What If Stranger Things Was Only the Tip of the Upside Down?

When Fiction Looks Suspiciously Like Classified History

After binge watching the first four seasons in a matter of days and waiting three long years for the fifth season to drop, I can’t help but shake the feeling that there is more to this story. It’s almost too familiar. Too possible. Like the kind of “fiction” that scratches a little too close to something real.

In the show, we watch kids in small town Indiana battling monsters and government scientists who mess with forces they barely understand. But here’s the thing: those labs, those psychic experiments, those dimensional rifts, they might not be as far-fetched as they look on Netflix.

Back in the Cold War era, the CIA really did run mind control experiments. It wasn’t some Reddit fever dream. They called it MK Ultra, and it involved LSD, hypnosis, and all kinds of questionable science that would make even Dr. Brenner blush.

Image from https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/1170099/Stranger-Things-season-4-Brenner-alive-The-American-clue-Eleven-Hopper-Netflix

Then there was the Montauk Project, a series of government experiments at Camp Hero, a decommissioned Air Force base on the eastern tip of Long Island. The story goes that scientists there conducted psychological warfare experiments that included mind control, teleportation, and even time travel.

Image from https://www.reddit.com/r/XMysteries/comments/12cnfii/the_montauk_project_plus_a_bonus/

Some accounts claim that gifted children were subjected to sensory deprivation, electromagnetic fields, and psychic conditioning in an attempt to harness and weaponize human consciousness. The goal, supposedly, was to open portals into other dimensions and manipulate the fabric of time itself. The conspiracy gained so much traction that it became the direct inspiration for the earliest concept of Stranger Things, which the Duffer Brothers first titled simply Montauk.

And while we are unpacking the file cabinet of strange, we can’t forget the Stargate Project. Unlike Montauk, this one was officially acknowledged. Beginning in the 1970s, the U.S. Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency poured money into research on psychic spying. They wanted to see if humans could use “remote viewing” to gather intelligence from across the planet or even other timelines.

Image from https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/project-stargate.html

Participants would sit in silent rooms and attempt to describe secret enemy facilities, hidden objects, and distant events with nothing but their minds. Some sessions reportedly produced information accurate enough to keep the project alive for decades. When the files were finally declassified in the 1990s, they admitted that results were “beyond chance” but “not reliable.” Which sounds a lot like someone who found something too strange to explain but too dangerous to keep funding out in the open.

Now toss CERN into the mix, the world’s largest particle accelerator buried beneath the French and Swiss border. Whenever it powers up, the internet swirls with theories about portals, Mandela effects, and alternate realities. Scientists insist the collider merely smashes particles to study the origins of the universe. Yet somehow, every time CERN restarts, something in the world feels slightly off, as if reality got nudged a few pixels to the left.

When you line them all up, a pattern starts to form. MK Ultra studied the mind. Montauk allegedly tried to weaponize it. Stargate attempted to project it across space and time. CERN might be doing it on a subatomic level, punching at the very structure of reality. Each program claimed to serve science or national security, but together they start to look like different steps in the same experiment.

And maybe Stranger Things, with its flickering lights, psychic kids, and parallel world creeping through the walls, is the softened retelling of those experiments. The show gives us enough truth to recognize it, but just enough fiction to keep us from taking it seriously.

That might be the greatest trick of all. What better way to hide something than to make it entertainment? We get nostalgia, neon lights, and synth music while the real files sit somewhere sealed and redacted. We laugh, we theorize, and we wait three years for the next season, forgetting that sometimes fiction is just a safer version of fact.

So when your lights flicker, your phone glitches, or your cat stares too long at an empty corner, maybe it’s nothing. Or maybe someone, somewhere, just turned a key in an invisible lock.

Because what we think we know, we really don’t.