East End Myths: Was the Montauk Project Real?

In 1942, the U.S. Army built a military base near the Montauk Lighthouse. Huge guns faced out to sea. Ammunition for them was stored in underground tunnels, safe from the guns of German U-boats, should they approach. The base closed down in 1959, the military just walking away and leaving everything behind. A chain link fence kept the public out. But local teenagers — I was one — climbed around among its abandoned radar tower, gun emplacements and tunnels.

Thirty-two years later, in 1992, two men, Preston Nichols and Peter Moon, wrote a book titled The Montauk Project, Experiments in Time. It became one of the most talked about books of that era.  Their book cited “the Philadelphia Experiment,” a World War II project where the military teleported an entire destroyer, the U.S.S. Eldridge, complete with crew, to Philadelphia. But the crew died. And this failure had to be covered up. Other secret experiments took place, sometimes using local residents who’d been lured into the tunnels.

A movie was made about the Montauk Project. An estimated 100,000 books were sold nationwide. And even today, groups still come to Montauk to explore the tunnels and gun sites where all this supposedly took place. Many people still believe it to be true.

In The Montauk Project, the authors claimed all the animals in the woods around Montauk came downtown one day and had to be rounded up. I was editing this paper then and knew it was not to be true, so wrote that. In a follow up book, The Montauk Project Revisited, I was described as part of the government coverup.

Today, the former base is now Camp Hero, a 415-acre public park. Visit and see the gun emplacements, tunnels and military hardware yourself.

Another legend of the Hamptons.

Read more of Dan Rattiner’s stories.