by Preston B. Nichols and Peter Moon

2000

 

INTRODUCTION

 

Throughout the last decade, Preston Nichols has developed a considerable reputation for his alleged involvement in time travel and secret government projects. However, it is not very well known at all that he was just as deeply involved in the music scene of the 1960’s as rock ’n roll came to center stage in world pop culture.

 

Although I have acted as Preston’s ghostwriter and co-researcher for a number of years, it was his expertise in sound engineering that brought me to meet him in the first place. This is very curious to me because I grew up with an antipathy to the subject. As I kid, I never understood what all the fuss was about when it came to stereo sound as opposed to monaural. It seemed to me that people were spending far too much time discerning the quality of sound rather than just listening to the music.

 

I could detect a difference, but I always thought the music being played was far more important than the sound system it was played on. Therefore, I tended to tune out when someone would start talking about the virtue of one stereo system over another. That was until, one day, I heard about quadraphonic stereo.

 

All of a sudden, my ears perked up. I wanted to know everything about it. I was even surprised at my own interest in the subject. I was not a technical buff, but I wanted to know about each track and each speaker and what all of the functions were. Unfortunately for my interests at the time, quad stereo in the late 1970’s was nothing but a flash in the pan.

 

Before I could begin to seriously think about buying a system, the fad was gone and written off as a complete failure, never to return to the commercial market since. In retrospect, there was only one significant aspect with regard to my capricious interest in a subject I had shown no previous interest in. It proved to be a premonition of my future and eventual collaboration with Preston Nichols.

 

In 1990, it had been over a decade since I had heard about quadraphonic sound. It was the last thing on my mind when I learned about another device that had elements of quad sound. At least, it had four speaker-like boxes and played music. It was owned by a chiropractor in Manhattan and was purported to balance the electromagnetic field that surrounds the human body. It was called the Betar and was put together by a man named Peter Kelly. A patient of the chiropractor told me about the machine and told me that a public company was being created to market it.

 

The Betar was going to retail to the public for $70,000 a unit but would also be marketed to the medical and healing community. They were going to need a full brochure. As I was in the field of advertising and design, this patient thought that maybe I could help them. This interested me as a potential business proposition, and I felt that I had a good angle as I knew I understood much more than most advertisers do when it comes to esoteric aspects about the human body. I pursued the lead.

 

Eventually, I met the chiropractor in Manhattan.

 

He showed me the Betar but complained that it was not set up right when he received it. It needed adjustments, and he had to make them himself. I did not know what he was talking about, but the device was aesthetically pleasing in its construction, and I just scoped it out. It had a reclining platform with four speaker-like boxes surrounding it so that while you rested comfortably, musical sound penetrated your energetic field. Two of the boxes were actually speakers and were directed at the center of the body. Two other boxes were opposite the other boxes and were input devices. The speakers sent waves directed at the body which bounced off and went into the input device.

 

The doctor explained that this was a biofeedback device. He gave me a pair of goggles which he said would reflect my state of being at the time I was looking at them. I would see colors and patterns that my own biological system was generating as I listened to the music. As I listened to the music, the colors were a cross between a kaleidoscope and what you might see looking under a microscope, but they were always moving.

 

After forty-five minutes, the doctor came over and brought me back to the real world. I was completely relaxed. What was particularly significant to me was that I remained relaxed for the entire day, even after a train ride from Manhattan to Long Island. Riding the Long Island Railroad has never been a pleasant experience for me. It has always been somewhat stressful, so this was a very welcome surprise.

 

Nothing ever came of the public offering for the Betar, but one day I was talking to a guy named Jeff who was studying to be a chiropractor. I was telling him about the Betar, and he said that he had been on it, too. In fact, he said there was an even better machine. It was put together by an inventor named Preston Nichols, and he said that I should check it out. Jeff said that Preston was not so much into marketing, but maybe I could help him.

 

The device, he said, was about $60,000 cheaper. Another one of Jeff’s friends was Margo Geiger, a nice older lady who worked as my proofreader up until her death. She told me that I must go to the Long Island Psychotronics Association and listen to Preston. She said it would be absolutely fascinating.

 

I met Preston soon after but never got a chance to ask him about his inventions. He was lecturing with others and talked on and on about the Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Project. I was subjected to an earful of science-fiction-like information that I deemed the best story-telling that I had ever heard. It was all about time travel with a stunning array of technical oriented information. His stories also included the subjects of mind control, aliens, and Nazis who were allegedly operating an activity right under our noses on Long Island.

 

Even if his stories were untrue, they were worthy of an “A” for creativity and holding one’s interest. As it turned out, my life would be changed forever by the remarkable stories I heard that night. I met Preston to see if I could help him market his equipment but ended up marketing his incredible stories. Since then, writing and researching the history, legends, and circumstances surrounding Montauk has become an entire career.

 

When I finally got the opportunity to sit down with Preston and talk about his machine, he told me that he was the one who had invented the prototype for Peter Kelly’s machine. He said that his own system did not have the goggles which he called “blinky lights.”

 

Preston did not advocate the use of these as they tend to be hypnotic and can be used to entrain a person’s thought patterns to their detriment. Preston also told me that when the original quadraphonic systems were introduced, the people behind them did not really know what they were doing. He could show me a far superior system. It was not a quad system in the same sense that the sound industry had already produced.

 

There were four boxes, but two of them were input devices, not speakers. The idea behind both stereo and quad stereo was to reproduce the actual experience of listening to live performers. His system, he explained, did that better than any other system on the market. After all, he had been in sound engineering since its emergence in the 1960’s. He called his device the Biofiss. I will defer the technical description of that device to Preston, and you will read about it later on in this book.

 

Preston’s music system was very much a focal point of his research into the paranormal, but as I interviewed him in order to write the The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, he never really linked the subject of music to Montauk. Nevertheless, I heard many stories about his experiences in the music business and his work with different artists. These anecdotes were told to me in bits and pieces throughout the years. The Montauk Project book was basically a summary of a decade worth of research by Preston. It consisted of scuttlebutt he had heard throughout his years in the defense industry, countless interviews conducted at Montauk, as well as research done with people involved in the project.

 

The Montauk Project itself was put together as a result of human behavioral studies conducted secretly under the umbrella of Brookhaven Laboratories. These studies were done as a result of the Philadelphia Experiment in 1943 when the Navy experimented with degaussing technology and sought to make a ship, the U.S.S. Eldridge, appear invisible to radar. The Navy denies this, but the subject matter is still highly classified and considered to be the forerunner of today’s stealth technology. Not only was the U.S.S. Eldridge reported to have become invisible, but the sailors involved were hurled out of this dimension. Upon their return, some were imbedded in the bulkheads and other fixtures of the ship with others spontaneously combusting or suffering severe psychological trauma.

 

Even if one does not accept the more sensational aspects of the Philadelphia Experiment, there is absolutely no doubt about the fact that the sailors were exposed to non ordinary electromagnetic fields as a result of the degaussing coils that were employed to demagnetize the hull. In order to first prevent negative effects on human beings, a massive study was eventually begun after the war, at Brookhaven Laboratories, in order to understand how human beings and the human consciousness relate to different electromagnetic fields.

 

This research project also had at its disposal human behavioral studies conducted by the Nazis. Many of them were quite gruesome, but they were empirical in nature and were as meticulous as only Germans can be. They provided considerable information about human reactions.

 

It is no small irony that when Brookhaven Laboratories was erected in 1946, the location selected was Yaphank, home to the largest concentration of Nazis outside of Germany. Before the war, Yaphank sported an “Adolf Hitler Boulevard” with other streets named after Goebbels, Göring and the like. Many people of German descent worked at the lab as well, and there have always been questions about their loyalties. Not only did Brookhaven entertain top international scientists, many of whom were German, but it became the premier atomic and scientific research center in the world.

 

Shortly thereafter, the National Security Act was passed and the C.I.A. was brought into being. Covert connections between the Nazis and the U.S. were completely affirmed when Allen Dulles, the first director of the C.I.A., hired Reinhard Gehlen to set up the working procedures of the C.I.A. Gehlen had served as the director of Nazi intelligence in Europe. Dulles also hired Ewen Cameron, the head of the American Psychiatric Association, to conduct mind control experiments under a program known as MK-ULTRA. These are documented facts, and no one who honestly researches this subject will deny it. 

 

As the human mind was studied, and sometimes quite brutally, all sorts of empirical observations were made. Just as the Nazis had their own occult bureau and researched the supernatural, so did the researchers at Brookhaven. Finally, after years of research, there were successes in integrating the human mind with computers. The experiments in mind control, although limited, were successful. Eventually, this clandestine research was considered to be potentially very dangerous and the funding was denied.

 

Nevertheless, great strides had been made in terms of technology and secret forces carried forward, eventually moving the project to a decommissioned Air Force Station at Montauk, New York. It was there that eye witnesses say that the research reached its apex on August 12, 1983, when a full scale hook up was made to the U.S.S. Eldridge in 1943 and time travel became a reality. The general pattern of this research is related in The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time.

 

Preston Nichols remembers entering the fold of the Montauk research when he became a paid employee of Brookhaven Labs in the late 1960’s. But, his first recollections occurred when he was having a family dinner that included his cousin and her husband. The husband mentioned that he had seen Preston at Montauk, yet Preston had no recollection of ever having been there. This resulted in a heated argument. Over the years, more people began to recognize Preston from Montauk and other associations he had no conscious memory of. Preston soon realized that he had an entire life he knew nothing about. Memories were buried, including what appeared to be memories of other realities which were elusive but nevertheless tangible in many respects. All of these experiences fostered Preston’s research which resulted in the book The Montauk Project.

 

This pattern of unrecovered memories is a primary reason why the music aspect of the Montauk Project was never dealt with in the earlier books. The connection was never completely made. He remembered being in the music business, and I knew something about it, but the working components of it and how it related to Montauk were overlooked by both of us.

 

There was also another factor. Although I had suggested for years to Preston that he should do a book about his music experiences, he was always reluctant. He said he had angered enough people with The Montauk Project, and he thought this music book might be even more aggravating to certain folks. Consequently, he has not relayed many anecdotes at all about various musicians and their bizarre behavior. Nevertheless, there was key information he was willing to release that will hopefully serve as a springboard to further research and understanding.

 

Working with Preston on this book was not an easy task. For example, he gave me four separate times (about seven years apart) for when he first met his boyhood friend, Mark Hamill. Finally, I asked his dad, Bob Nichols, if he remembered Mark. Bob remembered Mark raking leaves in their backyard as a youngster. By going over different information from different angles, we were able to arrive at as accurate a representation as possible. Preston explained his disparities by telling me that he seems to live on at least three different time lines, and they get confused. He has appreciated this attempt to put his history into words because it straightens out his own memories.

 

Preston is a genius. He is unsurpassed when it comes to understanding electromagnetic functions and all of the technical details that go with that. This is verifiable in science and industry and also makes him an irritant to those who would want to dismiss him as a mere crackpot or nut. He is also knowledgeable in psychology, religion and occultism and sees realms that regular human beings are cut off from. In esoteric terms, Preston occupies nonlinear space. This means that he is operating in a consciousness that is not regulated by linear thought. Therefore, his memories and experiences do not always conform to linear applications. This book is an attempt, and certainly not a perfect one, to put his experiences into a linear reality.

 

There are many controversial statements herein. I have made reasonable attempts to verify certain information, but these are Preston’s memories, not mine. I can neither prove nor disprove certain statements. Also, his experiences often defy ordinary attempts to verify them. For example, false identities are common throughout his experiences at Montauk. Sometimes, people appear to be one person when they are really another. Preston Nichols was definitely in the music business as a key player and knew plenty of famous people. Whatever the truth is, it is always stranger than fiction. After you have read the entire book, I will offer some additional perspective on the relative truth of the situation.

 

The second part of this book takes us on another adventure all together. It concerns some of Preston’s key activities post Montauk and attempts to harass and attack him that ultimately ended in the indefinite incarceration of one of his associates, John Ford, the founder and president of the Long Island UFO Network. What happens here is based upon cold hard documented facts that were chronicled in the local newspaper. It is an exposition of human rights violations, and a massive effort to hide the truth.

 

If the future contains endless possibilities, including a time when the truth of the universe will be fully known and the consciousness of man can move fluidly through time, there will be many stepping stones of realization along the way. This book and the stories herein are not a step back to the “The Land Time Forgot” but rather to the “The Land Where Time Remembered.”

 

 

1 -  MY START IN THE MUSIC BUSINESS

 

My involvement in the music world goes back to 1958 when my father and I were deeply involved in scouting. One evening, while attending a “Blue and Gold Dinner” for Webelo scouts at Oscar’s Bowling Alley in East Islip, the public address system suddenly went dead. We had been listening to a live band known as “The Recorders.” I thought they were fantastic and so did all most everyone else. No one knew what to do about the busted sound system until the pack master told the band that one of his Cub Scouts could probably fix it. They got a charge out of that and said “Sure, let’s see if the kid can fix it.”

 

That kid was me. I took a look at the amplifier and found out it had a burned out resistor. I bridged it with some aluminum foil and this turned out to be an excellent temporary solution. The amplifier was working again, and the band continued to play. During a break in the music, I talked to the guys in the group and convinced them to let me do a demo tape of their music. My father then took me down to St. Mary’s Church in East Islip where we borrowed their big Ampex tape recorder. We took it back to the bowling alley and did a demo tape of a song called “I’ve Had It”.

 

The leader of the Webelo scouts from Bayshore was Cal Mann, a small time record producer and an aspiring performer. He thought the recording was great and played it for a friend of his who had just started his own label. This man liked the song, too, but he needed a better recording than what I had provided. He eventually called the Recorders up to Belough Instruments in Manhasset for a more conventional recording, but the sound was faulty. Finally, they had to get me out of grade school to get the recording they wanted. The record “I’ve Had It” was subsequently cut at Grand Award of Pickering and Company in Freeport, New York and was released under the label “Time Records.” It can be found in CD format to this day. The name of the group “The Recorders” was changed to “The Bell Notes.”

 

Cal Mann, the scout leader and record producer, had noticed my acumen in the area of recording. When I ran into him again during a camping weekend, he talked to me about his interest in music and told me that he was originally from Philadelphia. He was trying to break into the music scene in New York City.

 

One Saturday, Cal and I got together and talked for most of the entire day. At the time, he was renting a house that was filled with all sorts of old audio equipment which would be considered antiques by today’s standards. Even in those days, most of what he had was considered to be old for the time period we were in.

 

Based upon our discussion and what he had already witnessed with my recording of “I’ve Had It,” Cal recognized that I was a whiz in electronics. He offered me four dollars an hour to work as his recording engineer in the hopes that I could do something with his old equipment and get his music career to take off. To a twelve year old kid at that time, his offer was huge money. I accepted it and told my parents that I had a job with a black fellow in Bayshore. When my mother saw his big limousine, she figured that he must be all right.

 

One of Cal’s old audio pieces soon came in very handy for both of us. It was a “brush development corporation sound-mirror” and was patterned after the German ferograph, a recording device which came to this country after World War II. It had a cork capstan and was used to produce a hit song entitled “The Twist”, a hit record which topped the charts in the early 1960’s.