Or Maybe That's What They WANT You To Think

Wiki:

The Montauk Project was alleged to be a 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.

Due to scant verifiable evidence to support its existence, critics argue the Montauk Experiment is an unverified conspiracy theory, urban legend or possibly a hoax.

No longer used as a military facility, the Montauk Air Force Station has been open to the public for several years, although public access to the old military building is prohibited.

The earliest citation of the Montauk Project is uncertain, but elements of the story have circulated since at least the early 1980s. According to astrophysicist and UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, the Montauk Experiment stories seem to have originated with the account of Preston Nichols, who claimed to have recovered repressed memories of involvement.

There is no definitive version of the Montauk Project narrative, but some accounts describe it as an extension or continuation of the Philadelphia Experiment.

In 1943, the Philadelphia Experiment supposedly aimed to render the USS Eldridge optically invisible, with disastrous results. Though the story has circulated since the 1950s, skeptics note that Philadelphia Experiment accounts are unverified, and that the story was initially based largely on testimony of the supposedly mentally unstable Carl Allen.

According to proponents of the Montauk Project, surviving researchers from the Philadelphia Experiment met in 1952-1953. The researchers aimed to continue their earlier work on manipulating the "electromagnetic shielding" that had been used to make the USS Eldridge invisible, and investigating possible military applications magnetic field manipulation as a psychological warfare device.

Researchers purportedly created a report about their proposals, which was presented to the United States Congress and rejected as far too dangerous. By resubmitting their project directly to the United States Department of Defense and bypassing congressional approval, the researchers promised a powerful new weapon that could induce the symptoms of psychotic disorders and schizophrenia at the touch of a button. 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. Army soldiers in a train tunnel in France, near the Swiss border. The train was blown up and all the soldiers involved were killed. When those funds ran out, additional funding was secured from ITT Corporation and Krupp AG in Germany.

Work began at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, New York under the name of the "Phoenix Project", but it was soon realized that the "project" required a large and advanced radar dish, and installing one at Brookhaven National Laboratory would compromise the security of the project. Luckily, the United States Air Force had a decommissioned base at Montauk, New York, not far from BNL, which had a complete SAGE radar installation. The site was large and remote and Montauk Point was not yet a tourist attraction. Water access would allow equipment to be moved in and out undetected. More importantly, the SAGE radar worked on a frequency of 400 MHz - 425 MHz, right in the range of 410 MHz - 420 MHz signal that was said to influence the human mind.

Equipment was moved to Camp Hero at Montauk AFS in 1967-1968, and installed in a "Deep Underground Military Base" that the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) were redeveloping and expanding beneath Montauk AFS on the surface at Montauk Point. 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 within the "D1 Base" would remain the property of the United States Air Force, although technically, in reality, Montauk AFS remained in operation until 1987. The park has never been opened to the public, under the excuse of "environmental contamination".

Various conspiracy theorists claim that experiments began in earnest from 1982 through to 1987-1988. They claim that during this time one, some or all of the following occurred at the site. The following claims are entirely unverified:

• Experiments were conducted in teleportation, parallel dimensions and time travel.
• On or about August 12, 1983 the time travel project at Camp Hero interlocked in hyperspace with the original Project Rainbow 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 USS Eldridge while it was in hyperspace and ended up after a period of severe disorientation at Camp Hero in the year 1983 at Montauk Point. Here they claim to have met John von Neumann, a famous physicist and mathematician, even though he died in 1957. Von Neumann had supposedly worked on the original Philadelphia Experiment, but the United States Navy denies this.
• 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 where apparently some kind of "Martians" had once lived many thousands of years earlier.
• Contact was made with alien extraterrestrials through the Time Tunnel and advanced kinds of "etheric technology" was exchanged with them which enhanced the Montauk Project. This allowed broader access to hyperspace. Stewart Swerdlow also developed the "language of hyperspace", utilizing archetypes and glyphs as well as color and tone, in other words, a "non-linguistic language", the language of the Creator, that is God itself. However many researchers have questioned the validity of Swerdlow and what he actually did within the Montauk Project.
• Enrico Chekov, a Spanish-Russian dissident, reported in 1988, after defecting to America, that satellite surveillance captured during the 1970s showed the formation of a large bubble of space-time centered on the site, lending further support to the D1 Base Time Tunnel research. After Chekov shared photographs with a reporter from the The New York Times, his apartment in Manhattan was burgled and the photos were all that was taken.
• 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 and psychological instability, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other issues, including being programmed with microchips, and also through the use of "psychotronic mind control". An alien supposedly designed a chair, which an individual could sit in to boost his mental and precipatory powers. A prototype duplicate was given to Britain and put in a facility on the River Thames.
• 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 and interconnected with vast maglev train tunnel networks to other "Deep Underground Military Bases", also known as "D1 Bases".
• Nikola Tesla, whose death was faked in a conspiracy, was the chief director of operations at the base (which, if they started in the 1980s would make him over 120 years old).
• 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.

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.