Camp Hero State Park

Montauk, NY

History

Commissioned by the US Army in 1942, Camp Hero State Park was built as a coast defense installation and disguised as a fishing village with the intention of deterring any coastal invasion of New York from the sea. The camp consisted of a total of three batteries. Two of them contained two 16-inch guns protected, the third containing two 6-inch guns, all surrounded by a large concrete bunker covered with earth, as well as a 126-foot radar dish added in 1958.

In 1984 after a heavily protested attempt to sell the camp to real estate developers, the United States government decommissioned Camp Hero, subsequently donating the grounds to the National Park Service. In the mid-’90s plans to develop the site into a golf course were once again met with heavy opposition from environmentalists, and by 1999 the idea was dropped. On September 18, 2002, Camp Hero State Park was opened to the public.

In 1992 amidst the back-and-forth turmoil of what to do with the installation, two authors Preston Nichols and Peter Moon wrote a book titled, The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time. The book alleged that several top-secret experiments had taken place on the grounds making it popular with conspiracy theorists almost immediately. In the time since the site has been implicated in several conspiracies from having ties to the Philadelphia Experiment to experiments carried out on saucer men.