Fiction mirrors reality in ways we could never comprehend. What we see on Television or on the Big Screens have some unexplained real world parallels. That is just how the show business industry has worked ever since its inception. Stranger Things, at first glance, looks like something that could only happen in a fictional world. There cannot be such experiments done on human beings that could give certain subjects super powers and open portals to other dimensions. But you might be wrong there. There is a real life project conducted by the CIA that was the inspiration for the Stranger Things Project that gave birth to Eleven!
Meet Project MK-Ultra – the Secret CIA Mind Control and Manipulation Experiment that was the basis for the Stranger Things Program.
The world of Stranger Things has many elements taken straight from the height of the Cold War. The Central Intelligence Agency and Russia’s KGB were hard at work at sending spies to infiltrate each other’s facilities and steal their secrets. There were projects of similar nature being conducted at both ends of the world. Russia was claimed to have its own version of a mind control project akin to MK-Ultra. Stranger Things shows that there was some conflict between the United States and Russia. The Government was also responsible for covering up the project and keeping it away from the public eye.
You May Also Like: 10 Greatest Netflix Original Action Flicks To Watch ASAP
Project MK-Ultra was born out of a need to restructure the human mind in order to make it do work no sane person would. The project had several applications. Through the usage of specialized psychological manipulation tactics and some powerful medications, the mind of the subject was made completely complacent and obedient to each and every command of his or her secret handler. The project aimed to make an interrogation technique that was a hundred per cent fool proof and will always give results. It would also be helpful in capturing and creating double agents. MK-Ultra would have allowed for techniques to brainwash its subjects and turn them into sleeper cells.
All of this looks and sounds very advanced and straight out of a science fiction movie. But here’s the truth you would not want to hear – Project MK-Ultra was sanctioned in 1953. It encompassed a series of mass surveillance campaigns followed by kidnapping and torture of American Citizens over US Soil followed by exposure to psycho-active drugs, powerful hallucinogens, and all forms of physical and sexual abuse to tame the subjects. The Project was halted twenty years later in the year 1973.
There is more to the story. The horror does not end here. Project MK-Ultra was such a classified program literally no information was ever leaked to the press. All the people who tried to blow the whistle on it mysteriously disappeared. It was only after a group of US Senators requested all information on the Project under the banner of a Freedom of Information Act Request that a cache of 20,000 documents related to the many inhuman experiments of the project were discovered. In 2001, other declassified information was brought forth. But the last of the information was only made public in December 2018.
Related: Why Movies Should be Released on Digital
This information gave us some startling pieces of news. The 2018 MK-Ultra documents revealed that an as of yet unidentified doctor had tried to experiment on the usage of neural probes aka brain implants on dogs. The objective of the experiment was to remotely control the movement and actions of dogs from afar.
And the best part of the story – the experiment, according to the doctor, was a success!
The MK-Ultra Project bears some uncanny resemblance to the Stranger Things Project. Like the former, the latter also involved illegal experimentation on US and Canadian Citizens over North American Territory which on broader terms amounts to abject treason. The MK-Ultra project was supposed to force the human mind into absolute submission and make people do things they normally would not do. The Stranger Things Project was aimed at controlling the human mind and letting it reach its hidden potential, by opening up doors to hidden talents and abilities that some would claim to be super powers.
Just like the MK-Ultra Project, the Stranger Things Project was also carried out in more than 80 educational and medical institutions throughout the nation. Every reputable facility belonging to a renowned university or a hospital was an accomplice to the project as seen in the web television series. As the show shows us in successive seasons, there were known attempts at destroying information that would prove the project’s existence. The Director of the CIA destroyed half of the evidence and documents related to the project prior to the 1970’s Watergate Scandal.
But slowly and steadily, data regarding the experiment was made public. The biggest cache of information came forth in the year 2001 right after the turn of the 20th Century. The CIA MK-Ultra Operation used radio logical, biological, chemical, and physiological methods to break a subject’s psyche and control their neural functions. The project involved the usage of high dosages of the LSD drug. What is even more frightening is that Project MK-Ultra also used a human sized apparatus that looks very similar to the Sensory Deprivation Tank Eleven was trained in as a psychic. Other techniques like hypnosis, electro-shock therapy, and isolation methods were also used to make the human mind submit to the program.
All of this was done without any form of consent. In the Stranger Things show reveals that the Hawkins National Laboratory was one of the primary institutions which conducted the experiments. Led by the elusive Dr Martin Brenner, the institution participated in the show’s counterpart to the real world Project MK-Ultra. In all of this chaos, it should be noted that it was Eleven’s mother that suffered the most. Being subjected to torture no sane human should be allowed to go through, Eleven’s mother gave birth to Eleven, who was born with super powers thanks to the pain and suffering of her pregnant mother.
Also Read: Stranger Things: One Shot Special Comic To Release Before Halloween
Project MK-Ultra is real. The Stranger Things Project may be fictional but its scale and intensity bears an uncanny similarity with MK-Ultra. We know for sure that the CIA destroyed most of the files related to the project by 1973. Maybe the project had also uncovered the secrets to unlocking telepathy and telekinesis within the human mind? Maybe monsters from another dimension did contact us?
Guess we will never know!!
