Project MK Ultra
"The most obvious real-life influence for Stranger Things was this project called MK Ultra. [It] was a CIA covert operation that happened from the 1950s to the 1970s.
It took place at over 80 institutions schools and universities, jails, even hospitals that were privately funded. And a lot of the participants in it had no idea that they were part of a government experiment.
MK Ultra's point was to develop methods and products for war, especially the Cold War.
They wanted to find ways to extract information, and they were testing them on the American public.
In Canada, during the Cold War, the CIA funded a series of secret brainwashing experiments at a prestigious psychiatric clinic at McGill University.
No method was too bizarre, including using LSD, hypnosis, prolonged periods of induced sleep, and electrical shocks to the brain. Patients were given the treatment without explanation or consent, and even decades later complained that they had never completely recovered.
Project MK Ultra is actually mentioned by name in the show when Chief Hopper, who's kind of trying to get to the bottom of everything that's happening at Hawkins Laboratory, tracks down Terry Ives ... who tried to sue the government for abuse. She explicitly mentions Project MK Ultra, and being a part of those experiments without being aware of it."
Sensory Deprivation
"Eleven is one of the main characters in Stranger Things, and we discover pretty early on that the government is trying to shape her into almost a killing machine. She's a human weapon of war, and they're doing this by putting her through a lot of different experiments.
One of the first indications we get in the show that the government is participating in some unorthodox experiments is when we see Eleven, who is a little girl, entering a sensory deprivation chamber; she's being submerged in water.
These actually existed and were used by the government as part of MK Ultra. Dr. Ewen Cameron, who was working on a subproject of MK Ultra, used a combination of hallucinatory drugs like LSD, electroshock therapy, and sensory deprivation on a lot of unwitting patients many of whom came to see him for things like anxiety."
Mind control and "Remote Viewings"
"MK Ultra was clearly a huge influence on Stranger Things, but it was shut down by the 1970s, and Stranger Things takes place in the 1980s. [But] there were actually some pretty weird government experiments going on in the '80s, too.
The one that most closely resembles the things that were happening in Stranger Things is the Star Gate Project. Star Gate was just getting warmed up by 1983; it actually started in 1978 and went all the way to 1995. And it was established to see whether psychic phenomena could be used in military applications. It wasn't even a CIA project; it was an army project.
Do you remember that scene where Eleven is told to try to kill a cat with her mind? Those telekinetic abilities and psychic powers were something the government was genuinely testing for.
There was a movie and a book called The Men Who Stare at Goats about the people who were involved in the Stargate experiments, testing telekinetic abilities by attempting to kill goats with their minds.
One of the other missions for [the] Star Gate project was to see whether people could engage in 'remote viewings'.
We actually see this in Stranger Things as well, when Eleven, while undergoing sensory deprivation, is able to listen in on a Russian conversation and actually see them in front of her.
There was a section of the government that was convinced that we could potentially engage in 'remote viewings', and they were convinced enough that they thought this project was worth continuing from 1978 to 1995."
