Keep Out!: Top Secret Places Governments Don't Want You to Know About

Conspiracy theorists allege that, at a relatively innocuous-looking location on Long Island, New York — originally called Camp Hero, and later renamed the Montauk Air Force Station — highly classified research has, for decades, been undertaken into a dizzying array of far-out issues, including time travel, teleportation, invisibility, and mind control. Whether the tales are the absolute truth, overwhelming fiction, or a swirling, hazy combination of both, only one thing is certain: They absolutely refuse to roll over and die. In the more than two decades that have now passed since the controversial stories first surfaced, they have spawned a veritable industry, with books galore, lectures and conferences, television documentaries, and magazine articles all focused intently upon what has become known as the Montauk Project.

The Philadelphia Experiment

Before we get to the meat of what whole swathes of conspiracy-minded people are devoted to believing has been going on at the Montauk Air Force Station for years, we have to take a trip through time, back to the height of the Second World War, when strange and unearthly things were reportedly afoot in the heart of the Philadelphia Naval Yard. The bulk of the rumors and testimony suggests that the fantastic, Top Secret research allegedly undertaken at Montauk began as a direct outgrowth of an equally fantastic and highly classified project of the U.S. Navy. It has become infamously known as the Philadelphia Experiment.

The genesis of the story dates back to 1955, with the publication of The Case for the UFO by the late Morris K. Jessup, a book that delved deeply into two key issues:

1. The theoretical power source of UFOs.

2. The utilization of the universal gravitational field as a form of energy.

Not long after the publication of the book, Jessup became the recipient of a series of extremely strange missives from a certain Carlos Miquel Allende, of Pennsylvania. In his correspondence, Allende commented on Jessup’s theories, and gave details of an alleged secret experiment conducted by the U.S. Navy in the Philadelphia Naval Yard in October 1943. According to Allende’s incredible tale, during the experiment a warship was rendered optically invisible and teleported to and from Norfolk, Virginia, in a few minutes. The incredible feat was supposedly accomplished by applying Albert Einstein’s never-completed Unified Field theory.

Allende elaborated that the ship used in the experiment was the DE 173 USS Eldridge, and, moreover, that he had actually witnessed one of the attempts to render both the ship and its crew invisible from his position out at sea onboard a steamer called the SS Andrew Furuseth. From the safety of the Furuseth, Allende, in his own words, said he “watched the air all around the ship turn slightly, ever so slightly, darker than all the other air. I saw, after a few minutes, a foggy green mist arise like a cloud. I watched as thereafter the DE 173 became rapidly invisible to human eyes.”[53]

If Allende was telling the truth, then the Navy had not only begun to grasp the nature of invisibility, but it had also stumbled upon the secret of teleportation. Allende claimed that the experiment rendered many of the crew-members as mad as hatters, and some even literally vanished from the ship while the test was at its height, never to be seen again — at least not in 1943. Others reportedly became fused into the metal hull of the ship itself, destined to die horrific and agonizing deaths.

It is a matter of official record that Carlos Allende did serve aboard the SS Andrew Furuseth during the time frame that he claimed to have witnessed the secret experiment. Crucial to the controversy surrounding the strange saga of the USS Eldridge is whether or not Allende was speaking truthfully, and if the case for the reality of the Philadelphia Experiment stands or falls on his words alone. The U.S. Navy’s position on the Philadelphia Experiment is that Allende’s story was completely bogus. But such was its allure, even the Navy admits, that it spawned a legend that just refuses to go away. However, despite the Navy’s assertions that the entire controversy can be traced back to Allende and no one else, that is most assuredly not the case.

Philadelphia Experiment investigators Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz uncovered a clipping culled from a presently unidentified newspaper of the 1940s that appears to confirm one of the strangest aspects of Allende’s account: namely, that some of the sailors who were onboard the Eldridge during the fateful experiment later vanished into thin air during a barroom brawl near the Philadelphia harbor.

Titled “Strange Circumstances Surround Tavern Brawl” the clipping reveals:

Although the origin of the clipping may remain elusive, the same cannot be said for every aspect of the story concerning the so-called barroom brawl. It was during 1949 that a sailor named George Mayerchak was confined to the Philadelphia Navy Hospital for a month with a particularly bad bout of pneumonia. While he was there, Mayerchak began to hear stories from enlisted sailors concerning a strange event that had occurred at a local tavern near the Philadelphia Naval Yard in late 1943—an event that very closely fitted the contents of the newspaper clipping described by Moore and Berlitz. When Mayerchak went public with his story, he disputed the claim that the sailors in question disappeared without a trace, however; rather, he maintained, it was his understanding that instead they had briefly, and fantastically, flickered on and off. For our purposes here, the most important aspect of Mayerchak’s recollections is that he heard these accounts no later than 1949—a full seven years before Carlos Allende told his amazing story to Morris Jessup.

Bill Moore also cited the testimony of one Harry Euton, who was reportedly involved in a Top Secret Second World War experiment to test a new concept of camouflaging ships against enemy radar. Euton told Moore that during the experiment something went catastrophically wrong and the ship literally became invisible to the naked eye from the second anti-aircraft mount to the rear of the vessel. As a result, it had no discernible bottom and no stern. Euton described to Moore the very strange and disorientating feeling of standing on the ship, but being unable to see it beneath his feet. He added that it was his automatic (and highly understandable) reaction to quickly reach out and grab something to keep him from falling: he clearly remembered holding tight to a cable or pipe, which felt normal, but which he could not see. Euton also told Moore that several crewmembers vanished in the blink of an eye, while others were still visible, but did not appear as they did normally — a potentially significant point upon which Euton steadfastly refused to clarify or even discuss any further.

Did the U.S. Navy really stumble upon the secrets of both invisibility and teleportation at the Philadelphia Naval Yard in 1943?

The Project Continues

The next chapter in the strange saga goes like this: Following the disastrous events that occurred in the Philadelphia Naval Yard in late 1943, the U.S. government moved quickly to shut down any and all research into such largely uncharted areas as invisibility and teleportation, primarily as a result of not having a full understanding and appreciation of the science behind what it was the Navy had stumbled upon. Deep, overriding fear of the unknown, in other words, was the prime motivation for halting this research. For a while, at least.

By 1952, rumors suggest, the times were changing; slowly at first, but ultimately at a rapid and mind-boggling pace. In that year, supposedly, some of the surviving military personnel and scientists who had been involved in the Philadelphia Experiment secretly got back together to discuss the possibility of once again trying to force open the doors to those strange realms of invisibility and teleportation — as well as seeking to understand what it was that had so drastically affected the mental and physical well-being of so many of the crewmembers of the USS Eldridge. They wanted to see if whatever had caused such terrible psychological effects could be used as a weapon to manipulate and/or disable the human brain. Mind control, in simplistic terms.

The U.S. Congress, however, members of which had been briefed on the less-than-positive outcome of the Philadelphia Experiment, nixed the entire program. Congress had major reservations about allowing Department of Defense scientists to recklessly dabble in fringe science that might very well end in unmitigated disaster for not only the research team, but for all of civilization as well. Thus, funding was duly, and swiftly, denied.

However, the Pentagon was not about to be thwarted by a bunch of old guys in suits who were closed-minded, stuck in their ways, and fearful of going where very few had gone before. Thus, a plot was initiated for the project to continue in stealth, far away from congressional oversight. Funding would have to come via alternative means. Much of the money for this project came from a huge stockpile of gold that had been liberated from the Nazis at the end of the Second World War, after having been found on a railroad car in France, close to the border with Switzerland. Utilizing such precious gold to fund military programs is certainly nothing new; it most definitely worked for Adolf Hitler during the Second World War, and it reportedly worked for the Montauk program too, a decade later.

So, with the money in place, and the scientists eager to push ahead, the project was ready to be taken to the next level. Allegedly, it first did so at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, which came into existence in 1947, under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission, and whose work throughout the years has focused on high-energy physics. One of the vital requirements for the secondary project dealing with mind control was a large and powerful radar dish working on a specific frequency that could alter and manipulate human behavior. It so transpires that one was available on Long Island itself: at Montauk. The project was now beginning to take significant shape. According to the tales, it did way, way more than that.

Today, the legend of the Montauk Project has risen to astronomical levels. Since it began operating out of Montauk, we are assured, the team has come to understand to a significant degree the nature of time travel and time paradoxes, the secrets of teleportation, and the means by which both may be harnessed and utilized for secret military applications. Far stranger — indeed infinitely bizarre — stories indicate that decades after the Philadelphia Experiment of 1943 occurred, some of the Naval personnel who reportedly vanished into thin air at the time reappeared in the future, as a direct result of some form of fantastic time loop established between the 1943 project and its latter-day equivalent at Montauk.

Sounds like science fiction? Well, yes, it does. In fact, in 1984, a science-fiction movie titled, not surprisingly, The Philadelphia Experiment, was released, which took this scenario as its central theme. In the movie, two of the sailors involved in the 1943 test find themselves plunged into the heart of the mid-1980s, as a result of a time portal being opened between the Philadelphia Naval Yard of the past and a nearly identical secret, modern-era experiment. But there’s much worse to come: the portal cannot be closed, and so the race is on to shut it down before the past and present fuse, resulting in Armageddon. Supporters of the Montauk story suggest that the movie was based upon a very real truth. Detractors suggest precisely the opposite, that the Montauk mythos was borne out of the movie.

Mind-Monsters

Scientists at Montauk involved in exploring the mysterious realms of the human mind supposedly uncovered something truly incredible: the ability to pull imagery from the depths of the human subconscious, externalize that imagery, and then allow it some form of quasi-existence in reality. In simple terms, nightmarish entities of the mind now had the ability to come to some degree of physical life. One longstanding story suggests a Bigfoot-type beast was manifested at Montauk by a man named Duncan Cameron, who reportedly possessed incredible mental skills and was a key player in the experimentation. Unfortunately, the beast slipped out of the control of its creator and ran riot at Montauk, before finally being reabsorbed or outright obliterated from existence.

With mind-monsters running wild and time portals threatening to destroy the world, science was out of control, and the team finally got cold feet. The entire project was abandoned as being too risky, and Montauk closed its doors to the past, the present, and maybe even to the future (if rumors of daring research into future-travel are true).

From Camp Hero to Montauk Air Force Station

Could there be any truth to these incredible tales? Or are they merely the ravings and rants of mentally deranged souls, shysters, and hucksters?

That a military base did exist at Montauk is not an issue of any doubt. As far back as the late 1700s, the eastern tip of Long Island was considered a point of strategic military importance. Initially, and throughout the period of the War of Independence, it acted as a prime lookout point for hostile British forces. Then, during the First World War, the same locale played host to military personnel and spy balloons, all keeping a careful watch for hordes of invading Germans. In early 1942, in direct response to the tragedy of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, as well as the fact that Nazi submarines were perceived as significant threats to East Coast cities, factories, and military installations, the U.S. government finally gave the go-ahead for the construction of an impressively sized official facility, replete with bunkers, at Montauk. It became known as Camp Hero.

To ensure that it did not attract too much unwanted attention — particularly from Nazi spies that might very well have been hovering around — the entire installation was ingeniously disguised as a pleasant little fishing port. A secret military outpost was the last thing anyone had on their mind when viewing Camp Hero from the sea. After the end of the war in 1945 the base became largely obsolete. That is, until it became apparent that the Soviets were seemingly intent on dominating the planet. Soon new plans were formulated for Camp Hero, including a name change in 1948 to Montauk Point, and, five years later, to the Montauk Air Force Station.

By the mid-to-late 1950s, Montauk was an integral part of efforts to watch for, and thwart, a Soviet sneak attack on the United States. Despite various changes in names, functional capabilities, and activities, it continued to play this role during the Cold War, particularly as a result of its radar-based capabilities. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter ordered the base closed, chiefly due to the fact that satellite-based technology was rapidly taking the place of radar. The death knell for Montauk officially came on the very last day of January 1981. (Unless you subscribe to the notion that certain work, into such areas as time travel, invisibility, and teleportation, continued in secret.)

The Degaussing Story

With Montauk’s background now laid out, let’s address the base’s reputed role as one of the United States’s most secret locations, perhaps even surpassing Area 51 in terms of strange goings-on. To do that we need to go back to the beginning: the Philadelphia Experiment.

As was noted earlier in this chapter, when the tales of Carlos Allende first surfaced, the U.S. Navy maintained they were nothing more than outrageous fantasy, with absolutely zero basis in reality. Today, more than half a century after Allende popped into public view, the Navy tells a significantly different story. Although there is certainly no official endorsement of the stories that the USS Eldridge was rendered invisible and teleported from one locale to another and then back again, or that crewmembers were injured, killed, or outright vanished into oblivion in October 1943, the Navy does admit that, in all likelihood, the story has a basis in a secret of real significance.

The Navy’s current position reads as follows: “Personnel at the Fourth Naval District believe that the questions surrounding the so-called Philadelphia Experiment arise from quite routine research which occurred during World War II at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Until recently, it was believed that the foundation for the apocryphal stories arose from degaussing experiments which have the effect of making a ship undetectable or ‘invisible’ to magnetic mines.”[55]

Degaussing, in simple terms, is a process in which a system of electrical cables is installed around the circumference of a ship’s hull, running from bow to stern on both sides. An electrical current is then passed through these cables to cancel out the ship’s magnetic field.

“Degaussing equipment,” says the Navy, “was installed in the hull of ships and could be turned on whenever the ship was in waters that might contain magnetic mines, usually shallow waters in combat areas. It could be said that degaussing, correctly done, makes a ship ‘invisible’ to the sensors of magnetic mines, but the ship remains visible to the human eye, radar, and underwater listening devices.”[56]

Just to confuse things, the Navy has offered a further theory to explain what might lie at the heart of the story: “Another likely genesis of the bizarre stories about levitation, teleportation and effects on human crewmembers might be attributed to experiments with the generating plant of a destroyer, the USS Timmerman. In the 1950s, this ship was part of an experiment to test the effects of a small, high frequency generator providing l000hz, instead of the standard 400hz. The higher frequency generator produced corona discharges, and other well-known phenomena associated with high frequency generators. None of the crew suffered effects from the experiment.”[57]

The fact that the Navy first denounced the Philadelphia Experiment as having no basis in reality, and today is seemingly happy to offer no less than two theories to explain what might have been behind the legend — both involving verifiable secret projects — has inevitably raised suspicions that we are still not being told the full truth of what really occurred all those years ago at that mysterious naval yard. Could that truth really have had something to do with classified research into invisibility?

Provable Classified research

It is a verifiable reality that in the 1940s the U.S. Navy was secretly working on a project codenamed Yahootie, the goal of which was to develop an invisible aircraft. By early 1942, it had become clear to the Navy that its aerial bombers were far too slow to visually spot a German U-boat submarine cruising on the surface and successfully launch an attack during daylight hours; U-boat commanders would frequently spot the lumbering bombers and dive beneath the ocean in plenty of time to avoid destruction. As a result, military planners came up with an ingenious idea: they placed a row of bright lights on the wings and propeller hubs of several experimental aircraft, which could be adjusted by their crews to match the natural background light of the sky. This, then, was essentially a means of camouflage rather than literal invisibility.

Investigative writer Charles R. Smith noted in 2005 that “The U.S. may very well possess an advanced version of Yahootie.” Smith continued that the aircraft in question “reportedly uses a combination of lights, low-noise engines and radar-absorbing skin to render itself practically invisible in daylight….”[58] Similarly, the British Ministry of Defense has admitted that it has been secretly funding a project known as Chameleon that is designed to diminish the contrast between an aircraft and the sky.

What of the reportedly Top Secret research undertaken at the Philadelphia Naval Yard in 1943, and years later at Montauk, into the realm of teleportation? Is there any hard evidence to suggest elements of the U.S. government really have researched this particular phenomenon, which many are content to relegate to the world of onscreen science fiction?

In August 2004, the U.S. Air Force declassified into the public domain a document titled “The Teleportation Physics Study.” The report was the work of a man named Eric W. Davis, of a Las Vegas — based outfit called Warp Drive Metrics, which the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Air Force Materiel Command had quietly contracted to explore the strange realm of teleportation. Within the pages of the report (which became Air Force property when the work was completed) Davis noted, “This study was tasked with the purpose of collecting information describing the teleportation of material objects, providing a description of teleportation as it occurs in physics, its theoretical and experimental status, and a projection of potential applications.”[59]

The Davis report noted that there did indeed appear to be keen interest, in official circles, in teleportation and its potential applications by the Department of Defense: “…it became known to Dr. [Robert Lull] Forward [a now-deceased physicist] and myself, along with several colleagues both inside and outside of government, that anomalous teleportation has been scientifically investigated and separately documented by the Department of Defense.”[60]

When the Air Force declassified the study, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University, the author of The Physics of Star Trek, stated: “It is in large part crackpot physics,” and added that it contained “some things adapted from reasonable theoretical studies, and other things from nonsensical ones.”[61]

Perhaps the Air Force, after reading Davis’s document, agreed: “The views expressed in the report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the Air Force, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government,” was the statement made by the Air Force’s Research Laboratory when questioned by USA Today. Asked why the laboratory had secretly sponsored the study, AFRL spokesman Ranney Adams said, “If we don’t turn over stones, we don’t know if we have missed something.” Significantly, the AFRL added, “There are no plans by the AFRL Propulsion Directorate for additional funding on this contract.”[62] Not surprisingly, this latter statement was perceived by some Montauk researchers as evidence that the military was trying to publicly distance itself from teleportation research, while privately continuing to dig deeper into it.

Holographic Imagery

As for Bigfoot, and the notion that the Montauk team learned how to project imagery of such beasts from the dark depths of the human mind into quasi-physical form in the real world, isn’t that just too outlandish to warrant even a solitary comment? Not everyone thinks so. One of those who offered commentary on these matters is a man who features significantly in another chapter of this book: Gabe Valdez, a key player in the story of the alleged underground alien base at Dulce, New Mexico.

Valdez has uncovered information that leads him to believe that many New Mexico Bigfoot sightings are actually the work of a covert arm of the U.S. government possessing the ability to create holographic imagery of the hairy man-beasts. The purpose? To deter people from getting too close to some of its secret underground installations. It is fascinating to hear such a theory coming out of the mouth of a respected police officer who was consulted by the FBI on cattle-mutilation cases at Dulce in the 1970s. Even more fascinating, Valdez’s position on Bigfoot eerily parallels the stories surfacing from the Montauk research community.

Time Travel

There is one other major area of controversy in relation to Montauk we’ve yet to cover: time travel. Although the idea that government agencies may be utilizing secret bases to research the possibility of surfing the centuries back and forth sounds, to most people, like nothing more than an adventure-packed movie, some have suggested that fact is far stranger than anything that could ever be conjured up by even the most imaginative Hollywood scriptwriters.

Dr. David Lewis Anderson — of the New Mexico — based Anderson Institute, a division of Anderson Multinational LLC, whose primary goal is “the development of time-warped field theory, its application, and ensuring the ongoing development of time reactor system design concepts and capabilities”[63] — has stated that, decades ago, he spent time working on a secret project at the U.S. Air Force’s Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The goal of the project was definitive time travel. We may never know the extent to which success has been achieved in this particularly strange area, but we do have this on-the-record source revealing that it has at least been investigated.

Closed for Business?

Today, the Montauk installation is no longer in use. In 2002 it was renamed the Camp Hero State Park, and is now widely open to the general public. Its role in classified activity is over — unless, that is, as many Montauk enthusiasts fully accept, far below the old base, dark and strange experimentation still continues at a steady pace, far away from both prying eyes and congressional oversight.

Given that we now know that official agencies of the U.S. government and the military have undertaken research into invisibility, time travel, teleportation, and even the mystery of Bigfoot, perhaps we might be wise to muse upon an interesting scenario: the Montauk program was not all fiction. Just maybe, Montauk is not as dead as the powers that be would have us believe. Perhaps, in some secret domain underneath Long Island, the sensational truth still exists, guarded with extreme prejudice by those tasked with ensuring the public never learns the incredible truths behind the mysteries of Montauk.