STARGATE

Opening

From 1972 to 1995 the United States government funded a classified program to find out whether "remote viewing", the claimed ability to perceive distant or hidden information without the ordinary senses, could become a usable intelligence tool. It passed through a chain of code names, SCANATE, GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK and finally STAR GATE, and employed both soldiers and civilian psychics.

It was not hidden from oversight: results were briefed twice a year to the Senate and House intelligence committees. It ended only after the CIA commissioned an independent scientific review in 1995, and the review's two lead experts disagreed sharply about what the data showed. Serious statisticians still argue about it.

Timeline

Early 1970sPhysicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff begin remote viewing research at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), driven largely by intelligence reports that the Soviet Union was pursuing parapsychology and by fear of falling behind in an unconventional field.

27 April 1973Ingo Swann, an artist and self-described psychic already working on psychokinesis at the American Society for Psychical Research, attempts to remotely view Jupiter while Pioneer 10 is on its way there. He describes crystals high in the atmosphere, "maybe like rings of Saturn". Pioneer 10 found no ring when it passed Jupiter that December; a thin ring was discovered by Voyager 1 in March 1979. Supporters count the session as a striking hit, skeptics as a loose match interpreted after the fact.

July 1974Pat Price, a former Burbank police officer working as a remote viewer, is given coordinates for a secret Soviet site the CIA called URDF-3, near the Semipalatinsk test area in Soviet Kazakhstan. His sketch of a rail-mounted gantry crane was judged remarkably close to the real one, checked against satellite imagery, and the session is often cited as one of the program's strongest. A CIA analysis in December 1975, however, called the experiment unsuccessful, because most of what Price described at the site did not exist.

Mid-1978Army intelligence turns its GONDOLA WISH study into an operational unit, GRILL FLAME, based in two buildings at Fort Meade, Maryland.

1979, Iran hostage crisisRemote viewers are tasked with locating American hostages in Tehran. Several reportedly describe places later said to match known intelligence; how far this shaped military planning remains disputed.

1983The unit is renamed the INSCOM CENTER LANE Project. Swann and Puthoff formalize coordinate remote viewing (CRV), a staged protocol meant to filter subjective noise from genuine perception and, in principle, let any trainee learn the technique.

1984Columnist Jack Anderson reports the existence of the program. The same year the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council evaluates it unfavorably, finding no scientific basis for the claimed effect.

Late 1985Army funding ends. The program is renamed SUN STREAK and moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency's Scientific and Technical Intelligence Directorate. Later in its life Army Colonel William P. Johnson Jr. is named SUN STREAK program manager, with a brief to show whether it was worth keeping.

Joseph McMoneagle's tenure. A retired Army chief warrant officer who says he ran more than 450 sessions, McMoneagle receives the Legion of Merit, whose citation credits him with information on numerous targets unavailable by other means. He later becomes the program's best-known alumnus through consulting, lectures and books.

1991Most contract work moves from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), where physicist Edwin May controls most of the contractor funds and data. The security classification changes and the program takes its final name, STAR GATE.

1995Time magazine reports that three full-time psychics are still working out of Fort Meade on about $500,000 a year. McMoneagle later wrote that the unit had peaked at more than 22 active viewers and dwindled to three, one of them using tarot cards.

1995The Fiscal Year 1995 Defense Appropriations bill transfers the program from DIA to the CIA and tells the agency to commission a retrospective review. The CIA hires the American Institutes for Research (AIR).

29 September 1995AIR delivers its report, released publicly on 28 November 1995. Statistician Jessica Utts concludes the laboratory data show a real effect, with some subjects scoring five to fifteen percent above chance. Psychologist Ray Hyman, a prominent skeptic, argues the effect has not been shown to come from any psychic mechanism and notes that remote viewing never produced intelligence that was acted upon. AIR, weighing both, recommends ending the program.

After the reportThe CIA cancels the program and, unusually for a classified effort of this size, declassifies and releases thousands of pages over the following years.

Key figures

Swann is the program's intellectual architect. His CRV protocol gave the work a structured, quasi-scientific framework that set it apart from casual psychic claims, whatever one concludes about the phenomenon.

McMoneagle is its public face, a decorated intelligence soldier whose long session record and post-program career made him better known to a general audience than any classified result.

Price supplied the most-quoted apparent success, the URDF-3 crane. Proponents treat it as strong evidence; skeptics point to the agency's 1975 verdict and to the risk of generous after-the-fact matching between a viewer's sketch and satellite imagery.

Utts and Hyman embody the unresolved scientific dispute: two credentialed reviewers looking at the same retrospective data and reaching opposite conclusions about whether it shows a real effect. Later research has not settled it.

Puthoff and Targ are the founders. Their SRI work gave the effort the method and the credibility to survive more than twenty years of internal doubt, doubt McMoneagle summed up when he wrote that "the Army never had a truly open attitude toward psychic functioning."

Physical and documentary trail

For a once-classified program the record is unusually complete: documented code-name changes across several managing agencies, the 1984 National Research Council review, the full 1995 AIR report with its split conclusions, and thousands of declassified pages, including individual session records searchable by subject and target.

What it lacks is any case the CIA accepts in which remote viewing directly guided a real intelligence operation. That gap separates the dramatic individual "hits" from the operational track record as judged by the agency that inherited and then closed the program.

Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established.

Things you might not know

• Hyman had met these labs before. In the early 1970s ARPA sent him to SRI to assess Uri Geller, and his report called Geller a "complete fraud". SRI lost its government contract to work with Geller.
• The psychic spies worked in a leaky hut. The Washington Post described the Fort Meade unit as about 15 to 20 people run out of "an old, leaky wooden barracks".
• A general tried to walk through walls. Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, who backed the work as head of Army intelligence command, attempted it himself and had his battalion commanders learn spoon bending.
• Swann had a partner on the Jupiter run. The psychic Harold Sherman tried the same probe at the same moment from Arkansas, and the session write-up notes that neither man claimed validity for his results.
• The whole thing cost about $20 million. That was the figure given when Utts and Hyman's review was announced, for a program spread over more than twenty years.
• The archive went online in 2017. The CIA put the STAR GATE records in its searchable CREST database in January 2017, and Edwin May later gave thousands of pages to Rice University's Archives of the Impossible.

Competing explanations

A genuine statistical anomaly, modest and operationally unreliable. This is Utts's position. It rests on above-chance scoring across many laboratory sessions and does not need any single dramatic case, Price's crane or Swann's Jupiter, to hold.

No psychic mechanism at all, with apparent successes explained by generous retrospective matching, selective reporting of hits over misses, and target descriptions vague enough to fit several answers. This is Hyman's position. He wrote that "inexplicable statistical departures from chance, however, are a far cry from compelling evidence for anomalous cognition." AIR's finding that remote viewing never produced actionable intelligence backs it with an institutional conclusion, not only outside skepticism.

A program kept alive by Cold War anxiety more than by results, because cancelling it risked ceding a perceived field to the Soviets. This fits the documented origin in reports of Soviet parapsychology, and it helps explain why the work survived for a decade after the unfavorable 1984 review.

Later life of the case

Stargate is one of the best-documented real programs cited in paranormal and conspiracy writing, because its declassified record allows primary-source work rather than speculation. McMoneagle's books and appearances have kept the human story alive since 1995, and the Utts-Hyman dispute remains a reference point in arguments about parapsychology methods.

Finding

A real, continuously funded US government program studied remote viewing for intelligence purposes from 1972 to 1995, was briefed regularly to congressional oversight committees, and was closed after an independent review whose two lead experts reached opposite conclusions about the data. The AIR conclusion, adopted by the CIA, is that remote viewing never supplied information that was acted on in an intelligence operation. That is a specific, checkable claim, separate from the open question of whether the phenomenon has any statistical reality.

What still will not resolve: the Utts-Hyman disagreement, which no research since 1995 has settled, and independent verification of the most dramatic cases, Price's crane and Swann's Jupiter description, both still read generously by some and skeptically by others.