The Most Confusing Moments In Stranger Things Explained

In season one, Sheriff Hopper finds an article about an MKUltra scandal at Hawkins National Laboratory. This, among other related articles he finds after conducting microfiche searches in the local library, sets him onto the trail of HNL and its director, Dr. Martin Brenner. The rabbit hole leads him to Eleven’s mother Terry Ives, and eventually to Eleven herself.

While Stranger Things has fictionalized the (known) results, MKUltra was an actual CIA program, started in 1953 to develop mental abilities, specifically mental abilities, as a way to fight the Soviets. Actual documents show it consisted of experiments including psychoactive drugs, electroshocks, sensory deprivation, abuse, and more. It was officially ended in 1973 and became public knowledge in 1975. Since Eleven is 12 years old in the first season of Stranger Things, which was set in 1983, Eleven would have been born in 1971, at the culmination of two decades of research and experimentation. It’s plausible that a shadow cell of the program kept going long after the official program was shut down.

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