Camp Hero and the Montauk Project

A real abandoned radar base wrapped in pop-culture conspiracy folklore

Camp Hero sits at the far eastern tip of Long Island, just south of the Montauk Point lighthouse, where the lighthouse was keeping watch for British ships as early as 1792. In 1942, with German U-boats off the coast and Montauk judged a likely landing point, the Army turned Fort Hero into Camp Hero, named for Major General Andrew Hero Jr., a former Chief of Coast Artillery. It grew to 278 acres, with four 16-inch naval guns meant for battleships set in concrete bunkers, a 6-inch battery and a fire control centre beside the lighthouse. To fool bombers and spies in fishing boats, the whole base was built to look like a New England fishing village: the bunkers had painted windows and fake dormers, and the gymnasium was made to look like a church with a steeple.

The guns came out in 1949, and the Cold War brought radar. A station opened here in 1948, became Montauk Air Force Station in 1953, and fed the SAGE air-defence network. In December 1960 the great AN/FPS-35 came on line, a reflector 126 feet long and 38 feet tall, weighing 40 tons, able to see aircraft more than 200 miles out. It was so powerful that it disrupted local TV and radio and had to be shut down for a time. The station closed on 31 January 1981. The giant antenna was left in place with its motors removed so it could turn with the wind, and it is said to have been spared demolition because boaters preferred it to the lighthouse as a landmark. It is the only one of its kind still standing.

Its secrecy fed a legend. Stories of the Montauk Project, said to have used the base for mind control, teleportation, time travel and contact with aliens, circulated from the early 1980s, and in 1992 Preston Nichols and Peter Moon published The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, the first of a series. Nichols claimed to have recovered repressed memories of taking part; the UFO researcher Jacques Vallée called the account highly questionable, and the authors themselves invited readers to take it as science fiction or non-fiction. The Netflix series Stranger Things drew on the stories, and its working title was once Montauk.

When the government tried to sell the land to developers in 1984, environmentalists fought it, and plans for a golf course were dropped in 1999 to protect rare salamanders and the groundwater. Camp Hero State Park opened on 18 September 2002. Its 415 acres hold maritime forest, wetlands, bluffs over the Atlantic, trails for hiking, biking and horseback riding, and some of the best surf fishing anywhere, though the old radar areas remain fenced.