Montauk: Camp Hero, the Giant Radar, and the Story of Experiments Buried on Long Island

At the eastern tip of Long Island, New York, Camp Hero is now a coastal state park. A massive radar tower still rises above the woods and old roads. Its AN/FPS-35 reflector is about 126 feet long, 38 feet high, and weighs roughly 40 tons. It is not a movie prop. The radar entered service in late 1960. Before the park existed, this land was a World War II coastal-defense base and later a United States Air Force radar station during the Cold War.

That real military site is where the Montauk story begins. The people who tell it do not point to an unnamed desert base. They point to a place with coordinates, concrete bunkers, military records, and a radar tower that can still be seen from a distance. Their account says that after the public air-defense mission, part of the installation was used for closed experiments: influencing minds with electromagnetic signals, manipulating perception, placing images in a subject’s mind, and eventually research involving time.