Netflix series created by Matt and Ross Duffer, five seasons and forty-two episodes between 15 July 2016 and 31 December 2025. Nothing in it flies and there is no occupant, no sighting and no radar return. What there is instead is the other half of the file: a named government programme, a laboratory in a small town, children referred to by number, an isolation tank and a psychic asset.
The borrowed premise
MKUltra was approved by Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles on 13 April 1953 and run out of the Technical Services Staff by Sidney Gottlieb; its files were destroyed in January 1973 on Richard Helms’s instruction, which is why what is known arrives in fragments through the Rockefeller Commission of June 1975, the Church Committee, and a joint Senate hearing of 3 August 1977 held only because financial records covering 149 subprojects surfaced under a freedom-of-information request. The series puts a student volunteer into that programme in 1969, has her daughter taken at birth and recorded as a miscarriage, and has her lawsuit dismissed for want of evidence. Very little of that needed inventing.
The calendar coincidence
Season one is November 1983 and the finale November 1987. Across exactly those years the real remote-viewing effort changed both its name and its owner: GONDOLA WISH in 1977, GRILL FLAME at Fort Meade in 1978, CENTER LANE from 1983, SUN STREAK at the DIA from 1985, STAR GATE from 1991, cancelled in 1995 on the AIR Review 1995. Nobody outside it would have known either change had happened.
The finale’s two arguments
The season’s one bespoke weapons system is built to disable an anomalous human being rather than the monsters, which lands somewhere uncomfortable for anyone who has read the Experiencers literature. And nothing is disclosed: the town is told the gates were an earthquake, the soldiers drive out eighteen months later, and the cover story holds. The state never has to lie forever; it only has to outlast the news cycle. Reviewed on this site in July 2026.
Connections
MKUltra · Sidney Gottlieb · Church Committee · Rockefeller Commission · GONDOLA WISH · GRILL FLAME · CENTER LANE · SUN STREAK · STAR GATE · Fort Meade · AIR Review 1995 · Remote Viewing · Experiencers · Hitchhiker Effect · Trickster · Communion · Majestic 12 · David Grusch · Reagan UN Address 1987 · Closer Encounters