STRANGER THINGS 4 Episode Titles Hint At The Real Life Inspiration For Eleven

Stranger Things has released a video featuring the names of the episodes for season 4. We have: The Hellfire Club, Vecna’s Curse, The Monster and the Superhero, Dear Billy, The Nina Project, The Dive, The Massacre at Hawkins Lab, Papa, and The Piggyback. Each title feels like it reveals a lot, but one of the more telling titles is The Nina Project.

During the Cold War, the US and USSR were racing on many different technological fronts. One of the weirdest ones started because of a Soviet woman named Nina Kualgina who claimed to have telekinetic powers. On May 10, 1970 she claimed to have stopped a frog’s heart using only her mind and later used this ability to speed up the heart of a skeptical doctor to dangerous levels. 

She claims to have gotten her abilities from her mother and there were even some recordings of her moving objects like egg yolks and matchsticks with her mind. Here is one such recording.

The wild part is that after this, the CIA started researching this with project Stargate and eventually concluded:

That report’s conclusion—which echoed the assessments of the CIA officers involved in the program during the 1970s—was that enough accurate remote viewing experiences existed to defy randomness, but that the phenomenon was too unreliable, inconsistent, and sporadic to be useful for intelligence purposes. We decided not to restore the program.

The US and USSR were in an arms race to see who could develop psychic abilities to spy on enemies first. And eventually concluded that it wasn’t that psychics couldn’t do it, they just couldn’t do it consistently enough to be useful.

But this all sounds strangely familiar to Stranger Things right? We saw that Eleven was being used to spy on enemy forces and it was during the experiments to help her do so that the portal to the upside down was opened. So it’s not at all crazy to think we’ll get to see a fictionalized Nina Kualgina, the real question is will she be the real deal like Eleven, or will she be a fraud that the Soviet’s were using to trick the US? It’s just another twist to add into the series that history buffs will really enjoy seeing play out. 

Source: Nerdist