All the eerie real-life events “Stranger Things” is based on

Before “Stranger Things” became a global sensation, it was a long-shot project by two aspiring filmmakers obsessed with how Stephen King and Steven Spielberg took inspiration from real-word events and conspiracies to craft their stories.

Initially titled Montauk, Matt and Ross Duffer’s creation was envisioned as an eight-hour sci-fi horror epic set in 1980 in Montauk, New York, a real town tied to disturbing rumors of government experiments into psychological warfare.

After being rejected several times, the Duffer brothers finally sold the project to Netflix, and Stranger Things was born.

The hit series draws heavily from 1980s pop culture, but some of its creepiest aspects are rooted in real-world experiments and programs. The show’s mind-control labs, psychokinetic children, and military secrecy borrow from classified U.S. and Cold War-era initiatives—stories not only strange, but also true.

The MK-ULTRA Program

Much of the shadowy backdrop for Stranger Things can be traced to Project MK-ULTRA, a real CIA mind-control initiative that operated between 1953 and 1964. The program’s objective was to find ways to manipulate the human mind through chemical, biological, and psychological means.

Sidney Gottlieb, the scientist who spearheaded the effort, has been compared to Dr. Martin Brenner, the sinister scientist overseeing Eleven’s powers in the show, played by Matthew Modine.

Like Brenner, Gottlieb believed that controlling the mind could lead to global dominance. He was particularly interested in developing a “truth serum” and psychokinetic capabilities through drug use.

Gottlieb’s experimentation began with substances like THC, cocaine, and heroin. But when he encountered LSD—then just 13 years old—he became fixated.

LSD was administered to both volunteers and unwitting subjects, with the goal of crushing the human psyche to elicit full compliance. The agency saw this not merely as science but warfare. Gottlieb described MK-ULTRA as a response to Soviet advances in “brain warfare,” painting the CIA’s own unethical work as defensive.

The experiments conducted on Eleven and her mother, Terry Ives, involving forced drug use and sensory deprivation, closely mirror the real-life MK-ULTRA program, where the CIA subjected both willing and unsuspecting participants to hallucinogens and psychological torture.

The Montauk Project

The original version of Stranger Things was set in Montauk, a town long shrouded in urban legend.

Camp Hero, a decommissioned military base in Montauk, is central to the so-called Montauk Project—an alleged series of government experiments focused, again, on mind control and psychological warfare.

Though the series eventually moved its setting to the fictional Hawkins, Indiana, the echoes of Montauk remain. The set design of Hawkins’ lab bears a striking resemblance to the real-life former Montauk facility.

“We considered bizarre experiments we had read about taking place in the Cold War,” Matt Duffer told Rolling Stone in an interview from 2016.

Nina Kulagina

The heart of Eleven’s character supposedly draws inspiration from Nina Kulagina, a Russian woman believed to possess psychokinetic powers.

Born in 1926 in Leningrad, Kulagina came to public attention in the 1960s when she was shown apparently moving objects without touching them. The similarities to Stranger Things are clear: with Millie Bobby Brown’s central character of Eleven displaying telekinetic abilities.

Kulagina claimed her powers activated when she was angry, much like Eleven’s emotionally driven abilities. The phenomenon baffled scientists, and some accused her of fraud.

In Stranger Things season 1, Hopper discovers that Dr. Brenner’s work at Hawkins Lab was officially linked to the real-life CIA program MK-ULTRA, grounding the show’s conspiracy roots in actual history. Later, in season 4, Eleven regains her powers inside a tub named “NINA”—which some fans feel could be a direct nod to Kulagina, whose alleged psychic abilities inspired her character.