Were strange things conducted in Montauk underground lab?

Ever since the summer of 2016 when Stranger Things debuted on Netflix I’ve wanted to investigate the mystery of the “Montauk Project” carried out on the site of a decommissioned United States air force base on the south shore of New York’s Long Island, located at Montauk Point on the eastern tip.

A fair bit of controversy surrounded the TV series created by the Duffer Brothers, with film-maker Charlie Kessler filing a lawsuit against them claiming the series was based on his short movie Montauk that had debuted at the 2012 Hamptons International Film Festival.

Kessler claimed to have pitched the idea to the Duffer brothers at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2014 and later gave them "the script, ideas, story and film" to develop into a larger undertaking he’d labelled The Montauk Project, which he claimed they adapted for Stranger Things.

Shortly before the lawsuit was due to go to trial in 2019, Kessler withdrew it after hearing the depositions and seeing documents allegedly indicating the brothers had independently come up with the concept of Stranger Things as early as 2010.

But the series itself and the legal wrangling piqued my interest so I began to read up on the Montauk Project, which is said to have been carried out at the Camp Hero facility from 1970 until 1983, after which it was turned over to the National Park Service to be redeveloped as Camp Hero State Park.

For those who haven’t seen Stranger Things the premise is that during the 1980s mysterious occurrences start happening at a rural town close to a Department of Energy facility that carries out covert studies into the paranormal and supernatural, undertaking experiments on children which open a portal to an alternate dimension that begins to adversely affect the town’s residents in unusual ways.

Solid science-fiction material there but could the truth about the Camp Hero project be just as strange as the fiction? Well, in 2014 film-maker Christopher Garetano, who grew up on Long Island, released his Montauk Chronicles documentary that detailed the allegations of three subjects who claim they were brainwashed and forced to take part in experiments at Camp Hero.

A New York Post article, updated in October 2020, by Dana Kennedy claims Garetano was far from convinced by the testimony of Preston Nichols, Al Bielek and Stewart Swerdlow at first but during his investigation of the site a geophysical analysis of the ground beneath Camp Hero discovered evidence of large structures not present on any official maps.

“I think there was some type of experimentation out there using kids or teenagers, maybe runaways from New York,” Garetano told the New York Post.

In a separate interview, with Coast To Coast AM, he said thousands of runaway and orphaned children may have been abducted and used as guinea pigs in mind-control experiments at the site, where they were put through a series of traumatic events to “fracture their minds”.

The New York Post article also quotes Camp Hero State Park worker Joe Loffreno, who claims he was abducted as a boy and taken through an old gunnery tunnel to an underground lab where experiments were carried out on him.

Under hypnosis with a certified therapist, Loffreno claims memories of the experimentation flooded back to him: “They did a very bad thing to us out there. We were just little kids. They had no right to experiment on us. It was a very dark, very evil thing.”

Loffreno believes he was experimented on during the summer of 1980 and possibly 1981, when he was 12 or 13. Under hypnosis he recalled biking to the base with a local boy he didn’t know very well, where they were met by two men dressed in civilian clothes who ushered them into a sunken facility.

Loffreno recalled that after he was taken underground through Battery 113, one of the gunneries left over from World War II, he remembered lying on a table with electrodes attached to him. “They analysed us like animals,” he said, adding there could have been as many as 50 other children being experimented on at Camp Hero at the time, many of whom may not have survived the ordeal.

One of the remaining tell-tale remnants of the work carried out at Camp Hero is the giant Cold War-era SAGE radar tower, once the “mother” of a series of smaller manned towers located in the ocean along the east coast of the US. The towers were supposed to provide an extra 30-minute warning time in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack, with the antennae at Camp Hero emitting a frequency in the 425-450 megahertz range… allegedly a signal that could enable it to tap into human consciousness.

Even locals, sceptical about the claims of experimentation at the base, said the signals interfered with television sets and other electronic devices, many people reporting headaches and other intrusive episodes.

“Every 12 seconds the radar tower would rotate and there would be animals freaking out and people getting headaches and bad dreams,” Garetano claimed. “And you know people’s electronic equipment would go haywire.”

But there have been other weird reports associated with Montauk too… more recently in July 2008 a carcass of a beaked, hairless creature washed up on Ditch Plains Beach four miles west of Camp Hero, where it was discovered by three friends. Local newspapers speculated it could have washed up from Plum Island, the US government’s secret Animal Disease Centre some 20 kilometres to the north of Montauk.

Not a common sight you’d have to admit, but “experts” dismissed the Montauk Monster (as it came to be known) as nothing more than a badly decomposed raccoon. With a beak?

Today the remaining military buildings scattered around the Camp Hero site are in pretty bad shape and closed off by “danger” signs. Presumably they are now empty, but the presence of manhole covers, grates and video surveillance suggests they might just be the tip of the iceberg, with a far bigger complex hidden beneath the ground.

And despite exploring the park hundreds of times, Garetano has never been granted permission to go below the surface. “The official word is that there is nothing underground,” he said. “But I really think there’s something to hide there.”

Before Camp Hero became a national park author Brian Minnick, who has been visiting the site since 1988, and his friends regularly explored the radar tower, uncovering documents and sealed entrances suggesting the base operated for much longer than is officially acknowledged.

In his book Montauk Is Strange, Minnick shares eyewitness testimony from Long Island locals and throws light on his discoveries there, including records of large quantities of food being delivered to the base in the late 1980s, long after the military had supposedly left. He also took photos of rooms with brightly-painted walls and psychedelic wallpaper adding weight to claims children imprisoned there had been exposed to mind-altering drugs.

There are even claims many of those experimented on at Camp Hero were programmed into becoming super soldiers – dubbed “the Montauk boys” – after being subjected to the powerful frequencies that opened up their consciousness to allow their minds to be manipulated.

The testimony of Nichols, Bielek and Swerdlow is widely available online but there are many more whistleblowers who have come forward, although Swerdlow remains one of the most outspoken on the subject claiming that from the age of 13 he was involved in experiments into time travel and interdimensional portals at Montauk.

Swerdlow’s revelations are quite bizarre and feature fascinating tales about the Montauk experiments into mind control and time travel, featuring interdimensional beings, a reptilian extraterrestrial agenda, the Fourth Reich, super soldiers, the secret space programme and ground-breaking electromagnetic devices.

In an April 2022 Exopolitics Today podcast with Australian political scientist Michael Salla, Swerdlow explains his understanding of why the facility on Long Island was closed down but adds that he believes similar research still continues at other sites around the globe, with the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland, one of the pre-eminent centres for interdimensional research where a “gateway to alternate realities” can allegedly be found.

Strangely, perhaps the most telling factor that something at the site is amiss are the signs warning visitors of the possible danger of unexploded ordnance left abandoned in the centre of a state park open to the public. Surely, if this was really a hazard, the site would never have been designated as a state park, sparking suspicion the signs are simply there to scare visitors away from the manhole covers and grates that are believed to grant access to the secret underground complex.

On the surface it seems very likely that something sinister has been buried beneath the ground at Camp Hero but it’s a secret that’s unlikely to ever be revealed. Today probably the greatest danger to visitors to the site are ticks, warnings about the tiny, blood-sucking arachnids as common as the “no trespassing” signs that dot the state park.

But hey, that’s another story entirely. Remember Plum Island? Strangely the Lyme disease that tick bites can transmit to humans is allegedly the result of secret research carried out at the labs there in the 1960s, when the Animal Disease Centre was at the forefront of US biological-weapons testing.

The idea was to create pathogens that could be deployed stealthily and in 1975 the nearby town of Old Lyme, Connecticut – less than a 20km tick trip from Plum Island – became the epicentre of the first known outbreak of a strange illness that saw children reporting unusual skin rashes, chronic fatigue and swollen joints which led to the condition being named Lyme disease in 1981, since when there’s been feverish speculation the sickness that now afflicts more than 30,000 Americans annually had been engineered at the Animal Disease Centre.