A Government Program Unlike Any Other
Between the early 1970s and 1995, the United States government — through the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Army — funded a series of classified research programs investigating whether psychic abilities, specifically remote viewing, could be weaponized for intelligence gathering. The umbrella program eventually known as Project STARGATE remains one of the most thoroughly documented government investigations into paranormal phenomena in history.
Origins: The Cold War Context
STARGATE didn't emerge in a vacuum. In the early 1970s, U.S. intelligence agencies became concerned by reports that the Soviet Union was investing heavily in "psychotronics" — their term for the military application of psychic phenomena. Whether or not the Soviets had achieved anything real, the perceived threat was enough to justify exploratory research on the American side.
The initial research was conducted at SRI International (Stanford Research Institute) in Menlo Park, California, by physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff. Their work began with studies of Ingo Swann, a New York artist who claimed the ability to perceive distant locations. Early sessions produced results that Targ and Puthoff found surprisingly compelling, leading to expanded government funding.
How Remote Viewing Was Tested
The protocol developed at SRI became the foundation for all subsequent STARGATE work. A "viewer" — sometimes a trained military officer, sometimes a civilian with claimed psychic ability — would be placed in a controlled room. A "monitor" would provide only a set of geographic coordinates or a sealed envelope. The viewer would then attempt to describe the target location or object in as much detail as possible through drawings and verbal description.
These descriptions were then evaluated by independent judges who were blind to both the viewer's responses and the actual targets, rating how closely the descriptions matched real-world locations from a pool of possibilities.
Notable Programs Under the STARGATE Umbrella
- GONDOLA WISH (1977): Early Army investigations into remote viewing potential.
- GRILL FLAME (1978–1983): The operational phase involving trained military "psychic soldiers."
- CENTER LANE (1983–1985): Continued Army remote viewing operations.
- SUN STREAK (1985–1990): DIA oversight and operational use.
- STARGATE (1990–1995): The final consolidated program before declassification.
What the Declassified Results Show
In 1995, the CIA commissioned an independent review by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). The review, conducted by statistician Jessica Utts and skeptic psychologist Ray Hyman, produced a split verdict that perfectly mirrors the ongoing debate around ESP research.
Jessica Utts concluded that the statistical evidence for remote viewing was robust — that effect sizes were small but real and replicable, comparable to effects accepted in other sciences. Ray Hyman disagreed, arguing that methodological problems and the lack of an independent replication in a truly controlled setting meant the evidence fell short of scientific acceptance.
The CIA ultimately concluded that remote viewing had not proven operationally useful enough to justify continued funding and shut the program down in 1995. The declassified documents are now available through the CIA's reading room online.
The Legacy of STARGATE
Project STARGATE had several lasting impacts:
- It produced the most rigorous body of laboratory remote viewing data ever compiled under controlled conditions.
- It trained a generation of researchers in tight protocol design for psi experiments.
- It demonstrated that serious institutions could investigate paranormal claims with scientific methodology — and disagree honestly about the results.
- Several participants went on to found civilian remote viewing training organizations after the program's closure.
Whether STARGATE proved anything about human psychic ability remains genuinely contested among researchers. What it unquestionably proved is that the question was taken seriously enough by major governments to fund millions of dollars of research — and that the results were ambiguous enough to satisfy neither true believers nor committed skeptics.