Project Phoenix
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Project Phoenix is the designation applied to multiple distinct alleged programmes, most notablely a series of experiments at Camp Hero (Montauk Air Force Station), Long Island, New York, that combined time-travel research, mind-control operations, and jump-gate technology development under a succession of codename phases. The Montauk Project witnesses use Phoenix as the overarching programme name encompassing three identified phases: Phoenix I (electronic mind control via the AN/FPS-18 SAGE radar system), Phoenix II (psychotronic chair experiments linking human consciousness to physical matter), and Phoenix III (the portal and time-travel phase).
Origins and infrastructure
The Phoenix Project is described as having been launched circa 1970, when the U.S. government covertly reoccupied the Camp Hero base — by that point a derelict radar station — and extended it downward to nine underground levels. Project Paperclip scientists specialising in mind control and human programming were relocated to the site and combined with alien technology that had accumulated in government custody over the previous two decades. Test subjects were drawn from what Stewart Swerdlow — a described survivor of the project — characterises as "expendable" populations: children of alcoholics, foster children, unadopted orphans, and homeless individuals taken from New York City, with Swerdlow estimating that approximately 300,000 people — children and adults — were used across the project's operational life from 1970 to 1983, the majority of whom did not survive. Swerdlow further elaborated in a 2024 interview that the programme's scope incorporated not merely mind control and programming but also genetic manipulation, esoteric weaponry, and weather control — and that foreign scientists including Soviet personnel operated at Montauk alongside the German contingent, reflecting a covert international collaboration concealed behind Cold War adversarialism; Swerdlow's own family connection to the project derived partly from his great-uncle Benjamin Sverdlov, who had pioneered mind-control programming in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Phoenix I: Electronic mind control
Phoenix I is described as the initial Montauk research phase, operating through the repurposed SAGE radar facility at Camp Hero. The SAGE system's AN/FPS-18 antenna — described by Swerdlow as "a curved metallic net on top of this very tall concrete building" — was repurposed from aircraft detection to frequency transmission into the atmosphere, the ionosphere, and the earth itself. Frequencies were also bounced off the ionosphere and directed at specific geographic targets elsewhere on the planet for mind control purposes, and Swerdlow describes this work as the precursor to the HAARP network subsequently installed in Alaska and northern Norway. This work is presented as a continuation of the naval Philadelphia Experiment programme, relocated to Montauk after the Philadelphia Experiment's alleged 1943 disaster, and was connected to early MK-Ultra-era research into consciousness manipulation.
Phoenix II: The Montauk Chair
Phoenix II centred on the development of the Montauk Chair — a device derived from captured Sirian technology, as described by some witnesses — that could focus and amplify the psychic output of a trained human subject (the "Montauk Boy" seated in the chair) and materialise thought constructs in physical reality. Swerdlow describes the device as resembling an oversized dental chair with a sensor array arching around (but not touching) the subject's head, which picked up brainwaves and transmitted them to a Cray-class supercomputer that could store, amplify, and re-transmit the information to manifest it physically. The chair reportedly functioned by interfacing the subject's mind with a sophisticated computer system that interpreted psychic output and converted it into transmittable electromagnetic signals. The programme was overseen, according to survivor Arkheim Ra, not primarily by human commanders but by an artificial intelligence that directed the experimental programme and made key decisions about subject selection and experimental parameters.
Phoenix III: Time travel and portals
Phoenix III represents the culmination of the Montauk research programme, involving the opening of stable vortices or portals through which alleged time travel was conducted. Children were used as operators and travellers, their physiology considered particularly suited to stabilising portal apertures and withstanding the disorientation of temporal displacement. Arkheim Ra describes being sent as a time soldier to Atlantis through a Montauk-opened portal, and separately being forced to open a portal to Atlantis to enable retrieval of advanced ancient technology from that civilisation.
Rebecca Rose corroborates the use of children in portal operations, describing her own work transiting cargo through a jump gate connecting a Moon facility to Dulce Base, and noting that Michael Salla confirmed this was consistent with what Montauk witnesses said about children's frequency characteristics being necessary for early jump-gate technology.
Stewart Swerdlow's personal testimony
Stewart Swerdlow describes having been recruited into the Montauk Project at age thirteen and a half, approximately 1970, through an alleged portal that opened inside his bedroom closet each night. He describes being sent on both physical and temporal missions: physical surveillance trips to the Middle East, Europe, and the Caribbean, as well as time-portal transits to ancient Rome, prehistoric Earth, and — in the most contentious incident he describes — to the time of Christ, where he was given a weapon and ordered to assassinate the figure he encountered; Swerdlow refused, was brought back, and was "severely punished."
Swerdlow describes the time portal device used in Phoenix III as resembling a large mirror through which operators could see energy waves; subjects would program the device to a specific historical frequency and physically step through it, experiencing the aperture as passing through a viscous liquid. An "anchor device" worn by the traveller maintained audio-visual contact with the Montauk control station, allowing operators to monitor transit in real time.
The research also yielded a practical discovery about the nature of reality: alleged time travel to the past did not change the originating timeline but instead created a parallel branch, since "whatever is in this timeline in the so-called past must remain." Swerdlow connects this finding to the purpose of the CERN Large Hadron Collider, which he characterises as an interdimensional portal designed to identify alternate realities where certain power structures have been preserved and collapse those realities into the present timeline.
Programme termination
The Montauk Project is commonly described as having been shut down in August 1983 following an incident in which a time portal opened without authorisation and a large creature — variously described as a beast or inter-dimensional energy being — emerged from it. Swerdlow specifies that the termination incident occurred when the lead psychic Duncan Cameron fell asleep in the chair during an unmonitored session and had a nightmare that the poorly supervised equipment picked up and materialised; the resulting entity — which "was not a physical creature that you could touch" but an energy being whose outline was visible — began destroying the base, and the computer systems were physically destroyed to close the vortex. After 1983, related research is described as having been dispersed to other underground military facilities.
Distinction from Operation Phoenix
The US military operation designated Operation Phoenix (Vietnam War, 1965–1972) was a pacification and counterinsurgency programme with no connection to the Montauk experiments beyond sharing a codename.