The Stargate Project: The CIA Spent 20 Years Investigating Psychic Spies. The Declassified Record Is Stranger Than You'd Expect.
From 1972 to 1995, the US government funded research into remote viewing — the claimed ability to perceive distant locations using only the mind. The programme produced results that its own evaluators couldn't fully explain.
In 1972, physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute began a series of experiments into remote viewing — the claimed ability to perceive locations, objects, or events at a distance using only the mind, without any conventional sensory input. The research was funded by the CIA. It continued, under various names and with various government sponsors, for the next twenty-three years. The programme was called, at various points, SCANATE, GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK, and finally STARGATE.
The basic experimental protocol involved a 'viewer' — a person claiming remote viewing ability — being asked to describe a target location that was unknown to them. A separate 'outbounder' would travel to the target location and spend time there while the viewer attempted to perceive it. The viewer's descriptions were then compared to the actual target location by independent judges who did not know which description corresponded to which target.
The results, across thousands of trials conducted over two decades, were statistically anomalous. The American Institutes for Research conducted an independent evaluation of the programme in 1995, commissioned by the CIA as part of a review of its intelligence value. The evaluation, led by statistician Jessica Utts and psychologist Ray Hyman, found that the remote viewing data showed a statistically significant effect — that viewers were, on average, performing better than chance. Utts concluded that the effect was real. Hyman concluded that the methodology was flawed. Both agreed that the results were unexplained.
The programme's most celebrated practitioner was Ingo Swann, a New York artist who claimed to have developed a systematic technique for remote viewing that could be taught to others. Swann's most famous claimed success was a 1973 session in which he described the planet Jupiter in detail — including the presence of a ring system — before the Pioneer 10 spacecraft confirmed the rings' existence in 1979. The description was documented before the confirmation. Whether it constitutes evidence of genuine remote perception or an extraordinary coincidence is a question the record does not resolve.
The operational use of remote viewers by US intelligence agencies is documented in the declassified records. Viewers were tasked with locating hostages in Iran, identifying Soviet military installations, and tracking the movements of specific individuals. The operational results were mixed. Some sessions produced information that was subsequently confirmed. Others produced nothing useful. The programme was never the primary source for any significant intelligence finding.
The Stargate Project was terminated in 1995 following the AIR evaluation, which concluded that the programme had not produced intelligence of sufficient value to justify its continuation. The declassified documents — over 89,000 pages, released in 2017 — are available through the CIA's CREST database. They describe a twenty-year government investigation into a phenomenon that the investigators could neither explain nor reliably replicate. The programme is closed. The question it was investigating is not.