The Montauk Project: Stranger Times

At the eastern tip of Long Island, New York, on its “south fork,” as the locals call it, stands the famous Montauk Point Lighthouse, first commissioned by George Washington in 1787. The beaches and land on which the lighthouse is located comprise Montauk Point State Park, a popular tourist attraction during the summer months.

There is another site on the same parkland, however, that is closed to the public, and that is the now-abandoned Montauk Point Air Force Station, with its imposing five-story concrete radar building topped off by an enormous “banana-peel” radar antenna, whose now-faded red and white checkered pattern still dominates the landscape to the southwest of the lighthouse.

The big building with its radar antenna is the focal point of the remains of what was once an entire small “town” run by the military: several winding roads accompanied by a “neighborhood” of multi-colored houses, maintenance buildings, an on-site electrical power station, a “PX”/commissary, a recreation center, as well as a computer center and the usual offices that any military facility would require.

Enter The Montauk Project Story

In 1988 or thereabouts, an “underground” videotape made its debut in the strange and enigmatic world of UFOlogy and Psychotronics: Three men mesmerized a small gathering of interested listeners in a private home on Long Island’s south shore, telling a tale that interwove stories of secret government weather control technology, mood and thought alteration by electronic means, actual mind control of subjects (willing and unwilling), transmission and reception of thought (“electronic telepathy,”) and, as if that wasn’t enough, actual teleportation of physical objects and persons to and from distant locations. This was allegedly extended into the development of a working Time Machine. The video got its name, The Truth About the Philadelphia Experiment, from the claim that, not only were these stories true and actual events, but that all of them were a continuation of, or spinoffs from, the techniques used to warp spacetime in the Philadelphia Experiment of 1943!

The “star” of the show is one Preston Nichols, a forty-ish Long Island-based microwave engineer who supposedly lost his job at AIL (an electronics defense contractor) when he began “remembering” glimpses of an “alter-ego” existence which he believed he was living, in which he was being used for his technical expertise to revamp and maintain the radar at Montauk Airbase – for a series of unofficial, secret underground experiments performed by a renegade group of scientists and military men who had originally operated out of the well-known Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, Long Island.

Nichols claims that, through hypnosis and brainwashing, he was made to “forget” that he was living a double life – by day a ‘mild-mannered engineer’ but by night (or during the day) he was whisked out to the supposedly-derelict Montauk radar base where he participated in some of the strangest experiments one could imagine – and that the control group ousted him from the program when snatches of these memories began to come back to him during his “normal” life. As chief technician running the Montauk radar, he would have been the resident expert on what they were doing and how they were doing it, technologically speaking. The bottom line is, Preston Nichols claims to have used a modified version of the old Montauk radar, under duress, to generate an updated Philadelphia Experiment with accomplishments far exceeding those claimed by Carl Allen in the original story.

The story goes that all was well until August 12, 1983, when a “saboteur” among the experimenters precipitated a big, hairy monstrous beast (referred to by Preston as “Junior.”) from a “thoughtform”, right out of the ether. The beast allegedly ran amok all over the base, and the only way the personnel could bring the ordeal to a halt was to disconnect the power to the radar; when that didn’t work, they supposedly chopped the power cables and radar waveguides with hatchets until the electromagnetic field lost its power and the beast faded back into the “hyperspace” from which it had been created. And why didn’t the power go down when they first tried to turn it off,

necessitating the frantic hatchet-work? You guessed it: the EM field generated at Montauk had tunneled back through time to 1943, when a similar field was being generated onboard the U.S.S. Eldridge in the Philadelphia Harbour. There was a “lock-up in hyperspace,” and one experiment was feeding the other. Anyone reading this who has seen the movie The Philadelphia Experiment has probably noticed the parallel in the idea of two experiments, forty years apart, locking up in hyperspace, with the main character having to travel back to 1943 to do a hatchet-job on the equipment aboard the Eldridge in order to shut the experiment down 1983.

Al Bielek 1927 ~ 2011

The second character in the video is a retired electrical engineer by the name of Alfred D. Bielek, probably in his late 50’s or early 60’s, another Long Islander who at this writing is living in Atlanta, Georgia. Al Bielek has a unique angle in his story, which he tells during much of the video: Al claims to have been one of the actual seamen who were below decks, in the control room, operating the generators which powered the Philadelphia Experiment, aboard the Eldridge in 1943!

He and the third character in the video, Duncan Cameron, assert that they are the two seamen after whom the characters in the Hollywood movie were modeled. The characters in the movie jumped overboard when the PX was obviously getting out of control, fell through a “hyperspace tunnel,” and landed on dry ground at a desert Air Force facility in Nevada or Utah, only to find out that they were now in the year 1984 and that the scientist responsible for the 1943 PX, a “Dr. Longstreet,” was still at it (although 40 years older) in the western desert. Longstreet “ripped another hole in hyperspace” and linked up with the two-time travelers from 1943 who never did hit the water when they jumped ship.

After an initial period of rational disbelief, Bielek has now been convinced (by the persistence of Preston Nichols and by the “trauma” of having viewed the Hollywood movie for the first time) that he and Duncan Cameron are indeed the two characters in the film, and are actually brothers besides! His real name, he has discovered, is Edward Cameron, and he was “originally” born in 1916!

Al Bielek use to travel the country, giving lectures to UFO and Paranormal Phenomena groups, claiming that he and Duncan Cameron were the two sailors who jumped off the ship in 1943. Bielek goes on to tell they actually ended up at Montauk Point rather than in the western desert when Preston Nichols’ renovated radar met up with the Eldridge’s electromagnetic field through the hyper-spatial connecting link. The “Dr. Longstreet” of the movie ends up being none other than the real-life John Von Neumann, famous mathematician and computer pioneer who was deeply involved with various classified projects during WW2 and who is said to have died in 1958 (Nichols, Bielek and Cameron dispute this, claiming that Von Neumann is still alive, living in upstate New York under a different name, as a split-personality).

All three of them have now passed away;

Alfred Bielek passed away on Monday, October 10, 2011, at 6:30 AM in Guadalajara, Mexico. Al was born on March 31, 1927, and was 84 years old at the time of his death. He was buried at a local cemetery in Guadalajara.

Preston Nichols passed away on Friday, October 5, 2018, at 4am. Preston was born on born May 24, 1946, and was 72 when he died. He had suffered a heart attack in July followed by a stroke in September.

Duncan Cameron just lost his long battle with prostate cancer and died Thursday, May 9th, 2019 and was 67 when he died.

After some research, I found that Bielek is not some “Johnny-come-lately” to the UFO/paranormal field. He has been around and active in the UFO field as far back as 1966 and earlier, offering his “professional evaluation” of the Trevor James photos.[1] Ivan T. Sanderson also refers to Mr. Bielek as a friend. In the paragraph quoted below, Sanderson is asking some “experts” to determine whether “vile vortices,” or anomalous ocean whirlpools such as are allegedly found in the Bermuda Triangle, are spaced at regular intervals around the earth’s surface.

“I first appealed to, and then assembled a number of engineers, EM specialists, and geophysicists, and presented them with our problem and what we had found out by pure research, and then gave them a set of blank globes to go to work on. I started with my very old friend, Al Bielek, an EM engineer who lives in moral chastity with a sort of harem of slide rules. I started with him because I wanted first to get the math and spherical geometry sorted out before we started the (as I then envisaged it) very arduous task of speculating upon, investigating, and ferreting out possible causes for what we already had; and it was lucky that we did so, as it turned out. All of them were also mathematicians, despite their working specialities, so that the session, which lasted a week, became interesting to say the least– to the non-mathematicians, that was.”[2]

Here is another example that shows Bielek clearly had exposure to the Philadelphia Experiment well before all his “memories” returned

“In 1966, author Brad Steiger received a letter from Steve Yankee, a bright young college student from Michigan with whom he had been corresponding for several months. Yankee actually had in his possession a microfilmed copy of the (much sought after) Varo Manufacturing edition of the annotated version of The Case for the UFO by Morris K. Jessup. He had received this microfilm from a scientist-engineer by the name of Alfred Bielek. (This was also privately confirmed to Robert by Bielek himself.) Brad (Steiger) confirms that Al followed PX since 60s.” ~ Robert Goerman

The uninformed attendee of one of Bielek’s lectures might think he was just a nuts-and-bolt electronics engineer, until suddenly one day he began remembering that he was personally involved in the Philadelphia Experiment. On the contrary, his interests in the esoteric seem to go back a long way, at least to the mid-1960’s. While this in itself doesn’t make him a charlatan, it does tend to destroy the “innocence” he would have if he had had no previous interest in such things, and then to have it blow up in his face suddenly.

“I know Al Bielek. He has been to my home. I have questioned him from every angle and cannot determine whether or not he is telling the truth. He must have some inside information source because he knows about Project RAINBOW, an experiment in time travel. I do not know the results of RAINBOW but saw documents about its purpose. I am keeping an open mind on Bielek at this time.” – Bill Cooper [3]

(here is a great link for every imaginable map of the area)

Historical Time Line of the Base & Montauk Project

This is presently a work in progress. Items with no reference numbers are Historical Fact, Reference Numbers;

{1} Preston Nichols in videos, and issues of the “Montauk Pulse”
{2} “The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time” by Preston B. Nichols w/ Peter Moon
{3} “Montauk Revisited: Adventures In Synchronicity” by Preston B. Nichols w/Peter Moon