Project STARGATE: the government psychic espionage program
For twenty-three years, the United States government paid people to close their eyes and describe places they had never been. The program ran under a series of code names: SCANATE, GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK, and finally STARGATE. It cost roughly twenty million dollars. It tasked psychics against Soviet weapons facilities, hostage locations, and drug shipments. In 1995, before deciding whether to keep it, the CIA commissioned an outside evaluation. Two scientists reviewed the same data and reached opposite conclusions. The program was shut down months later. This page covers the full history and links to the report that ended it.
Government interest in remote viewing started in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International. Two laser physicists, Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, proposed that certain individuals could perceive distant locations by some unexplained means. The CIA funded early tests. A former police commissioner named Pat Price produced descriptions of Soviet facilities that some analysts found startlingly accurate, and other analysts dismissed as lucky guessing. The CIA program ran from 1972 to 1977, then was discontinued.
The work did not stop. The Army picked it up. Then the Defense Intelligence Agency. Across the 1980s and into the 1990s the program operated under the rotating code names, with an operational unit at Fort Meade, Maryland, and a research contract that moved from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, under physicist Edwin May. By the early 1990s the umbrella name was STARGATE, and it had three components: operations, which used viewers to collect intelligence, research and development, which ran laboratory studies, and foreign assessment, which tracked what other countries were doing in the same field.
The basic procedure stayed consistent across the program's life. A viewer was asked to describe a target, sometimes a physical location, sometimes a photograph sealed in an envelope, sometimes a set of geographic coordinates and nothing more. The viewer produced drawings and written notes. A judge who did not know the correct answer then compared the viewer's description against a set of five possible targets and ranked them. If the correct target was ranked first more often than chance would predict, that was counted as evidence of a real effect.
In the later experiments, the target pool was a large set of National Geographic photographs. The statistical method was rank-order judging, which the program's own statistician noted was conservative: a near-perfect description earned the same score as a description that was just barely good enough to pick the right target out of five. The SAIC laboratory adopted neutral terminology, calling ESP "anomalous cognition" and psychokinesis "anomalous perturbation," to sidestep the loaded history of the older words.
In 1995, Congress directed that the program be considered for transfer to the CIA. Before taking it on, the CIA declassified the program's history and contracted the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization, to evaluate it. The review had two parts: the laboratory research, and the operational use of viewers for actual intelligence gathering.
For the research review, AIR assembled a panel built to represent both sides. Dr. Jessica Utts, a statistics professor at the University of California, Davis, had published work viewing the phenomenon positively. Dr. Raymond Hyman, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, was one of the best-known skeptics in the field. Both were regarded as fair-minded. They reviewed the same roughly eighty publications. They wrote independent reports. Then they tried to agree.
They could not. Utts concluded that psychic functioning had been scientifically established, that the statistical results were far beyond chance, and that similar effects had been replicated in laboratories around the world. Hyman agreed the statistics were anomalous but concluded that anomaly alone did not prove a paranormal cause, and that no mechanism had been identified. The disagreement was not about the numbers. Both accepted the numbers. The disagreement was about what the numbers meant.
The operational review was less divided. AIR interviewed the end users who received the viewing reports, the viewers themselves, and the program manager. The finding was blunt: the laboratory conditions that produced positive results did not hold in real intelligence work. The reports were vague, inconsistent, accurate only on broad background details, and required heavy interpretation. In no case had a remote viewing report ever been used to guide an actual intelligence operation. The report stated plainly that remote viewing failed to produce actionable intelligence.
AIR recommended against continuing the program. The CIA accepted the recommendation. STARGATE was terminated in 1995, and the program records were declassified over the following years. The final report stands as the official government verdict on twenty-three years of psychic research, and it refuses to give either side a clean win: a statistically significant effect that no one could explain, attached to an intelligence tool that never once worked when it mattered.
The complete executive summary, program history, evaluation plan, and the opposing conclusions of Dr. Jessica Utts and Dr. Raymond Hyman, transcribed word for word from the declassified report. The capstone document of the entire STARGATE program.
Document: "An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications" by Michael D. Mumford, Andrew M. Rose, and David A. Goslin, American Institutes for Research, September 29, 1995
Commissioned by: CIA Office of Research and Development
Collection: CIA STARGATE, declassified paranormal research archive, 1972 to 1995
National Security Archive, George Washington University: full report PDF →
The Interference begins with a patent. US3951134, filed in 1974, describes a device for remotely monitoring and altering human brain waves without physical contact. The patent is real. The USPTO granted it.
What precedes that patent is a documented institutional record. In 1960, the CIA funded MKUltra Subproject 119 at Texas Christian University. The stated objective included techniques of activation of the human organism by remote electronic means. The contractor was unwitting. The budget was $6,370. Sidney Gottlieb signed off. In 1952, an ARTICHOKE field team produced total amnesia in two overseas subjects held in a guarded safehouse with eyes taped shut in transit. Their dispositions after the operation were outside the team's responsibility. In 1963, the CIA Inspector General recommended termination of unwitting testing on American citizens. The program ran for another decade. In 1983, a U.S. Army Intelligence report filed in the CIA's STARGATE collection treated the brain as an electromagnetic organ that could be entrained to external frequencies. Not as theory. As established fact.
The Colonial Authority in The Interference is what that timeline produces if you follow it forward rather than stop at the declassified record. The mesh program James Harlan carries inside his skull is built on the physics in these documents. The fiction begins exactly where the public record stops answering questions.