Stranger Things' true story is based on a mind-blowing CIA experiment

Stranger Things' true story is based on a mind-blowing CIA experiment

These days, it sometimes feels like the whole world is upside-down, but what if we told you that the Upside-Down in Stranger Things is actually real? While that's clearly not true, other elements of the show are apparently based on real-life events.

Grab yourself a slurpee and settle in for a weird conspiracy story that will blow your curiosity door wide open.

Back when Stranger Things first flipped our worlds with its Netflix debut in 2016, show creators Matt and Ross Duffer explained to Rolling Stone: "We wanted the supernatural element to be grounded in science in some way."

To achieve this, they threaded a real government project called MKUltra into the storyline of season one, which formed the basis of Dr Brenner's experiments on Eleven.

On the show, Eleven's mother is actually one of the MKUltra test subjects and while she was pregnant, Brenner used LSD and sensory deprivation to experiment on her, unwittingly imbuing Eleven with psychic gifts.

In real life, the MKUltra project was created by the CIA in 1953 with the aim of developing mind-control techniques that could give America an advantage against Russia in the Cold War. Yes, really. Some details were later revealed in declassified CIA documents.

What started out as a volunteer-based program soon evolved into something far more sinister: unwitting participants were subjected to physical and mental abuse via psychedelic drugs, sleep deprivation and other experimental means.

One particular experiment, Operation Midnight Climax, even surreptitiously tested the effects of LSD on men who visited brothels set up within agency safehouses in San Francisco, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Stranger things, indeed.

The dangerous nature of this research eventually led to the project's shutdown in 1965, and although many of the relevant documents were later destroyed, enough information leaked out to later inspire the shady going-ons at Stranger Things' Hawkins National Laboratory.

As if that wasn't crazy enough, the Duffer Brothers also drew inspiration from a government conspiracy called the Montauk Project that's wilder than Steve's hair and Billy's mullet combined.

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