In this premiere episode of Shadow Wars: Stranger Things and the Cold War from the Cold War Bunker, we dive into the eerie parallels between Hawkins Lab and one of the darkest chapters in American history: the CIA’s Project MKUltra.

Through an interwoven narrative of fiction and fact, we place Eleven’s experiments side-by-side with real-life stories of LSD trials, psychic warfare, and a government obsessed with weaponizing the human mind.

From secret brothels wired with two-way mirrors to mothers unknowingly dosed with hallucinogens, the truth behind MKUltra is more unsettling than fiction. And yet, Stranger Things transforms that history into a metaphorical battleground where paranoia, secrecy, and power created monsters both real and imagined.

Episode 1 asks: when governments use fear as fuel and science as a weapon, who are the real monsters?

Step into the bunker. The shadow wars are just beginning.