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  • 2021-08-07 (xsd:date)
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  • No, Bill Clinton Was Not Forced to Apologize for 'Stranger Things' Experiments (en)
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  • In the summer of 2021, a widely-shared TikTok video discussed the Montauk Project — a notorious conspiracy theory which claims that a shadowy U.S. government program of pseudo-scientific experimentation at Montauk, New York yielded runaway orphans and mutated animals. The video correctly described the conspiracy theory as being part of the inspiration for the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, but its claim that former President Bill Clinton had to apologize for the purported experiments was completely fabricated. Since a public apology of that kind would constitute official government acknowledgement of the conspiracy theory, it is clearly the most significant and substantive claim made in the video. As such, we are issuing a rating of False. The video was posted on July 26 by @tcezy, and contained the following text: At the point, the video incorporated a clip of Clinton, standing at a podium saying: In reality, Clinton's remarks were part of his historic official apology, made in 1997, for the Tuskegee experiment — a 40-year government-run study of syphilis in Black men — which is now regarded as a stark and shocking example of unethical and racist biomedical research. From the 1930s until the 1970s, hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama were told by researchers that they were being treated for syphilis, but were not in fact given any treatment, even though penicillin was widely available from the 1940s onwards. Hundreds of men died of syphilis, or from syphilis-related complications, as a direct result of this inhumane treatment. In May 1997, Clinton delivered a speech in the East Room of the White House, and issued a formal presidential apology, on behalf of the U.S. government, for the treatment of the men involved, and their families: https://youtu.be/F8Kr-0ZE1XY?t=1346It is true that Stranger Things was based in part on the Montauk Project conspiracy theory (though that theory itself is not accurate). The series begins in November 1983, with the disappearance of a local boy in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, and the escape from a secret government research facility of a young girl with telekinetic abilities. When Netflix first commissioned the series in 2015, it had the working title of Montauk, and was set in Montauk, on Long Island, New York. The location and name of the show were later changed. (en)
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