New Docudrama Tackles 'The Montauk Project'

Independent filmmaker Christopher Garetano has always been obsessed with the paranormal, but even he has his limits.

The tales the main subjects tell in Mr. Garetano’s newest docudrama, “Montauk Chronicles”—which tackles the legends swirling around experiments that allegedly took place at Camp Hero, and will make its world premiere this weekend at Gurney’s Inn in Montauk—pushed them further than the director could have ever imagined when he started the project in 2006.

“I thought it would be a fun little movie to make,” he recalled during a telephone interview last week. “It turned out to be an intense experience that made me work to get my head on straight.”

Submerged for years in stories about experimentation involving mind control, time travel and alien abduction, Mr. Garetano—who also wrote, edited and produced the 90-minute film—became extremely paranoid, he said.

“If you believe these stories, you have to submit to the fact that everything you’ve ever known about your life is a lie, and that’s a hard thing to take,” he said. “I went into this not believing in it, and I still don’t. But I believe in the possibilities. I believe that maybe something did happen there.”

Camp Hero, a decommissioned United States Air Force Base, has roots dating back to the Revolutionary War. During World War II, it served as a coastal defense installation against possible Nazi invasions. But, though it is now a New York State park, the legacy of the base lives on. It has been the center of conspiracy theories for almost half a century.

Some believers say they were kidnapped from their homes by members of a secret organization, transported deep underground at Camp Hero and then subjected to mind control and time travel experiments. Others say that they saw extraterrestrials roaming the dank, cold hallways, checking in on their subjects before returning home.

No one has been able to prove these allegations. All that’s left are the sealed-off, above-ground remnants of the original Air Force Base—among them the looming radar tower, the centerpiece of the conspiracies—and those who remember what they say happened, which has been dubbed “The Montauk Project.”

Mr. Garetano found three such individuals—Alfred Bielek, Preston Nichols and Stewart Swerdlow—who claim these atrocities did, in fact, occur.

The director first visited Mr. Bielek, a retired electrical engineer, at his home in Florida. Mr. Garetano wanted his subjects to open up, and thought interviewing them in their natural environments would generate honest conversations.

His instinct was correct.

As seen in the film, Mr. Bielek, who died in November of last year, maintains he was part of the Philadelphia Experiment—an alleged naval military experiment said to have been carried out at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1943, where the U.S. Navy tried to make a small destroyer undetectable to radar. The test ended in disaster, Mr. Bielek maintained. He explained that the ship disappeared from the Philadelphia Navy yard and traveled through time. In the film, he says that he was also transported through time from Philadelphia, and aliens were behind the technology.

The stories got only stranger when Mr. Garetano talked to Mr. Nichols in upstate New York. Also an electrical engineer, Mr. Nichols claimed he worked with Mr. Bielek in the mind control and psychic aspects of The Montauk Project during the 1970s, and witnessed the extraterrestrials underground.

“There were definitely alien beings at Montauk,” Mr. Nichols says in the film. “We had the little grays and the larger grays, as well as a variety of reptilian beings. The large grays didn’t want anything to do with me because they couldn’t reach me telepathically. When I entered a room they would leave. They were the strangest thing that I ever saw. At that point, I was beginning to doubt my own sanity.”

It wasn’t until Mr. Garetano interviewed Mr. Swerdlow in Michigan that he began to doubt his own.

“Alfred and Preston, as you’ll see in the movie, they’re both kind of,” Mr. Garetano paused and continued, “I don’t want to call them crazy, but these guys have no gauge. I said, ‘Wow, these guys were really affected by something.’ I was on this plane of thought until Stewart. Everyone there was of sound mind. They were intelligent, calm, lived in an affluent neighborhood. I was confused. I just met two guys who most people would think were nuts—but they were both intelligent and knew their stuff—but both in state of mind that was polar opposite to Stewart.”

Mr. Swerdlow claims that, as a teenager, he was kidnapped from his home and taken to the Montauk base, where he was subjected to a variety of often brutal experiments.

“Beatings, a lot of torture, electrical shock, burials, near-drownings,” Mr. Swerdlow says in the film. “They’d bring you to the point of death, and then they would save you, and the person doing this would be your rescuer or god, and would say, ‘I’m the one that saved you and remember that.’ And that became your handler—your programmer.”

Mr. Garetano couldn’t believe what he was hearing, he said, and refused to at first. But being immersed in the paranormal that once fascinated him—and still does—took a hefty toll.

“You just start to think for a little while, and it starts to make sense,” he said. “That’s what happened to me. Around two guys could be labeled as crazy, I was in a safe zone. ‘They’re nuts and just making this up.’ But in a house full of sane people—the Swerdlows—who are thinking the same thing, saying the same thing, whether it’s true or not, it had a huge impact to the point where I was considering a lot this stuff to be real.”

The filmmaker shot most of the film on the East End, including a tour of Camp Hero led by local history buff Paul Fagan.

“You see the inside and the façade of everything,” Mr. Garetano said. “There’s a lot of great stuff in the film, great points of view. I didn’t want to make the same typical TV documentary. It definitely has its own unique flare to it. I allow the audience to see different personalities and make decisions for themselves about what they believe.”

But this film’s power of suggestion is no joke, Mr. Garetano said.

“It’s easy to be a skeptic. That’s what you are to begin with,” he said. “But when was the last time you stepped outside at night, by yourself, in the dark, and looked up at the stars twinkling above you? We are standing on a rock in the middle of space. The probability that there is intelligent life out there is through the roof. Probability tells us that there’s endless space out there. Endless possibilities.”

“Montauk Chronicles” will make its world premiere on Friday, May 25, at 7:15 p.m. at Gurney’s Inn, Resort, Spa and Conference Center in Montauk. A Q&A with filmmaker Christopher Garetano, as well as some of the docudrama’s subjects, will follow. For tickets, call 668-1717 or email phyllis@gurneysinn.com. For more information on the film, visit montaukchronicles.com.