Project Stargate: The Pentagon's Psychic Spies

The Story

For about two decades, parts of the U.S. intelligence world tested a question most people would laugh off: could someone sit in a room and describe a place on the other side of the world using only their mind?

The idea was called 'remote viewing.' The CIA's own review later put the appeal plainly: if some people could really 'see and describe target locations they have not visited, this ability might prove of great value to the intelligence community.'

The CIA's 1995 review: 'remote viewing failed to produce actionable intelligence.'

The government took it seriously enough to pay for it. According to that review, the CIA ran a parapsychology program from 1972 until 1977. Much of the laboratory research was done at what was then the Stanford Research Institute in California, and later at Science Applications International Corporation. The Defense Intelligence Agency became directly involved about 1985, and by the early 1990s its program was called Star Gate.

Star Gate had three jobs, the review says: 'Operations,' using remote viewing against foreign targets; 'Research and Development'; and 'Foreign Assessment,' studying what other countries were doing with the paranormal. In the operational work, intelligence 'end users' gave targets to remote viewers, who wrote up what they described.

In 1995 the CIA declassified its old parapsychology work and hired the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit, for an outside review. AIR brought in two experts picked from opposite sides: Jessica Utts, a statistician at the University of California, Davis, who had written favorably about paranormal research, and Ray Hyman, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, chosen to represent 'a more skeptical position.' They looked at about 80 publications.

The lab results were the strange part. The review agreed that 'hits occur more often than chance.' But it said it was unclear whether that came from the viewers or from the judges, the target photos or other features of the method, and that the experiments 'have not identified the origins or nature of the remote viewing phenomenon, if, indeed, it exists at all.' Utts and Hyman kept arguing about it in written replies printed in the report.

On the real-world spying, the review was blunt. End users said the reports 'failed to produce the concrete, specific information valued in intelligence gathering.' The information was 'inconsistent, inaccurate with regard to specifics, and required substantial subjective interpretation.' And: 'In no case had the information provided ever been used to guide intelligence operations.'

AIR's conclusion, dated September 29, 1995: 'continued use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering operations is not warranted.' Press reports that November, including a Washington Post story carried by the Los Angeles Times, said as much as $20 million had been spent over the years. That figure is from the press, not the review.

So the program was real, and so was the government money. Proof that remote viewing worked was never found.