The Montauk Project is an alleged series of secret United States government projects conducted at Camp Hero or Montauk Air Force Station on Montauk, Long Island, for the purpose of developing psychological warfare techniques and exotic research including time travel. Jacques Vallee describes allegations of the Montauk Project as an outgrowth of stories about the Philadelphia Experiment. The history of the Montauk Project story is closely associated with - and often believed to originate in - the Montauk Project series of books by Preston Nichols.
Stories about the Montauk Project have circulated since the early 1980s. According to UFO researcher Jacques VallŽe, the Montauk Experiment stories seem to have originated with the account of Preston Nichols, who claimed to have recovered repressed memories of his own involvement. American Preston B. Nichols (born May 24, 1946 in Long Island, New York) claims to have degrees in parapsychology, psychology, and electrical engineering. He authored a series of books, known as the Montauk Project series, along with Peter Moon, the primary topic of which is alleged activities at Montauk. These center on topics including United States government/military experiments in fields such as time travel, teleportation, mind control, contact with alien life and staging faked Apollo Moon landings, framed as developments which followed a successful 1943 Philadelphia Experiment. These culminate in "a hole ripped in space-time" in 1983.
The authors have encouraged speculation about the contents (for example, writing "Whether you read this as science fiction or non-fiction you are in for an amazing story" in their first chapter,describing much of the content as "soft facts" in a Guide For Readers and publishing a newsletter with updates to the story).
In 2015, Montauk Chronicles, a film adaptation of the conspiracy featuring Preston Nichols, Al Bielik, and Stewart Swerdlow was released online and on DVD and Blu-ray. The film won the best documentary award at the Philip K. Dick Film Festival in New York City and has been featured on Coast to Coast AM and the Huffington Post. The Netflix web TV series Stranger Things was allegedly inspired by the Montauk Project, and at one time Montauk was used as its working title. The Project is widely regarded by mainstream sources as fictional.
The Legend of the Project
The Montauk Project is believed by small numbers of people to be an extension or continuation of the controversial Philadelphia Experiment, which supposedly took place October 28, 1943.
According to the legend, sometime in the 1950s, surviving researchers from Project Rainbow began to discuss the project with an eye to continuing the research into technical aspects of manipulating the electromagnetic bottle that had been used to make the USS Eldridge invisible, and the reasons and possible military applications of the psychological effects of a magnetic field.
The legend goes on to say that a report was supposedly prepared and presented to Congress, and was soundly rejected as far too dangerous. So a proposal was made directly to the Department of Defense promising a powerful new weapon that could drive an enemy insane, inducing the symptoms of schizophrenia at the touch of a button. Without congressional approval, the project would have to be top secret and secretly funded. The Department of Defense approved. Funding supposedly came from a cache of US$10 billion in Nazi gold recovered from a train found by U.S. soldiers in a train tunnel in France. The train was blown up and all the soldiers involved were killed. When those funds ran out, additional funding was secured from ITT and Krupp AG in Germany.
Work began at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York under the name Phoenix Project, but it was soon realized that the project required a large radar dish, and installing one at Brookhaven would compromise the security of the project. Luckily, the U.S. Air Force had a decommissioned base at Montauk, New York, not far from Brookhaven, which had a complete SAGE radar installation. The site was large and remote (Montauk was not yet a tourist attraction) and water access would allow equipment to be moved in and out undetected.
Equipment was moved to Camp Hero at the Montauk base in the late 1960s, and installed in an underground bunker beneath the base. According to conspiracy theorists, to mask the nature of the project the site was closed in 1969 and donated as a wildlife refuge/park, with the provision that everything underground would remain the property of the Air Force (although, in reality, the base remained in operation until the 1980s). The park has never been opened to the public, under the excuse of environmental contamination.
Various conspiracy theorists claim that experiments began in earnest in the early 1980s. They claim that during this time one, some or all of the following occurred at the site. No evidence has ever been provided that any of the following is true:
The facility was expanded to as many as twelve levels and several hundred workers. Some reports have the facility extending under the town of Montauk itself. Homeless people and orphans were abducted and subjected to huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation to test mind control technology and remote brain programming. Few survived.
People had their psychic abilities enhanced to the point where they could materialize objects out of thin air. Stewart Swerdlow claims to have been involved in the Montauk Project, and as a result, he says, his "psionic" faculties were boosted, but at the cost of emotional instability, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other issues. An alien supposedly designed a chair, which an individual could sit in to boost his mental and precipitory powers. A prototype duplicate was given to England and put in a facility on the Thames River.
Teleportation experiments were conducted.
A "porthole (portal?) in time" was created which allowed researchers to travel anywhere in time or space. This was developed into a stable "Time Tunnel." Underground tunnels with abandoned cultural archives were explored on Mars using this technique.
Contact was made with alien extraterrestrials through the Time Tunnel and technology was exchanged with them which enhanced the project. This allowed broader access to "hyperspace".
Mind control experiments were conducted and runaway and kidnapped boys were abducted and brought out to the base where they underwent excruciating periods of both physical and mental torture in order to break their minds, then their minds were re-programmed. Many were supposedly killed during the process and buried on the site. Others were released with programming as mind-slaves with alternate personalities to be sleeper cells who could be activated to perform missions.
On or about on August 12, 1983 the time travel project at Camp Hero interlocked in hyperspace with the original Rainbow Project back in 1943. The USS Eldridge was drawn into hyperspace and trapped there. Two men, Al Bielek and Duncan Cameron both claim to have leaped from the deck of the Eldridge while it was in hyperspace and ended up after a period of severe disorientation at Camp Hero in the year 1983. Here they claim to have met John von Neumann, a famous physicist and mathematician, even though he was known to have died in 1957. Von Neumann had supposedly worked on the original Philadelphia Experiment, but the U.S. Navy denies this.
Flying saucers were observing the Philadelphia Experiment in 1943 and and got sucked into a time warp and was transported to one of the underground tunnels in Montauk and got stuck there. The aliens demanded a large quartz crystal to help get their ship's engines started to be able to leave. The time machine was used to obtain one from another planet.
Nikola Tesla, whose death was faked in a Conspiracy, was the chief director of operations at the base. Mass psychological experiments, such as the use of enormous subliminal messages projects and the creation of a "Men in Black" corps to confuse and frighten the public, were invented there.
Professional wrestler Rob Van Dam claims to have accidentally stumbled upon the area while driving to an arena. During one hour's time, he went into the time tunnel and claimed to have met Nikola Tesla, who told him that he was "...going to return in 2007 to end it all".
The site was opened to the public on September 18, 2002 as Camp Hero State Park. The radar tower has been placed on the State and National Register of Historic Places. There are plans for a museum and interpretive center; focusing on World War II and Cold War era history. Despite rumors, no traces of secret underground facilities have been found; although on the grounds of Camp Hero there is a hill with concrete sealed doors.
Below is an interview I did with Preston Nichols and Duncan Cameron who were guests on my TV talk show "The Metaphysical Experience" in 1991. This does not imply that I agree with what was told to me. My interests go to time travel technology in Nazi and current timelines. There is something about the Philadelphia Experiment and Montauk Project that draws the same people together over and over - my connection with them having begun in 1989. We have shared memories of experiences during WWII. There is something that links the time travel experiments of WW II with our current timeline, experiences and the destiny of humanity, not to mention reality as a consciousness experiment in linear time. I last spoke with Preston Nichols in 2013. He had moved to upstate New York and was still in enmeshed in his theories. I am not in touch with Duncan Cameron. Duncan's half brother, Al Bialek, who I also interviewed, has since deceased.
The Interview
The Philadelphia experiment originally began back in the 1930's in Chicago with three people. Dr. John Hutchinson Sr., who was the Dean of the University of Chicago, Nicola Tesla, and Dr. Kurtenaur, who was an Austrian physicist who was on staff at the University. They decided to do something with the speculation regarding the concept of things and people being invisible. This subject had been discussed for several year. They got together and did some research at the University of Chicago around 1931 or 1932. In 1933 the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton was formed and the project was transferred there in 1934. One of the people on staff at the Institute was Dr. John Erich Von Neumann, who was from Budapest Hungary. He got his degree in chemistry in 1925 and his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1926. He taught in Europe for about four years and transferred to the United States. He taught at the graduate level for three years and was invited to join the Institute.
Other people at the Institute included Albert Einstein, who left Germany in 1930. He went to the California Institute of Technology for three years and taught there and then went to the Institute upon their invitation and acceptance. A lot of other people showed up there as time went on. The project expanded about 1936. In the meantime, Tesla was named director of the project. He was a friend of president Franklin Roosevelt, whom Tesla met in 1917 when FDR was secretary of the Navy.
Tesla was asked at that time to do some work for the government for the war effort, which he did. He accepted and became director of the invisibility project until he resigned in 1942. In 1936, after intensive study, they decided to have an initial test of their work. They achieved some partial invisibility. The Navy and everyone else was encouraged to continue the work, and the Navy supplied money for research.
Scientists were coming to the United States from Germany until 1939, when the war with Germany was started.
In 1940, after research using Tesla's approach, they decided they were ready for a full test at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They had a small ship and a tender ship at each side. One ship provided the power and the other supplied the drive for the coils. They were tendered to the test ship by cables. The idea was that if anything went wrong they could cut the cables or sink the test ship. Everything worked and the project was declared a success.
The important point about the 1940 test is that there was no one on board the test vehicle. It was strictly a dry run with no people. This is important because of what happened later. Other people came on board. Thomas T. Brown joined the project because of his expertise in electrogravity effects. He had the task of solving the problem of the German magnetic mines that were affecting allied shipping and Naval efforts. This led into a parallel project which involved the use of disguising coils and cables to explode the mines at a distance from the ship.
The Navy wanted several people to keep an eye on the tests. That is how I got involved. Keeping technical commentaries. Let's look at Nicola Tesla.
In 1879 his father died and his first year at college ended. He came to the United States in1884. He had enormously intuitive insight. He had a perfect track record. Before coming to the US he had known Robert Oppenheimer, who later worked with the development of the atomic bomb, and Dr. David Hilbert, the mathematician who devised equations for Hilbert Space, which described multiple space or multiple realities mathematically.
These equations for multiple space became very important in the project. Dr. von Neumann met Hilbert in 1927 and retained a lot of what he had learned. With that, Von Neumann developed other new systems of mathematics. Von Neumann was considered to be one of the most outstanding mathematicians in this century. Some think he was better than Einstein. Another mathematician involved was Dr. John Levinson, who was born in 1912. He died in 1976. He published three books on mathematics. Levinson developed the so-called Levinson Time Equations. with all this behind them, the group had all they needed to proceed with the project.
After the successful 1940 test, the Navy decided to give the project unlimited funds and to classify the project. In 1942 Tesla was given a ship and a crew for a full sized test. Tesla got a battleship. Tesla and Von Neumann didn't agree on some things. Tesla insisted that they were going to have a very severe problem with personnel. Tesla wanted more time but the NAVY wouldn't agree. Tesla made periodic announcements in the late 1930's and early 1940's about his contact with off planet species. He was in contact with the outside, who agreed that there was a problem with the people. He decided to sabotage the 1942 test in an attempt to stop the project. He de-tuned the equipment so nothing would work. The test failed. Tesla then turned the project over to Von Neumann in March 1942 and left the project.
Von Neumann went to the Navy and requested time to study the problem to determine what had gone wrong. Von Neumann decided to make changes in some of the equipment. He decided he would need a special ship that was designed from the ground up. The Eldridge was selected. The equipment was built into the ship. They put all the equipment on the ship. October 1942 arrived. They selected 33 volunteers for the crew, who arrived after graduation in December 1942. We still have a picture of the class.
After the ship was out of drydock work began. In May of 1943 von Neumann installed a third generator. It would never synchronize with the other two. It went out of control one day and zapped one of the men. Von Neumann pulled out the third generator (installed because Tesla had convinced Von Neumann of the potential problem with people) and went back to the original design. In mid June, the ship had sea trials. On July 22, 1943, they had the test. The ship between radar and optically invisible. They discovered people very disoriented. The Navy pulled the crew off and consulted Von Neumann, who requested more time again from the Navy. The Navy, after consultation with higher-ups, announced that the drop dead date was on the 12th of August, 1943. Von Neumann voiced his concern that it wasn't enough time.
The Navy decided that it just wanted radar invisibility and not optical invisibility. The equipment was again modified by Von Neumann. August 12th arrived. We knew things were not right. The test began, and for about a minute everything was all right. The ships outline could be seen in the water. There was suddenly a blue flash and the ship disappeared entirely. No radio communication was possible. It was gone. In about three hours it came back. One of the masts was broken.
Some personnel were partially embedded in the steel deck. Others were fading in and out. Some disappeared entirely. Many were insane. The Navy extracted the crew and proceeded with four days of meetings to decided what to do about the problem. They decided there would be one more test with another dry run without personnel. They conducted the dry run using about 1000 feet of cable attached to another ship. In late October 1943 the test occurred. The ship disappeared for about 20 minutes. When it returned, they found equipment missing. Two transmitter cabinets and one generator was missing. The cabinet with the zero-time reference generator was intact. At that point, the Navy stripped the ship and stopped the project. The Eldridge served in the war and was turned over to Greece at the end of the war.
The important thing is that there were two tests that were exactly 40 years apart to the day. It was a 40 year separation in hyperspace. Now, the Earth itself has a biorhythm that peaks on a 20 year cycle on August 12th. It "just happened" to peak and provided the connecting link through the fields of the Earth for the two experiments to lock up in hyperspace. Walk-in efforts are aided if they occur during this peak.
The ship was pulled into hyperspace. We were inside the ship and knew something was drastically wrong with the test. We tried to shut it off but it wouldn't shut off. We ran out on deck and jumped over the side of the ship. We jumped overboard but ended up in a time tunnel which ended at Montauk, Long Island on August 12th, 1983. At night.
We were found very quickly and taken down stairs, where Von Neumann greeted us. He expected us. It was a bit of a shock. We had just been in 1943 and now we were in 1983 looking at Von Neumann as an old man. He said that there was a hyperspace lockup and that we had to go back and shut off the generators on the ship or the hyperspace rift would keep increasing and possibly engulf the planet. He had been waiting 40 years for us to arrive.
Montauk sent us back and we smashed the equipment with axes. The ship returned to its original point in space and about three hours later in time. From 1943 on, Von Neumann didn't know what happened. He had modified earlier equipment in 1943 to where he had a full blown time machine. The Germans also were working on time travel, and had it working in 1945 just before the end of the war. This is all a matter of record.
After the Navy decided to shut down the project in 1943, Von Neumann was sent to work on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos until that was over. In 1947 there were major changes in the Department of Defense. Someone in the new structure decided to dig up the Philadelphia project to see if they could find out what went wrong. They asked Von Neumann to "take another look" at the project. He agreed.
There is another matter. Starting about August 6th, 1943, UFOs appeared over the Eldridge for about six days. They were there during the test. One of the UFOs was sucked up into hyperspace with the Eldridge and it ended up in an underground facility in Montauk in 1983. It contained a charging device which some aliens made us go back and get for them, as they didn't want humans to have it. We don't know who they were. Pruett was concerned about an alien invasion.
Also, Von Neumann was called by the government to come and assist in the examination of a crashed UFO in 1947 at Aztec. Another crash occurred at Aztec about a year later. The first crash had greys on it and none survived. At least one occupant survived the second crash. The radar systems unintentionally brought down the craft. Radar was used intentionally after that until the aliens got wise to it.
The occupant of the second crash was not a grey, and Von Neumann got to talk with it. Von Neumann asked it what the answer to the invisibility problems could be. He learned that he had to go back and do his homework in metaphysics. The nature of the problem was that the personnel on the ship were not locked to the zero time reference of the ship. Humans are normally locked to the point of conception as a time reference, not a zero-time reference. The time stream lock allows the person to flow in synch with the system so interaction is possible.
Time locks are fragile. All the power of the project disrupted the time-locks of the people on the deck on the ship. When the ship came back in time, the people didn't come back to the same reference. Von Neumann realized that he needed a computer, as well as some knowledge of metaphysics in order to be able to lock the time reference of the people to the time reference of the ship. He built a computer in 1950 for the purpose. It was ready to be installed in 1952 and a test was performed in 1953 that was successful. They didn't go floating off into space when it was over. At this point, the Navy canceled Project Rainbow and changed the name to project Phoenix.
A lot came out of the negative effects of the Rainbow project. Some of it led to mind control research programs in the Phoenix project. The invisibility research produced some Stealth technology as well as other highly classified projects.
In 1983, they decided to apply mind control to all participants in these projects in an effort to cover them up. They had also been working on another project: age regression. Now, Tesla had sought back in the 1940's to develop equipment that could help the members of the crew after they lost time-lock . The government developed it into the age regression program. It was physical age regression. A person retained the memory they had from the older age.
Tesla's theory was that if you took the individual's time-lock and moved it forward in time than you would remove aging. That's what happened. It took between 30 and 60 days for the body to complete the change to the new time reference.
When our astronauts first landed on the moon in 1969 they were greeted by a fleet of disks sitting on the rim of a crater. The astronauts asked their superiors if they knew about these disks. They were told "yes", that they were American disks. The astronauts were angry at being used as public relations men by the government.
Well, the aircraft combines two aspects for invisibility. One of the aspects relates to the construction and coating applied to the surface. The other aspect relates to an electronic type of invisibility package which is a result of work done on the Philadelphia experiment years ago. Also, the stealth has a secondary drive system which is very advanced and allows it to fly in space. The assistant director of NASA admitted that this came straight out of alien technology. He admitted this to the public.
There are breaks in the government secrecy programs that are starting to show up. More and more people are getting totally disgusted with government activities and attitudes and they are beginning to talk.
The Phoenix Project was a project that evolved out of the Philadelphia Project. It was a project that the Navy did in the 1930's and 1940's in an attempt to make ships invisible. They threw the switch one eventful day and the ship went into hyperspace. They had all sorts of problems with the people on the boat. It was a huge success as well as a huge failure - then they shelved it. Around 1947 it was decided to re-activate the project and it was moved to Brookhaven National Laboratories with Dr. John Von Neumann and his associates. Out of Phoenix I came Stealth technology. It also produced all sorts of energetic little toys like the radiosonde.
The radiosonde was a little white box that they attached to a balloon and sent up into the atmosphere. The government told people that it involved gathering weather data. It used a very unusual type of pulse modulation. In most cases they used a CW (continuous wave) oscillator and pulsed the signal. This turned out to be a very efficient conversion of electrical energy to etheric energy. They were designed up at Brookhaven National Labs. I started to talk to people at Brookhaven and ran into a retired gentleman who used to work there. He told me that the design was originally done by Wilhelm Reich.
The story goes that in about 1947 Wilhelm Reich handed the US Government a weather control device, a device that would do DOR-busting. Reich thought that if he could decrease the amount of DOR that storms would not be so violent. (DOR is the result of orgone energy coming into contact with an enclosed radioactive source). Deadly Orgone Energy is DOR. The government sent the device up into a storm and it did reduce the intensity of the storm. They worked.
The Montauk Project was a combination of Wilhelm Reich's work and the Philadelphia Experiment. There were two separate projects going on in Phoenix One. You had the invisibility aspect and you had the development of Wilhelm Reich's weather control. Toward the end of the Phoenix project, by using some of Wilhelm Reich's concepts and some of the transmission schemes used from the "radiosonde" project, they found that you could combine the two -factors and use them for 'Mind Control'.
The people who were running it went to the military and proposed that they could use it to "influence the minds of the enemy". The military loved the idea, and let them use the old Montauk Air Force Base. Among the equipment requested was an old SAGE radar unit, which was on the base. The base was shut down and everything was auctioned off. The group then moved in from the Brookhaven Labs. That began what we call Phoenix Two. They spent the first ten years from about 1969 to about 1979, researching pure mind control.
The first part of the mind control project was to take an individual and stand them about 250 feet away from the antenna. The SAGE radar had a peak pulse power of .5 MW. The antenna had a gain of 30db. That means an effective radiated power of at least a gigawatt. It was nominally a gigawatt. Can you imagine what that would do to people? I think its amazing these people are still here. It does things like burn out brain functions, create neurological damage, scar lungs from heat, etc. They tried this with a number of people and there were few survivors. The subjects were often indigent people they grabbed off the streets.
The project was controlled by Dr. John Von Neumann and Jack Pruett. About 30 people worked there. It was a joint project...Air Force & Navy. Original funding came from the Nazi government funds. In 1944 there was an American troop train that went through a French railroad tunnel carrying $10 billion in Nazi gold which they had found.
It was $10 billion at the 1944 price of $20 per ounce. The train was blown up in the tunnel. It killed 51 American soldiers. The gold turned up ten years later at Montauk. This has been verified. That money was used to finance the project for many years as the value of gold went up.
They spent all of it and ran out of money. That's when they tapped on ITT, who funded it. ITT was owned by Krupp in Germany. In terms of personnel, many of the civilians and scientists there were all ex-Nazi's who came from Germany both before and after the war ended.
The project was under US Government surveillance. The intelligence community knew what was going on and the CIA monitored everything, as did other government intelligence agencies. The field of players who actually operated on the base was small, between 30 and 50.
The funding was entirely private. After 1983, Senator Goldwater found out about it and started an investigation. He couldn't find any trace of government funding. Pruett was the metaphysical director of the project. He was Air Force. After he left Dr. Herman C. Untermann took over. They had an electronics expert, Dr. Mathew E. Zerrett, who came over from Germany in 1946 with Werner von Braun. Probably the reason that they ran out of money is that they had a total of 25 bases around the United States to support. The last of the bases shut down August 12, 1983. The base at Montauk, where all the stations got their zero-time reference from, shut down and the other two remaining bases went down with it.
Other experiments included time travel. No one has picked up a tangible future beyond 2012 AD. There is a very abrupt wall there with nothing on the other side. A working time vortex was created to the future.
At one point a creature came through and everyone went into a panic. They shut the transmitter off. The creature ate people and equipment. They had to go back and shut down the unit in Philadelphia in order to shut off the unit in the future so they could stop this creature in 1983. This was on August 12,1983.
