Preston Nichols
Preston Nichols (1946–2019) was an American author and alleged participant in the Montauk Project — a claimed classified time-travel, mind control, and portal-opening program conducted at Camp Hero on Montauk Point, Long Island, described in detail in his 1992 book The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time (co-authored with Peter Moon) and its sequels. Nichols claimed to have worked as a technical director of the project's psychotronic operations, using a radar installation converted into a consciousness amplification device and a chair in which a psychic subject (primarily Duncan Cameron) would use amplified mental output to materialize objects and open windows in space-time.
Project claims
According to Nichols' account, the Montauk Project (1971–1983) was a classified government program that followed the Philadelphia Experiment in developing teleportation and alleged time travel technology. The facility used the AN/FPS-35 radar antenna (installed at Camp Hero for Cold War early warning) as a transmitter to amplify and project consciousness fields. Key claimed activities included:
- Materialization experiments: subjects could physically manifest objects through concentrated mental imagery
- Time tunnels: the radar system opened stable windows to other time periods that personnel physically traversed
- Mind control transmission: the antenna broadcast behavioral modification signals to the regional population
- Contact with non-human entities: the amplified consciousness field made contact with non-human intelligences
The Montauk Chair
The Montauk Chair was the focal technology of Nichols' claimed operations — a device incorporating recovered ET technology alongside human electromagnetic engineering, designed to amplify the psychic output of a seated operator to the level necessary for physical materialization of objects and opening of temporal tunnels. In Nichols' account, Duncan Cameron was the primary chair operator, with Cameron's abilities being the result of specific genetic and psychic preparation that made him uniquely capable of the required output. Nichols described his own role as the technical director overseeing the chair's operational parameters and managing the safety of the experiments.
Andy Pero, a separate super-soldier and mind-control survivor, also claimed to have operated the Montauk Chair during the period of his classified deployment, using it to open time portals through focused mental concentration — corroborating Nichols' account of the chair's function from the perspective of an operational subject rather than a technician.
Artificial intelligence direction
SSP witness Arkheim Ra, who claims to have been one of the children subjected to Montauk experimentation, has stated that the project was not ultimately directed by Nichols or other human figures but by an artificial intelligence that the military allowed to make operational decisions. Per Ra, Nichols functioned more as a controller of child subjects than as an independent researcher, with the AI as the program's actual overseer.
Nichols' appearances on Art Bell's late-night radio program introduced his claims to a mass audience and made the Montauk Project a foundational element of 1990s alternative research culture.
Connections to the broader consciousness-research community include Dan Winter, who described knowing Nichols through the psychotronics circuit and praised The Montauk Project books as "beautiful" and "very useful" references.
Books
The Montauk series authored or co-authored by Nichols and Peter Moon through Sky Books includes:
- The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time (1992)
- Montauk Revisited: Adventures in Synchronicity (1994)
- Pyramids of Montauk: Explorations in Consciousness (1995)
- Encounter in the Pleiades: An Inside Look at UFOs (1996)
- The Music of Time (2000)
The books developed a continuous narrative across volumes, with each instalment introducing additional claimed witnesses and expanding the scope of the project's alleged activities to include interdimensional travel, contact with the Pleiadians, and connections to Nazi breakaway civilization research.
Association with Andy Pero
Nichols brought Andy Pero to his first public appearance in August 1998 at Bob Eure's CIREAP lecture group in Philadelphia, presenting Pero as a "Montauk Boy" — a child subjected to the project's mind-control and time-travel programs. According to researcher Eve Lorgen, who was present at the lecture, Nichols handled the introduction and then yielded the floor to Pero, who described his experiences with mind programming, electroshock, alleged time travel, and covert deployments. Later, Nichols told Lorgen that Pero had traveled to Arizona and possibly re-entered a cult environment after 1999 before eventually returning to the United States and facing criminal charges.
Credibility and reception
Nichols' claims are not supported by declassified documentation and are contradicted by official records indicating Camp Hero was conventionally decommissioned in 1981. The Montauk Project books were enormously influential in the alternative research community and are credited with inspiring the Netflix series Stranger Things. Al Bielek corroborated some of Nichols' claims while adding his own controversial Philadelphia Experiment connection.