Navy officer on the Montauk claims
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 10
Navy officer on the Montauk claims
| Date | 4 August 2008 |
|---|---|
| Source | Anonymous post on the Above Top Secret forum |
| Claimed informant | Unnamed "senior Naval officer", a family friend of the poster |
| Claim | Most Montauk stories are a "mountain of BS"; the site's real purpose was drug-based tests of subjects' psychic abilities |
| Site | Camp Hero / Montauk Air Force Station, Long Island, New York |
| Status | Unverifiable |
| Topics | Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Government programs (topic), Bases & Area 51 (topic) |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 167 |
| Year | 2008 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 2008 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 8 |
The Navy officer on the Montauk claims is a second-hand story posted anonymously on the Above Top Secret forum on 4 August 2008. The poster said a family friend who was a senior naval officer when the poster was growing up had told them there was a "mountain of BS" about the Montauk Project and Camp Hero. According to the officer, the facility's main purpose was using drugs to test subjects' psychic ("psi") abilities, in rooms designed to trigger bad LSD trips, on the theory that trauma could strengthen psi.[4][7] Neither the poster nor the officer is named, and no evidence supports the account.
The post
- The anonymous UAP timeline in the journalist Michael Shellenberger's November 2024 written testimony to the House Oversight Committee summarises the forum post. In that summary, the officer dismissed much of what had been written about Montauk and Camp Hero but said the facility's "primary aspect" was the use of drugs to test psi capabilities.[7]
- He said some rooms were built to bring on bad trips in subjects given LSD, because of a belief that trauma could improve psychic ability.[7]
- The earlier version of this article said the officer described Camp Hero as having been used for "genuine classified work". As summarised in the timeline, the claim is more specific: LSD-based psi experiments.[7]
- The Above Top Secret thread returned a server error (HTTP 522) when checked for this article, so the post itself could not be read.[4]
The MKUltra comparison
- The timeline sets the post beside Operation Midnight Climax, a real, declassified CIA programme in which unknowing citizens were given LSD.[5][7]
- Midnight Climax was a sub-project of MKUltra, the CIA's mind-control research programme. The chemist Sidney Gottlieb set it up in 1954 and based it on interrogation research from Project Artichoke. It was run by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent George Hunter White.[5]
- It operated CIA safe houses in San Francisco, Mill Valley and New York City. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll lured clients there, where they were secretly given LSD and other drugs and watched through one-way glass. The safe houses were scaled back after a 1963 Inspector General report and closed in 1965–66.[5]
- None of the documented Midnight Climax sites was at Montauk, and nothing in its record mentions psychic testing at Camp Hero.[5]
Camp Hero's documented history
- The Army established Fort Hero near the Montauk Lighthouse in 1942, upgraded it, and renamed it Camp Hero. Disguised as a New England fishing village, it housed four 16-inch naval guns in concrete bunkers to guard against German U-boats and a possible invasion. The gun emplacements were dismantled in 1949.[8][1]
- From 1948 the Air Force operated radar there. In 1953 it became Montauk Air Force Station, and in 1958 it joined the SAGE air-defence network as part of NORAD, under tight security.[8]
- The Army closed its part of the reservation in November 1957.[8] The local journalist Dan Rattiner, who explored the abandoned site as a teenager, dates the closure to 1959 and recalls the military leaving everything behind a chain-link fence.[1]
- In December 1960 the station's huge AN/FPS-35 radar came into service. Its 126 ft antenna weighed 40 tons and could detect aircraft more than 200 miles away. It was powerful enough to disrupt local television and radio, and was temporarily taken out of service in 1961.[8]
- The station closed on 31 January 1981. Because the antenna was so hard to remove, it was abandoned in place. It survives as the only one of its kind, partly because boaters valued it as a landmark.[8] The site is now Camp Hero State Park, about 415 acres.[1]
The Montauk Project legend
- Rumours of mind-control and teleportation experiments at the base began circulating in the early 1980s.[3] They were popularised by Preston Nichols and Peter Moon's book The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time. That book tied the base to the "Philadelphia Experiment", in which the destroyer USS Eldridge was supposedly teleported, and described secret experiments, including some using local people lured into the tunnels.[1]
- Rattiner dates the book to 1992 and says about 100,000 copies were sold. The entertainment site Grunge gives 1982 and names only Nichols as author.[1][3] The 1992 date fits Rattiner's first-hand account of reviewing the book as a newspaper editor.
- Nichols said his claims came from recovered memories. He described a "Montauk chair" that used electromagnetics to boost psychic powers, and thousands of abducted "Montauk Boys" whose minds were controlled with powerful frequencies. Others later said they had recovered similar memories under hypnosis. Most of Nichols's book has been debunked to some degree. He died in October 2018 still insisting it was true.[3]
- Rattiner, who was editing his paper when the book came out, wrote that one of its claims was false: that all the animals in the woods had come into town one day and had to be rounded up. In the follow-up book, The Montauk Project Revisited, he was described as part of the government cover-up.[1]
Other links in the timeline
- The timeline also links to a YouTube video titled "GRID Camp Hero Montauk project 'Age of Confusion'", posted by the channel GridTubeLIHC. Only its title and channel were checked for this article.[6]
- The RationalWiki article on the Montauk Project, cited in the earlier version, returned a server error (HTTP 503) when checked.[2]
Assessment
- The account is third-hand at best: an anonymous forum user recalling what an unnamed family friend said years earlier. It cannot be checked.[7]
- Its dismissal of most Montauk stories fits the documented history of the site as a coastal-artillery post and later an air-defence radar station.[8] Its alternative claim of LSD-based psi testing at Camp Hero has no documentary support. The real CIA drug experiments it resembles took place elsewhere.[5]
People and topics
- U.S. Navy — The U.S. naval service, whose pilots reported the UAP encounters revealed in 2017.
- Montauk Project — Montauk Project
- Camp Hero — A former military base at Montauk, New York, linked to the Montauk Project legend.
- U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
On the Timeline
- Bill Richardson and the Roswell records (28 June 2008) — Bill Richardson says Los Alamos and the Pentagon refused his questions about Roswell.
- JASON report on high-frequency gravitational waves (October 2008) — The JASON science advisers evaluate high-frequency gravitational waves for national security.
See every 2008 event on the UAP Timeline →
Further reading
- Montauk Project — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Camp Hero — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- UFO documents — CIA Reading Room · cia.gov · archived copy
References
- East End myths: was the Montauk Project real? — Dan's Papers · danspapers.com · archived copy
- Montauk Project — RationalWiki · rationalwiki.org · archived copy
- What some people think happened at Montauk Air Force Station — Grunge · grunge.com · archived copy
- abovetopsecret.com · abovetopsecret.com · archived copy
- en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- youtube.com · youtube.com · archived copy
- Michael Shellenberger, written testimony to the House Oversight Committee (13 November 2024), p. 167 · oversight.house.gov
- Montauk Air Force Station — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “en.wikipedia.org”, “Montauk Air Force Station”, “Montauk Air Force Station”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
Categories: 2008 | Bases area 51 | Camp hero | Government programs | Montauk project | Secrecy cover-up | Timeline event | Us air force | Us navy
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.
No discussion yet.