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.
The Montauk Project: Where “Stranger” really began
Long before Hawkins and the Upside Down existed, the Duffer brothers were developing something called “Montauk”. This wasn’t just a cool placeholder title — it was literally the foundation of the show. Montauk, named after the seaside town on the tip of Long Island, is home to a real military base called Camp Hero, which conspiracy theorists claim was the site of secret US government experiments on children involving psychic warfare, time travel, and even interdimensional contact.
If that sounds like a rejected Hawkins Lab storyline, well — that’s basically the point.
Speaking to PEDESTRIAN.TV, Matt Duffer explained how they discovered the idea:
“The show was originally called Montauk. We didn’t grow up in New York, so we didn’t know about this conspiracy theory until sometime in high school. But it’s a conspiracy theory called The Montauk Project and it involved, you know, monsters and other dimensions and government experiments and children.”
Ross added that their childhood influenced the friendship aspect of the story more than the strange happenings. They “stole a lot of street names” from their own hometown, but the darker, government-experiment energy came straight from those late-night Montauk rabbit holes.
What was The Montauk Project anyway?
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.
The lore links loosely to other notorious government programs like MK-ULTRA, a real, declassified CIA initiative in the 1950s and ‘60s that tested LSD and psychological conditioning on unwitting participants. Many fans believe Hawkins Lab is a direct blend of Montauk mythology and MK-ULTRA history — government-funded science gone full horror.
From Cold War anxiety to Hawkins panic
The Duffers have openly cited Stephen King and Steven Spielberg as major influences, but their real-world fascination with small-town secrecy was the engine that powered Stranger Things. When the brothers first pitched the series to Netflix, they pulled heavily from Montauk legends — secret research facilities buried beneath ordinary towns, wrapped in Cold War paranoia.
And yes, they even borrowed the structure of the Montauk “missing kid mystery” and added a supernatural twist.
As Ross once told FOX4, they asked themselves: “We went, well, what if we just combine these ideas? What if a monster took this kid?… And that was really how Stranger Things was birthed.”
From there, the show transformed from a coastal conspiracy to a nostalgia-fuelled horror epic about friendship, grief, and otherworldly goo.
The government theories that fuelled Stranger Things
Even though Stranger Things stops short of claiming real-life authenticity (thankfully), it dips into decades of US government fear mongering.
Some of the most cited inspirations include:
- MK-ULTRA: Real CIA experiments involving LSD, hypnosis, and mind control during the Cold War. Matt told Vulture that when they were devising the show they “were talking about some of the mysterious government experiments that we felt were happening at the tail end of the Cold War, right when rumored [projects] like MKUltra were ramping down”.
- The Philadelphia Experiment: A rumour that a U.S. Navy ship disappeared during radar invisibility tests in 1943 — allegedly spawning time portals.
- The Stargate Project: A genuine U.S. Army-funded program that researched psychic abilities and “remote viewing” in the 1970s.
All of this was real enough (or secret enough) to blur the line between truth and science fiction — and a perfect backdrop for a show about government labs meddling with psychic teens.
Beyond the myths — The Duffer brothers’ reality check
While many parts of Stranger Things began in the fog of Cold War conspiracies, the Duffers were always more interested in heart than horror.
Matt Duffer told PEDESTRIAN.TV, “We think of Stranger Things as a coming-of-age story and this final season is about these characters reaching adulthood. And once they’ve reached adulthood, you’ve reached the end of the story.”
That emotional centre is what’s kept Stranger Things from collapsing under its own lore — even if the lore involves psychic chairs, portal-making kids, and interdimensional spiders.
So, while Stranger Things isn’t technically “based on a true story”, it is based on something real enough to have sparked decades of conspiracy books, documentaries, and Reddit threads. And with the final episode dropping on January 1 — it’s your last chance to return to Hawkins before the gates close forever.
As for the Duffers, they’re already plotting something new. “We are working on a spin-off,” Matt teased. “It doesn’t involve any of the characters or Hawkins. Or even the Upside Down. Or the 80s. So it’s very, very different, but also very much Stranger Things.”
In other words, the world of Stranger Things might be ending, but the weirdness? That’s eternal.
The post Government Secrets & The Montauk Project: The True Story Behind Stranger Things appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
