2/12/2020
General Notes on some claims made about the experiments conducted at the Montauk Air Force Base and the directions I might go with my story.
The Montauk Chair was a fictional device presented as an actuality by the writer Preston Nichols. Preston Nichols is one of the most vocal and visible proponents of several schizoid, sci-fi, conspiracy theories related to a decommissioned air force base on the east end of Long Island.
Because of his many books and YouTube videos on the alleged ‘Time Travel’ experiment conducted in the subterranean recess of the base, the Montauk Air Force base’s ‘actual’ history is often forgotten. Though the ‘real’ history of the base is probably boring compared to Nichol’s take, I hope to give it equal measure in my research. But first, it is hard to ignore Nichol’s bizarre and far-out version.
According to Preston Nichols, government scientists conducted experiments underneath the base, continuing to this day supposedly, using kidnapped people, some of which supposedly had ‘psychic’ abilities. The subjects who exhibited talent in this area were isolated and subjected to highly immoral ‘mind control’ experiments which eventually resulted in some of them gaining the ability to open time and dimensional ‘portals. Combining the so-called ‘Trauma-based’ “MK-Ultra’ mind control techniques, ‘tantric’ meditation techniques adapted to the western occult mode of ritual ‘magick’ with vaguely defined technologies at the base such as the SAGE radar, eventually the scientists, it is claimed with little hard evidence, that the subjects eventually contacted ‘extraterrestrial beings’ who provided the researchers with a blueprint for an advanced technological device that would allow the psychics to further enhance their abilities eventually learning how to ‘materialize’ thought and enhancing the other abilities just mentioned.
Many of the experiments that Preston Nichols claimed were conducted are too far-fetched to warrant any serious consideration. For example, he claims that they sent a man named Al Bielik back to the time of Christ to collect his DNA to bring it back to the present day and create a clone.
I hope to write a fictional story related to some mythology just covered that borrows from the ‘found footage’ style where the story appears to be an artifact of some actual events. Personally, I feel most if not all the conspiracy theories are fabricated, although I’m not sure why. To sell books? To sell a new age spirituality for alleged victims of the Montauk Project? Do the stories of the Montauk Project give victims of childhood abuse some mythology to help process their bad experiences or dreams? Posting my description of the Montauk Chair Story that was emailed to Yvonne Murphy.Does the Montauk Project story attract psychotics, schizophrenics, and acid-heads looking for some rationale behind their disjointed and fragmented ways of thinking? Interesting to note how The Montauk Project lore influenced ‘Stranger Things’.
I first heard about the Montauk Project from a friend named Michael Hemby who used to date my girlfriend’s sister. He told me he once tried to sneak into one bunker before the base became a national park. At the time it was just a decommissioned air force base. This was before they concreted all the bunkers off. He said that the passages were so quiet, still, and dark, seeming to just go on forever, that he became spooked almost immediately and never returned. Knowing Michael was a slightly superstitious guy, I figured his fear was just a part of his personality.
Speaking with others who grew up on this part of Long Island, I’ve heard many strange stories from people who are not necessarily into crazy conspiracy theories. Well, they are, but they don’t know it. For example, there is a bartender who was a friend of my girlfriend who claimed to be one of the ‘Montauk Children’. The Montauk Children were kidnapped and subjected to ‘Mind Control’ experiments.
Interestingly, the so-called mind control experiments I’ve read about in relation to the Montauk Project follow a similar pattern of another conspiracy/ semi-historical theory called ‘MK Ultra’. Some conspiracists claim they continued MK Ultra at the base after shut down. In reality, MK Ultra is not a far-fetched conspiracy theory since history shows that the CIA did in fact experiment with various techniques to get secrets from people or to brainwash them into doing things through some form of hypnotic triggering with various drugs and traumatic experiences. They apparently became interested in these techniques after witnessing American POW brainwashing during the Vietnam War or was it the Korean war and ‘they’ wanted to replicate these techniques to have an advantage over their adversaries.
Posting my description of the Montauk Chair Story emailed to Yvonne Murph One of the most interesting and offensive cases of this occurred in a psychiatric hospital in which a woman who was suffering from postpartum depression suffered through a CIA-funded experiment. It was a method that sought to completely ‘erase’ her identity and then rebuild her from the ground up. Using stimulants and depressants and through bringing about a chemically induced coma, they discovered that such techniques were not so simple, and it just resulted in damaged goods, so to speak. Surprising there was no moral question about such an extreme and rough treatment, even if it was for the greater good or possibly the good of the patient. She settled out of court years later. This is one of the most historically validated cases of the government trying to use extreme techniques of mind control. I side with the idea that even if the government experimented with these techniques, they were probably unsuccessful in achieving any useful results, the illegality of it all aside.
Because events like this happened, such methods of Mind Control became the storylines of various conspiracy theories of greater and greater complexity and convolution leading spin-offs with more of a spiritual bent such as ‘The Monarch Program’, the product, of a right-wing fundamentalist Christian with psychological issues. Interestingly, her tale is like Nichols. Recovering lost memories through hypnotic regression. Discovering multiple personalities created by the government. Most of the victims of this so-called version of MK Ultra claim there is a ‘Satanic’ conspiracy to train women to be sex slaves for the rich and powerful. Though it may be true that such things happen for less ‘sinister’ reasons. An organized effort by some cultish faction of the US Government seems like a stretch or rather, the way they frame the story seems to stretch credulity.
At any rate, in my story, there is an aspect of the Montauk story where the occult practice of ‘taboo’ sex (Tantra) is used to bring about various ‘psychic powers’. To make my story more creepy and shocking for at least the entertainment value of it, I’m hoping to rationalize the method used to create a time portal with a made-up combination of high-technology, occult practices, and alien ‘influence’. This is something stranger things left out of the Montauk mythos they lifted. I’m big on the HR Geiger take on the unconscious and Ridley Scott’s execution of Geiger’s mythos. The Montauk Project seems a perfect story to tie these ideas together, to give the story the ‘scariness’ needed for the story I’m shooting for.
2/12/2020 Evening
Posting my description of the Montauk Chair Story that was emailed to Yvonne Murphy.
Hi again Professor Murphy, Thanks for taking the time the other day to give me some ideas for this independent study storytelling format class. I got an ambitious idea for a short story about time travel. Its a work of weird fiction, a sci-fi thriller. The basic gist of the story is, two friends, one a bookish rationalist, the other a conspiracy theorist and adventurer embark on an exploration of the tall tales surrounding the Montauk Air Force Base. First through a conversation about videos and books about the so-called ‘Montauk Project’ but later through a wild journey into the unknown. The conspiracy theorist, ‘Dane’, convinces his friend ‘Specter’ to go with him to break into the bunkers at the now sealed up base which is also a public park on the far east end of Long Island, to find out once and for all if there is any truth to any of the stories about the base. Dane is a professional explorer; he has a lot of the equipment needed to get into the underground passages in the base’s bunker to see what is there. He also has the equipment needed for documenting and filming such an adventure. Specter being a rational and academic guy is biased against conspiracy theories and tales about sci-fi notions of alien technologies, or dimensional travel, or time travel, or mind control experiments and so on. He is a keen adherent to scientific knowledge and only agrees to go because he is confident reason will triumph against the nonsense and they can put all the stories to rest once and for all. There is rich background mythology revolving around the Montauk Project. I don’t expect to tie it all together in this story, necessarily. I wanted to focus on the technology known as the Montauk Chair which allows a certain well trained (or brain-washed) and innately ‘psychic’ person to project their consciousness into different times, and different dimensions and also to materialize the contents of their mind. The story goes that the government kidnapped runaways and used brutal mind control techniques to find their most promising subjects. Initially, they were magnifying their psychic abilities with the SAGE Radar. This led to them contacting ‘alien intelligences’ which communicated to the researchers the blueprint for a device known at The Montauk Chair which would enhance the psychic’s ability much more than even with the radar. Once they construct the chair and used various morally questionable techniques for enhancing and magnifying the tests subjects’ abilities, they can unlock time travel, dimensional travel, remote viewing, and materializing thought. These seem like interesting speculative sci-fi tropes. The experiments eventually lead to the manifestations of a ‘being’ of some sort which destroys the base leading to the eventual shutting down and sealing off of the whole project. With the background mentioned established as the story they intend to investigate, the two characters on a bet break into the bunkers, and have a suspenseful journey deep into the abandoned tunnels until discovering the big secret which is that the ‘gate’ that was opened all those years before that was never closed. The explanation is that ‘they’ never could close it and they knew if they restricted any access to the base it would attract even more attention. So they hid it in plain sight and just cordoned it off, expecting no one to dig deep enough to rediscover it. Because everyone who entered it never came back, they deemed it too dangerous for continued research and sealed off. Other things happened as well which resulted in a frantic shut down of the whole operation with all knowledge of it destroyed along with most of the people involved except for a few stragglers whose stories were so bizarre and extreme that they were deemed mentally unreliable, even within the government. But Dane and Specter rediscover it. As they get closer to it, they think something is following them. A suspenseful and chilling scene follo3ws in which they are fleeing ‘something’ that is after them as they get close to some other mysterious energy form which they don’t understand…yet. When they finally reach ‘The Gate’ they aren’t sure what it is exactly. Maybe Specter and Dane debate what it might be. But being in the presence of it causes temporal disturbances and odd sensations novel to them. Then whatever was chasing them audibly warns them not to go into the gate and whatever was chasing them shoots at them and yells that they will shoot them unless they leave the way they come, never to return and never to tell anyone of this place. They consider it but are frightened, and so to escape they go into the gate instead, it is the only way out; as they do, they fade out of this time and space, but they see who it was that was trying to stop them since they step out of the dark hallway and realize it was themselves only much older. At that moment, their surroundings completely change, and they find themselves in a well-lit, clean, and a new version of the room they originally entered only now with scientists all around, and all the electronics and equipment new and working and a psychic test subject whose abilities are being magnified by the SAGE radar. They realize that this was the first moment the time gate was opened and the Montauk Project is just getting off the ground. They are its first success. The scientists at first don’t know if Dane and Specter are from another dimension or just another place in their time or from another time, or a materialization of the psychic’s consciousness but they will find out. This is classified and highly dangerous experimentation, and no one is sure what sort of results to expect. Soldiers imprison the two time travellers, subject them to a battery of tests and examinations and interrogations until the researchers realize what has happened. The most improbable thing had happened. Two people from the future went looking for a legendary time portal, and they found it. Now here they were in the past with information on future outcomes of the very project the scientists are just starting to develop. Because they have all this material on the Montauk Air Force base on the containing information about things that supposedly happened at the base in the past which Specter at least thought was all made up sci-fi nonsense from the schizophrenic radar engineer Preston Nichols, all the research they were just starting to develop since the Philadelphia Experiment, was enriched with future history.
They become the first success of the project. And they are used to supplement the knowledge of the scientists to make all the things in the mythology possible because they read a future history of it in the books of Preston Nichols which extrapolates on top-secret experiments they were attempting to conduct, ideas they were exploring which had never gotten out to the public. It confirms for them that what they are doing is inevitable, and it sets the course they take. I guess my idea is similar in some ways to the movie ‘Mr. Nobody’, but I thought if I could create a sense of realism to the story where it is like the viewer or reader or listener is involved in something that happened in the spirit of ‘found footage’, or maybe ‘case files’ it would be a worthy spin-off. To supplement my work, I plan a course of research for fiction. Coming up with a systematic method of researching a story like this where all the details create as much of a sense of realism as possible would be my goal. I have written some story down but first I just wanted to express some ideas to you, rework what I’ve written a little and then I’ll submit the first draft to you. In closing, I guess I need guidance on how to structure my story and how to give it the realism I’m shooting for. I’m open to any ideas or suggestions. I look forward to revisiting this work with you. -Al
The Montauk Chair Outline.
- The story is written by a character in the story recounting events that already occurred.
- Something happened which has caused him to desire an escape from everything.
- events that led up to the present moment.
- The main character, R. Specter, is a scientist on vacation visiting a friend on the east of Long Island named ‘Dane’.
- His friend, Dane, is an adventurous type into spelunking, urban exploration, hiking, camping, and fringe experiences and beliefs.
- Specter is bored with his academic life, in a rut, and is drawn into what he normally would avoid—a set of conspiracy theories revolving around the so-called ‘Montauk Project’.
- At first, Specter thinks Dane is gullible and easily drawn into fabricated stories although finds the stories interesting as science fiction.
- they converse about theories posited by a real-life author alleged engineer involved in the Montauk Project.
- extra-terrestrial contact.
- time travel.
- species hybridization/chimeras.
- psychological mind control techniques.
- the kidnapping of runaways to isolate individuals with ‘psychic’ ability to train them.
- the kidnapping of runaways to isolate individuals with ‘psychic’ ability to train them.
- ‘The Philadelphia Experiment.
- teleportation
- time wormholes.
- Al Belek.
- Specter gets pulled into the vast, unending circles of speculation related to ‘Camp Hero’
- maybe some advanced and terrible technologies are rightfully hidden from the public.
- intentional misinformation and obfuscation.
- prevents ‘adversaries’ from getting a hold or developing similar technologies.
- experimental technologies could be too dangerous for the government to admit they’d created it creating scandals and breaking of international treaties.
- Specter wonders if maybe he is too biased by his rational positivism to actually see things clearly sometimes.
- Preston Nichols
- many videos of him making claims that seem unhinged, or because of mental illness (schizophrenia)
- maybe some advanced and terrible technologies are rightfully hidden from the public.
- They visit the base together to find out for themselves if there is any evidence of the conspiracies.
- Because any real evidence would have to be inside the bunkers, they plan an exploration.
- Dane’s explorer skills allow them to gather gear and methods of breaking into the bunkers.
- They slowly bring equipment to the base, hiding it and amassing gear for the planned night.
- the pick a rainy new moon for concealment, and less likelihood of being caught.
- finally, they pneumatically drill through the concrete.
- they descend into the tunnels.
- they move a lot of debris and junk blocking various entryways.
- eventually, they think someone is falling them but when only when they are moving.
- when they stop, the sound stops.
- they eventually find a large room with a chair inside a pyramid surrounded by electrical equipment.
- As they enter the room, they hear people yelling at them to stop and turn back.
- bullet fire erupts, barely missing them, but instead of turning back, they run into the room towards the chair.
- when they walk near the chair, a temporal displacement occurs.
- the last thing they see is two people running towards them waving their arms and firing rounds into the air.
- they yell at them to stop, to turn back.
- then Dane and Specter realize that the two people who appear out of the hallway are actually themselves, only much older.
- At that moment, the entire room changes, as if time has reversed and now they are stepping into an earlier time.
- they are on the base in the 1960s at the precise moment which scientists are first able to create a permanent time wormhole into the time they just left.
- but the scientists do not know what has just happened.
- they just see two men appearing as if out of nowhere.
- they immediately quarantine them.
- interrogation
- Dane and Specter had on them all the research they’d compiled related to the Montauk Project.
- it turns out that all the experiments they thought were mere conspiracy theories, were things the government was just starting to explore.
- now they have future information describing the direction their initial experimentation eventually will take.
- as a result, Dane and Specter inadvertently bring about the very thing they sought to confirm.\
- Stuck in the past.
- now the two are prisoners of the government.
- and they cause all the terrible and immoral and dangerous experiments to take place in the future.
- after they deem the two safe to return to society to live their lives out.
- they trick the government into believing this, intending to stop themselves from ever entering the wormhole.
- Because any association with their early self could have unforeseen and catastrophic consequences, they wait til the night they discover the wormhole.
- even the slightest attempt to influence their young selves may cause their time traveling selves, having different histories.
- they live their life separately to allow everything to happen as it did.
- even the slightest attempt to influence their young selves may cause their time traveling selves, having different histories.
- the wormhole that was created always leads back to the moment they created it no matter when you enter it.
- they live out their lives until the fateful night follow themselves down and try to find a way of stopping them without revealing to them who they are.
- but they fail and reveal the truth at the last minute out of desperation.
- Since they couldn’t stop themselves, their old selves remain while their young selves disappear. Near the end, Specter writes what happened since he is near the end, anyway.
- Dane was too rattled by the whole thing and ended up retreating off to some Buddhist monastery for the rest of his days.
- At first, Specter thinks Dane is gullible and easily drawn into fabricated stories although finds the stories interesting as science fiction.
- The main character, R. Specter, is a scientist on vacation visiting a friend on the east of Long Island named ‘Dane’.
- Something happened which has caused him to desire an escape from everything.
February 13th, 2020.
The occult connection between The Montauk Project and the ‘infamous’ but laughable Aleister Crowley.
Since there is no such thing as ‘magic’, and since there is no evidence that extra-terrestrials are real, then any claim that Aleister Crowley contacted aliens or was involved in the Montauk Project in 1918 to help the government train psychic kidnap victims to open dimensional portals, travel in time, summon ‘beings’, communicate with ‘aliens’ is doubtful. Such ‘abilities’ sound like age-old superstitions wrapped up in modern language.
Aleister Crowley, though no doubt a charlatan showman and spoiled rich-boy megalomaniac hedonistic libertine and awful poet and writer, used a similar marketing strategy for his cult that Donald Trump uses for his political brand. The goal is always to draw attention to yourself, whether negative or positive. The truth about you as an individual is irrelevant. Anything that gets the public eye is all that counts. Allow people to believe anything that bolsters your ego. That Crowley was a ‘spiritual’ guru is laughable, and I think even he probably would have dissuaded anyone from following him. Ironically, this attitude is probably what attracted followers to him.
False or Dubious Connections Between Crowley and UFOlogy and other Sci-fi as reality concepts.
Since the American public is compartmentalized in their way of processing claims, it is not surprising that some might fall because Crowley, with his wicked ‘sex magick’ techniques of contacting ‘praetor human intelligence’ including his drawing of ‘Lam’ who is apparently one of the first depictions in the modern day of a ‘grey’ alien, was something to take seriously. That he was involved in a lot of UFO-ology in his later years and with his American disciples like Jack Parsons seems to say more about American culture than Crowley’s beliefs. Crowley’s LAM figure is touted as evidence that Crowley’s magick brought forth the ufos. He just gets tied into the UFO obsessions in American culture. His magickal powers were so great that he unlocked the secrets to dimensional travel, time travel, and communicating with alien beings. Communicating with intelligences that once considered ‘spirits’ but now he calls ‘praeter human intelligence’ in his ‘Book of the Law’ (a channeled ‘Holy’ book). My theory about why people associate Crowley with Montauk project is because of his sinister personae combined with purported high intelligence, and an ‘amoral’ willingness to explore ‘forbidden’ arts and bring them back into the modern age with its focus on science, easily ties in with the Montauk project mythos. His study of Asian Tantric spirituality also fits in with some sexual hysteria revolving around the conspiratorial end of CIA Mind Control through drugs, hypnosis, ‘trauma, and sexual high bizarreness.
So what I hope to do in this story is to present a highly skeptical view of Crowley from the perspective of Spector. I will write it like a research project where he is looking at many sites, trying to interview people who think there’s truth to it, perhaps a fictionalized account of getting in touch with Preston Nichols and Al Bielik and Duncan Cameron. But the point is to show the fallacies and delusions at work. For instance, ‘Cameron’ is the last name of Jack Parsons’s ‘Scarlet Whore of Babylon’ who he supposedly ‘summoned’ in the form of an actual woman who showed up at his door. Duncan Cameron was one of the best psychics at the Montauk project. He has the same last name as Parson’s ‘Moonchild’. They MUST be connected!
Source Material for conspiracies.
I also am interested in finding real source material for many of the conspiracies in the story. I know there is the source material for the Philadelphia Experiment. There is probably a ‘first UFO sighting reported’. There is historical data about MK Ultra. I wonder when it schizmed off into wilder and wilder conspiracy?
Psychological Skepticism towards ‘Trauma-based conditioning’
There is also a skeptical analysis of the so-called ‘trauma-based Mind Control techniques. The point Spector will make is that it only leads to mental instability and does not work to create ‘Manchurian Candidates’ who can be triggered hypnotically to carry out assassinations. There should be a sound psychological counterpoint to the idea that traumatizing, abusing and drugging people could ever produce any controllable or stable personality that the government could make use of.
The Pro-Conspiracy Camp.
Many intelligent people believe in conspiracies. How to portray them through Dane in a convincing and charitable way? Thinking about people I know who are into it but are not dysfunctional mental cases.
Friday the 14th of February, 2020.
Today I started looking for hard science or science fiction books about time travel. It is maybe an overdone topic in fiction and movies, so coming up with an original spin will not be easy. The movie ‘Primer’ is one of my favorite films about time travel. In it, two scientists accidentally travel back in time for 5 hours. It is possible to go back farther, but it causes the traveler to get more sick the farther back they go. Eventually, the two engineers become obsessed with going back to prevent the tragic death of a loved one. In Primer, the characters can coexist with their past selves with many copies of themselves running around. They go as far as knocking their old selves out, hiding the unconscious body, taking over and redoing their actions with a recording in their ear of every step to take until they can make one slight change that will finally alter events to go in the direction they seek. They go back over and over and over doing this like true scientists, slightly changing their actions in the past each time, trying to find just the right series of actions that will lead to the result they seek.
But there is another theory about time travel that says if you go back in time, you will start in on a different timeline than the one you left from. I would like to read more hard science on this question about alternate timelines versus coexisting on the same timeline.
Kathy brought up a good point about the structure of a story. It needs a rise in action, a climax, and a denouement. I rarely think about those elements when writing stories. Considering what she said, I got one idea about the first rise in action. Specter, being a skeptical and cynical science writer, gets into Dane’s interest in the off-the-charts conspiracy theories of the Montauk project for entertainment initially. He’s bored with his dry, stuffy, overly specialized academic work. He went on vacation on the east end of Long Island intentionally to see the weirdest guy he knew to get out of his rut. As they get more into the mythos of the Montauk project, Specter wonders about his world view. Is the scientific world view an ideology with its own culturally relative biases and dogmas that blind it to the possibility that things are going on which are ‘beyond’ conventional logic, reasoning, and empiricism? But he feels frustrated with himself to even seriously consider such ideas. So there is this inner conflict he’s dealing with over his scientific conventionality and the wish to recapture curiosity, wonder, and awe. Because of this, he gets more interested in Dane’s way of looking at things until they are researching the Montauk Project deliriously and seriously considering breaking into the bunkers to find out if there is any truth to some wild claims they are now familiar with.
At this point the reader doesn’t know that Dane and Specter have doubles coexisting with them in the world, trying to avoid them, but also trying to prevent their young selves from ever discovering the Montauk Chair.
The old doubles have been living in the world since, maybe the 60s or 80s. For quite a while they were prisoners of the US Government. I’m not sure how to explain how they get away from the government. Also, I’m not sure what the problem is with their old selves running into their young selves. I’m using the old Back to the Future II trope about how if you run into yourself in a different timeline, it could cause the universe to explode or something. I’d like to research the ‘hard’ scientific speculation on how meeting yourself could pan out. For now, I’m going with the idea that they found out some reason they must avoid doing anything to alert their young selves to the fact their old selves are running around on their timeline. Maybe while imprisoned by the government, they learn the researchers have discovered that when people travel in time and run into themselves that something terrible happens which they discovered and must never happen again.
Assuming I figure out a way to logically explain how the two escape imprisonment by the government, the next problem is that there are so many ways they could prevent their young selves from discovering the chair. I suppose it would be very difficult for them to return to the chair while the government was still underground doing their sinister experiments. The air force base would be completely locked down, still operational. Based on Preston Nichols’s account of why the project was shut down, the only time the two could get onto the base to do things that would prevent their young selves from finding the chair would be after one of the ‘psychics’–Cameron Duncan–manifests the ‘monster’ from his unconscious, the monster that Preston Nichols claims rampaged around the base until the whole experiment had to be shut down permanently.
A few Links to Science Articles on Time Travel
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-chronology-protection/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1269288/STEPHEN-HAWKING-How-build-time-machine.html
Stephen Hawking wrote that traveling into the past is likely impossible because enlarging the unimaginably tiny wormholes in the quantum foam underlying everything would create a radiation feedback loop, destroying the wormhole the moment it was created. Yet if we accelerate matter to near the speed of light, the matter can travel into the future.
So, if scientists can accelerate themselves to near the speed of light, they would travel into the future. And so if Dane and Spector are in the future, maybe they don’t step into a wormhole. Instead, scientists have come to them from the past. But to them, it seems like they have stepped into the past? Not sure if the vibes with the physics behind time travel.
Time travel into the past undermines causality. If traveling into the past were possible, then wouldn’t we see time travelers now? Time travelers might not visit our past, or, maybe the past they visit, if it were possible, is in an alternate universe.
Saturday, February 15th, 2020.
The Discovery of Travel into the Future.
Coming up is an attempt at a hard sci-fi description of how time travel becomes possible based on the theories of Stephen Hawking. I mean this to become a ‘Welcome to the Montauk Project’ informational package for onboarding new scientists to the Top Secret Experiments, modeled maybe after any ideas I can get on how scientists were on-boarded to the Manhattan Project.
In the 1980s, the United States government discovered the secret of traveling into the future. It was determined that enlarging wormholes, hidden away in the so-called quantum foam, destroyed the wormhole because of an unavoidable radiation feedback loop. Therefore, traveling into the past was an impossibility, and many physicists breathed a sigh of relief, for causality was preserved.
The development of the Montauk Chair showed that if they accelerated an object close to the speed of light, the time scale of that object slowed down relative to other objects that were not accelerated near the speed of light. Once the accelerated object slowed down to the speed of objects traveling at their regular, unmanipulated speeds, that object had, for all intents and purposes, traveled into the future, while the objects left behind, appeared to ‘age’, or time sped up for them. So, unlike in the movies or science fiction, time travel is an inevitable result of accelerating the momentum of an object.
But the main problem was generating enough energy to accelerate a human being to such speeds while keeping them alive. They could accelerate only the smallest known particles to such levels.
But then the government discovered how to quantify human consciousness, discovering the fundamental unit of energy comprising human consciousness itself. Once this was discovered, it was possible to replicate consciousness ‘virtually’ through the use of supercomputers, evolutionary biology, quantum physics, and neuroscience computers with the same computing power as the human brain. But a perfect emulation of its objective, physical state. Once this was discovered, they conducted experiments to accelerate the speed of pure consciousness itself to such a degree that the self-aware aspect of consciousness could emerge in the future while reality around it appeared to have slowed down. But consciousness needed a container and the meat, blood, and bones of a human being were more than just consciousness, although a ‘disembodied’ consciousness, though once the parlance of spook hunters, was now an actuality. The clues were all there for so long, though. Experiments in lucid dreaming, so-called ‘astral traveling’ suggested an ability of consciousness in which we could imagine the self traveling outside of the body. This was thought to be a trick of the brain, though. There was no solid evidence that anything tangible was traveling through time and space. The traveling was occurring solely within the imagination of the traveler, or so it was thought. But some individuals were better at it than others. Some could disassociate enough from their body to feel as if they were literally and objectively traveling outside of their body through a consistent environment that other travelers could confirm. But since there was no understanding of the physical nature of consciousness, they thought it to be nothing more than the imagination of the individual. A collective hallucination. It didn’t matter if people were mapping out these so-called astral realms in some relatively consistent form, because it all seemed like a result of suggestion and self-hypnosis. Yet the question remained, what is the nature of consciousness in the natural world? And if consciousness can trick itself into believing it is outside of the body, then is it? Is our sense of being in our bodies itself another sort of trick or delusion that serves an evolutionary purpose, but is not an accurate reflection on how things really are?
But because we could not directly observe the subjective state of the emulation through any instrumentation, it became necessary to find suitable human hosts to house an artificial consciousness which, though much simpler than real human consciousness.
The Story Arc
https://www.nownovel.com/blog/understanding-storytelling-arc/
Links on the Montauk Project.
This link shows one motivation for pushing potentially fake conspiracy theories to the public. The money motive. Since time travel for human beings has not been demonstrated scientifically, a site claiming to offer information on time travel for a fee is most likely going to promote some ‘astral’ or consciousness-related method for traveling in time. Having known individuals who think just because they can ‘astral travel’ through self-hypnosis, and because these astral realms are being mapped out ‘objectively’ by, for example, people associated with the Monroe Institute, that any place you supposedly visit in your mind via astral traveling is as real as the external world. The point is, it is possible to trick the mind into believing many delusions, to invite and produce convincing hallucinations. Even our day-to-day reality is just a fabrication of our minds, a projection perhaps. So what are the problems with a solipsistic view of life?
https://www.timetraveleducationcenter.com/
Article about a supposed experiment that will ‘prove’ there is another universe parallel to ours, the upside-down universe of Stranger Things.
2/16/2020
It just occurred to me…we need a villain, an evil academic who is amoral and will do anything it takes to achieve whatever is possible. A real Professor Vander-Schlock. Should the villain be slightly comical? Or authentically disturbing? Comical is probably more fun and campy. Authentic is draining, disturbing, and probably too serious to keep the average reader on board. Its hard one. If we’re going for authenticity, then deep, dark, dangerous, and unnerving is the only way.
But I’ll keep his stupid name for now. Its a parody of those rich, over-educated, big-ego, grandiose academics we all love to hate or hate to love.
Professor Robert Marx Vanderschlock was the world’s foremost expert on the Grand Unified Theory of science with a Ph.D. in quantum physics, neuroscience, and Artificial Intelligence and masters in evolutionary biology, computer science to name a few of his accolades. Though some geniuses graduated MIT at 12, prodigies with inbuilt, almost inherited an aptitude for the sciences, Vanderschlock, was fairly conventional in his accomplishments, having a kind of stoic apathy towards all that was expected of him, but seeing no real point in it all. But he was not a melancholic type. He was a realist and a pessimist. But, at the same time, as a consummate scientific mind, with an enormous level of patience and almost demoniac powers of concentration, his passion exercised a cool, calculated, patient, and instrumental method.
Absolutely without friends or lovers completely out of choice—friends were a distraction and a waster of energy, and very few people he knew were worth his time; his pursuits, and the way he worked, was singular. His work at the Brookhaven Labs was legendary, though. For what he lacked in personality, he made up for in capability and inventiveness. With the mathematical capability of a computer, and a photographic mind, combined with a magnificent focus that would have destroyed most minds, he had been working on a mathematical theory for years, first on paper—a series of formulations meant to quantify one of the great mysteries of science. In fact, it was such a mystery, and so difficult, that he told no one of his pursuit. For if he were to do so, there is no doubt he would have been deemed a quack, or a mad scientist, or dangerous, or many ignorant judgments that lesser men waste their time with because of their own inability to accomplish much, as they passively go along with the program, enjoy their boringly secure little lives, save enough to have a nice gravestone, forgotten by all after a hundred years.
Because of his sheer intellectual capabilities, he had many times been contacted by the US Government asked if interested in working for them on a secret project which has several novel and dangerous problems suitable for a man of his caliber. The contacts increased after he started at Brookhaven Labs. But since they would never specify the exact nature of the experiment, they needed his help in; he kept plugging away at his theory. But then on that fateful morning, the morning when everything changed, when the world changed, he was commanded to report to the Montauk Air Force Base immediately to assist in a scientific experiment of monumental importance for the national security of America, and of the world. Since he had no choice, he packed his things and met up at the specified location on the east end of Long Island. The year was 1969.
He was picked up by a car and driven in silence to the base. He did not speak with the driver, and the driver did not speak with him. As they drove up to the base for the first time, he noticed the SAGE Radar looming on the horizon atop the concrete, rectangular structure beneath. They pulled up to a nondescript building, and the driver escorted him to an office inside. An Air member of some sort was sitting there with a man in civilian attire. They offered him a seat asked if he would like a drink. He said no. And so commander spoke.
Professor Vanderschlock, my name or rank, is not important. What we are about to tell you Top Secret and any disclosure of this information is punishable by imprisonment, or worse, capital punishment. Do you understand?
The professor nodded his head.
So I suppose you are wondering what this is all about?
I am true. I noticed there is a SAGE Radar over there. It must be the largest one I’ve ever seen. I’ve read quite a lot about them, and am intimately familiar with how they are engineered, what they are for, but I can’t imagine you brought me here for help with monitoring the Russians?
No sir, this base is no longer involved in its original mission which was, as you correctly say, to monitor for incoming Russians. Sir, this base has been converted into a research facility to study a phenomenon in which we are having great difficulty understanding.
And what phenomenon is that, may I call you ‘commander’?
The professor, despite his genius, had a weakness for top-down authoritarian games. Psychologically, he felt that humans were best off when highly organized, and structured by those above them who were suited to the task. And even if this man before him did not have his intellect or breadth of knowledge, he had the will to place orders and get things done. He respected that.
Professor, are you familiar with the Philadelphia Experiment and the USS Eldridge?
Can’t say that I am.
Well, sir, the USS Eldridge was used to conduct a radar invisibility experiment in the 40s. I am not a scientist, but I can tell you it was transported, or teleported to another location and then back again to its original location. When it returned, sailors and staff on board were missing. Some had been mentally affected severely. Some sir, their bodies…
At that point the man in white who had been sitting off to the side patiently listening chimed in.
Their bodies molecularly bonded to the ship Professor as if the atoms of the ship had been taken apart then reassembled through some hitherto unknown process, an accidental effect of creating a magnetic field which was mean to conceal the ship instead transported it and we don’t know why or how it happened. As the chief nuclear physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratories, we became aware through our sources you secretly worked on a mathematical theory of time travel, interdimensional travel, and a quantum theory of consciousness.
Vonschloch was taken aback that anyone could have known about his private work and thought back, wondering who would have betrayed his trust…
It is no one you knew professor. No one you knew betrayed you. We took it upon ourselves to monitor your activities due to your reputation and talent, as we do to many scientists and researchers throughout the world. We chose you to help us because some of your work coincides with top-secret research we have been conducting at this facility.
The commander took a seat and allowed the scientists to continue on, gratefully.
You have been experimenting with time travel? Interdimensional travel and what have you discovered about consciousness? This is all theoretical.
The scientists wrote a formula on the board.
2/17/2020 Foils and Time Travel Physics.
Foils
Physics of Time Travel
https://slate.com/technology/2009/08/a-physicist-looks-at-the-time-traveler-s-wife.html
2/19/2020
This scene is about Specter’s visit early in his trip to Montauk. I started thinking today about ways I could incorporate seemingly trivial events that are actually a result of the fact that Dane and Specter go back in time. ITs like Primer that way. Events the reader thinks are just a part of the present, turn out to be tied in with the past which was caused by traveling back. Even though traveling back in time is apparently impossible.
Specter got up out of bed and walked to the sliding door to look at the shoreline that cool, bright morning. Out the window, he could see that at this time of year, hardly anyone was around this sleepy resort town. During the summer he knew there would be an invasion of college kids, as this was like the new hot spot for spring breakers. He thought back on his 20s longingly, remembering when everything he did felt natural and without self-censorship. There was no real direction in his life then, and it had become troublesome, eventually. But maybe he’d gone too far organizing his life and future. Maybe he could find some balance between regimentation and freewheeling.
Back when he used to read fiction, he came across the works of HP Lovecraft. It occurred to him now, sipping his coffee and looking out on the horizon past the empty beach, that the name of the ship which had supposedly been teleported during the so-called Philadelphia Experiment was called The USS Eldridge, hearkening back to a Lovecraftian word ‘Eldritch’. The coincidence struck him as slightly comical as did all things sinister, weird, or ghostly. Lovecraft himself could not have come up with a more perfect name for a ship that supposedly was subjected to the most bizarre and uncanny scientific experiment in history. From his readings of Preston Nichols’s and various websites on the subject, the experiment made the ship invisible to radar, with the side effect of teleportation. . During its journey through hyperspace, two members of the ship attempted to jump off, finding themselves trapped in the future, trapped in the 80s of all places! When the ship reappeared, many of the people on board had ‘lost their minds’ from whatever they saw during their hyperspace trip.. Some were molecularly bonded to the metal of the ship. The picture of sailors merged into the metal of the Eldridge had a slightly haunting quality that irked Specter a bit, to his surprise. But he didn’t believe in ‘hauntings’ or being ‘spooked’ by the unknown. He lived in a rational, comprehensible universe, and what he could not understand, he could not claim to know anything meaningful about. When he was younger, the unknown had this romantic, spooky, adventurous quality, but now it was just meaningless worshipping of the unknown like all the mystics in their ivory towers, escaping from the real world with their phantasmagoria fixation. He regretted feeling this way secretly, but he felt it was necessary to view things this way, to see things clearly.
Dane burst into the room excitedly. Rob! You will not believe what I just found!
Specter turned around, almost spilling his coffee, his quiet contemplation interrupted. What Dane? What is it?
OK, so last night I was at this bar in town and I’m getting lit right! So there’s this grizzled looking guy at the bar drinking too. We strike up a conversation and before you know it, he’s asking me if I know a way he could sell a control panel that he stole from the air force base back in the 80s. He tells me he snuck into the base back after it had first been closed down and snagged a control panel from inside the SAGE Radar tower and he wants to sell it!
Sell it for what? Scrap metal?
No man think about it, its in perfect condition. Did you study electrical engineering as an undergrad right? maybe we could hook it back up and make the radar work again?
Are you kidding me? Have you seen that rusted out radar tower online? There is no way anyone is making anything work over there again! There’s no power. It is all ripped apart. Seriously.
Dane seemed dejected, like a kid told that Santa Claus doesn’t exist at that.
They went over to a nearby organic food store to pick up some breakfast. Dane brought his laptop so they could talk about the Project over breakfast.
As they sat there waiting for their food, Dane popped open the laptop and commented on a bunch of open tabs he had on the project.
So, Rob, I was thinking about it last night after a few drinks. Maybe there’s a reason there are so many bizarre stories about the base.
Yeah, there is, it’s called gullibility. Face it man, the base’s real history is a lot more interesting than all that alien conspiracy crap.
Rob had started in on Preston Nichols Experiment in time Travel just for a laugh. Preston Nichols was supposedly an engineer who worked on the project. He lived in a house full of old radio receiving equipment. He just looked like a vintage 50s hardware hoarder. None of it looked like it worked at all. He was just living in a house full of inoperable junk ranting about pseudoscientific, metaphysical woo basically. Yet Dane thought there was some hidden kernel of truth in all this?
Just hear me out. So obviously some stories about the Montauk Project are complete nonsense and granted Nichols and Al and Cameron may all have made up a lot of crap or are delusional or maybe just spinning stories for money or fame or whatever.
But what if all these bizarre stories are a disinformation campaign to cover up things that happened at the base? If ‘they’ spread enough insane stories, any true stories become obscured in all the noise.
For the first time, Specter thought Dane might make sense.
It’s possible Dane that something happened at the base which was covered up. I mean, the MK Ultra stuff was historically accurate. There was, in fact, a mind control program run by the CIA. I found a fascinating web article about this shrink who the government hired to conduct secret mind-control experiments in an asylum. He found this family less woman suffering from postpartum depression and he started shooting her up with many drugs, trying to wipe her identity to rebuild it again later.
I read the one too. Some evil shit that. they put her in a coma and had to reteach her everything like she was infant afterward. They would give her stimulants and downers and psychedelics. Amazing she didn’t go insane or die of an overdose. But when she finally had the presence of mind to prosecute, they settled out of court. That way it would draw attention away from the public eye.
Right, Dane so mind control was a real historical goal of the CIA, but so they destroyed much information about the program it’s hard to really know the details and that is exactly why so they have spun many conspiracy theories around it. Nature abhors a vacuum.
Dane, did you see that Netflix show about the spook who jumped to his death out of a hotel in New York City?
No missed that one. I work Dane.
well so his son who went to Harvard, spent decades investigating what really happened, and it turns out that most likely the whole tale of him losing his shit on LSD, was really a front for assassination because he was about to spill the beans on illegal bio-weapon testing the government was doing.
So you’re saying maybe the stories about camp hero are so bizarre and excessive that it almost seems intentional? Like its a part of a campaign to conceal something else?
Exactly what I’m saying. Obviously not everything Nichols or any of the madmen who are spinning sci-fi tales and offering new age healing therapy to victims of the project as a side hustle is true or even remotely close to the truth. But what if, at the heart of it all, there was some time travel experiment that was too dangerous to carry on with?
Why time travel? ‘
That was when Dane produced the letter.
It was a single yellowed envelope with the words ‘For Dane and Specter, to be opened on the day Dane gives this letter to Specter.
Rob looked over at Dane’s face quizzically and said, so what’s this?
Dane said, ‘I don’t know.’ I haven’t opened yet.
Indeed, it was still sealed.
Who gave this to you?
I don’t know. I found it in my mailbox this morning.
So why are you giving it to me?
Because once I give it you, which is now, we can open it?
What are you talking about? It could be opened anytime. Rob grabbed it out of his hand and tore it open.
It had a musty smell like old comic book paper from the 80s. Inside was a single piece of paper with a typed message on it.
Rob, if you’re reading this letter, then Dane has delivered it to you just as requested. I cannot tell you who I am, but it is important that you take what I am about to write to you seriously. Something has happened which I can’t explain to you, but it is something that should have never happened and I’m not sure if we can undo it. But if it can, then please do what I am about to ask you.
At that point, Rob threw the letter down laughing and stared at Dane with a comical sinister gaze. YOU wrote this you goof? I recognize the comical dramatics dude! What do you take me for?
Dane looked sincerely taken aback, his eyebrows wide. I didn’t write that! Look how old it is! It’s all yellow, and it was typewritten with a real typewriter!
Rob kept grinning mischievously. This has YOU written all over it. Dane interrupted him by jumping over to Rob’s side to look at the letter. As he read through it, he got to the end of the part Rob had just read.
It was faded and hard to read, but it looked like the words.
No matter what happens, do not go to the Montauk Air Force base for any reason from this point on. It is not too late. For reasons difficult to articulate, I already know that despite this letter you are going anyway, most likely. But we will try to do everything we can to stop you. We don’t want to hurt you, but if we must, then we will, for the greater good and to stop The Project from ever happening. If you go despite this warning, know that it may mean not only your destruction but mine. So do not take this warning lightly. You have your whole life ahead of you in the world that was meant for you. Don’t waste it as I have to wait in the shadows to undo my mistakes, living out my life like an alien on my planet. It will be a long time before you read this. Almost a lifetime. I remember reading what I’m writing to you right now as I write it… what I thought about it… how I thought it was Dane playing a prank on me to trick me into drinking the Montauk Project Koolaid at first, but then the moment I realized what I was reading had to be something I wrote to myself, for how could Dane have known what I was thinking at this very moment, at that very moment. But then I kept my realization to myself, for it was impossible, it could not be. I cannot explain. Just promise me. Promise me!
Specter stopped caring if there was anything more to read and gazed off into the distance looking shell-shocked as he let the letter slowly fall out of his hand onto the plate of pancakes getting syrup all over it. Dane was there beside him reading it as well and grabbed it off the plate as the syrup and butter soaked into it. He pulled the letter up to read the last line which read,
How do you think I know that this next sentence was smudged and illegible because of the syrup and butter the letter was dropped into by Specter when he lost his shit over what he was reading? How do you think I c…. ..ow ..a..t.h……. .. ..u …d .h…….
Dane looked at Specter and said, I didn’t write this, you ass! It was you! You wrote this.
Specter got up and said nothing and walked out of the cafe to get some fresh air, Dane running after him telling him to wait up.
It wasn’t possible. There had to be an explanation. There must be some other meaning to it. Ever since he’d arrived from the city in Montauk and the air force base had come up, they’d gone back and forth on the topic. Dane had been absorbed in the storyline for a lot longer than Specter, It was all new to him, mostly. He rarely wasted his time with conspiracy theories. But both of them had gotten sort of locked into this contest of wills over the truth or falsity of it. It always boiled down for Specter to how if you don’t know something you don’t know and that is it, but for Dane, if you didn’t know something then anything was possible. It drove him crazy. It is a logical fallacy, he’d tell him, to think just because you don’t know something, that you could know something else.
Sunday, March 1st, 2020
Today I’m writing a research essay on the Montauk Project by a character in my story. I need to gather the material that could be used in the past to create the very project in question. Somehow I got to convince the reader that when Specter and Dane go back in time, that the research they did before is enough to result in the project occurring. Many of the things they cannot really determine are true or not, turn out to be in the works secretly in the past but the researchers are not sure how to proceed until they get ahold of Rob and Dane’s research where it’s all fleshed out. So it questions how things come to be. Are we searching for the truth or are we making the truth as we go along?
The essay also tries to explore Western Occultism’s spin on Tantra being appropriated for military-industrial goals via MK Ultra, Radar Tech, and speculative physics. MK Ultra brainwashing techniques, mental programming techniques, were in use at the base to bring out the powers of talent against their will. But it wasn’t til Crowley brought his sex magick techniques into it; they got the result they were looking for. He brought a systematic way of communicating with aliens, and for programming the talent. Duncan Cameron should be the next focus as their main psychic. And Vandershlock has to be the scientific catalyst that brings together mind and machine while Dr. Z represents physics. I feel like Manda should be the voice of morality, of humane conscience. Someone who couldn’t see what her life was about until she confronts the wrongdoing that she can’t ignore, that she finally has to care about.
March 4th 2020.
In need of structure and some ideas on how to incorporate a multimedia approach. So far, the story refers to different formats that could be recreated literally. An old letter, a home movie, a recorded announcement. Since I last thought about the story, I started writing an essay from the perspective of Rob Specter, a skeptical essay meant to be focused on the facts. One telling fact about the Montauk project is how much unreliable information there is to back up many of the claims of Nichols. For instance, the claim that Aleister Crowley was involved in the project is based on the flimsiest of evidence. This interests me because it says something about how people think who are into believing in conspiracy theories. It doesn’t seem to matter what is actually true. All that matters is that the story is unique, and different, and against the grain. Conspiracists seem to relish having original insights into things. They seem to get their sense of worth from possessing knowledge that no one else has but they do it through nothing more than assertion or weak rationalizations for their assertions. Peter Moon’s explanation why Crowley must have been at the Montauk Project is absurd. It got to be one of the most ridiculous rationales I’ve ever read for an assertion. It’s not even worth retelling. But it is. Just because Nichols says he has some connection to Crowley and just because conceptually there is a connection between what Crowley was supposedly doing with his ‘magick’ and the supposed goals and pursuits of the MP, Moon concludes there is a connection. Then there is this reincarnation theory based on similarities of last names and coincidences about last names.
I think it would be hard to read Nichol’s work seriously. But in a way I have to to get the mythos down.
March 9th, 2020
There’s a limit to how close I can get to the story I’m picturing. I realized today that I could tie in another story I’m writing — BZ — into this story because they both take place at the Montauk Air force base but BZ focuses on experimental drug testing on soldiers that follow the Stranger Things idea of talent accidentally opening the gates (which is derived from Lovecraft anyway), but in BZ it focuses on the sex magick combined with high technology angle and more of a Lovecraftian theme of monsters taking over with no real hope of defeating them ultimately. I’m trying to create a plausibly sophisticated enough weird theory to explain how impossible things like time travel, interdimensional travel, and mind materialization, and communication with alien beings could ‘seem’ plausible. I could write up fake documentation of the other project though to tie in with the Montauk chair as something discovered by Dane and Specter during their research that lends more credibility to what Rob at least considers silly conspiracy theories that the gullible believe in, the time traveler letter not included.
I saw something online about how Stephen King said or wrote that a story is just the story you were telling yourself that you then tell others. Or something. But this may help me bring in a lot of this seemingly un-related thinking about the story to make it a part of the story or to turn it into the story itself. I feel like a leap has to be made to bring the two together. It’s hard to take on realistic personalities to give such a leap realism though. All writing seems like just me playing at being other people poorly.
There’s so much material I got to structure it, break it down again. And I got to reformat parts of the story into replicas or artifacts like a radio announcement of Rob’s dream recollecting his involvement in the Montauk Projects as a mind control victim, and the old letter that Rob writes to his future self to keep them from traveling back in time through the time vortex.
Then there is the sage radar tower stolen control board. I’m thinking instead of trying to realistically portray sci-fi fantasy elements that Nichol’s tries to present as real, I should focus on the metaphoric value of it all to the mind for that’s really where the true meaning of such a story lays, not in fabricated technologies and psychological techniques are immoral government boondoggles covered up self-righteously as if they could have helped the American people resist their enemies more effectively. Still if MK Ultra resulted in the scientific foundations of CIA torture techniques, you could say it had a real effect, but it’s debatable whether torture really works at getting real, actionable intelligence anyway. There’s a lot to be said for the Israeli technique of befriending and relating to the enemy to warm up to them, to have a lot in common with them, positive reinforcement, etc.
Verisimilitude:
Rob writes an information request letter to the Hampton Library.
Hi,
I’m doing research for a research project about Camp Hero and The so-called ‘Montauk Project. My goal is to create a comparative time-line between the main urban legends about the base and the conventional or mainstream history of the base as one element of the story. I want to approach the story from a rational, skeptical perspective, and also a charitable depiction of an intelligent believer in the various conspiracies.
My interest in doing this came originally from what I learned about Preston Nichols, the radio engineer who claims to have ‘first-hand’ knowledge about secret government projects that occurred at Camp Hero or possibly even to this day (LOL).
To make the story more realistic and compelling, I’m trying to get information on several topics. They are The Philadelphia Experiment, MK Ultra, The Montreal Treatment, and up-to-date popular Physics on ‘Time Travel’ and consciousness.
I’m also trying to get technical information on how the SAGE Radar at the base was used when operational. Its actual use plus hypothetical uses such as what Nichols claims — materializing thought, bringing ‘beings’ into our reality like the Stranger Things Remote Viewing spin-off.
In addition, I’m trying to find science fiction novels or short stories that relate to this story. Stories about time travel, government conspiracies, cold-war era top-secret mind-control experiments, particularly ones that involved ‘trauma-based’ conditioning are of interest. I’m interested in how it failed as a technique for creating spies or getting people to disclose hidden information and as a ‘cure’ for a mental illness like schizophrenia. I’m looking for detailed accounts of how the Montreal treatment was employed by Cameron.
Stories, where human consciousness is emulated in biological computers, are of interest.
I’m interested too in source documents for the conspiracy theories related to the Montauk Project. For example, I know that the current UFO craze may have been rooted in doctored documents by Vallee. Vallee also was behind pushing for the sci-fi version of the Philadelphia Experiment. What are the source documents for extreme conspiratorial spin-offs of the historically documented MK Ultra program such as ‘The Monarch Program’ for example? Speaking of which stories that touch on time travel back in time via wormholes and going into the future by speeding up matter are of interest.
Also, to create a plausible theory of how time travel might have occurred, I’m interested in the concept of quantum computing wetware Artificial Intelligence replications of human consciousness that enabled future time travel by working with information theory of consciousness.
I’m also looking for information on the historical inspiration for the movie ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ where an experiment drug puts the hero into a psychosis. I’m interested in the historical actualities that may have inspired this idea about drugging soldiers to make them more aggressive, unleashing a good deal of uncontrollable psychosis.
I also am looking for any scholarly analysis of the use of Tantric Meditation or, as it’s called in Occult circles, ‘Sex Magick’, to have a ‘technique’ that could theoretically alter human consciousness in a way that a reader might be convinced could work in tandem with the technologies supposedly used at the air force base with so-called alien engineered devices like ‘The Montauk Chair’.
Eroto-comatose-lucidity is one such technique that I plan to put into the story as a ‘secret’ method for ‘real’ psychics’ to channel their ‘abilities’ in tandem with radar technology at the base.
Any historical evidence or information on the so-called ‘Montauk Boys’ would be nice too. These are people who believe they were kidnapped and used in secret experiments at the base. Also, any documentation of urban exploration of the base whether written or video would be amazing. The more involved, the better. The idea being I want documentation of deep explorations of the base after it was closed down.
Last, I wonder if there is any singular source on the conventional history of the Montauk Air Force base from its inception until closing in the 80s.
If my idea that Dane and Specter going back in time to actually inspire the Montauk Project based on the information they gathered during their research in the future will work, I need some real information to work with. I need source documents on conspiracy theories related to Montauk. What are the source documents that skeptics point to as the root cause for various beliefs? I need a book like that. A friend recommended “he Rides a Pale Horse’ but he believes in conspiracy theories. Maybe its a good intelligent pro-conspiracy book, but I need a rationalist, skeptical version too.
Instead of using the actual story of BZ, I could refer to it as if it was documented historically and full of well-recognized truths. A fake research document with fake sources that quote my story as if it actually happened. That’s a Lovecraftian approach I like.
March 16th 2020.
I’ve been working on an essay written by Rob Specter about the Montauk Project. It’s supposed to be a rational analysis of the various roots sources of the conspiracy theories and its meant to provide rational criticism of the many hard to believe or unfounded claims and some theories as to where these conspiracies came from. What motivated them? Why did actual historical events morph together with various other feeds on the subject into a more fantastical version of the originals? As I write this essay, and read more about the project, I can see how this endless variation and all the maybes and possibilities and the inability to get to the bottom of anything can drive a person crazy and turn them into the paranoid madman that Rob is trying to avoid becoming. Thinking back on one section of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the letter between the main character’s mom is in a mental asylum, I thought the way it was written was creative and meaningful. On one hand, it seems like the mother is very much lucid and is a victim stuck in an asylum, but then her letter becomes more and more unhinged and you realize just how crazy she is. It’s a very well-written piece and probably true to life for anyone who has a relative that is truly mentally ill.
I’m thinking maybe I can turn this sober, intellectual, rational, well-researched paper into the device for Rob starting to become unhinged as he realizes the terrible truth as he gets pulled into the alternate reality that is the Montauk project. So maybe, instead of trying to make it a convincing hard sci-fi story, it can be more about how a person discovers the truth about who they are and their real history, and it will play into the whole Monarch Training theme where people’s personalities are broken into various partitions, programmed.
As I’m writing this essay, I find myself just telling my take on the Montauk project history, but I repeat myself, retell the same thing over and over and lost patience. Also, instead of it being an investigation, it’s more like I’m committing the attribution error where I seek only evidence to back up what I already think is going on with a couple of exceptions, maybe.
there’s this idea that I’ve been into for a while from a Book called ‘The Denial of Death’ where a person who tried to be a master of reality succumbs to neurosis by trying to hard to be a master of reality, thinking everyone else but them is neurotic and deluded while missing their own blind spot.
I’ve always had an interest in the cut-up method of writing because even though it creates a lot of incoherent nonsense, it can be revealing about the pattern recognition tendency of the human mind. The mind creates meaning and order where there is none. But, going through a random word salad can still be linked to a non-linear theme or mood since the collection of words is taken from a passage that had a particular direction, to begin with. The same direction is hidden in the words, only expressed in a chaotic, strange way. It takes a lot of time to overcome the urge to just let it all be incoherent and meaningless, though. to get back on track to where you were originally going only in a novel way that also makes sense is the challenge. But the randomness and surprise of it is such a useful tool as crazy as it may seem.
trying to bring the giant mish-mosh of the writing equivalent of spaghetti code will not be easy.
March 23rd, 2020
Reading through some of the blogs on the right-wing conspiracy theorist spin on MK Ultra and the Montreal treatment. I also found a great 80s CBS documentary about the Montreal treatment, which touches on the idea that the CIA wanted to study the psychology behind various cultish abilities. Seems the Monarch Program is just an exaggerated, fabricated version of actual CIA research. These writers, like Cathy O Brien, seem to lack honesty though. Or they are deluded. They describe things with no evidence of how they know these details.
No depatterning was ever publicly described as a success. Interviews with depatterning victims and psychological staff at Ravenscraig reveal; that even the psychological benefits of depatterning were no better than results available from more conventional methods.
Using LSD to get information from volunteers was unsuccessful and resulted in long term psychological problems for the patients.
March 30th 2020
Daily blab.
Edited more of the story, getting rid of overused words, passive voice, and grammar mistakes. There’s alot of repeating and variations and a messed up order to the story right now. Plus, I’m running out of time in this class. On top of it having to read a few fi novels, I’m not sure if I have enough time for that, unless they’re engrossing. hard to know til I start in on them. Not sure if this story is about actual time travel or the delusions of a mind control victim. Maybe both? haha.
A part of me wants this to be a serious, intense story that blows the reader’s mind, but at the same time, it feels kind of comical all this striving to make it so full of arcane, underground urban legends, it gets kind of tiring thinking about it. I started thinking today about what drives people to really believe in sci-fi horror government conspiracies, and maybe this is the real theme of this story, that it all is a sign of a kind of escapism, almost like taking implausible religious mythology literally, but revamped for our scientific, militarized, high tech, cosmically oriented times. Put simply the whole montauk project conspiracy corpus seems alot like a religious mythology to me, only more underworld myth like Inferno, or the beginning of Gilgamesh when Enkidu travels to the underworld only nowadays, the underworld is peopled by mad scientists and alien beings and psuedo-scientific psychological contrivances. Where a power hungry magician once conjured trolls out of the mud to fight a barbaric war, now scientists design technologies that bring interdimensional monsters into our world that we cannot control. Maybe the best mythology at the time of its creation, doesn’t seem like mythology at all but something people might accept as possible or real.
But the idea of escapism while in decline seems like an important theme. Only the montauk project isn’t that comforting a mythology because in the end, we’re powerless to control the powerful and the knowledgeable who go too far with technology in the name of national security. Also, there’s this new angle about drug experimentation (I mean if we’re going to do Montauk project, might as well do it all the way) on soldiers that brings something into our dimension kind like Vandermeer’s annihilation where alien DNA fuses with DNA on this planet and starts transforming things into something unrecognizable. But it’s because of our own carelessness, and contempt for nature, nature as solely for our purposes alone.
Part of the allure of this mythology is how head spinningly all encompassing it has to become. Eventually something has go to give, and that’s when something new and interesting will come out hopefully, like the end of House of Leaves when the war photographer rides all the way down into the impossible place with no end, the labyrinth and the Minotaur. god my foot hurts so much and I got stuff I have to do that involves walking. It really sucks. But there’s a pandemic going on so I guess I’m stuck in the house anyway.
March 31st, 2020
Not to over-complicate things, but I kind of heading for the Shutter Island approach. Rob, instead of discovering a time portal with Dane, is really just laying on some bed in a thorazine induced coma undergoing the Montreal treatment, and the story is just all in his head. So everything leads up to him discovering this truth instead of finding a real time portal. The time portal is just a metaphor for escape from the world he is trapped in, a fantasy where he can change the world he is stuck in through science fiction magic or dreaming with a scientific flavor.
Here is a link to eh CIA interrogation torture treatment that was based on the montreal treatment according to MTL Blog
Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook
“The apparent reason for these effects is that a person cut off from external stimuli turns his awareness inward, upon himself, and then projects the contents of bias own unconscious outwards, so that he endows his faceless environment with his own attributes, fears, and forgotten memories. Lilly notes, “It Is obvious that inner factors of the mind tend to be projected outward, that some of the mind’s activity which is usually reality bound now becomes free to turn to phantasy and ultimately to hallucination and delusion.”
–Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook–
The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys
resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat
to inflict pain for example, can trigger fears more damaging
than the immediate sensation of pain .
–Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook–