Speaker 1: And of course now there are all kinds of theories
Speaker 1: about how John Trump taught Donald Trump all the secrets
Speaker 1: of Tesla technology and like imbued him with all of
Speaker 1: his knowledge of nuclear power, which is like that probably
Speaker 1: didn't take very long.
Speaker 2: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she I.
Speaker 3: Served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years,
Speaker 3: living undercover all around the world.
Speaker 4: And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
Speaker 4: served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 3: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
Speaker 3: created conspiracies.
Speaker 4: In our operations. We got people to believe things that
Speaker 4: weren't true.
Speaker 3: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 3: news almost every day.
Speaker 4: We'll break them down for you to determine whether they
Speaker 4: could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Mission implausible. So we grew up in CIA,
Speaker 3: and so we lived through sort of this view from
Speaker 3: some people that the CIA is involved in all kinds
Speaker 3: of stuff, which is true, much of which is not true. Well,
Speaker 3: today we're going to talk about sort of the mother
Speaker 3: of conspiracy theories, called the Montalk Project, where all sorts
Speaker 3: of these government conspiracies come home to roost.
Speaker 4: I love the Montalk Project. It's the kitchen sink of
Speaker 4: conspiracy theories. It's got everything from monsters to Nazis, to
Speaker 4: Tibetans to time portals.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, what's interesting is, you know, this thing sort
Speaker 3: of started by a couple of people writing about this
Speaker 3: old army base and suggesting there's all kinds of government projects, secret,
Speaker 3: nefarious government projects were happening there. But what sort of
Speaker 3: has made it continue over time is that it has
Speaker 3: become so filled with like interesting and weird stuff that
Speaker 3: Hollywood picked up on it. So the X Files and
Speaker 3: Men in Black and even more recently the Stranger Things
Speaker 3: often are built on this original conspiracy called Montalk Project.
Speaker 3: It's a very American thing too. There's this American view
Speaker 3: that somehow the government, while it's collecting taxes and it's
Speaker 3: involved in national security and we have an army and
Speaker 3: doing healthcare and all these different kind of things, it
Speaker 3: is at its base and a presser who is ready
Speaker 3: to sort of take away the rights of American citizens.
Speaker 3: So Americans have to always be watching that the nefarious
Speaker 3: and dangerous government is coming for them.
Speaker 4: You and I, having been in CIA, know just how
Speaker 4: screwed up and deeply human these organizations can be.
Speaker 3: They're made up of the same citizens who worry about
Speaker 3: these kind of things, and the notion that a large
Speaker 3: group of people could keep some sort of secret that
Speaker 3: other Americans are being oppressed is unlikely. Frankly, the jfk assassination.
Speaker 3: I have to say, if I worked in the CIA
Speaker 3: for thirty years and if I got a hint that
Speaker 3: the CIA was involved in killing John F. Kennedy, I
Speaker 3: would be yelling to the rooftops right now about it.
Speaker 3: And so this is a story of a couple guys
Speaker 3: who wrote a book in the early nineties, really before
Speaker 3: the Internet, and one of them claims that he had
Speaker 3: been working in this place and repressed memories had come
Speaker 3: back to him about all these variety of things that
Speaker 3: you mentioned at the outset. And so we're going to
Speaker 3: talk to a guy that we've talked to before who's
Speaker 3: written some on this who is it Today? We have
Speaker 3: Mike Rothschild again for those who don't remember, he's a
Speaker 3: journalist and conspiracy theory expert, which is perfect for us.
Speaker 3: The author of several books, including Jewish Space Lasers. The
Speaker 3: Rothschilds and two hundred years of conspiracy theories, and so
Speaker 3: today we're going to talk about the mon Talk project.
Speaker 3: And to kick us off, why can you give us
Speaker 3: just a little bit over your what exactly that is?
Speaker 4: Sure?
Speaker 1: So the mon Talk project is this conspiracy theory that
Speaker 1: emerged in the early nineties that the US government had
Speaker 1: been using a naval base at the tip of Long
Speaker 1: Island Sound to conduct experiments in time travel, opening dimensional portals,
Speaker 1: mind control, making ships disappear, as sort of any horror
Speaker 1: from extra dimensions that you can imagine was being experimented
Speaker 1: on in this secret military base in Montalk. And the
Speaker 1: proof was that a monster washed up on the shore
Speaker 1: in Montalk, and they were all these books written and
Speaker 1: all of these repressed memories came out, and I hate
Speaker 1: to sort of get to the end at the beginning here,
Speaker 1: but there's really no evidence any of this is true,
Speaker 1: and actually quite a bit that it's not true, that
Speaker 1: none of it ever happened. But that's the very basics
Speaker 1: of it. And there's this kind of long string of
Speaker 1: authors who sort of pile on one thing after another
Speaker 1: onto what is the mon talk project, and it's almost
Speaker 1: kind of unfollowable at this point, it's become kind of
Speaker 1: like a cinematic universe of weird stuff.
Speaker 4: Mike, can you walk us through sort of the main points.
Speaker 4: The name five or six conspiracy theories that make up
Speaker 4: the Montalk projects.
Speaker 1: So the overall umbrella of the Montalk Project is that
Speaker 1: there was a secret base built at an actual US
Speaker 1: Army camp called Camp Hero to the tip of Long
Speaker 1: Island Sound, and that's been a military base actually since
Speaker 1: the American Revolution.
Speaker 4: It's got a.
Speaker 1: Perfect position to essentially keep watch over Long Island Sound.
Speaker 1: And there was a base there for a while. It
Speaker 1: was radar and it was anti aircraft missiles. It was
Speaker 1: shut down in the eighties and it was basically just
Speaker 1: left there to lie fallow. So the story is that
Speaker 1: the Phoenix Project was using Camp Hero and then a
Speaker 1: big underground bunker there to essentially test out mind control
Speaker 1: technology and they were using it on orphans that wouldn't
Speaker 1: be missed by society. They were subjecting these children to
Speaker 1: massive electromagnetic radiation hits in this contraption called the Montak Chair,
Speaker 1: and they were using it to essentially open a portal
Speaker 1: to another dimension, and you can go down a million
Speaker 1: different rabbit holes of what's actually going on, Alien ships,
Speaker 1: fifty foot titanium structures, all of it's funded by Nazi
Speaker 1: gold and being supervised by Nazis who are part of
Speaker 1: the Order of the Black Sun. I mean, you just
Speaker 1: go on and on. But the basics of it is
Speaker 1: that there's this underground bunker that is being used to
Speaker 1: open a portal using these psionic powers of orphans.
Speaker 3: So tell us a little bit about the authors of
Speaker 3: this original nineteen nine two book that sort of kicked
Speaker 3: this off.
Speaker 1: So this wasn't really a thing until a book from
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety two called the Montalk Project Experiments in Time.
Speaker 1: It's written primarily by this guy, Preston Nichols. Also there's
Speaker 1: another author by line, Peter Moon, and Nichols claims that
Speaker 1: he had repressed memories of working at this base called
Speaker 1: Camp Hero, and it was involving also the Philadelphia Experiment,
Speaker 1: which was this supposed plot to make a warship disappear.
Speaker 1: There's a movie made about it, and it's a really
Speaker 1: good clue that you're dealing with very creative fiction when
Speaker 1: you start talking about repressed memories, because the science behind
Speaker 1: that is very pseudoscientific, very dodgy, but It's that kind
Speaker 1: of thing where you can't prove that it didn't happen,
Speaker 1: and the authors adding more and more and more detail
Speaker 1: to it actually makes.
Speaker 4: It more believable. And you find this a lot in
Speaker 4: the conspiracy theory world.
Speaker 1: A conspiracy theory that's really vague doesn't catch on, but
Speaker 1: one that has a ton of irrelevant and ridiculous and
Speaker 1: contradictory details is actually going to somehow be more convincing
Speaker 1: because it feels more thought out.
Speaker 3: So, like, what was the reality of what was happening there?
Speaker 1: There was nothing happening. It was a decommissioned military installation.
Speaker 1: Some of it was unsafe because of chemicals. You know.
Speaker 1: They had anti aircraft missiles stored there. They had a
Speaker 1: big radar installations, but of course, as the Soviet threat
Speaker 1: transitioned from bombers to missiles, you didn't need missile sites
Speaker 1: in the domestic US. So the site was shut down,
Speaker 1: I think in nineteen eighty four, and it just was
Speaker 1: there growing weeds for quite a long time. And now
Speaker 1: Camp Hero is actually a state park where hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of people go. The installations are still there, you
Speaker 1: can tour some of them, but right now it's a
Speaker 1: sort of a testament to reclaiming land. It's not a
Speaker 1: testament to psionic powers or portals. It's like go walk
Speaker 1: in the woods.
Speaker 4: I know that. And looking into this, one of the
Speaker 4: roots of this was also mk ultra, right, which is
Speaker 4: something that goes back to the nineteen fifties, like seventy
Speaker 4: eighty years ago.
Speaker 1: That's a really good point in that the government has
Speaker 1: done a lot of things like mk Ultra, like DARPA,
Speaker 1: like you know, some of the psionics experiments where they
Speaker 1: are messing around with things that maybe you should not
Speaker 1: be messed around with. But that's easy to take and
Speaker 1: spin it into a fiction. And I think it's also
Speaker 1: important to understand that the first mom Talk book came
Speaker 1: out in nineteen ninety two. This was a time when
Speaker 1: distrust of the federal government was really starting to peak.
Speaker 1: With the Clinton years. You had a whole slew of
Speaker 1: really major conspiracy theory books that came out. So it
Speaker 1: was another instance of a really well told story that
Speaker 1: caught on at the right time and touched on things
Speaker 1: that were really getting into the zeitgeist at that time,
Speaker 1: that were based on certain things that had been declassified
Speaker 1: and certain sort of suspicions about the government.
Speaker 3: So as the coldor was really sort of turning warmer
Speaker 3: and eventually hot. There was real concern that the Soviets
Speaker 3: may have found a way to get involved in mind control,
Speaker 3: and there was a concern that perhaps the Soviets, because
Speaker 3: it was an ideology, might have success in turning Westerners
Speaker 3: towards Communism. And there was a concern that maybe the
Speaker 3: Soviets had found some sort of technique of mind control,
Speaker 3: whether it was a drug or some sort of technology.
Speaker 3: And so Ellen Dulles, who then headed the CIA, put
Speaker 3: together a small team inside the CAA to try to
Speaker 3: see what they could do to study this idea of
Speaker 3: mind control. It was led by a scientist inside the CIA,
Speaker 3: and they tested a variety of things, using LSD and
Speaker 3: shock therapy and a variety of other things to see
Speaker 3: if they could find a way to create super soldiers
Speaker 3: or mind control. There really isn't anything to mind control,
Speaker 3: but at the time there was such fear that we
Speaker 3: were falling behind in mind control. The CIA probably went
Speaker 3: way too far and trying to explore it, and in
Speaker 3: the process took advantage of subjects they were They were
Speaker 3: testing people in prisons for example, Whitey Bulger, the famous
Speaker 3: Boston criminal, claims that he was part of a test
Speaker 3: in the mk Ultra process where they were taking prisoners
Speaker 3: and testing them with drugs and such things. So mk
Speaker 3: Ultra is sort of an ugly aside in CIA's history,
Speaker 3: and it was something that the Church Commission looked at
Speaker 3: as part of their reforms in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 4: And to be clear, mk Ultra was a failure, complete failure.
Speaker 4: They never found any way of mind control. And two,
Speaker 4: in light of what we've been talking about, there's an
Speaker 4: interesting lash up to Hollywood because the Manchurian candidate, the
Speaker 4: initial movie had come out where the Chinese had actually
Speaker 4: been able to control in the movie plot to control
Speaker 4: a presidential candidate.
Speaker 3: So in the early nineteen seventies, a couple of congressional
Speaker 3: committees reformed, the Church Commission in the Senate and Pike
Speaker 3: Commission in the House to look at the CIA and
Speaker 3: FBI and this variety of problems atrocities that were occurring.
Speaker 3: And those two committees came up with a wide variety
Speaker 3: of recommendations that eventually led to changes in the intelligence
Speaker 3: community to include providing for the first time ever official
Speaker 3: congressional oversight means by which presidents have to formally request
Speaker 3: covert action and action being taken by the intelligence community.
Speaker 3: It was ended up being a very important point for
Speaker 3: US intelligence reform after sort of the early years of
Speaker 3: post World War Two, where intelligence community was just trying
Speaker 3: to fight off the Soviets in any way they could,
Speaker 3: and oftentimes using some of the same techniques that the
Speaker 3: Soviets were using themselves.
Speaker 4: And it revealed and ouded some of the past sins
Speaker 4: of the US intelligence community, some of the mistakes that
Speaker 4: they made.
Speaker 3: There's a famous case in our world, in the espionage
Speaker 3: world of George Blake, who was a British intelligence officer
Speaker 3: who was in Seoul, Korea, who has taken prisoner by
Speaker 3: the North Koreans and kept in North Korea. While in
Speaker 3: North Korea, he was recruited by the Soviets to become
Speaker 3: a long term spy for the Russians. And it's like,
Speaker 3: how could this happen? How could a good British boy
Speaker 3: end up becoming a spy for the Russians. And we've
Speaker 3: seen it even in our times. Jerry and I like
Speaker 3: when Americans are scared, they fall in for sort of
Speaker 3: views either conspiracy theories or they want their government to
Speaker 3: do all kinds of things that they might not want
Speaker 3: to when they're not scared.
Speaker 1: Well, there's always going to be a need for conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories that cast the government as these sort of outlandish
Speaker 1: villains in lab coats and doing secret things to kids.
Speaker 1: I mean, anything involving like kids is always going to
Speaker 1: pique people's interests.
Speaker 3: All right, So let's take a short break and we'll
Speaker 3: be back in to talk more about.
Speaker 2: This, and we're back.
Speaker 4: So, as John said, Americans that were held captive in
Speaker 4: North Korea who were subjected to imprisonment and brainwashing as
Speaker 4: best they could by the Chinese and by the Russians
Speaker 4: and by the North Koreans, some of these people actually
Speaker 4: did change their minds. And of course we talk about
Speaker 4: that now as Stockholm syndrome. George Blake, it's not like
Speaker 4: he just turned and joined the North Korean side, which
Speaker 4: he did to become a Russian agent. He also watched
Speaker 4: the people around in his comrades being tortured and killed
Speaker 4: by the North Koreans and Russians. He watched atrocities happen,
Speaker 4: and something happened inside of his mind where he switched
Speaker 4: sides for whatever the psychological reasons were.
Speaker 3: This effort brainwashing has come around to a point now
Speaker 3: where we realize there are Soviets and the Russians who
Speaker 3: were doing things to try to influence opinion and influence Americans.
Speaker 3: It's actually a lot easier than we thought. You know,
Speaker 3: we've seen at our elections and recently. If you just
Speaker 3: pump information over and over into a system, people start
Speaker 3: to believe things that aren't true, and it fits into
Speaker 3: that part of our mind where conspiracies exist. It's not
Speaker 3: as hard as you think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it has never required drugs or complex light shows
Speaker 1: and things to make people think certain things. You just
Speaker 1: tell them things they want to believe, and you do
Speaker 1: it a lot, and you do it in a flashy way.
Speaker 1: You know, whether it's selling you chicken nuggets or whether
Speaker 1: it's selling you Donald Trump. It's not that difficult, and
Speaker 1: it's a lot easier than I think all of these
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories would required.
Speaker 5: It's just tell people's.
Speaker 1: Stuff that they want to believe, and do it in
Speaker 1: a way that's believable.
Speaker 3: I think sometimes science is sort of beyond a lot
Speaker 3: of people, and so when scientists look into something, it
Speaker 3: can be then scary to people who don't follow and
Speaker 3: think that maybe there's more stuff going on.
Speaker 4: So on the Nazi gold, I spent a lot of
Speaker 4: time in German and I found that interesting, And of
Speaker 4: course there is a small speck of truth in that
Speaker 4: as well, insofar as there was something called Operation paper
Speaker 4: Clip at the end of World War Two, which was
Speaker 4: a way to gather together some of Germany's best scientists,
Speaker 4: some fairly nasty individuals involved in their UTWO program, involved
Speaker 4: in their nuclear program. But the reason they were being
Speaker 4: gathered together and brought to the West was so that
Speaker 4: the Russians didn't get a hold of them to build
Speaker 4: a Russian bomb. And some of these scientists were brought
Speaker 4: to the US. And it's certainly possible I couldn't find
Speaker 4: it my research. They would have ended up in Montak
Speaker 4: because that was one of our in the fifties and
Speaker 4: late forties, one of our most advanced radar stations.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: And as for Nazi gold in Europe, there is this
Speaker 4: story of a trainload of gold that was hidden. Trainload
Speaker 4: of gold did disappear somewhere in Nazi occupied Poland, and
Speaker 4: people today are still looking for it, and.
Speaker 1: There's also real life historical mysteries that probably are never
Speaker 1: going to be solved. The Nazi Gold, I mean, there's
Speaker 1: the Japanese equivalent with Yamashida's Gold and the Philippines and
Speaker 1: people are still looking for that. There are real mysteries
Speaker 1: and real unanswered questions, and as long as there are
Speaker 1: unanswered questions, there will be people who provide the answers.
Speaker 3: Is there any evidence that these kind of conspiracies are
Speaker 3: pushed by foreign actors or is this an earlier one
Speaker 3: that just seems to be wholly domestic in scope?
Speaker 1: This, to me, I believe is completely domestic. I've never
Speaker 1: seen any indication that there was any kind of foreign
Speaker 1: pushing of something like Montalk, and I don't know that
Speaker 1: there would be. I mean, I don't know that there
Speaker 1: would be any benefit from that because it is still
Speaker 1: in that sort of cool story mode rather than sort
Speaker 1: of societal division mode.
Speaker 4: Might take us into the Montalk Monster's truth and fiction.
Speaker 1: Sure, So the Montalk Monster was this I think it
Speaker 1: was two thousand and eight when it washed up on
Speaker 1: the shore, and it was this sort of blobby bit
Speaker 1: of flash and people like, ah, that's proof, that's proof
Speaker 1: of the monsters. Coming through the portals, and of course
Speaker 1: we love stuff like that. We love cryptids, we love Bigfoot,
Speaker 1: we love the Lockness monster. You know, in this case,
Speaker 1: what they think was probably just the decayed remittens of
Speaker 1: a raccoon that washed on the shore. But that's not fun.
Speaker 1: And most people are going to go, well, it's just
Speaker 1: something that got eaten up by LG and washed up
Speaker 1: on the shore. But a few people go, that's proof
Speaker 1: of the thing that I already believed was Trump.
Speaker 4: So we've discussed monsters, let's discuss Nicholas Tesla. Sure, how
Speaker 4: does he fit into all this?
Speaker 1: So Tesla is one of those figures where again the
Speaker 1: mythology completely outstrips the reality. You know, Tesla obviously a
Speaker 1: very important inventor, a very important figure in science, but
Speaker 1: by the end of his life he was kind of
Speaker 1: mentally debilitated by very severeo CD other mental illnesses. He's
Speaker 1: writing down stuff in his notebooks that it's just impossible think,
Speaker 1: you know, death rays and time travel. And of course
Speaker 1: at one point the FBI, I think, had somebody go
Speaker 1: through those notes. Well that person was Donald Trump's uncle.
Speaker 4: Ah.
Speaker 1: Interesting, so yep, it was John Trump, who was a
Speaker 1: physicist went through Tesla's notebooks to find anything useful for
Speaker 1: the war effort and basically said, these are the ravings
Speaker 1: of a lunatic. None of this stuff is real at all.
Speaker 1: And of course now there are all kinds of theories
Speaker 1: about how John Trump taught Donald Trump all the secrets
Speaker 1: of Tesla technology and like imbued him with all of
Speaker 1: his knowledge of nuclear power, which is like that probably
Speaker 1: didn't take very long. And you know, this Tesla worship
Speaker 1: is very real in certain corners of the fringe, and
Speaker 1: now it's all bound up with Trump and all like
Speaker 1: these secret weapons and stuff. But anything Tesla was talking
Speaker 1: about at the end of his life probably was a
Speaker 1: delusional raving Mike, as always, thank you very much.
Speaker 4: It's been great, heavy on the show.
Speaker 1: Well, thanks for having me back. Guys, this was great.
Speaker 4: All right, everybody, let's bring in John Star, who's done
Speaker 4: a lot of research. Sitting on the toilet over the
Speaker 4: last thirty minutes.
Speaker 2: John, what did you come up with? The extent of
Speaker 2: my research was to interview one person, but that one
Speaker 2: person is very key to the story. He is a
Speaker 2: documentary filmmaker who made a movie called The Montak Chronicles
Speaker 2: in twenty fifteen. And that is the movie that really
Speaker 2: kicked off this conspiracy theory and put it into the
Speaker 2: public realm.
Speaker 3: It's a Christmas movie. I think you take the family
Speaker 3: to something like that.
Speaker 2: It's full of magic and joy. So I'm going to
Speaker 2: play for you a selected section of my interview.
Speaker 5: My name is Christopher Garretano, and I am a movie maker,
Speaker 5: and I wanted to do something on the unknown and unexplained,
Speaker 5: and I was more interested in cryptozoological factors. And then
Speaker 5: my buddy said, listen, man, you live near mon Talk,
Speaker 5: why don't you make it about the Montalk Project? And
Speaker 5: I remembered reading that little book and had no interest.
Speaker 2: What little book was that?
Speaker 5: Well, it was it was by Preston Nichols Experiments and
Speaker 5: Time the Montalk Project, and I felt it was kind
Speaker 5: of a redic and very flimsy and thin. However, further
Speaker 5: conversation with this guy John, he said, yeah, but there's
Speaker 5: another aspect to that, and I think it's a cover up.
Speaker 5: I think all of the alien stuff and all of
Speaker 5: that other stuff might be a distraction from a very
Speaker 5: brutal mind control program that involved the kidnapping of runaway
Speaker 5: kids and perhaps murder. And then he showed me a
Speaker 5: little videotape of al Buelick that was an elderly man
Speaker 5: that was telling this Montac tale, and he was like
Speaker 5: the archetype of every old crazy man in the movies
Speaker 5: that I love so innocently. That's how I started. I
Speaker 5: was like, let's go interview these crazy old guys and
Speaker 5: see what they tell.
Speaker 2: At that point, did you think it was a real
Speaker 2: situation or did you think they were just making it
Speaker 2: up or delusional?
Speaker 5: It was the weirdest thing I ever stumbled upon, because
Speaker 5: most of the time when you have a science fiction
Speaker 5: type story or someone's claim to have been abducted by
Speaker 5: an alien or you know, it has those basic elements
Speaker 5: that we all kind of inherently know from either fiction
Speaker 5: or hearing these stories and shows like Unsolved Mysteries or
Speaker 5: way back with in search of When I heard them,
Speaker 5: it was this like weird, almost perverse mixture of brutality, abuse, murder.
Speaker 5: These things are not normal when it comes to like
Speaker 5: alien stories. And then it got into drugging people, and
Speaker 5: it got into doing horrible things to people, and then
Speaker 5: it was connected to Nazi scientists, and that's a real thing.
Speaker 5: We can talk about that and there's this conspiracy that
Speaker 5: tortures and ideas of experimental torture were brought on here
Speaker 5: in the United States and used in government, secret government
Speaker 5: programs and the Montalk program.
Speaker 2: What would these guys claiming happened to them?
Speaker 5: Each of them had a similarly constructed story. There weren't
Speaker 5: too many differences. And what they claimed happened that each
Speaker 5: of them reluctantly were incorporated or absorbed into a program
Speaker 5: for each of their very particular unique set of skills.
Speaker 5: And so Preston Nichols, he's one of the elder of
Speaker 5: the group, or was. He's since passed, many of them have.
Speaker 5: He was acquired because of his engineering, his electronic skills,
Speaker 5: but also he was supposed to start implanting suggestion into
Speaker 5: the minds of these children teenagers, and they are now
Speaker 5: rebuilt into a psychic soldier and perhaps a government assassin,
Speaker 5: a lah you know what some people have suggested. Sir
Speaker 5: Han Sir Haan was.
Speaker 2: So he was working for the government to create those soldiers.
Speaker 5: They all claim that they entered the base through Brookhaven Laboratories,
Speaker 5: which is further west. And according to al Bielick, who
Speaker 5: was one of the elders of the group group. He
Speaker 5: claimed that there was an underground train that went from
Speaker 5: Brookhaven Laboratories to the Montalk Base underground, while according to
Speaker 5: al Bulick and Preston Nichols and Duncan Cameron and Stuart's
Speaker 5: word Low, they suggest that most of the action was
Speaker 5: happening underneath the ground. And I started to consider, Okay,
Speaker 5: these guys are talking about Tillians and praying mantis people
Speaker 5: and you know, stuff I've only seen in science fiction.
Speaker 5: And I said, is it possible that these guys were
Speaker 5: drugged up? That maybe they were used for some reason,
Speaker 5: but drugged up in case they would ever say what
Speaker 5: happened there. Now they're out there telling the story of
Speaker 5: praying mantis people and monsters drinking draino like these are
Speaker 5: the stories they.
Speaker 2: Told, and.
Speaker 5: You know, no one's going to believe them, but something
Speaker 5: tells me, at least Preston, Nichols and al Blick believed
Speaker 5: that something happened there, that they were part of something.
Speaker 5: For what reason, I can't tell you. It could be,
Speaker 5: you know, mental if but why would someone go to
Speaker 5: these great lengths. Neither of them ever really benefited from this.
Speaker 5: They received more ridicule than anything else.
Speaker 2: So what changed your mind in the making of this
Speaker 2: to open your mind to that possibility.
Speaker 5: So it was associative type programs that I had no
Speaker 5: knowledge of before going in, like in Kultra, like the
Speaker 5: Holmesburg prison experiments, the Tuskegee medical experiments, and then the
Speaker 5: hearings in the nineties where Bill Clinton was apologizing for
Speaker 5: so called radiation experiments and the Tuskegee medical experiments and
Speaker 5: saying that's the past, this is in US, we don't
Speaker 5: do this now. So if that was happening there, then
Speaker 5: I started to think, well, of course it was happening
Speaker 5: in other places, and you discover that it was that,
Speaker 5: maybe I start to consider that these things were truly
Speaker 5: happening at Montak.
Speaker 2: Have people been writing in with new clues and new information?
Speaker 5: Yeah, a lot a lot of people that have talked
Speaker 5: to me claim they were part of it. And then
Speaker 5: I talked to the guy and he was in and
Speaker 5: out of jail, and he was in trouble and he
Speaker 5: wanted to wear a ski mask and disguise's voice. He
Speaker 5: was more believable to me because someone who had grown
Speaker 5: up going through all that trauma, being drugged, beaten, then
Speaker 5: thrown back out on the street is going to have scars.
Speaker 2: You seem to be suggesting that it's possible that people
Speaker 2: who suffered other traumas and abuse have created the Montak
Speaker 2: Project as a fiction to explain to themselves what they
Speaker 2: otherwise couldn't.
Speaker 5: I considered that along the way too, where these people
Speaker 5: abused and they're just making it up. And I know
Speaker 5: in psychiatry there is a word for that, and they
Speaker 5: apply that to alien abduction too.
Speaker 2: Has there been any other evidence that you've uncovered physical
Speaker 2: evidence or yes, historical records.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So finally I had the resources to hire geophysicists
Speaker 5: and went to Camp Hero and use something called electric
Speaker 5: resistivity imagery, where you would have these kind of spikes
Speaker 5: that would be hammered into the ground. What he found
Speaker 5: was very similar to many unmarked grave sites that he's
Speaker 5: found in the past. He says it could be other things,
Speaker 5: but it is very similar to a mass grave site.
Speaker 2: The underground could have been secret but used for something else,
Speaker 2: ammunition storage or a record storage.
Speaker 5: Sure they have bunkers and things like that, but even
Speaker 5: on record, it's dismissed. They say there's nothing, there's nothing there.
Speaker 5: Ammo was stored inside the batteries where the sixteen inch
Speaker 5: guns were. No matter how many people and we put
Speaker 5: in foyer requests, government officials, park officials, they all say, no,
Speaker 5: there's nothing there.
Speaker 2: From what you've learned in this process, you believe this
Speaker 2: is very possible. Whether it happened to mon talk or not,
Speaker 2: not so much, but.
Speaker 5: Somewhere using people under false pretenses for horror horrific experiments
Speaker 5: is possible that aspect of it. I have never seen
Speaker 5: a UFO, I've never seen an alien being. I've seen
Speaker 5: some curious things in my life, but I can say
Speaker 5: that I do believe it's a strong possibility that something
Speaker 5: like the Holmesburg prison experiments or mk Ultra did occur
Speaker 5: at Campuro.
Speaker 3: All right, John, based on your discussion with him, you
Speaker 3: know what, what's your take?
Speaker 2: Well? I think Christopher himself seems kind of iffy on
Speaker 2: whether Camp Hero is a location where the government did
Speaker 2: weird stuff or he's just more convinced that the government
Speaker 2: does weird stuff somewhere, whether it's a Campuro or not,
Speaker 2: who knows. He did find it very significant that there
Speaker 2: is underground areas that weren't on the charts and maps
Speaker 2: for Campuro. I think, yeah, of course there's an army base.
Speaker 2: You're going to have underground chambers you don't want people
Speaker 2: to know about. Could be putting weapons there, it could
Speaker 2: be putting paperwork. Just because there's underground rooms doesn't mean
Speaker 2: that fact of the government was torturing children. There a
Speaker 2: lot of other uses for underground rooms than torturing children. However,
Speaker 2: he did talk a lot about New government's history and
Speaker 2: experimenting on people with mind control and drugs, and whether
Speaker 2: anything happened in Montalk or not is an independent question
Speaker 2: from whether the government is doing that or not. I
Speaker 2: see on our screen here that Adam Davidson is He's
Speaker 2: still checking his email, but I think he's ready to
Speaker 2: join us. So I'm going to pass the ball to Adam.
Speaker 2: But I did want to let all of you know.
Speaker 2: I think you knew already that Stranger Things was inspired
Speaker 2: by the Montalk Project. But Stranger Things was originally called Montalk.
Speaker 2: That was the original name of the show. Prior to that,
Speaker 2: Ryan Murphy, the creator of American Horror Story and Glee,
Speaker 2: he had a show called The Montalk Project that didn't
Speaker 2: go but that was in twenty eleven.
Speaker 6: Well, I actually think the point that this story is
Speaker 6: so appealing to Hollywood. Is a really good way in
Speaker 6: to talking about the role that conspire theories play, sometimes
Speaker 6: the very real financial role they play in the lives
Speaker 6: of people who share them or are attracted to them.
Speaker 6: Let's take into that after this break all right back
Speaker 6: to the show. So, gentlemen, I've had this question for
Speaker 6: a long time. Like I've heard about mk Ultra, I
Speaker 6: had not heard about the Montak project before this. And
Speaker 6: so when you were in Cia, did any of this
Speaker 6: come up, like people wondering if there are extrasensory perception,
Speaker 6: if there are telekinesists, did that come up in your
Speaker 6: day to day work.
Speaker 3: I'll let us the first No, I never did, but
Speaker 3: it was an odd time. But I think the early
Speaker 3: years of the Cold War there was a real fear
Speaker 3: in America that we could be obliterated, or that the
Speaker 3: Russian hordes would come across the fords in Europe, and
Speaker 3: Jerry and I felt a little bit of that. For example,
Speaker 3: after nine to eleven, the fear in America that there
Speaker 3: will be more attacks, that this could happen to us.
Speaker 3: And in those circumstances, in an effort to try to
Speaker 3: keep people safe, governments have often gone too far, and
Speaker 3: there was a view at the time that the Russians
Speaker 3: were experimenting with mind control. We had found some people
Speaker 3: who had agreed to spy for the Russians in certain circumstances,
Speaker 3: and it didn't seem to make sense. There was even
Speaker 3: popular movies at the time about how the Russians had
Speaker 3: some sort of special ability to control minds, like the
Speaker 3: Manchurian candidate. And so what happened is long before Jerry
Speaker 3: and I joined the CIA, the head of the Technical
Speaker 3: Services Department, which did everything from disguises and gear like
Speaker 3: you see in the James Bond movies to poisons and
Speaker 3: other things, started a program which was code named mk Ultra,
Speaker 3: which was meant to try to test and use drugs
Speaker 3: in other ways to try to find if this was
Speaker 3: at all possible. Is it possible to get people to
Speaker 3: tell the truth when they don't want to, Is it
Speaker 3: possible to control minds? Is it possible to create super soldiers?
Speaker 3: And in the process, as you can imagine, they did
Speaker 3: too much. My understanding is they used people who weren't
Speaker 3: aware of what they were getting into, and these other
Speaker 3: kind of.
Speaker 4: Things I'd throw in there that a lot of it
Speaker 4: had to do at least when we're on the inside,
Speaker 4: explained by ignorance in those days. I don't think people
Speaker 4: really before Timothy Leary people understood what LSD was right.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's another element to this, and let's throw
Speaker 4: politicians under the bus. Something I love is oftentimes CIA
Speaker 4: responds to what policymakers want to know, and people will
Speaker 4: say to the agency or to whomever, to the military.
Speaker 4: So is this possible? Let me know, the Agency had
Speaker 4: an office for years where they were studying far seeing right,
Speaker 4: whether you could with your mind sort of imagine Russian submarines.
Speaker 4: And it turned out there were a couple of influential
Speaker 4: senators who demanded they do that and demanded that the
Speaker 4: money be put in there. And I think people sort
Speaker 4: of scoffed at it on the inside and it produced nothing.
Speaker 4: But this was something that was posed on the agency.
Speaker 3: Is that the men who steer at Goat's thing?
Speaker 6: Yeah, My buddy John Ronson wrote the book. It's a
Speaker 6: really fun book.
Speaker 4: If Uri Galer could like really bend spoons for those
Speaker 4: of us old enough to remember that, if that power
Speaker 4: existed and we could replicate it in a lib that
Speaker 4: would be really useful for like messing up Soviet missiles,
Speaker 4: nuclear missiles, if you could like mess up their inside.
Speaker 3: You know, Jerry and I were in the operational overseas
Speaker 3: part of things, and by the time we were in
Speaker 3: there was no discussion of drugs that could help you
Speaker 3: get better information or get or truth serums or anything.
Speaker 3: In fact, oftentimes for our job, we had to drink
Speaker 3: a lot and I always would say, is there anything
Speaker 3: Is there a pill or something I can take?
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't feel like.
Speaker 3: Death the next day? And even no, we didn't have
Speaker 3: anything like that, So, I mean, that would have been
Speaker 3: a more practical thing that would have been useful to
Speaker 3: me in my services.
Speaker 6: Conspiracy theories solve problems for certain people. They can solve
Speaker 6: problems for politicians who want to say there's a like,
Speaker 6: there's a simple story. It's not just Oh, my voters
Speaker 6: are older, uneducated white men who our economy has kind
Speaker 6: of left behind, and I don't really have any solutions
Speaker 6: for them. We can say it's the Jews, or it's
Speaker 6: black people, or it's this, or it's that. You can
Speaker 6: see why that's useful for that audience, even if it's
Speaker 6: bad for society. But also like Hollywood is such a
Speaker 6: direct like it's hard to come up with ideas. I
Speaker 6: have this one friend, John Stearn. He hasn't had a
Speaker 6: new idea in like fourteen years, and that's his whole job.
Speaker 6: So I just find it helpful to think, who are
Speaker 6: they helping.
Speaker 3: Make inner said or something? For every complex problem, there's
Speaker 3: an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: They serve an important purpose and they make people feel better.
Speaker 3: But there's a downside too many of them.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, there's definitely a downced. I'm not trying to
Speaker 6: say they're good in some objective way. I'm just saying
Speaker 6: they're useful for people, just like a gun that can
Speaker 6: be useful, or saren gas can be useful, doesn't mean
Speaker 6: it's good. By the way, do you, guys, when an
Speaker 6: officer or an agent dies in the field of duty,
Speaker 6: do you do what journalists do and think of all
Speaker 6: the ways they fucked up? Like I find whenever someone dies,
Speaker 6: we're very sad and very upset when a journalist dies,
Speaker 6: like in a war situation, and it you know, I've
Speaker 6: lost some real friends and.
Speaker 2: It's awful, it's truly awful.
Speaker 6: But then I've also noticed and I think others have
Speaker 6: remarked on this that pretty soon we're talking about the
Speaker 6: choices they made that put them in harm's way that
Speaker 6: we wouldn't necessarily have made. And I always see that
Speaker 6: as our effort to like avoid the real terror, which
Speaker 6: is that could have happened to any one of us
Speaker 6: a million times.
Speaker 3: It's a good point, though. The world is complex and chaotic,
Speaker 3: and yeah, you have to create some sort of narrative
Speaker 3: otherwise you're worried that anything could happen at any time
Speaker 3: and you have no control. It's about control. I think
Speaker 3: it's about control. Yeah, of your circumstances, of your life,
Speaker 3: of your beliefs and your thoughts and your lifestyle matter,
Speaker 3: and you know, frankly, maybe it doesn't. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 3: the longer we talk, the less likely that we're going
Speaker 3: to solve these issues issues here, So we'll have to
Speaker 3: take this up next time on the next episode of
Speaker 3: Mission Implausibles.
Speaker 2: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher,
Speaker 2: and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible.
Speaker 2: It is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures
Speaker 2: for iHeartMedia,