Full Transcript for The Real Stranger Things?

here for. So pour the coffee or the bourbon, 70 00:04:03.159 --> 00:04:07.000 whichever kind of night you're having, and settle in, because 71 00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:09.879 we're going to start where these stories almost always start, 72 00:04:10.439 --> 00:04:13.560 not with the mystery, not with the monster. We're going 73 00:04:13.599 --> 00:04:15.879 to start with the ground itself and the war that 74 00:04:15.919 --> 00:04:18.920 brought the government there in the first place. Because to 75 00:04:19.000 --> 00:04:22.040 understand what people say happened at Montauk, you have to 76 00:04:22.120 --> 00:04:25.199 understand why the United States military ever went to Montauk 77 00:04:25.279 --> 00:04:28.639 to begin with. And that part, that part isn't a 78 00:04:28.680 --> 00:04:33.120 conspiracy at all. That part is just history. Long Island 79 00:04:33.160 --> 00:04:35.519 stretches east from New York City for about one hundred 80 00:04:35.519 --> 00:04:38.600 and twenty miles. If you live somewhere else in the country, 81 00:04:38.879 --> 00:04:40.680 you might not have a clear picture of what it 82 00:04:40.720 --> 00:04:43.480 actually looks like. So let me give it to you. 83 00:04:44.199 --> 00:04:47.560 Picture a long, low fish of land tapering to two 84 00:04:47.680 --> 00:04:51.160 narrow forks at its eastern end. The south fork is 85 00:04:51.199 --> 00:04:54.160 the one that ends in Montalk. By the time you've 86 00:04:54.199 --> 00:04:56.839 gotten that far out from the city, the strip, malls 87 00:04:56.879 --> 00:05:01.480 and the freeways are long behind you. Thins, the trees 88 00:05:01.519 --> 00:05:05.959 get smaller, they get bent sideways, leaning west, pushed by 89 00:05:05.959 --> 00:05:09.480 the constant wind off the ocean. The Atlantic is on 90 00:05:09.480 --> 00:05:11.759 one side of you, and the Long Island Sound is 91 00:05:11.800 --> 00:05:14.399 on the other, and the air is salt all the time. 92 00:05:15.120 --> 00:05:17.639 At the very end of that fork, sticking out into 93 00:05:17.680 --> 00:05:19.959 the sea like the tip of a finger, sits the 94 00:05:20.040 --> 00:05:24.560 village of Montauk, population a few thousand in winter, many 95 00:05:24.600 --> 00:05:27.879 times that in summer, a working fishing village for most 96 00:05:27.920 --> 00:05:32.720 of its history, before it got expensive charter boats, surf casting, 97 00:05:33.160 --> 00:05:36.399 a few good seafood places. A lighthouse on the cliff 98 00:05:36.439 --> 00:05:39.680 at the very tip, commissioned by President George Washington in 99 00:05:39.720 --> 00:05:43.199 seventeen ninety two, still throwing its light across the dark 100 00:05:43.240 --> 00:05:47.000 water more than two centuries later. Now, just before you 101 00:05:47.040 --> 00:05:50.040 reach that lighthouse, just shy of the very end of 102 00:05:50.040 --> 00:05:53.319 the land, there's a chunk of bluff and forest along 103 00:05:53.360 --> 00:05:56.720 the south facing coast that, for forty years was completely 104 00:05:56.759 --> 00:06:01.399 closed off to the American public, fenced, guarded, not on 105 00:06:01.480 --> 00:06:05.800 most maps. The locals knew. The locals always know. They 106 00:06:05.839 --> 00:06:08.920 knew there were soldiers there, they knew there were antennas there, 107 00:06:09.439 --> 00:06:11.480 They knew there were buildings down in the trees that 108 00:06:11.560 --> 00:06:15.560 nobody talked about. But the average American, even the average 109 00:06:15.600 --> 00:06:18.360 New Yorker, had no idea what was sitting at the 110 00:06:18.399 --> 00:06:21.800 eastern edge of Long Island. That place was Camp Hero. 111 00:06:22.560 --> 00:06:25.360 Camp Hero is real. I want to be very direct 112 00:06:25.399 --> 00:06:28.040 about that, because as we get further into this story, 113 00:06:28.399 --> 00:06:30.920 the line between what's real and what's claimed is going 114 00:06:30.959 --> 00:06:33.439 to get blurry. And I want to plant a flag. Now, 115 00:06:34.120 --> 00:06:38.519 Camp Hero existed. It still exists. The buildings are still there. 116 00:06:39.120 --> 00:06:41.800 You can walk through them this weekend. Most of it 117 00:06:41.839 --> 00:06:44.800 is now Camp Hero State Park, open to the public 118 00:06:44.839 --> 00:06:48.800 in two thousand and two. The other piece, a smaller chunk, 119 00:06:49.199 --> 00:06:52.759 is still federal property, controlled by the United States Air Force, 120 00:06:53.160 --> 00:06:56.720 still technically active, although what's active about it is a 121 00:06:56.800 --> 00:07:00.199 question without a public answer. The Army built it during 122 00:07:00.240 --> 00:07:03.720 the early years of the Second World War. Construction started 123 00:07:03.720 --> 00:07:07.279 in nineteen forty two. The war was on German U 124 00:07:07.360 --> 00:07:09.920 boats were prowling off the East coast, and numbers most 125 00:07:09.920 --> 00:07:14.160 Americans today would not believe, and the United States military 126 00:07:14.240 --> 00:07:17.439 was in a panic about the possibility that German warships 127 00:07:17.439 --> 00:07:21.160 could shell American cities from the Atlantic, so they put 128 00:07:21.199 --> 00:07:24.240 a coastal defense battery at the eastern end of Long Island. 129 00:07:24.839 --> 00:07:29.279 Big guns sixteen inch naval rifles, the kind designed to 130 00:07:29.319 --> 00:07:32.399 put a shell through the armor of a battleship. Two 131 00:07:32.480 --> 00:07:35.639 of them mounted in heavy concrete bunkers buried deep in 132 00:07:35.639 --> 00:07:38.759 the bluff, where the recoil of a fired round would 133 00:07:38.759 --> 00:07:41.439 shake the soil for half a mile. But here's the 134 00:07:41.439 --> 00:07:44.920 part that already starts to feel like fiction. The army 135 00:07:44.959 --> 00:07:47.959 was worried that any obvious military installation at the tip 136 00:07:47.959 --> 00:07:50.800 of Long Island

would draw German attention from the sea, 137 00:07:51.560 --> 00:07:54.800 so they camouflaged the entire base. They built it to 138 00:07:54.839 --> 00:07:58.279 look like a quiet New England fishing village. The barracks 139 00:07:58.279 --> 00:08:00.720 were dressed up with peaked roofs and fai gables to 140 00:08:00.720 --> 00:08:03.800 look like beach cottages. The mess hall was made to 141 00:08:03.839 --> 00:08:06.480 look like a church, complete with a fake steeple and 142 00:08:06.519 --> 00:08:10.639 stained glass paint on the windows. The gymnasium was disguised 143 00:08:10.639 --> 00:08:13.839 as a small town meeting hall. There were buildings out 144 00:08:13.879 --> 00:08:16.720 there that from a passing ship at sea looked like 145 00:08:16.759 --> 00:08:20.160 a sleepy little hamlet of fishermen and their families. It 146 00:08:20.199 --> 00:08:23.759 was all a stage set. Underneath it was a fortress. 147 00:08:24.480 --> 00:08:29.639 That part is document photos exist, records exist. Visit the 148 00:08:29.639 --> 00:08:31.759 state park today and you can still see some of 149 00:08:31.800 --> 00:08:36.360 those buildings, half restored, half falling apart, with their churchy 150 00:08:36.399 --> 00:08:39.919 facades and their thick concrete bones underneath the wood paneling. 151 00:08:40.759 --> 00:08:43.080 The peaked roof on the chapel that wasn't a chapel 152 00:08:43.120 --> 00:08:46.480 still has a steeple painted on. The whole place was 153 00:08:46.519 --> 00:08:49.440 a lie told to the ocean. I want to sit 154 00:08:49.480 --> 00:08:52.039 with that detail for a second, because if you've ever 155 00:08:52.080 --> 00:08:54.840 taken the time to read about military deception during the 156 00:08:54.879 --> 00:08:58.200 Second World War, you know the United States and Britain 157 00:08:58.240 --> 00:09:00.399 and the Soviets all did things like that on a 158 00:09:00.440 --> 00:09:03.960 scale modern people have a hard time imagining. There were 159 00:09:04.000 --> 00:09:07.600 inflatable rubber tanks dressed up as armored divisions in Southeast 160 00:09:07.600 --> 00:09:11.279 England before the D Day invasion. There were entire fake 161 00:09:11.360 --> 00:09:15.080 air bases built out of plywood. There were studio train 162 00:09:15.200 --> 00:09:18.480 set designers turned loose on the war effort by both sides, 163 00:09:19.159 --> 00:09:23.159 So in one sense, the camouflaged Camp Hero was nothing exceptional. 164 00:09:23.879 --> 00:09:26.360 It was a small piece of a very large pattern. 165 00:09:27.200 --> 00:09:30.720 The American military in nineteen forty two was perfectly comfortable 166 00:09:30.720 --> 00:09:33.360 building a fake church on a cliff to fool a 167 00:09:33.399 --> 00:09:37.720 German submarine commander looking through a periscope. But there's something 168 00:09:37.759 --> 00:09:40.759 about that fact when you stand there, that doesn't quite 169 00:09:40.879 --> 00:09:44.159 leave you alone, because the church is still there, and 170 00:09:44.200 --> 00:09:47.480 the steeple is still painted on, and the bunkers underneath 171 00:09:47.519 --> 00:09:50.360 are still there, And the war the church was built 172 00:09:50.399 --> 00:09:54.440 to deceive ended a long time ago. The deception outlived 173 00:09:54.440 --> 00:09:58.159 the deceiver, and nobody really has ever come along to 174 00:09:58.240 --> 00:10:01.240 take it down. Walk through that part of the park 175 00:10:01.279 --> 00:10:03.679 on a foggy morning, and you can see exactly how 176 00:10:03.720 --> 00:10:06.879 the trick was meant to work. From a distance. It 177 00:10:06.960 --> 00:10:10.600 almost still works. When the war ended, the big guns 178 00:10:10.600 --> 00:10:13.320 came out, Coastal artillery wasn't going. 179 00:10:13.159 --> 00:10:16.039 To be the future. The future was rockets. 180 00:10:15.639 --> 00:10:18.840 And radar and the long, cold, paranoid stare of the 181 00:10:18.879 --> 00:10:23.159 next war. So Camp Hero was reborn. By the late 182 00:10:23.240 --> 00:10:25.399 nineteen fifties, it had been turned over to the Air 183 00:10:25.440 --> 00:10:28.600 Force and rebuilt as a radar station part of the 184 00:10:28.639 --> 00:10:33.320 Semi Automatic Ground Environment system SAGE for short, a continent 185 00:10:33.360 --> 00:10:36.960 wide air defense network designed to detect Soviet bombers crossing 186 00:10:37.039 --> 00:10:40.519 the pole, and in nineteen sixty the Air Force put 187 00:10:40.600 --> 00:10:43.799 up the antenna that defines the Montauk skyline to this day. 188 00:10:44.639 --> 00:10:48.200 It was called the A N Slash FPS thirty five. 189 00:10:49.000 --> 00:10:51.360 It was at the time one of the most powerful 190 00:10:51.399 --> 00:10:55.159 long range radars ever built. The DISH was the size 191 00:10:55.200 --> 00:10:58.039 of a small office building. It sat on top of 192 00:10:58.080 --> 00:11:00.240 a steel framed tower that rose more than than one 193 00:11:00.279 --> 00:11:03.360 hundred feet above the trees. From the right angle on 194 00:11:03.399 --> 00:11:05.519 a clear day, you could see it from the deck 195 00:11:05.559 --> 00:11:08.919 of a fishing boat fifteen miles off shore. It looked 196 00:11:08.919 --> 00:11:12.120 like nothing else on the coast. It looked, frankly, like 197 00:11:12.159 --> 00:11:14.240 something out of a science fiction film. 198 00:11:14.559 --> 00:11:15.960 People who grew up out there. 199 00:11:15.759 --> 00:11:18.120 Remember the way it would make a low aching sound. 200 00:11:18.159 --> 00:11:21.799 When it turned a deep mechanical groan, you felt in 201 00:11:21.840 --> 00:11:26.559 your teeth. It tracked Soviet aircraft. That was its declared mission, 202 00:11:27.279 --> 00:11:30.080 and in the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, 203 00:11:30.480 --> 00:11:33.960 that was a serious mission, because the United States genuinely 204 00:11:33.960 -->

00:11:36.320 believed that World War III could begin with a wave 205 00:11:36.399 --> 00:11:39.559 of Soviet bombers coming over the Arctic, and the radar 206 00:11:39.600 --> 00:11:42.919 belt was the first line of defense. By the late 207 00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:47.240 nineteen seventies, that mission was already obsolete. Bombers had been 208 00:11:47.240 --> 00:11:51.080 replaced by intercontinental ballistic missiles. You don't need a giant 209 00:11:51.080 --> 00:11:55.399 ground radar to spot an ICBM, you need satellites, and 210 00:11:55.480 --> 00:11:59.559 the United States had those. Camp Hero stopped being strategically 211 00:11:59.559 --> 00:12:03.399 necessary area around nineteen eighty the Air Force decommissioned it. 212 00:12:03.960 --> 00:12:06.279 The official records say the base was closed on the 213 00:12:06.279 --> 00:12:11.279 thirty first of January nineteen eighty one, deactivated, mothballed, and 214 00:12:11.320 --> 00:12:14.519 eventually transferred to the state of New York. That's the 215 00:12:14.559 --> 00:12:18.519 official story. Here's where it gets a little strange, because 216 00:12:18.559 --> 00:12:21.600 the antenna up on the bluff, all forty tons of it, 217 00:12:21.759 --> 00:12:24.759 was not removed when the base shut down. The Air 218 00:12:24.759 --> 00:12:27.960 Force decided that taking the dish off its tower, given 219 00:12:28.000 --> 00:12:31.399 its size, was more trouble than it was worth, so 220 00:12:31.440 --> 00:12:35.440 the an slash FPS thirty five was in the official 221 00:12:35.480 --> 00:12:39.879 phrase abandoned in place. The motors and electronics that drove 222 00:12:39.919 --> 00:12:42.840 its rotation were taken out, but the dish itself was 223 00:12:42.919 --> 00:12:45.600 deliberately left free to turn in the wind so that 224 00:12:45.639 --> 00:12:48.759 a storm wouldn't tear it loose from its bearings. For 225 00:12:48.879 --> 00:12:52.000 years afterward, locals walking along the bluff or driving past 226 00:12:52.080 --> 00:12:55.000 on the highway would see it slowly spinning up there, 227 00:12:55.440 --> 00:12:59.600 slowly groaning, slowly creaking, even though the base was supposed 228 00:12:59.639 --> 00:13:03.519 to be dish. The official explanation was the wind. The 229 00:13:03.600 --> 00:13:06.039 legend that grew up around it had a different explanation. 230 00:13:06.960 --> 00:13:10.080 The Air Force's answer, when anybody pressed was that the 231 00:13:10.120 --> 00:13:11.879 antenna was simply turning. 232 00:13:11.559 --> 00:13:13.080 With the breeze. 233 00:13:13.120 --> 00:13:15.879 The radar finally rusted to a stop sometime in the 234 00:13:15.960 --> 00:13:19.480 years that followed, and today it sits frozen on its tower, 235 00:13:19.840 --> 00:13:22.960 too corroded to move, although locals will tell you that 236 00:13:23.080 --> 00:13:26.279 on certain nights when the wind dropped, you could still 237 00:13:26.320 --> 00:13:29.759 hear something humming in the trees out there. There were 238 00:13:29.799 --> 00:13:33.159 Freedom of Information Act requests filed in the years that followed. 239 00:13:33.879 --> 00:13:36.720 Most of them came back with redactions. Some of them 240 00:13:36.759 --> 00:13:39.919 came back with non responses, which is its own kind 241 00:13:39.960 --> 00:13:43.360 of answer. Researchers who tried to dig deeper than the 242 00:13:43.360 --> 00:13:46.159 official record found that the paper trail for the latter 243 00:13:46.279 --> 00:13:49.960 years of Camp Hero's life, the years between roughly nineteen 244 00:13:50.039 --> 00:13:54.960 seventy and the supposed shutdown was unusually thin. There were 245 00:13:55.039 --> 00:13:58.639 budget line items that didn't fully account for. There were 246 00:13:58.679 --> 00:14:03.279 personnel rosters that read strangely. None of that, taken a loan, 247 00:14:03.440 --> 00:14:07.039 proves anything, but together it adds up to a picture 248 00:14:07.080 --> 00:14:10.720 that is just slightly off, a picture that doesn't quite 249 00:14:10.759 --> 00:14:13.960 line up with a quiet little radar station winding down 250 00:14:14.000 --> 00:14:17.440 toward retirement. Now, people will tell you a lot of 251 00:14:17.480 --> 00:14:21.080 things in places like Montalk coastal towns where the winters 252 00:14:21.120 --> 00:14:23.679 are long and the bars are warm, and the stories 253 00:14:23.720 --> 00:14:26.639 build up in the corners like sand. So you have 254 00:14:26.720 --> 00:14:28.799 to be careful what you do with stories like that. 255 00:14:29.440 --> 00:14:33.279 But that ambiguity, that strange gap between the official record 256 00:14:33.519 --> 00:14:35.879 and the lived experience of the people who live next 257 00:14:35.879 --> 00:14:38.919 to that base, is the soil that grew the Montauk 258 00:14:39.039 --> 00:14:43.519 Project legend. Right there in that gap. If you grew 259 00:14:43.600 --> 00:14:46.440 up in eastern Long Island in the nineteen seventies and eighties, 260 00:14:46.919 --> 00:14:49.840 you knew somebody who had a story. A cousin who 261 00:14:49.879 --> 00:14:52.200 said his friend had wandered up there as a teenager 262 00:14:52.399 --> 00:14:55.159 and gotten chased off by men in plain clothes carrying 263 00:14:55.200 --> 00:14:58.720 weapons they had no business carrying. A neighbor who said 264 00:14:58.759 --> 00:15:00.759 the lights in his house would go strange when the 265 00:15:00.879 --> 00:15:03.720 radar turned a guy at the bar who said his 266 00:15:03.840 --> 00:15:06.960 uncle had worked there in the sixties briefly and would 267 00:15:06.960 --> 00:15:09.879 never talk about what he saw. Almost none of that 268 00:15:10.000 --> 00:15:13.039 on its own means anything. Most of it is the 269 00:15:13.159 --> 00:15:16.200 ordinary fog of small town gossip about a place nobody 270 00:15:16.240 --> 00:15:16.879 could get into. 271 00:15:17.679 --> 00:15:18.720 But there's a lot

of it. 272 00:15:19.279 --> 00:15:22.679 And then in nineteen ninety two, a man named Preston 273 00:15:22.759 --> 00:15:26.000 Nichols published a book Stay tuned for more disturbing history. 274 00:15:26.519 --> 00:15:32.759 We'll be back after these messages. Before we get to 275 00:15:32.799 --> 00:15:36.240 Preston Nichols, though, we need to back up, because the 276 00:15:36.320 --> 00:15:40.279 Montalk Project, as Nichols would tell it, didn't begin at Montalk. 277 00:15:41.039 --> 00:15:44.759 It began nearly forty years earlier in a Philadelphia shipyard 278 00:15:45.039 --> 00:15:47.159 on a humid October day in the middle of the 279 00:15:47.159 --> 00:15:52.000 Second World War, with a destroyer escort called the USS Eldridge. 280 00:15:52.440 --> 00:15:55.360 If you know anything about the Philadelphia experiment, you might 281 00:15:55.399 --> 00:15:58.919 already see where this is going. If you don't settle in, 282 00:15:59.320 --> 00:16:01.320 because this is where one of the strangest legends in 283 00:16:01.360 --> 00:16:05.159 twentieth century American folklore. And to understand what people claim 284 00:16:05.200 --> 00:16:08.279 happened at Montauk, you have to understand what people claim 285 00:16:08.320 --> 00:16:12.360 happened in Philadelphia. First, the official version, the one the 286 00:16:12.519 --> 00:16:15.720 United States Navy will tell you to this day, is simple, 287 00:16:16.240 --> 00:16:19.240 it didn't happen. The other version, the one that has 288 00:16:19.279 --> 00:16:21.600 spread for the better part of a century through paperback 289 00:16:21.639 --> 00:16:25.000 books and late night radio shows and now the deepest 290 00:16:25.039 --> 00:16:29.320 reaches of the Internet, go something like this. In October 291 00:16:29.360 --> 00:16:31.600 of nineteen forty three, the Navy was working on a 292 00:16:31.600 --> 00:16:35.440 way to make ships invisible to enemy radar. Not invisible 293 00:16:35.480 --> 00:16:40.200 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 296 00:16:48.399 --> 00:16:52.480 magnetic signature so that German magnetic minds wouldn't sense them. 297 00:16:52.799 --> 00:16:56.840 That part is documented. That part is real. Degaussing was 298 00:16:56.879 --> 00:16:59.600 a real practice. You can read about it in any 299 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 302 00:17:10.359 --> 00:17:13.519 a system designed to bend not just radar waves but 303 00:17:13.680 --> 00:17:17.599 light itself. They threw the switch and the Eldridge, with 304 00:17:17.680 --> 00:17:21.839 its full crew aboard, became literally invisible, not just a 305 00:17:21.920 --> 00:17:25.480 radar to the naked eye. There was a green fog 306 00:17:25.519 --> 00:17:29.160 where the ship had been, and then the ship was gone. 307 00:17:29.240 --> 00:17:33.240 According to the story, it didn't just go invisible, it teleported. 308 00:17:33.880 --> 00:17:37.920 It vanished from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and reappeared hundreds 309 00:17:37.960 --> 00:17:42.559 of miles away at the Norfolk, Virginia Naval Anchorage. Witnesses 310 00:17:42.599 --> 00:17:46.359 on a nearby merchant ship, the SS Andrew Furisth, are 311 00:17:46.400 --> 00:17:49.359 said to have seen it materialize out of nothing, sit 312 00:17:49.440 --> 00:17:52.480 there for a few minutes, and then vanish again before 313 00:17:52.519 --> 00:17:56.359 reappearing back in Philadelphia. When the crew came off the ship, 314 00:17:56.440 --> 00:17:59.319 the legend says, they were not the same men who 315 00:17:59.319 --> 00:18:03.880 had walked aboard. Some were missing, some had gone insane. Some, 316 00:18:04.359 --> 00:18:07.000 the most famous detail of the legend, were said to 317 00:18:07.039 --> 00:18:09.599 have been physically fused with the steel of the hull, 318 00:18:10.400 --> 00:18:13.880 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 322 00:18:23.440 --> 00:18:27.200 steel forever. That's the legend. I want to be very 323 00:18:27.319 --> 00:18:31.119 very clear. There is no credible documentary evidence that any 324 00:18:31.119 --> 00:18:35.400 of this happened. The USS Eldridge's log books have been examined. 325 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 328 00:18:44.880 --> 00:18:48.480 Bermuda on its first shakedown cruise, returned to New York 329 00:18:48.519 --> 00:18:51.559 in mid October, and never stopped in Philadelphia at all 330 00:18:51.640 --> 00:18:54.680 between her commissioning in August nineteen forty three and the 331 00:18:54.799 --> 00:18:58.039 end of that year. The men who served on the Eldridge, 332 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. 336 00:19:09.680 --> 00:19:12.680 Reunion in March of nineteen ninety nine in Atlantic City, 337 00:19:13.119 --> 00:19:16.079

fifteen of them in attendance, and gave a public statement 338 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 342 00:19:31.640 --> 00:19:33.839 a UFO researcher named Morris K. 343 00:19:34.079 --> 00:19:34.519 Jessup. 344 00:19:35.400 --> 00:19:37.920 Jessup had recently published a book called The Case for 345 00:19:38.000 --> 00:19:41.920 the UFO. Alindi's letters told a wild story about a 346 00:19:42.000 --> 00:19:44.680 navy experiment he claimed to have witnessed from the deck 347 00:19:44.680 --> 00:19:48.240 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, 349 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, 351 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, 366 00:20:57.039 --> 00:21:02.160 is real. It exists of it myself. You can find 367 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 369 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 372 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 374 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 383 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