The Montauk Project: The True Story Behind Stranger Things

After three long years, the kids from Hawkins are back — a little older, a little traumatised, and probably still in desperate need of therapy. We are almost through Stranger Things season five with the gang’s last big fight against Vecna ( Jamie Campbell Bower ) and whatever else has crawled out of the gates to hell that Eleven ( Millie Bobby Brown ) accidentally cracked open back in 2016.
But beyond the bikes, Eggo waffles and Kate Bush , fans have always wondered: is Stranger Things actually based on a true story?

Or at least… a government story that got a little too close to the truth?
Turns out, it kind of is. And it starts with one of the strangest conspiracy theories to ever come out of Cold War America.
According to believers, the Montauk Project was a top-secret government experiment happening under Camp Hero between the late 1970s and early 1980s. The story exploded after Preston Nichols ‘ 1992 book The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time , where he claimed to have worked on time travel and mind-control testing with kidnapped kids.

Another supposed participant, Al Bielek , even insisted that his psychic brother accidentally manifested a monster during one experiment — one that rampaged through the facility until everything was destroyed.
So yes, a big scary creature from a kid’s subconscious tearing through a lab? The Demogorgon practically writes itself.

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