Project STARGATE — Remote Viewing Programs

Background

Beginning in 1972, the Central Intelligence Agency funded research at the Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park, California, into what the principal investigators — physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ — described as "remote viewing": the claimed ability of certain individuals to perceive distant or hidden targets in the absence of any sensory channel between viewer and target. The initial CIA contract, designated Project SCANATE, supported laboratory experiments under controlled conditions in which subjects were asked to describe locations specified by geographic coordinates or by sealed envelopes opened only after the session.¹

The SRI work was undertaken in the context of broader US-government interest in human-performance research that had also produced the parallel Office of Research and Development funding for parapsychology in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and against a background of Soviet and Eastern Bloc state-funded research programmes in the same area. The Soviet effort — concentrated at Leningrad State University, Novosibirsk, and several institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences — was treated at the time as a strategic-intelligence concern in its own right, and a portion of the early US funding was framed in those terms: if the Soviets believed they could obtain intelligence by these means, the United States needed to assess the credibility of the threat and develop comparable capability or counter-measure.²

The CIA-funded SRI research continued under successive contracts through 1975. Pat Price, an early subject who had been a Burbank, California police commissioner, produced descriptions in laboratory sessions that the SRI team and the funding officers within CIA's Office of Technical Service judged to be of intelligence interest, including a 1974 description of a Soviet research site at Semipalatinsk-21 that the Agency subsequently compared favourably with overhead-imagery products of the same site. Price died in 1975. Ingo Swann, a New York artist who had begun work with SRI in 1972, developed during the mid-1970s a structured protocol for remote-viewing sessions that was subsequently called Coordinate Remote Viewing.³

The Operation

In 1977, responsibility for operational use of the methodology passed from CIA to the Defense Intelligence Agency and to the United States Army, which established a small operational remote-viewing unit. The successive programme names reflected periodic re-designations rather than substantive changes in mission: GONDOLA WISH from 1977, GRILL FLAME from 1978, CENTER LANE from 1983 under Army management, SUN STREAK from 1985 under DIA, and STARGATE from 1991 until termination.⁴

The operational unit was based at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland — co-located with NSA but administratively separate — and was staffed by between three and seven trained military and civilian personnel at any given time. The unit's tasking came principally from DIA but periodically included requests from CIA, NSA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Customs Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Targets included Soviet military installations, Soviet missile-system characteristics, hostage locations during the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis and subsequent Lebanon hostage cases, the locations of US service members missing in Southeast Asia, drug-trafficking shipments, and the Lockerbie bombing. The unit's tasking volume varied substantially over its operational lifetime; in some years it processed several hundred sessions, in others a small number.⁵

Notable claimed operational results, drawn from declassified session reports and from published memoirs by participants:

• Joseph McMoneagle, the unit's first operational viewer (designated "001"), produced a 1979 description of a Soviet shipyard at Severodvinsk that included a large submarine class then under construction; the description preceded by some months the public emergence of the Typhoon-class ballistic-missile submarine. McMoneagle subsequently received the Legion of Merit for his service, with the citation describing his work as having "produced critical intelligence reported at the highest echelons" of the US government.⁶
• Sessions during the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis and the 1985–1986 Lebanon hostage cases produced material that participants described as accurate at descriptive level but that could not be operationalised into rescue or location action.
• Sessions targeting the Khaddafi regime in Libya in advance of the 1986 US air strikes produced material that participants subsequently described as having contributed to target-package development.

The session reports themselves, declassified in 1995–1996, contain a substantial proportion of material that is descriptively interesting but operationally ambiguous: viewers regularly produced sketches and impressions that subsequent target imagery showed to have correlations with the actual target site, alongside material with no apparent correspondence. The interpretive question — whether the correlations exceeded chance, and whether the operational product was actionable — became the subject of the 1995 external review.⁷

Disclosure

In 1995, the Director of Central Intelligence, John M. Deutch, commissioned an external review of the programme by the American Institutes for Research. The review panel — chaired by AIR vice-president Mumford and including the statistician Jessica Utts of the University of California, Davis (a methodological proponent of the underlying parapsychology research) and the psychologist Ray Hyman of the University of Oregon (a long-standing methodological critic) — produced a divided assessment. Utts concluded that the laboratory data showed a statistically significant departure from chance expectation that was not, in her judgment, attributable to known methodological flaws. Hyman concluded that the operational record, separately, did not demonstrate that the methodology produced actionable intelligence reliably enough to justify continued operational use.⁸

The AIR review's overall finding — that the operational utility was unclear — provided CIA the institutional basis for termination, which Deutch ordered in late 1995. The programme files were declassified during 1995–1996 and made available through CIA's electronic reading room, ultimately comprising several tens of thousands of pages of session reports, administrative records, and external-evaluation documents. The Stanford Research Institute work, much of it published in technical reports during the 1970s and 1980s, was likewise made fully public.

The post-1995 public-record discussion of the programme has divided along the lines that the AIR review itself reflected: methodological proponents (including Jessica Utts in subsequent publications, and Edwin May, the SRI principal investigator after Puthoff's departure) point to the laboratory statistics as evidence that something requires further investigation; methodological critics (including Hyman and the broader skeptical community represented by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and its successor) maintain that the statistics are explained by a combination of subtle protocol leakage, data-selection effects, and absence of independent replication. The site's editorial framing on contested-result programmes is to present the public record without taking a position on the disputed underlying question.

Legacy

Project STARGATE and its predecessors are documented in the public record more thoroughly than most twenty-year classified programmes, both because of the comparatively complete 1995–1996 declassification and because the operational personnel — McMoneagle, Mel Riley, Lyn Buchanan, David Morehouse, Ed Dames, and others — published memoirs and contributed to a sustained post-programme parapsychology research community. The full session-report archive in CIA's electronic reading room remains available; the SRI technical reports are similarly available; the AIR review is published.

The programme's wider significance for the intelligence record is twofold. First, it documents the extent to which US intelligence organisations were prepared, during the Cold War period, to fund unconventional research programmes whose theoretical basis was contested within the relevant scientific communities — a pattern visible elsewhere in the period (MKUltra in human experimentation, MK-NAOMI in biological agents, behavioural-modification work at multiple universities) and discussed in the methodology page's selection-bias section. Second, it illustrates the difficulty of resolving programmes whose operational records are descriptively suggestive but methodologically ambiguous: the AIR review's split between Utts and Hyman captures a genuine analytical impasse rather than a failure of the review itself to reach a conclusion.

For the lexicon, the programme is the documented anchor case for the proposed GATEINT entry — gating intelligence, intelligence derived from the pre-conscious cognitive mechanisms (attentional gating, predictive coding, posterior parietal pre-conscious decision encoding) that select what enters explicit awareness. STARGATE is the operational programme that, whatever the disputed underlying mechanism, treated this category as a collection discipline.

1. Harold E. Puthoff, "CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing Program at Stanford Research Institute," Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 10, no. 1 (1996); CIA STARGATE Collection, electronic reading room (multiple SCANATE-period documents); Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, "Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding," Nature, vol. 251 (October 1974), 602–607.
2. Defense Intelligence Agency, Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research, DST-1810S-202-78 (declassified 1980); Martin Ebon, Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion? (McGraw-Hill, 1983); Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies (Dell, 1997), chapters 1–4.
3. CIA STARGATE Collection, "Pat Price" session-report series, 1973–1975; Ingo Swann, Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy (Crossroad Press, 1998); Russell Targ, The Reality of ESP: A Physicist's Proof of Psychic Abilities (Quest, 2012), chapters 1–3.
4. United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), GRILL FLAME and CENTER LANE administrative records, declassified 1995; Defense Intelligence Agency, SUN STREAK and STARGATE programme records, declassified 1995; Schnabel, Remote Viewers, op. cit., chapters 5–10.
5. CIA STARGATE Collection, operational session-report series, 1978–1995 (Fort Meade unit); Lyn Buchanan, The Seventh Sense: The Secrets of Remote Viewing as Told by a "Psychic Spy" for the U.S. Military (Pocket Books, 2003); Paul H. Smith, Reading the Enemy's Mind: Inside Star Gate, America's Psychic Espionage Program (Forge, 2005).
6. Joseph McMoneagle, The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy (Hampton Roads, 2002); Joseph McMoneagle, Legion of Merit citation (declassified excerpt published in Schnabel, op. cit.); CIA STARGATE Collection, McMoneagle session reports.
7. CIA STARGATE Collection, complete operational session-report series 1978–1995 (CIA electronic reading room).
8. Michael D. Mumford, Andrew M. Rose, and David A. Goslin, An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications (American Institutes for Research, 29 September 1995); Jessica Utts, "An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning," Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 10, no. 1 (1996), 3–30; Ray Hyman, "Evaluation of Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena," Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 10, no. 1 (1996), 31–58.