The Real-Life Experiment That Inspired "Stranger Things"

#1

Mixing tense horror, family drama and eighties nostalgia the show has become the unexpected Netflix hit of the summer. But what a lot of viewers don't realise, and would probably be massively freaked out by, is that the show is actually based on a dark real-life government research faculty.

#2

Series creators the Duffer brothers have said that as well as drawing on classic eighties sci-fi the show also draws on an end of Cold War experiment called Project MKUltra, otherwise known as the "CIA's mind control progam." No, I'm not joking.

#3

As Matt Duffer explained to Vulture:

"When we were first starting to talk about the idea [for the show], we had talked about a paranormal-missing child story line. Then we were talking about some of the mysterious government experiments that we felt were happening at the tail end of the Cold War, right when rumored [projects] like MKUltra were ramping down."

#4

The project is deep-seated in the mysterious on-goings of the CIA in the 1950s and 60s which has been explored in movies like The Men Who Stare At Goats where they dabbled in hallucinogenic drugs (LSD) and mind control more than I do at festivals. Things like the sensory deprivation tanks we see Eleven being forced into were common place, as the agency stretched the patients drugged mental capacities in an attempt for them to "see" things like the future, or the Soviet Union

#5

This all would have been very handy if it had come to pass, but unfortunately for the American government it didn't really work. Or at least we don't think it did.

#6

But despite the programme being closed down in the seventies, it has since been confirmed that part of this research saw CIA agents drugging "American citizens without their knowledge" with things like LSD which they hoped would act as a kind of truth serum.

Crazy, right. Or is it