Montauk Phoenix and Rainbow claims
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 8
| Date | 1983 |
|---|---|
| Topics | Remote viewing & psi (topic), Bases & Area 51 (topic) |
| People | Preston Nichols, Peter Moon |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 96 |
| Year | 1983 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 1983 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 8 |
The Montauk Project is a conspiracy theory claiming that secret U.S. government experiments at Camp Hero, a former military base at Montauk Point on Long Island, New York, used powerful radio and microwave transmitters for mind control and even time travel under a program called "Phoenix", said to descend from the wartime "Rainbow" project — another name for the legendary 1943 Philadelphia Experiment.[1][2]
Origins
Stories about secret experiments at Montauk circulated from the early 1980s. They were popularised by Preston Nichols and Peter Moon (the pen name of Vincent Barbarick) in The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time (1992) and its sequels, which sold widely. Nichols and Al Bielek claimed to have recovered repressed memories of their own involvement; Jacques Vallée traced the stories to their accounts. The books extended the Philadelphia Experiment legend — the claim that the destroyer USS Eldridge was made invisible or teleported — into tales of mind control, contact with extraterrestrials and travel through time.[1][2]
Camp Hero
The Army built Camp Hero in 1942 as a coastal defence post disguised as a fishing village, with heavy gun batteries and underground magazines. It later became Montauk Air Force Station, whose large radar tower still stands. The base closed, and after a failed 1984 attempt to sell it to developers most of it passed to New York State; Camp Hero State Park opened on 18 September 2002.[2][3]
Assessment
The authors themselves described much of their material as "soft facts", and the work has been characterised as fiction. There are no documents to support the Phoenix experiments. Local journalist Dan Rattiner, who edited a Hamptons newspaper at the time, has said that at least one incident described in the book did not happen. The legend nevertheless inspired films and was the working title of the television series Stranger Things.[1][2][3]
Contrast with documented programs
The testimony contrasts these claims with the documented U.S. remote-viewing programs, known by names such as Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak and Stargate, which were run by the military and the CIA with SRI International as a contractor in the 1970s and 1980s and are recorded in declassified files.[4]
People and topics
- Montauk Project — Montauk Project
- Preston Nichols — Engineer who claimed in The Montauk Project that he worked on secret experiments at Camp Hero.
- Peter Moon — Co-author of The Montauk Project books.
- Camp Hero — A former military base at Montauk, New York, linked to the Montauk Project legend.
- 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.
- Remote viewing — The claimed ability to describe distant places by mental means.
- Stargate Project — The U.S. government's remote-viewing program, which ran from the 1970s until 1995.
- Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.
- SRI International — The research institute where the government's remote-viewing studies began.
On the Timeline
- Hutchison Effect (1983) — An Army intelligence group studies the 'Hutchison Effect', claimed to produce antigravity.
- Sarbacher letter (1983) (29 November 1983) — Physicist Robert Sarbacher writes that he heard of recovered UAP materials while consulting for the Pentagon.
See every 1983 event on the UAP Timeline →
References
- Montauk Project — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Dan Rattiner, "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
- Stargate Project — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Montauk Project — RationalWiki · rationalwiki.org · archived copy
- What some people think happened at Montauk Air Force Station — Grunge · grunge.com · archived copy
- urigeller.com · urigeller.com · archived copy
- cia.gov · cia.gov · archived copy
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
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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