![]() Check out the complete Skeptoid episode on the Philadelphia Experiment, episode #16, for the basics. Now, I don't want to take too big of a detour here, but Nichols' Montauk Project used the existing mythology of the Philadelphia Experiment for its backstory, so it's important to have a general understanding of it. These people that he met were Al Bielek and Duncan Cameron, two guys who - ever since the Philadelphia Experiment became another such pop-culture urban legend - claimed to have been aboard the ship used in the Philadelphia Experiment when it disappeared and traveled through time and space. Nichols tells how, while working as an engineer at an unnamed company on Long Island, he happened to meet people who triggered him to recover repressed memories of having had a whole alternate career working inside the underground base buried deep underneath Camp Hero, personally conducting the experiments. It was this book that tied together the entire story and made it into a pop-culture thing. Its title was The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, and it is the very genesis of The Montauk Project conspiracy theory and the MPU. Nevertheless, in 1992 - the middle of the 20-year period in which the facility sat completely dormant - a book was published by a man named Preston Nichols (who died in 2018), with contributions by Peter Moon. Today it remains somewhat unusual among former military facilities cloaked in conspiracy theories, in that you're free to visit and examine everything in detail for yourself. Hiking trails provide access to almost the entire area, and for a long time they've been talking about reopening the antenna building as a museum. The entire installation was vacant and neglected until 2002 when it was opened to the public as Camp Hero State Park, which you can visit today. Its most prominent feature, the huge radar antenna and its building, were simply abandoned instead of being taken down, due to their size. By 1981, the station had been made obsolete by orbital satellite reconnaissance technology and was decommissioned. With the advent of the Cold War, Montauk Air Force Station was established there as an emplacement for large Air Defense Command radar systems to watch for Soviet long-distance bombers. The Army, Navy, and the Coast Guard all had facilities there to defend against German submarines in World War II, and it even had presences during World War I and the American Revolution. For a long time, Camp Hero was a joint military facility occupying the eastern tip of Long Island. Let's start by having a look at where this story was supposed to have taken place. Make no mistake: The MPU is a pop-culture thing. The Travel Channel series Strange World featured Christopher Garetano, who made the 2015 documentary movie Montauk Chronicles, traveling around interviewing people involved in MPU conspiracy theories (I was in one episode and tried to talk Christopher down, but without much success). The Netflix series Stranger Things was originally titled Montauk, and consisted of new fictional stories all based in the MPU. Any number of Internet bloggers, authors, and YouTube filmmakers have cropped up and expanded the MPU with new tales of their own. You know how Marvel has the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)? All the fan fiction here has arguably created a Montauk Project Universe (MPU). Nichols and his co-author both went on to write multiple sequels to the original book, all containing expansions to the Montauk Project universe that obviously would have been in the first book if it had been a literal true account. The Montauk Project is even blessed with a whole universe of what can only be called fan fiction. Today's discussion of The Montauk Project is less an exploration of whether the urban legend is true or not (it's obviously not), and more a look at how and why such stories manage to take root. The story exists only because of the writings of one man, Preston Nichols, the lone author who invented it. The story goes that the military secretly conducted a program involving time travel, inter-dimensional portals, 10-meter-tall alien monsters, and anything else you can imagine, for decades, in a gigantic underground facility on Long Island, New York. We've talked about many of these on Skeptoid, and today's example - the Montauk Project - is a prime one. Every so often there is a conspiracy theory or alternative history invented by a lone person that, although it has zero plausibility or evidence, manages to stick.
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