Stranger Things has finally returned for a second season, so get ready for a tidal wave of Facebook updates from enthusiastic fans.
Usually they go something along the lines of: 'OMG Stranger Things on Netflix is the BEST THING EVAAAAAA'. Although if you have anyone on your Facebook friends list who actually speaks like that, you're probably considering deleting them right now.
Credit: Stranger Things/Netflix
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Many of us are going into this follow-up season with high expectations, largely due to the brilliance of the first. It was weird, creepy and generally reminiscent of the best 80s sci-fi, horror and adventure movies, with a tinge of Stephen King's finest moments. It was brilliant.
But the inspiration behind the show is actually nothing to do with old horrors, E.T. or even The Twilight Zone. It was actually based on real-life experiments.
The Guardian has previously revealed that the real-life inspiration for the show's government research facility was in fact Project MKUltra.
If you've seen the show, you'll know that one of the characters, Eleven, was subjected to experiments to test her mind-control abilities. Well, this wasn't plucked out of nowhere. Back in the 1950s, Project MKUltra was launched.
Credit: Stranger Things/Netflix
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Not much is known about it (the majority of the project's records were destroyed in 1973 once it was shut down), but here's what we do know: Back in 1977 there was a Senate elect committee hearing which confirmed that agents 'drugged American citizens without their knowledge'. They even used LSD as a 'truth serum'. If you're interested in that kind of thing, check out the notes here.
The thing is, many people are convinced that they researched mind control, telepathy, ESP, psychic warfare and 'remote viewing'.
You may be wondering: 'What the fuck is remote viewing when it's at home?!' Well, as Eleven so beautifully demonstrates, it's the ability to use your mind to see things happening in a completely different place to where you are.
The writers behind the show, The Duffer Brothers, spoke to Vulture about their inspiration: "When we were first starting to talk about the idea [for the show], we had talked about a paranormal-missing child story line.
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"Then we were talking about some of the mysterious government experiments that we felt were happening at the tail end of the Cold War, right when rumoured [projects] like MKUltra were ramping down."
So we'll never know exactly what went on behind closed doors (thanks to some very quick destruction of the project's paperwork) but sometimes the truth can be stranger than fiction, right?
Featured Image Credit: NetflixTopics: Entertainment News, TV and Film, Stranger Things, US News