I suppose I’m most surprised that the Netflix show, Stranger Things has done so well, and that so many people continue to demand more of it.  I’m not the kind of guy who looks back a lot and thinks how great this or that was—but the 80’s were great.  It’s not just because I grew up in the 80’s and literally every week a new movie was being made of a similar caliber to Stranger Things.  It was obvious that the show’s creators were deeply inspired by Steven Spielberg, Stephen King and I saw a lot of John Hughes sprinkled around as well.  The good news is that the Duffer Brothers absolutely nailed the optimism and style of the 80s even down to the rebellious innocence—and the style of the music.  I don’t want to be that guy who says that the 80s was the best decade just because I happen to have grown up in that time.  When I was the age that the kids were in Stranger Things, the parents all pointed to the 50s as the magic decade, and before that it was the roaring 20s.

So I take that into account when I say things like that the 1980s was a special time in America—and it shared with those other generations strong presidents in peacetime who guided the nation toward capitalism—raw, unapologetic capitalism—and virtually every industry prospered from art and comics to science and technical innovations.  So in that respect—now that we live in the depressing era of Millennials taught to love socialism—I am surprised they like Stranger Things so much.  But then again—I’m not, because beyond the throwback to the 80’s there is something else going on which I think is much more important.  There is a reality to Stranger Things in the science which is something truly new—and is actually something that I spend quite a lot of time thinking about—because like all good horror—there is a truth in the fiction.  So before continuing on, watch this video on the actual science of Stranger Things.

I either have personal experiences similar to that of most of the main character in Stranger Things or I know someone close to me who has—so many of the themes hit home for me in a way that other viewers might not have experienced.  Being a kid from the 80’s and having no apprehensions yielding to fear of any kind, I actually went and did similar things as was seen in Stranger Things when I was young which migrated into my adulthood.  When I was a kid I explored every cemetery and haunted spot that I could under the scariest conditions.  I carried that curiosity into a period where I had kids of my own.  For my youngest daughter’s birthday—who was always naturally interested in paranormal activity—even before she could talk, I took her to Moonville, Ohio which is one of the most haunted spots in North America.  And we did witness paranormal activity.  My conclusions are that the ghost there isn’t the “brakeman” who worked the railroad when that ghost town was fully functioning in the late 1800s, but is actually something like what the monsters are in Stranger Things–where that region acts as a kind of portal from a reality existing within a quantum fluctuation of our current state of being—and waves of time stored within those sub space patterns emerge to our vision.  That is why I believe there are so many Bigfoot sightings in that part of America—which extend all the way up into Pennsylvania—because that entire area from the Serpent Mound to the Point Pleasant, West Virginia region of the famous “Mothman” all the way up the Ohio River to Pittsburg is a very haunted land dotted with ancient mounds, Illuminati activity and the presence of a lost race of people who certainly predated the American Indian—and were well versed in science.  Bigfoot sightings are common, yet there are no footprints really to speak of, and nobody is really able to capture the images on video.

That is because the beings exist within quantum fluctuations that only a part of our brain can see.  They don’t exist in our current time as we think of it, but they are there in a form mutually understood.  They may be aware of us too, but we are prevented from interacting with one another most of the time due to the limits of understood physics.  For more on the mysterious lost aspects of this particular region, Fritz Zimmerman is doing great work on uncovering the past so we can see what might be coming back to us through the folds of time.  Just read some of his books and take some day trips to visit the hot spots that he lists and a whole new world will open up to you.  Religion has attempted to simplify that science into something it can understand.  Unfortunately, most religions require curiosity to be put into a lock box and to never come out again.  That is of course why shows like Stranger Things hit a nerve with us, because deep down inside, we know there is something more going on, but our social limitations placed on our own minds prevent us from seeing it.

In the 80s government conspiracies were actively part of many plots which covered up paranormal activity.  It was very present in Spielberg movies and it was of course the driving force of the X Files which was really a 90s thing, but it started as a product of the 80s.  I grew up down the road from Wright Patterson and all the U.F.O. phenomena associated with that airbase—and the cover-ups.  So it wasn’t such a shock to me to experience actual government harassment when I found myself as a young 30-year-old with two little kids and a wife fighting drug distribution in my community and having the wrath of God unleashed on our small family for daring to interject ourselves into those activities.  My hatred of government expansion running out of control is due to real life experiences where my house was bugged and monitored constantly. It was easier on me than my wife.  The pressure was hard on her.  While I was at work the family was defenseless and those who wanted to scare us away from our observations harassed her openly.  White vans, fire department personal, and police followed her everywhere for several years.  Spies and malicious characters were sent into our lives to rock the very foundations of our lives—actually to destroy my family because I was raising it in a traditional way and the powers running things didn’t like that.  The more they attempted their attacks and harassment, the more I dug in and fought.  Those attacks are always designed to make the victims look crazy, but when you are clear-headed and have the ability to connect the dots under duress, you can break through.

There is no need for the cumbersome listening devices the government used in those days now, and video cameras are so small that there is no way to see them.  The NSA has technology that makes those old days look prehistoric.  They can listen to everything we say to each other any time they want through our cell phones and other devices.  The government already has nanoprobes and drones much smaller than the electronics in an iPhone and they can use them at will.  Living with me because of my beliefs, my wife was made to suffer with a slow mental torture that lasted for a long time.  It didn’t affect me, because I knew the game from a lot of experience.  When the constant harassment didn’t scare us off our social stances—which actually started within the Mason school system when they failed to address a drug trafficking problem in grade school, and attempted to force unwanted sex education on our children while in the fourth grade.

So we pulled the kids from school and homeschooled them to save their minds from statist incursions—which to some seemed extreme.  In a lot of ways, my wife became the Winona Ryder character in Stranger Things and to the outside world; she sometimes looked like she had lost it.  At that time, I was a lot like the sheriff—a guy who knew something was wrong and wasn’t afraid to peel back the layers—but also knew that there were legal limits to dealing with the thugs causing the harassment and that I had to find a way to outmaneuver them intellectually—otherwise they were going to kill my family.  In Stranger Things the sheriff, actually broke into the Department of Energy building to discover their secret so he could gain leverage over the problem with knowledge, and once he did—he gained the upper hand on “them.”  Lucky for me, I didn’t drink, smoke, or have any secret girlfriends that they could use to extort me into inaction, so I eventually forced them into hiding instead of them pushing us to the brink of insanity.  But it wasn’t easy.

The gist of the experience was that some government authorities who were supportive of the drug trade into Mason, Ohio had acquired technology that evolved from the cumbersome old electronics to actually manipulating quantum fluctuations and could inspire thoughts disguised as “heavenly advice.”  These sometimes come in the form of dreams, sometimes as that trusted “whisper” that religion can call the “voice of God.”  What it was actually were a bunch of government pinheads trying to shake a traditional family off the trail of their social experiment by attacking the heart of that family, the mother, and plunging them into self-destruction.  Well, it didn’t work.  I’m smarter than they are and they had to grudgingly admit that to themselves.  I also have more willpower and the willingness to grind away at them until their complete destruction—which is something they hadn’t experienced before.  My wife’s solutions to the problems involved attacking these things within the quantum fluctuation fields where false images and paper enemies could provide the illusion of a menace.

My solution was to attack the source, not the result.  We had some disagreements as to that strategy, but eventually, we outlasted it.  There is a reason I go by the tag “overmanwarrior.”  Once you survive the things I have, and we have as a family, you’ve evolved beyond the limits of a normal human being.  I don’t know anybody who has went through what we have and come out on the other side sane or optimistically healthy, emotionally—yet we are.  Those government agencies aren’t nearly as pompous as they used to be.  Now they are drowning in debt and their employees are so lackluster that they lack the ambition to engage in that kind of activity.  The difference between the 80s and the 2000s is that the Millennials who now hold these jobs have much less ambition and patience.  They don’t even want to think about a traditional family let alone attack and harass them—because to do so means they have to get to know them through spying and monitoring.

That’s why I was surprised that so many people loved Stranger Things.  It’s not just the pleasant throwback to the 1980s—the characters themselves are all generally positive and trying to do good things—and that is really unique in this modern age.  Perhaps people are ready for something positive again, maybe they’ll vote for Donald Trump to unleash once again a new age of capitalism that will have a positive influence for us all.  Maybe entertainment companies will take notice and make more stories like those of the Uncharted 4 video game and the Netflix series Stranger Things.  Hollywood is obviously out of ideas and it is from of these new entertainment sources that two of the best stories I’ve seen in years has come forth—and people are responding.  That is truly a good thing.  But remember, there is often truth to the best horror—at least on a conceptual level.  Obviously Steven King was inspired by the 1920s pulp writer H.P. Lovecraft, who inspired the Batman Arkham stories, which has deeply inspired the current table top game phenomena seen at modern Gen Cons which has advanced the old Dungeon & Dragon concept to new levels—and all of that inspired obviously the Duffer Brothers—and this all makes up our modern culture in 2016—with bits of this and that thrown all over the place.  But—and I discovered this the hard way, Lovecraft had his pulse on the quantum fluctuations which produced monsters which came to him most nights in the form of terrible dreams.  Governments do try to manipulate those monsters in those quantum fluctuations to enact their strategies of statism—and 80s movies touched on the level of interest which we responded to as audiences with a level of shock and awe.  Yet those monsters are real.  We may not be able to change our mass and interact with them like they did in Stranger Things by crawling through a slimy tunnel—but we do sometimes catch them in the sides of our vision, or in our nightmares.  And they do mean us harm which is one more reason why we should have a smaller government that doesn’t attempt to use them to harm us as we live our lives under a banner of freedom and capitalist enterprise.

I’m looking forward to season 2—if they ever get it started.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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