Hoaxes From Space: The Montauk Project

Continued from The Philadelphia Experiment Part II: Along Came Bielek

Meet Me in Montauk

When Al Bielek was recruited into the Montauk Project (then called the Phoenix Project) in the ’50s, it had just been transferred from the Navy to the Air Force and divided into two separate, but loosely connected, programs: Electromagnetic mind control experiments, and time travel experiments. A third, unofficial, program consisted of basically cooking human guinea pigs with radar beams of 100 million watts. A few planes were accidentally shot down during these experiments, so in the ’70s air traffic was restricted over the Montauk base.

Bielek and Duncan Cameron were both aware of the murders of test subjects, but at the time they did nothing to stop them or alert the public to what was happening at Montauk. Just one of the many flaws in their story. To be true heroes (or even just whistleblowers), they would’ve had to tell these horrifying tales decades earlier than they actually did. The way they tell it, it seems like they were every bit as evil as they would like us to believe John Von Neumann and the military officers in charge of the project were.

The civilian head of the project was still John von Neumann, who faked his death in 1957. Bielek claims he is the “Dr. Reinhard” in Moore and Berlitz’s book about the Philly Experiment. He was in charge of the Phoenix Project until 1977, when a split personality he’d developed became a problem. A Dr. Herman C. Unterman took over. Von Neumann’s alter ego, Howard E. Decker, moved to New York and became a surplus electronics dealer.

The Montauk Boys

In the ’70s, Bielek was put in charge of the young men and boys involved in the Montauk Project, directing all the operations of the mind control program during his evening shift. During the day, he conducted ELF research in Los Angeles. In the early ’80s, he gave presentations on his work at the annual conferences of the U.S. Psychotronics Association, and claims he shared research results with William Bice, the “first person to detect the Russian Woodpecker signal“. (As this signal was picked up by amateur radio operators in numerous locations, I seriously doubt that anyone knows who noticed it first.)

It’s worth noting that ELF research was very popular among mentally disturbed, science-minded conspiracy theorists in the ’70s. Among them were Philip K. Dick and Ira Einhorn, who still insists the FBI framed him for the murder of his girlfriend because he knew too much about psychotronic mind control – even though the woman’s putrefying, reeking corpse was found in his bedroom closet after body fluids leaked into the apartment below his.

The Montauk Boys, as the Montauk test subjects are called by Bielek and company, were brought in beginning in the ’60s and housed in a bunker on the base. Most of these boys were blonde and blue-eyed, ranging in age from 10 to 16. Most were street kids or foster children. All were physically, sexually, and emotionally brutalized, to break them down for mental reconditioning (why anyone would publicly claim to be part of a project like this, I do not understand). Using alien technology, the scientists then eradicated the boys’ thoughts and memories and replaced them with “new”, fully indoctrinated minds. Just what they were reconditioned to do is unclear. Some of the boys were also subjected to genetic experiments.

Preston Nichols and Duncan Cameron have explained that part of the Montauk Boys’ new psyches were somehow copied from Duncan’s, so they had to be genetically similar to him (blonde and blue-eyed) in order for the process to work. This makes about as much sense as saying that a wall clock has to look like a grandfather clock in order to keep the correct time.

To date, only one of the Montauk Boys has come forward to discuss the torture and mind control carried out at Montauk, and that man is Stewart Swerdlow. Preston Nichols has claimed to have deprogrammed several survivors, but none of them have publicly discussed the project under their real names. Today, Swerdlow conducts workshops and seminars on the history of covert government mind control.

The Cameron Boys

Throughout the ’70s and most of the ’80s, Duncan Cameron and Al Bielek worked together at Montauk without realizing they had once been half-brothers, or that they had taken part in the Philadelphia Experiment (though Bielek admitted to a fascination with it). Bielek had no inkling that he had been age-regressed and adopted; Cameron had no clue that he was the reincarnation of his own dead brother, also named Duncan, born in Germany in 1917. Cameron says that in 1963, his soul was transplanted into the body it now occupies (which belonged to a child born to his parents in 1951). This “explains” why he is technically far too young to have served on the Eldridge during WWII. I wonder what happened to the soul of the child Duncan Cameron? That part hasn’t been explained. Not that the explanation would make much sense.

The Camerons’ father, Alexander Cameron, came out of retirement after WWII to participate in Project Paperclip (smuggling Nazis into the U.S. and South American countries). Peter Moon (real name Vince Barbarick), who wrote three books about Montauk with Preston Nichols, draws links between Dr. Mengele’s genetic experiments and the Montauk Project. It’s very interesting to note that Peter Moon also co-wrote Ong’s Hat: The Beginning with Joseph Matheny.

Alexander also had some role in training the crew of the Eldridge for the Philly Experiment. He was selected to instruct 33 volunteers at the Coast Guard Academy in Groton, Connecticut. As the story goes, most of these men disappeared, burst into flames, or were driven insane by the experiment.

Bielek possesses a photo that supposedly shows “his” father standing on the deck of the ship with some sailors, the only physical proof he has ever presented in support of his stories. But even Duncan Cameron seems to doubt whether this is really his father. At any rate, in 1939 Alexander pressured his two sons, Edward (born to a mistress in 1916 ) and Duncan (born to Alexander’s wife in 1917), into joining the Navy and becoming part of Project Rainbow. They had the perfect qualifications. Duncan had a physics degree from the University of Edinburgh, and Edward had a Masters from Princeton and a doctorate from Harvard. As with Bob Lazar, the government apparently scrubbed their academic backgrounds, because there is no record of the Cameron brothers at any of these schools.

The Cameron brothers’ first Navy assignment, in early 1940, was to observe the Project Rainbow operations at the Institute for Advanced Study and explain them to Navy and government officials who couldn’t possibly understand them. For most of 1941, they served at sea on the Pennsylvania. On December 5th, they were returning to Pearl Harbor from a short furlough when they were summoned to see Admiral Hal Bowen, chief of the Office of Naval Engineering. He informed them that Pearl Harbor would soon be attacked by Japan, so they were being reassigned to San Francisco. At the start of 1943 they were shipped back to the Institute to resume their observations of Project Rainbow. They crunched some numbers and realized that Tesla’s concerns about “personnel problems” related to invisibility were valid. Reluctantly, Von Neumann tried to avert catastrophe by adding a third generator to the ship. However, it was removed after it arced and put a technician into a coma for four months. Tesla didn’t want to use crew members during the big test, but the Navy wouldn’t budge from its March 1943 deadline. Finally, Tesla secretly sabotaged the equipment and bowed out of the project. Von Neumann took over. T. Townsend Brown, alleged antigravity pioneer, was also on the project at this time, designing the antennas that would be used on the Eldridge. By January 1943, the ship was outfitted with the two generators, the motor drive, the diesel electrical system to power it all, four RF transmitters, the two tower-mounted antennas designed by Brown, and Tesla’s Zero Time Reference Generator. According to Preston Nichols, this was a vastly important piece of equipment. Zero Time Reference is the geocentric centre of our galaxy; everything has to be referenced to it. Though it was ingeniously designed by Tesla, the generator apparently didn’t function as intended, and that’s why many of the sailors ended up deranged. The power on the Eldridge disrupted the sailors’ time references; they had been unmoored from the only reality they had ever known, ripped from their time locks without warning. To combat these and other problems, Von Neumann later developed the first all-electric computer. By 1953 a Dr. Goldston had perfected the new system, and another test with a different ship was fully successful.

On July 22, 1943 the first test with crew aboard was conducted, with a Captain Hangle in charge. At 0900 hours the Cameron brothers threw the switches, and the ship vanished for 15-20 minutes. The sailors on deck were severely nauseated and disoriented afterward, but suffered none of the dramatic effects that would mar the August 12th test. The Navy bigwigs decided that the goal of this test would be radar invisibility only, since optical invisibilty was too risky. Doy.

On August 12th, everything went as planned for the first minute or so. When the Camerons threw the switches, the Eldgridge vanished from radar while remaining visible.

Then there was a flash of blue light, and the Eldridge vanished. The time tunnel to Montauk opened, swallowing up the Camerons and one of the three UFOs that were apparently observing the Philly Experiment. There’s a big fat paradox here, because while a sodden Edward Cameron was chatting with a not-dead John Von Neumann in 1983 Long Island, the exact same man – Alfred Bielek – was obliviously working at his day job in Los Angeles. That evening, he took a secret, magnetic levitation train to Montauk without ever knowing that he had visited the facility earlier in the day. Add this to the other paradoxes that have already piled up. For instance, while Edward Cameron was studying at Harvard, he was also (in the form of Al Bielek) attending high school in New York. Bielek says these paradoxes were explained by the theories of MIT prof Norman or Henry Levinson (the name varies in Bielek’s speeches), but the scientific establishment has ensured that Levinson’s work remains buried and unknown. He supposedly died in 1974. Needless to say, I can’t find a trace of him.

Another invisibility test, sans crew, was conducted in October. It failed utterly. Equipment was missing when the ship reappeared, and the control room had been mysteriously destroyed by fire. In 1948 or ’49, according to Bielek, the military rendered an F-80 invisible, but the pilot vanished in mid-air and the plane crashed with its helpless passenger.

Though he would later insist he had no interest in the paranormal or the unexplained aside from the Philly Experiment, Bielek was already on the scene in the ’50s. He met Ivan Sanderson and confirmed for him the authenticity of some “rod” photos taken by Trevor James Constable. This is extremely interesting, because (as previously mentioned) Sanderson was a good friend of Morris K. Jessup – the man at the centre of the original Philly Experiment hoax.

Back to Montauk

While Nichols and Bielek worked on technical aspects of the Montauk Project, maintaining equipment and supervising the Montauk Boys, Duncan Cameron became the project’s star psychic. The researchers had already learned how to enter human minds, and were eager to use an alien chair that would employ a human-computer interface to transmit messages from one human brain to another. Duncan became the project’s primary sender of telepathic messages, creating a virtual reality scenario in his mind and sending it to a Cray 1 computer. From there, the scenario would be sent to the radio transmitter and beamed to the intended recipient(s). Duncan could virtually recreate any time and place in history, and it could be projected anywhere in the world. Thoughtforms could actually be materialized through this method; cans of beer, which you could really drink, were routinely beamed to the commander’s desk. But the thoughtforms wouldn’t materialize on any reliable schedule, so the techs were put to work on the task of fully mastering time. Soon, they had a functioning time tunnel on the base.

In the ’80s, time travel experiments commenced at Montauk, and Al participated in some of them. Both he and Duncan traveled to Mars on several occasions. With other team members, Al also traveled to a research station set up in 10,000 B.C., to the year 6037, and to several distant planets. On some of these other worlds, researchers collected “light” and “dark” energy in canisters.

But Wait, There’s More!

Everybody knows that stories about invisible ships and time travel and mad scientists faking their own deaths would be boring as hell without some aliens, right? That’s probably why Preston Nichols and Duncan Cameron added a few. Nichols says that in ’75 or ’76, a flying saucer that was not of manmade origin suddenly appeared in the magnetite deposits beneath the Montauk facility, materializing out of nowhere. He assumes it was one of the three saucers glimpsed by Duncan as the Eldridge was sucked into hyperspace; for some reason, it had taken a few decades to fully materialize. Soon, Bielek and Nichols were working alongside aliens. A 7-foot-tall reptoid named “His Highness Draco Something-or-Other” used the office adjacent to Preston’s. He somewhat resembled the Gorn from Star Trek. He liked to sip Drano.
Gray aliens were also running around the base, and they reeked because they excrete through their skin. Project members made a habit of grabbing the ugly little guys and flinging them into the shower, until one enterprising employee came up with the idea of dousing a Gray with Lysol. This is how they learned that Lysol is an intoxicant to Gray aliens; from that point on, the Grays got smashed on the stuff at every opportunity, while His Highness Draco enjoyed his Drano.

The Beginning of the End

On August 12, 1983, the Montauk scientists opened the tunnel between 1943 and 1983. Back in 1943, the Cameron brothers leapt from the deck of the Eldridge in Philadelphia only to end up at Camp Hero in 1983. Duncan recalls seeing three vast UFOs hovering in the vicinity of the wormhole when the ship vanished, and one of these craft slipped into the wormhole along with the Camerons. Years later, in 1975 or ’76, it would spontaneously materialize in the underground facility at Montauk. The aliens had telepathically influenced the scientists to conduct the Philly Experiment and the opening of the Montauk time tunnel on these specific dates so they could enter our world from another dimension. Nichols says the earth’s biocycle makes August 12th a significant date every 20 years, energetically speaking.

Von Neumann and the other Montauk researchers had finally realized they were playing a very dangerous game (never mind torturing young boys, frying homeless people, or subjecting sailors to time travel). They wanted to call the whole thing off, but they couldn’t; the time tunnel they had opened was “locked in” to the equipment on the Eldridge. Someone would have to travel back in time and destroy it, or else the “bubble” that surrounded the ship could expand and swallow up the entire planet. Von Neumann ordered the Cameron brothers to do this, and both men have taken credit for dismantling the equipment with axes – but both insist they did this without the other’s help. At any rate, the equipment was trashed and both projects were shut down (Rainbow temporarily, Montauk permanently). A section of the Montauk facility that had been floating in hyperspace as the result of an experiment spontaneously returned to Long Island, and the Eldridge rematerialized in Philly with its crew deranged or embedded in the ship.

At least, that’s one version of the story. The other version, told by Duncan Cameron and Preston Nichols, is that renegade workers on the Montauk Project (themselves included) had decided to sabotage the project by having Duncan summon a ravenous and angry monster from another dimension while he was seated in the alien chair. This plan worked. The monster, nicknamed “Junior, rampaged through the Montauk facility, terrifying scientists and technicians. The project director ordered a powerdown. Nichols cut wires to the transmitter with an acelatylene torch, but the transmitter kept going. He had to venture into the transmitter building itself to pull more wires. Again, nothing happened. Finally, he made his way to the master controls on the second floor and succeeded in shutting down the transmitter. Junior returned to his own dimension, or to Duncan’s brain, or whatever, and the facility was saved. The project, on the other hand, was promptly shut down. But Bielek and company have hinted that it probably continued, maybe even to this very day, in some other form at some other location.

Back (Foward?) to Philly

After the Philly Experiment, Edward Cameron was assigned to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, then to Camp Hale in Colorado around the same time that Dr. Vannevar Bush was directing the recovery of a crashed UFO at Aztec, New Mexico. (As you may know, the Aztec UFO crash was one of the stupidest and most poorly executed hoaxes in the history of ufology, and it was thoroughly exposed years before Bielek made this statement. But this hasn’t stopped the more credulous ufologists from fixating on it.) Bielek also describes a small alien recovered from a ’49 UFO crash. It had chlorophyll instead of blood, communicated telepathically, and could walk through walls. The military kept him in a Faraday cage for about two years, until he died. This alien gave Von Neumann some tips on how to improve the technology used in the Philly Experiment, and Von Neumann also dipped into metaphysics and the occult in search of help. From his studies he learned that each person has a “time lock” from conception, that we live in a 5-D universe, and that time flows. His findings would be incorporated into the Montauk Project.

By 1947 the Navy apparently had no further use for Edward Cameron. Von Neumann ordered that he be age-regressed to the age of one and placed in the care of Albertina and Arthur Bielek of New York in the year 1928. Meanwhile, Duncan Cameron had returned to the year 1983. The loss of his time lock caused him to age and die within days, despite the Navy’s best efforts to save him. It was up to Al Bielek to convince “his” aging parents to have another child so that Duncan’s soul, stored in a Navy facility, could be transplanted into the child. The new Duncan Cameron was born in 1951. In 1963, the old Duncan’s soul was placed in the new Duncan’s body. Both Cameron brothers lived out their new lives without any conscious awareness of their previous existence. Then, in 1988, the memories of Edward Cameron surfaced in Al Bielek’s mind as he watched The Philadelphia Experiment on HBO.

Bielek and Preston Nichols have a silly story about how the movie came to be made. It was produced by EMI-Thorn, the merger of EMI and Thorn Industries, a maker of scientific instruments established around 1820 and inherited by the Wilson brothers in 1850. This much is factual. But Preston Nichols claims that in July of ’89, the “chief archivist” of EMI-Thorn showed up at his lab unannounced to tell him that the company had been searching for him for a long time. He presented a group photo featuring the Wilson brothers, Aleister Crowley, and Preston Nichols. It was taken in 1890. Apparently, Nichols had been sent back to this year and had told Crowley and his pals all about the wonders of time travel. Then his memory of the trip was erased. It seems someone with EMI-Thorn had recognized Nichols from the photo while he was attending a U.S. Psychotronics Association conference in New York, and knew they had finally found the man Crowley described as “not of this time”. Back in 1890, the archivist explained, Nichols had given the Wilsons all the details of the Philly Experiment. They were recorded and stored away until, in the ’80s, EMI-Thorn decided to turn them into a shitty B movie.

Preston Nichols, whose memories of the Montauk Project were artificially repressed by the military, regained them while working on a time transducer in his personal lab.

Bielek’s handlers must have realized something was up, because Bielek was quietly removed from government contract employment. In ’89 he began giving public lectures on his part in the Philly Experiment. He made a big splash among ufologists with his January 13, 1990 MUFON presentation in Dallas. He may have met Nichols at the February 1989 Psychotronics Association conference in New York, where they both gave presentations unrelated to the Philly Experiment.

The reason the government didn’t try to silence him, Bielek explains, is that he and his “half-brother” Duncan had something of a special, protected status within the Montauk Project. Their bodies were “locked in” with a biorhythm stabilization cycle that would be complete on August 12, 2003 – exactly 60 years after the Philadelphia Experiment. If either man was harmed before that date, time would go all wonky. Or something. This doesn’t explain why the government still hasn’t shown any interest in Bielek and company, of course. They’ve been promoting their tales through lectures, interviews, and books for over 20 years without the slightest impediment, convincing hundreds (perhaps thousands) of very credulous people that the government knows all about telepathy, teleportation, thoughtforms, time travel, total thought control, age regression, soul transference, and at least two species of intelligent extraterrestrial or ultradimensional entities.

Part II: Lingering Questions