The Secret Government Projects in Stranger Things Aren’t All Fiction—Here Are the Surprising Initiatives the U.S. Actually Tried

It may feel like we’re living in the Upside Down these days, but we’re about to be reminded just what that means, Stranger Things–style. Netflix’s buzziest sci-fi series is finally back after more than three years, with the first four episodes of the fifth and final season set to premiere on Nov. 26. Two more installments will follow on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, as Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and the gang battle Vecna.

Eleven, of course, gained her supernatural powers through a secret government project and unwittingly created a portal to a parallel universe. The shady mind-control experiments conducted on her and other child subjects were led by a covert operation within the Department of Energy, with the military policing the operations. And while viewers might think the show is pure fiction, the U.S. government actually has a history of engaging in secret experiments that aren’t too far from those in Stranger Things.

The government’s secret forays into extrasensory perception (ESP), mind control and more started after World War II and were motivated by a race against the Soviet Union to weaponize the potential of psychic powers. A lot of the experiments involved illegal and unethical programs on those who couldn’t properly consent to the experiments—or didn’t even know they were being conducted. Like we said, it was pretty shady, but the government believed the ends justified the means.

“The CIA became paralyzed with a fear that Communists had perfected some kind of a drug or a potion or a technique that would allow them to control human minds,” Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, told NPR’s Fresh Air podcast in 2019. “This was actually a greatly exaggerated fear, but it played on something cultural that affected everybody that grew up in the early 20th century. And seized by this myth, the CIA not only believed that Communists had approached or reached this holy grail, but that the CIA should also find out a way to do it.”

The Duffer brothers, who created Stranger Things, told Rolling Stone that they wanted the show’s “supernatural element to be grounded in real-life science in some way, [including] bizarre experiments we had read about taking place in the Cold War.” And because of that, a lot of what you see on the show has an actual basis in history.

We searched the web to dig up the strangest, most disturbing projects the government kept under wraps for years. Read on to find out about the real-life secret government operations that inspired the series—and have been going on in our proverbial backyard for decades.

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Operation Paperclip enlisted Nazi doctors to conduct human experiments

After World War II, the U.S. government brought over scientists from Nazi Germany in a secret program called Operation Paperclip. The goal was for them to continue their work here and prevent German research from falling into the hands of the Soviets. Although much of the research centered on rocket science and military technology, some Nazi scientists experimented on humans to test interrogation techniques, hypnosis, drugs and mind control. These programs—which included Projects Chatter, Bluebird and Artichoke, all forerunners of mind-control project MKUltra (more on that below)—lasted through the 1950s.

Discovered on CIA.gov

Project MKUltra attempted to harness mind control

In this secret CIA program, which spanned the 1950s and ’60s, scientists experimented on test subjects with electroshock treatments, hypnosis, radiation, chemicals and drugs such as LSD. The study’s participants—which included mental-hospital patients, prisoners, college students and military service people—were often coerced, unable to give informed consent or didn’t know they were being subjected to harmful substances. In Stranger Things, Eleven’s mother was a test subject for MKUltra experiments and later gave birth to a daughter with psychic abilities.

Discovered on the National Security Archive

Sensory deprivation was studied as a brainwashing technique

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) scientist John C. Lilly developed the sensory deprivation tank in the mid-1950s to study human consciousness, but intelligence and defense officials were covertly interested in how it could be used against enemies. Would prisoners be more willing to offer up information or switch sides after being deprived of their senses? The government even believed the Chinese used sensory deprivation to brainwash some American POWs in the Korean War. Then-NIMH director Robert Felix revealed the result of secret sensory deprivation experiments publicly in 1956, when he told Congress, “Once … the person is completely disoriented and disorganized, then you feed back in information you want this individual to have. I am sure you can break anybody with this.”

The sensory deprivation tank gets a different use in Stranger Things—to get Eleven to channel her psychic abilities and communicate with other dimensions.

Discovered on History of the Human Sciences

The Endicott Experiments tested ESP

Some of the first government tests of extrasensory perception occurred at a small women’s college in Massachusetts in 1962. Another reaction to Russia’s forays into psychic abilities, the experiments were part of a secret project by the U.S. Air Force conducted practically in plain sight in a small building on campus. With the thinking that women were “more intuitive” than men, the researchers used a machine that generated random numbers for the female students to make predictions about; however, no evidence of ESP was ever found.

Discovered on Soundings: Endicott College Magazine

The Montauk Project allegedly experimented on kids

The Duffer Brothers were directly inspired to create Stranger Things by this alleged secret project at a now-decommissioned Air Force station in Montauk, New York—in fact, the show was originally called Montauk. Although it was officially a weapons-testing site, popular conspiracy theo ries say it was really the site of clandestine government experiments on children from the 1960s through the ’80s, focusing on teleportation, mind control, time travel and otherworldly beings. Sound familiar?

Discovered on The History Channel’s The Dark Files

Project Blue Book investigated UFOs—and the AARO continues to do so

The U.S. government investigated unidentified flying objects in the 1950s and ’60s through Project Blue Book, a highly classified analysis of reported sightings. No actual aliens or alien craft had been detected when the program shuttered in 1969, although 701 reports (out of more than 12,000) remain unexplained. Today, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), established in 2022, attempts to identify what’s now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Curiously, a 2024 report revealed that in the 1980s, the Pentagon deliberately spread alien-fueled rumors about Air Force site Area 51 in the Nevada desert in order to hide its real project: creating top-secret stealth fighters.

Discovered on The Wall Street Journal

The Stargate Project researched psychic abilities

This government project—which ran from 1972 to 1995, when it was declassified—focused on harnessing ESP abilities in supposedly “gifted” people. According to a CIA briefing from 1993, the project’s primary focus was “anomalous phenomena, to include parapsychological and related biophysical interactions (e.g., telepathy, remote viewing, psychokinesis).” Another goal of Stargate was to find out what Russia and China were up to in this psychic race.

Discovered on CIA.gov

Project Sun Streak tried spying from afar

Another secret program in the 1980s focused specifically on “remote viewing,” the ability to see things happening in another space or time (Stranger Things‘s Eleven can also do this). Run by the Defense Intelligence Agency, Project Sun Streak looked into how this psychic ability could be used for intelligence gathering with little to no cost or risk since the subject isn’t actually in the same place as those they’re spying on. Another goal was to train professional intelligence personnel to perform remote viewing. Can you “train” someone to be psychic? Apparently not, because the project was shut down and declassified in 2000.

Discovered on Forbes

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is looking for a “mirror world”

Of course, not all hidden government facilities are doing nefarious things. Still, even legit scientific research has been compared to the secret projects of Stranger Things. Take the case of the “mirror universe” supposedly opened by a national lab deep underground in Tennessee in 2019 (and which got national attention in 2022 when Season 4 premiered). Funded by the Department of Energy, scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory experimented with sending subatomic particles through a barrier to transform them into a sort of “mirror particle”—so naturally, media hype built that the researchers were opening a portal to another dimension a la the Upside Down. In reality, though, the scientists were studying dark matter, which is little understood but makes up most of the universe, and its interactions with regular matter.

Discovered on AP News

The government funds giant underground machines

Labs deep underground currently house giant machines that look like the “key” machine from Season 3 and the Nina device from Season 4. But the actual reason they are so far below ground is to shield the machines from cosmic radiation, which would make it harder to detect signals from dark matter. South Dakota’s Sanford Underground Research Facility, which is a mile underground, has a massive dark-matter detector called LZ. And in Switzerland, there’s the underground Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator, where researchers are also searching for evidence of dark matter.

Discovered on Sanford Underground Research Facility

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