A documentary separating the real history from America's most enduring paranormal legend.
“The film doesn’t resolve the Montauk Project. It asks why the story survives.”✦
At the easternmost tip of Long Island sits Camp Hero — a decommissioned military installation disguised, at different points in its life, as a fishing village, a church, and a windmill. To a generation of Long Island teenagers who broke in through holes in bunker walls, it became the birthplace of the Montauk Project conspiracy — and the uncredited inspiration for Stranger Things.
Montauk: Off the Record follows Dean Philippe, stationed here as a nineteen-year-old airman during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as he walks the grounds for the first time in decades and finds a name — a friend he hasn’t thought of in forty years — surfacing on its own.
Around Dean’s personal reckoning, two supporting voices frame the mystery: Brian, whose childhood exploration became a lifelong archive of the base’s stranger corners, and DJ, whose research grounds it in real military history.
In the early 1980s, a set of books by Preston Nichols, Al Bielek, and Duncan Cameron claimed that Camp Hero had been the site of a secret government program known as the Montauk Project. According to the legend, underground experiments in mind control, time travel, teleportation, and psychological warfare were conducted beneath the radar tower — often framed as a continuation of the infamous Philadelphia Experiment.
To a generation of Long Island teenagers who slipped through holes in bunker walls, the story felt plausible. The base was already forbidden, already crumbling, already full of sealed tunnels and Cold War silence. The Montauk Project gave that emptiness a narrative — complete with “Montauk Boys,” abducted children, and whispered accounts of a chair that could open doorways in time.
The Duffer Brothers drew directly from this atmosphere when developing Stranger Things. Their original pilot was even titled Montauk, and the show’s central ingredients — a secret government lab, child test subjects, interdimensional experiments, and a small coastal town — all echo the Montauk mythology. The fiction borrowed the mood; this film returns to the real place and people underneath it.
What often gets lost is that Camp Hero was also a functioning military installation. The 773rd Radar Squadron operated the AN/FPS-35 radar here. The base played a real role during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy assassination. Its buildings were disguised as a fishing village, a church, and a windmill to hide from Soviet reconnaissance. The Montauk Project did not erase that history — it overshadowed it. This film does not resolve the myth. It asks why the story survives.
The Duffer Brothers called their first draft Montauk. This is where that draft came from.
773rd Radar Squadron · 1961 — 1965
Stationed at Camp Hero with the 773rd Radar Squadron from 1961 to 1965, Dean arrived at nineteen years old as a cook and left four years later having lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy assassination from inside the base's perimeter. He later married a woman from Montauk he met during his service. Dean returns to the grounds for the first time in years for this film.
Author · Montauk Is Strange
Brian first found his way into Camp Hero as a ten-year-old in 1988, discovering a collapsed World War II bunker on a bike ride with friends. That accidental discovery grew into a lifetime of research, culminating in his book Montauk Is Strange — an archive of the base's military history alongside the decades of legend that have grown up around it.
Historian · Coastal Fire-Control Stations
DJ's connection to Montauk began at the lighthouse's bicentennial celebration in 1996, when his family became close with the site's longtime caretaker, Marge Winsky. That relationship led him to Camp Hero itself, and eventually to a graduate thesis on the base's coastal fire-control stations. DJ brings the film's grounding in documented military history.
Independent documentary work lives and dies on the people who believe in it early. Every contribution funds another day in the field with Dean, another archive pulled from storage, another mile of tape.