The Montauk Project: Time Travel at Camp Hero?

The Story

At the eastern tip of Long Island stands Camp Hero, where a huge radar antenna rises above the trees. According to Skeptoid, the Army, Navy and Coast Guard all had facilities there in World War II. During the Cold War it became Montauk Air Force Station, a radar post watching for Soviet long-range bombers. By 1981 the station was obsolete and was decommissioned. The antenna was too big to take down, so it was left standing. The site sat vacant until 2002, when it opened as Camp Hero State Park.

In 1992, while the base still sat empty, Preston Nichols published 'The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time,' with contributions by Peter Moon. Nichols wrote that meeting two men, Al Bielek and Duncan Cameron, triggered repressed memories of a secret career conducting experiments in an underground base beneath Camp Hero. Both men claimed to have been aboard the USS Eldridge in the 'Philadelphia Experiment.'

The book's own authors said it 'can also be read as pure science fiction.'

That legend, about a 1943 Navy experiment that supposedly made a warship disappear, was invented by Carl Allen in the 1960s, according to Skeptoid. The Eldridge was a real ship, but it had nothing to do with any such experiment. Skeptoid says researchers showed that neither Bielek nor Cameron had any connection to it.

The book's claims include time travel through wormholes, hundreds of people sent to other times and places, and trips to a pyramid on Mars, all run from a facility twelve levels underground. The book's 'Guide to the Reader' says it 'contains no falsehoods to the best knowledge of the authors' but 'can also be read as pure science fiction if that is more suitable to the reader.'

Skeptoid's Brian Dunning points to geology. Long Island is a glacial moraine of loose till, and the water table is at sea level. He argues that a deep underground base could only have been built by digging an enormous open pit, which could not have been kept secret. He also notes that the supposed top-secret site is now a public park where almost anyone can walk.

The legend lives on in pop culture. Skeptoid notes that the Netflix series 'Stranger Things' was originally titled 'Montauk.' The radar tower is real, but no evidence of the time machine has ever been found.