Preston Nichols — Sole Source, Montauk Project
Every strange thing you have heard about Camp Hero traces back to one Long Island electronics technician. Preston Nichols worked in radio and audio engineering, and in 1992 published 'The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time' with co-author 'Peter Moon' — the pen name of Vincent Barbarick — describing time travel, mind control, and displaced crewmen from the USS Eldridge at a decommissioned radar station down the road.
Why it was classified
It wasn't. Nichols said he had recovered the memories himself, having repressed them, which conveniently places the entire evidentiary base inside a single skull. No service or employment records corroborating his stated role have surfaced, and no physical evidence of the described program has ever been found at Camp Hero, which is now a state park where anyone may walk up and look at the tower.
Why it matters
It is a clean case study in how one uncheckable narrator becomes a canon. Nichols died in October 2018, and the story he assembled continues to be retold, adapted, and monetized without him — proof that a legend, once properly formatted into a paperback, no longer requires its author.