The True Story Behind Stranger Things Is Completely Insane

Stranger Things will be back for a second season and, if you're anything like us, you'll be hungry for something (anything!) that can give you a hint of what's to come. Well, here's something: Did you know Stranger Things is based loosely on a true story? Of course, "true" in this formulation means "crackpot conspiracy theory about time-traveling battleships, recovered memories, and personalities being transferred between bodies." That version of true. Thrillist has a wonderful and in-depth piece about the Montauk Project, a conspiracy theory about goings-on at a Long Island military base. (In fact, Stranger Things was titled Montauk before the setting was changed.) We'll give you a small taste. Much of what we know about the Montauk Project is based on a series of books and interviews by Preston B. Nichols, the most significant being The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, released in 1982. After Nichols published the book, which was based on memories recovered in therapies and new-age techniques, others came forward to corroborate his claims. What exactly those claims are is a bit confusing. One of the people that corroborated the claims was Al Bielek, who saw a movie based on Nichols' book in 1988. Bielek said he was actually Edward Cameron and that he and his brother had been sent, accidentally, forward in time when a 1943 battleship was transported through a wormhole. It popped out in 1983, when he and his brother escaped from the ship and swam ashore. The 1983 scientists realized what had happened and sent them back in time to stop the battleship from being sent forward in time by destroying the equipment on board. Got all that? It gets stranger. The continuing story involves the brother switching bodies, children being abducted, and a psychic brother summoning a monster through a wormhole (sound familiar?) before it could be defeated. Read more here.