The Hawkins Lab experiments are the engine underneath every season of Stranger Things, the reason Eleven exists, the reason Vecna exists, and the reason a sleepy Indiana town ends up sitting on top of an interdimensional wound. What a lot of viewers don’t realize is how closely those experiments track a real CIA program the U.S. government ran for two decades and later tried to erase.
Table of Contents
- What the Hawkins Lab experiments actually did
- The real MKUltra program behind the show
- How Eleven fits into the Hawkins Lab experiments
- Why the Duffer Brothers used this history
- Frequently asked questions about the Hawkins Lab experiments
What the Hawkins Lab experiments actually did
Inside the show, the Hawkins Lab experiments are run out of a Department of Energy facility in the woods outside town, overseen by Dr. Martin Brenner. Officially, the lab does nothing more sinister than energy research. Unofficially, it’s the site of a mind-control program aimed at producing psychically gifted children who can be used for espionage — remote viewing, telekinesis, and eventually contact with other dimensions.
Brenner recruits volunteer test subjects, dosing them with experimental drugs and placing them in sensory deprivation tanks in an effort to expand what the human mind can do. When one of those subjects, Terry Ives, becomes pregnant, Brenner continues the experimentation on her, and the daughter she gives birth to is taken from her and raised inside the lab as Eleven. The Hawkins Lab experiments don’t stop with her; over a dozen other children with similar abilities are raised inside the same program, each one designated with a number instead of a name.
The real MKUltra program behind the show
The Hawkins Lab experiments are directly modeled on Project MKUltra, a real CIA operation that ran from 1953 to 1973. MKUltra was created during the early Cold War with the explicit goal of developing mind-control techniques that could give the United States an edge over the Soviet Union, and it involved dosing subjects — often without their knowledge or consent — with LSD and other psychoactive drugs, alongside sensory deprivation, hypnosis, and electroshock.
Much of what happened under MKUltra only came to light because of a Senate investigation in the 1970s, after most of the CIA’s own records had already been destroyed on internal orders. What survived was enough to confirm that the program had run for two decades, spanned dozens of institutions, and left a trail of psychological damage that the government never fully accounted for. The Duffer Brothers have said this history, along with conspiracy theories about a related site in Montauk, New York, directly shaped the design of Hawkins Lab.
“It is based on a place in Montauk, New York called Camp Hero,” Gaten Matarazzo has said of the lab’s inspiration.
How Eleven fits into the Hawkins Lab experiments
Eleven’s storyline mirrors the real history of MKUltra almost point for point. In the show, Terry Ives volunteers for the program while pregnant, and the drugs and deprivation experiments performed on her transfer some version of psychic ability to her unborn daughter. After Terry attempts to reclaim her child and expose the lab, Brenner has her subjected to electroshock treatment that leaves her catatonic for years — a fate that echoes accounts from real MKUltra survivors and their families.
Eleven isn’t the only product of the Hawkins Lab experiments, either. The program eventually expands into a subprogram the show refers to internally as Indigo, in which other test subjects are given experimental treatments — including transfusions tied to the season 4 villain’s own altered blood — in an attempt to replicate psychic ability across a wider pool of children. Kali, or Eight, is one of the more prominent products of that expanded program, escaping the lab before the events of the original series even begin.
Why the Duffer Brothers used this history
The Duffer Brothers have been open about wanting the Hawkins Lab experiments to feel plausible rather than purely fantastical, and grounding the show’s central conspiracy in a documented government program was part of that strategy. MKUltra gave them a real-world skeleton — CIA overreach, unwitting test subjects, a cover-up that worked for decades — onto which they could graft the show’s supernatural elements without the whole thing feeling untethered from reality.
That choice is also part of why the Hawkins Lab experiments still unsettle viewers who already know the broad strokes of the plot. The Upside Down, the Demogorgon, and Eleven’s powers are all fiction. The idea that a government agency spent twenty years running unauthorized psychological experiments on its own citizens, then destroyed the evidence when it got too close to public scrutiny, is not.
For more on how those experiments produced the show’s final villain, Read more: Vecna’s True Identity covers Henry Creel’s path from Hawkins Lab test subject to the season 4 and 5 antagonist. And if you want the full picture of how Brenner ran the program from the inside, Read more: Dr. Brenner walks through his role across all five seasons.
The declassified history of MKUltra is covered in more depth by outside reporting, including a CBC investigation into the real CIA projects that shaped the show, which is worth reading in full here.
Frequently asked questions about the Hawkins Lab experiments
Were the Hawkins Lab experiments based on a real government program? Yes. The Hawkins Lab experiments in Stranger Things are directly based on Project MKUltra, a real CIA mind-control program that ran from 1953 to 1973 and involved unwitting human test subjects.
What did the real MKUltra program actually involve? The real program behind the Hawkins Lab experiments involved dosing subjects with LSD and other drugs, along with sensory deprivation, hypnosis, and electroshock, in an attempt to develop mind-control techniques during the Cold War.
Did the Hawkins Lab experiments create Eleven’s powers? In the show, yes. The Hawkins Lab experiments performed on Eleven’s mother while pregnant are depicted as the origin of Eleven’s telekinetic and psychic abilities, mirroring the real MKUltra program’s use of pregnant test subjects.
Was Dr. Brenner based on a real person? Dr. Brenner isn’t based on one specific real figure, but his oversight of the Hawkins Lab experiments draws on real MKUltra administrators and psychiatrists who ran similar programs during the Cold War.
Why did the government shut down MKUltra? The real program behind the Hawkins Lab experiments was shut down in 1973 after growing internal concern over its methods, and much of what is known about it today only surfaced through a Senate investigation in the 1970s.
