STARGATE Mars 1984: the CIA remote viewed Mars one million years ago

By 1984 the STARGATE program had been running for over a decade under successive code names. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had spent millions of dollars testing whether trained viewers could acquire accurate information about real-world targets using only geographic coordinates and nothing else. They had done this with Soviet military facilities, with missing persons, with hostage locations, with military hardware. The Mars session was different in one specific way: the target was not a current event or a physical location that could be verified. The time of interest was approximately one million years B.C. No verification mechanism existed. Whatever the viewer described could not be confirmed against any known source.

That design feature is significant for evaluating the session. Every other operational STARGATE target could at least theoretically be checked against satellite imagery, human intelligence, or on-the-ground confirmation. The Mars session produced a transcript that could never be verified. The CIA filed it anyway. It is in the STARGATE collection alongside verified operational sessions. No annotation in the available record explains why this session was conducted, who requested it, or what the requesting party intended to do with the results.

The session protocol matches standard STARGATE procedure. The monitor provides coordinates verbally. The subject enters a relaxed state and begins describing impressions. The monitor occasionally asks follow-up questions. The subject's responses are transcribed verbatim, including pauses, corrections, and expressions of uncertainty. The format of the document is identical to operational sessions targeting Soviet facilities that produced findings later partially corroborated by satellite imagery.

The viewer's opening impression: yellowish, okra-colored. An oblique view of something like a pyramid or pyramid form. Very large people. Very tall. A basin that was very, very large. Structures with channels cut very deep, like roads going down. The viewer described these structures as shelters from storms, designed for that purpose. When asked about the inhabitants, the viewer described ancient people, very tall, who were dealing with the corruption of their environment. It was failing very rapidly.

The viewer described a group that had separated from the main population and traveled a long way to find another place to live. When asked about the cause of the environmental disturbance, the viewer struggled to describe it and eventually produced an image of a globe passing through something like a comet's tail. The viewer used the word obelisk at one point. Near the end of the session, the viewer described what appeared to be a population in distress, unable to find a way out, waiting or looking for something to return, or something coming with the answer.

The monitor's questions throughout are measured and consistent with standard STARGATE session protocol. At one point the monitor notes a definite voltage reversal in the equipment. At another, the monitor instructs the viewer to go back to the time before the geologic problem. The session does not end with a conclusion. It ends when the monitor terminates it.

This session was not an operational tasking. STARGATE operational sessions targeted verifiable real-world phenomena: where a hostage was being held, what equipment was inside a Soviet building at specific coordinates, where a missing person might be located. This session targeted a time and place that cannot be verified by any known method. The CIA filed it in the same collection as its operational work.

The 1995 AIR evaluation that terminated the STARGATE program concluded that no remote viewing report had ever been used to guide an intelligence operation. It did not distinguish between types of sessions. It evaluated the program's operational output as a whole and found it produced no actionable intelligence. The Mars session is part of that evaluated body of work.

What this document does not establish: that Mars had an ancient civilization, that the viewer's descriptions correspond to any physical reality, or that remote viewing is a valid intelligence collection method. What it does establish: the CIA conducted and filed this session as part of a program that ran for over two decades, cost millions of dollars, and was taken seriously enough to employ multiple trained viewers, generate thousands of documents, and survive multiple intelligence community reviews before being terminated in 1995.

The CREST archive released in January 2017 contains over 12,000 declassified STARGATE documents. The vast majority are operational: session transcripts targeting Soviet military facilities, budget documents, training materials, evaluation reports, indoctrination forms for new viewers. The Mars session is one of a small number of sessions that targeted non-verifiable phenomena. It represents a distinct subset of the program's work: sessions where the CIA was not attempting to collect actionable intelligence but was testing the boundaries of what viewers claimed they could access.

Pat Price, the viewer whose work CIA Project Officer Kenneth Kress documented in his 1977 classified paper for Studies in Intelligence, claimed in unrecorded sessions that he could access information about historical events, non-human entities, and locations outside Earth. Price died of a heart attack in 1975. The Mars session in 1984 used a different viewer and a different monitor, but the framing of the session, asking a viewer to go back to ancient Mars, is consistent with the kinds of extraordinary claims that some program participants made privately and that the program's leadership sometimes pursued despite their operational irrelevance.

Related: CIA Officer Kenneth Kress documents the STARGATE program from the inside, 1977 →

Related: The full STARGATE program record and the 1995 evaluation that ended it →