Montauk Project
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 9
| Date | January 1971 |
|---|---|
| Topics | Crashes & retrievals (topic), Beings & bodies (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic) |
| People | Preston Nichols, Peter Moon |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 73 |
| Year | 1971 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 1971 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 6 |
The Montauk Project is a conspiracy theory claiming that the U.S. government ran secret experiments in mind control, time travel and contact with aliens at Camp Hero, a former military base at Montauk on the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. The story comes almost entirely from engineer Preston Nichols and writer Peter Moon, and is regarded as fiction.[1][2]
Origins
According to UFO researcher Jacques Vallée, stories about Montauk circulated from the early 1980s and seem to have originated with Nichols and Al Bielek, who both claimed to have recovered repressed memories of their involvement. Nichols, born on Long Island in 1946, described the project with Moon — the pen name of Vincent Barbarick — in a series of books beginning with The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time (1992). Nichols said he had worked on the experiments from the early 1970s and had periodically been abducted to continue against his will.[1][3]
The claims
The books describe a program growing out of the legendary 1943 "Philadelphia Experiment", using the base's huge radar to develop psychological warfare techniques and pursue time travel, teleportation, mind control and alien contact; later versions added claims that the Moon landings were staged. Nichols and Moon themselves described much of the material as "soft facts".[1]
Camp Hero
Camp Hero was real: it served as a coastal defence post during the Second World War and later as an Air Force radar station until 1981, and its giant radar tower still stands in what is now a state park.[4]
Assessment
There are no documents or credible witnesses supporting the claims, which have been described as pseudoscience and fiction, and the government denies them. Book databases classify Nichols's work as speculative fiction.[1][2]
Influence
The legend became widely known through television documentaries, including a 2003 Discovery Channel episode and the 2015 film Montauk Chronicles. It inspired the Netflix series Stranger Things, whose working title was Montauk.[1][3]
People and topics
- Preston Nichols — Engineer who claimed in The Montauk Project that he worked on secret experiments at Camp Hero.
- Camp Hero — A former military base at Montauk, New York, linked to the Montauk Project legend.
- Peter Moon — Co-author of The Montauk Project books.
- Allende letters and the Philadelphia Experiment — Allende letters and the Philadelphia Experiment
- U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
On the Timeline
- Project Skylite (5 April 1970) — McDonnell Douglas papers describe Project Skylite, a failed effort to copy UAP behavior.
- Montauk chair (January 1971) — Nichols also claims Montauk mind experiments produced a chair that turned thoughts into reality.
See every 1971 event on the UAP Timeline →
References
- Montauk Project — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Montauk Project — RationalWiki · rationalwiki.org · archived copy
- "East End myths: was the Montauk Project real?", Dan's Papers (Oct 2024) · danspapers.com · archived copy
- Camp Hero State Park — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- What some people think happened at Montauk Air Force Station — Grunge · grunge.com · archived copy
- abovetopsecret.com · abovetopsecret.com · archived copy
Further reading
- Montauk Project — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Camp Hero — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Mutual UFO Network — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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