold it as pure fabrication.
1137
01:06:58.400 --> 01:07:00.880
You can decide that Nichols was either a fraud or
1138
01:07:00.880 --> 01:07:04.079
a deluded man, that everyone who came after him was
1139
01:07:04.159 --> 01:07:07.480
riffing on his fiction, that there is no there there,
1140
01:07:08.119 --> 01:07:10.760
and that the only Montalk that ever existed was a
1141
01:07:10.760 --> 01:07:13.480
fishing village with an unusually big antenna at.
1142
01:07:13.400 --> 01:07:13.960
The edge of it.
1143
01:07:14.719 --> 01:07:17.000
If you hold it that way, I think you're closer
1144
01:07:17.039 --> 01:07:20.079
to the truth. I think most of the specific claims
1145
01:07:20.079 --> 01:07:24.119
in the Montauk Project legend collapse under examination. I think
1146
01:07:24.159 --> 01:07:27.760
a lot of the apparent corroboration was retroactive, with later
1147
01:07:27.800 --> 01:07:31.519
witnesses building on details laid down by earlier ones. But
1148
01:07:31.599 --> 01:07:34.000
I don't think the story is nothing. I think the
1149
01:07:34.039 --> 01:07:37.760
story is something. I think what it is is folklore,
1150
01:07:38.360 --> 01:07:43.480
American folklore, Cold War folklore folklore, and the same family
1151
01:07:43.519 --> 01:07:47.039
as the disappearance of Flight nineteen in the Bermuda Triangle,
1152
01:07:47.480 --> 01:07:50.519
the lights at Skinwalker Ranch, the men in black at
1153
01:07:50.559 --> 01:07:54.760
the edge of the desert. These stories are not factually true,
1154
01:07:54.800 --> 01:07:57.800
most of them, if you press hard enough, fall apart.
1155
01:07:58.639 --> 01:08:02.199
But they're not lies exactly. They're the way a culture
1156
01:08:02.239 --> 01:08:05.760
works out in the dark, what it suspects about itself.
1157
01:08:06.719 --> 01:08:09.639
The Montalk Project legend is the United States in the
1158
01:08:09.679 --> 01:08:12.960
second half of the twentieth century, telling itself a story
1159
01:08:13.000 --> 01:08:15.599
about what its own government might be capable of doing
1160
01:08:15.639 --> 01:08:18.960
in a place nobody is allowed to look. It's a
1161
01:08:18.960 --> 01:08:22.239
folk story about secrecy and power and children and the
1162
01:08:22.279 --> 01:08:25.520
price of weapons that work on the human mind. It's
1163
01:08:25.560 --> 01:08:28.079
about all the secrets we already know to be true,
1164
01:08:28.680 --> 01:08:31.000
dressed up in the costume of all the secrets will
1165
01:08:31.039 --> 01:08:34.560
never confirm. It's a sermon in a way with a
1166
01:08:34.640 --> 01:08:37.920
lab coat where the robe should be. The Duffer brothers
1167
01:08:38.000 --> 01:08:41.119
understood that. I think that's why their show works the
1168
01:08:41.159 --> 01:08:43.960
way it does. They didn't try to film a documentary
1169
01:08:44.000 --> 01:08:47.399
about the Montalk Project. They took the emotional truth of
1170
01:08:47.439 --> 01:08:50.319
the legend, the feeling of it, the dread and the
1171
01:08:50.319 --> 01:08:52.640
wonder of it, and they made a story for the
1172
01:08:52.680 --> 01:08:55.800
rest of us out of it. A story about kids
1173
01:08:55.840 --> 01:08:57.720
on bikes and a girl with a shaved head and
1174
01:08:57.760 --> 01:09:01.520
a creature in a basement translated something from the language
1175
01:09:01.520 --> 01:09:05.640
of conspiracy into the language of childhood. They made it bearable,
1176
01:09:06.079 --> 01:09:08.600
They made it beautiful. They made it the kind of
1177
01:09:08.600 --> 01:09:10.359
thing you can sit on a couch and watch with
1178
01:09:10.439 --> 01:09:14.079
your own kids, while what it was originally describing, if
1179
01:09:14.119 --> 01:09:18.159
it ever existed, would be unwatchable in any form. That's
1180
01:09:18.199 --> 01:09:21.760
a magic trick, and it deserves credit. But underneath the
1181
01:09:21.760 --> 01:09:24.800
magic trick is still the older story, the colder one,
1182
01:09:25.479 --> 01:09:27.960
the radar tower at the eastern end of Long Island,
1183
01:09:28.520 --> 01:09:31.680
the bunkers that nobody opens, the men who came back
1184
01:09:31.680 --> 01:09:35.279
from somewhere with memories they couldn't carry, and the country that,
1185
01:09:35.680 --> 01:09:38.239
when it does open up about its past, has to
1186
01:09:38.279 --> 01:09:41.720
admit that, yes, it did some of these things, maybe
1187
01:09:41.720 --> 01:09:46.239
not at Montalk, maybe nowhere near Montalk, but somewhere to
1188
01:09:46.319 --> 01:09:49.920
somebody with permission from the men in the right offices.
1189
01:09:50.640 --> 01:09:52.640
When I drive out to that part of Long Island,
1190
01:09:52.920 --> 01:09:54.880
when I go to walk the trails at Camp Hero,
1191
01:09:55.520 --> 01:09:58.159
I don't go expecting to feel a portal opening at
1192
01:09:58.159 --> 01:10:01.119
my feet. I don't go ex expecting to see the beast.
1193
01:10:01.840 --> 01:10:04.079
I go because I think there's something worth doing, and
1194
01:10:04.159 --> 01:10:07.319
standing at the actual location where a story like that grew,
1195
01:10:08.119 --> 01:10:10.159
to put your hand on the cold concrete of a
1196
01:10:10.199 --> 01:10:13.640
real bunker, to look up at a real decommissioned radar.
1197
01:10:13.760 --> 01:10:16.720
Dish to remember that the country you live in has
1198
01:10:16.720 --> 01:10:19.119
a basement, and that the basement is bigger than the
1199
01:10:19.119 --> 01:10:21.600
part of the house we usually live in, and that
1200
01:10:21.720 --> 01:10:23.920
some of what's down there is true, and some of
1201
01:10:23.960 --> 01:10:26.640
what's down there is folklore, and you don't always get
1202
01:10:26.640 --> 01:10:30.399
to know which is which. I think about Preston Nickels sometimes.
1203
01:10:30.880 --> 01:10:34.279
He died in twenty eighteen, in his late sixties, in
1204
01:10:34.319 --> 01:10:37.600
his house full of vintage radio equipment, surrounded by the
1205
01:10:37.600 --> 01:10:40.720
books and the broadcasts and the conferences that had defined
1206
01:10:40.720 --> 01:10:41.640
the second half.
1207
01:10:41.439 --> 01:10:42.840
Of his life.
1208
01:10:42.880 --> 01:10:46.560
Whatever he was, he was committed. Whatever he had seen
1209
01:10:47.039 --> 01:10:50.800
or thought he had seen, or constructed or remembered, he
1210
01:10:50.840 --> 01:10:54.039
carried it with him until the end. He never recanted,
1211
01:10:54.560 --> 01:10:57.359
He never softened. He never got rich enough off his
1212
01:10:57.399 --> 01:10:59.079
books to make you suspect.
1213
01:10:58.600 --> 01:10:59.359
A long con.
1214
01:11:00.119 --> 01:11:02.720
He just kept telling the same story in the same
1215
01:11:02.760 --> 01:11:06.800
way for almost three decades. That's not proof of anything.
1216
01:11:07.479 --> 01:11:11.560
Liars can be consistent sincerely deluded. People can be consistent,
1217
01:11:12.079 --> 01:11:16.039
but it weighs the way persistence always weighs. I think
1218
01:11:16.079 --> 01:11:19.520
about al Ballick too. The same is true for him.
1219
01:11:19.720 --> 01:11:23.159
Whatever was happening inside that man's head, he died inside
1220
01:11:23.159 --> 01:11:25.760
the story he had told. He never got out from
1221
01:11:25.800 --> 01:11:30.039
under it. Neither did Duncan Cameron, neither did Stuart Swerdlow.
1222
01:11:30.840 --> 01:11:33.880
Whatever you decide their testimony is worth, you have to
1223
01:11:33.920 --> 01:11:38.079
grant them this. They lived inside their story. They believed it.
1224
01:11:38.640 --> 01:11:42.399
The believing of it cost them something. The Montauk Project,
1225
01:11:42.399 --> 01:11:47.079
as Preston Nichols told it, almost certainly didn't happen. Stranger things,
1226
01:11:47.119 --> 01:11:50.760
as the Duffer brothers told it, definitely didn't happen. But
1227
01:11:50.840 --> 01:11:54.239
the impulse that drives both stories is the oldest impulse
1228
01:11:54.279 --> 01:11:57.920
there is to wonder what's behind the door, to wonder
1229
01:11:57.960 --> 01:12:01.039
who's on the other side, and to listen, on a
1230
01:12:01.119 --> 01:12:04.840
quiet night on a coastal cliff, in the wind off
1231
01:12:04.880 --> 01:12:07.600
the ocean, for the sound of a machine that's supposed
1232
01:12:07.600 --> 01:12:10.520
to be turned off but is still humming somewhere down
1233
01:12:10.520 --> 01:12:13.479
in the dark. If you ever find yourself out at
1234
01:12:13.479 --> 01:12:17.159
the eastern end of Long Island, take an afternoon drive
1235
01:12:17.199 --> 01:12:21.159
past the Lighthouse Park at the State Park entrance, walk
1236
01:12:21.159 --> 01:12:24.680
into the trees. The radar tower is up there, the
1237
01:12:24.720 --> 01:12:27.439
way it always has been. The bunkers are down in
1238
01:12:27.479 --> 01:12:31.039
the bluff the way they always have been. The ocean
1239
01:12:31.119 --> 01:12:34.600
is right there, the way it always has been. You'll
1240
01:12:34.600 --> 01:12:37.199
have a feeling. I promise you you'll have a feeling.
1241
01:12:38.079 --> 01:12:41.119
Whether that feeling means anything is between you and the place.
1242
01:12:41.960 --> 01:12:45.199
Thanks for spending this time with me. Take care of yourselves,
1243
01:12:45.760 --> 01:12:48.319
take care of the people around you. And the next
1244
01:12:48.319 --> 01:12:51.560
time somebody puts on stranger things and the lights flicker
1245
01:12:51.840 --> 01:12:54.239
and the kids get on their bikes and that synth
1246
01:12:54.279 --> 01:12:57.239
score kicks in, you can tell them something most people
1247
01:12:57.279 --> 01:13:01.159
don't know. They almost called it montalk. And now you
1248
01:13:01.239 --> 01:13:07.399
know the reason why.
1249
01:13:12.840 --> 01:13:13.920
I shall.
1250
01:13:15.159 --> 01:13:16.079
Your ski.
1251
01:13:17.560 --> 01:13:20.800
Half God a taste from.
1252
01:13:22.439 --> 01:13:25.760
Your house. I'm see.
1253
01:13:27.199 --> 01:13:30.560
Ward child and come full.
1254
01:13:38.880 --> 01:13:44.920
You better know the moon is out.
1255
01:13:45.199 --> 01:14:01.680
Now you're gonna hear my heart, Lord Scott red Ice,
1256
01:14:03.199 --> 01:14:06.800
can't gigg love fuming.
1257
01:14:08.039 --> 01:14:11.399
My drink. Please you'll let.
1258
01:14:12.840 --> 01:14:16.439
You'll see the come and full.
1259
01:14:19.119 --> 01:14:20.960
You come full?
1260
01:14:21.119 --> 01:14:25.439
You you better.
1261
01:14:29.279 --> 01:14:35.199
From movies on. Now you're gonna.
1262
01:14:35.000 --> 01:14:54.560
Hear my hoo. You better run.
1263
01:14:58.119 --> 01:14:59.119
Some Moisa.
1264
01:14:59.560 --> 01:15:00.239
No, you
1265
01:15:03.199 --> 01:15:04.399
Gotta hear my