Project Stargate

Origins

The program's roots lie in the early 1970s, when the CIA began funding parapsychology research under the name SCANATE. In 1972 the work was contracted to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, where physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff ran laboratory experiments in which trained subjects tried to describe hidden locations, often from geographic coordinates supplied by a separate 'target' person. Ingo Swann helped formalize a structured procedure called coordinate remote viewing, and former police officer Pat Price became the best-known subject. According to the CIA's own account, the agency ended its in-house research in 1977 and passed it to the Defense Intelligence Agency, which later gave the work the name STARGATE.

The FAS Intelligence Resource Program summary describes a more continuous chain of names: an Army operational collection effort called GRILL FLAME at Fort Meade in 1978, a redesignation as CENTER LANE in 1983, and a move to DIA's scientific intelligence directorate as SUN STREAK after Army funding ended in 1985. Contracting shifted from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation in 1991, when the program was renamed STAR GATE.

Program evolution and cost

According to the FAS summary, the effort cost about $20 million over more than two decades, involved more than forty personnel including roughly 23 remote viewers, and at its mid-1980s peak had up to seven full-time viewers plus analysts. The most detailed public accounts, including GlobalSecurity's overview, describe a program that was repeatedly reviewed, renamed and kept alive largely on the strength of a small number of subjects' reported successes.

Claims from the field were sometimes dramatic. Price was said to have described a Soviet facility in the Ural Mountains, a claim Targ and Puthoff reported had been confirmed in several details, though that verification came from the researchers themselves. Later operational claims, including reports relating to the Gulf War and Libya, were never independently verified.

The 1995 review

In 1995 Congress directed that the program move from DIA to the CIA, which commissioned the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to evaluate it. AIR's 183-page report, An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications, was dated 29 September 1995 and released publicly in late November. Its two principal reviewers disagreed sharply: statistician Jessica Utts argued the laboratory data showed a statistically significant effect, while psychologist Ray Hyman argued the results did not rule out methodological artifacts. The CIA's summary of the review, published in its 'Ask Molly' explainer, said the report found enough accurate results to defy randomness, but judged the phenomenon 'too unreliable, inconsistent, and sporadic to be useful for intelligence purposes.' The agency declined to restore the program, and the FAS summary notes that the CIA concluded there was no case in which remote-viewing data had guided an intelligence operation.

Case for and against

Proponents point to the statistically significant laboratory results cited by Utts, the detailed transcripts produced by Targ, Puthoff and Swann, and the fact that a government would not spend two decades on a program it considered worthless. Some ufologists and later researchers treat Stargate as evidence that governments took anomalous human capabilities seriously and that the program's documentation was incomplete.

Skeptics respond that the lab results rested on blinding and feedback procedures that were vulnerable to cueing and selective judging, that accuracy in operational tests was low (the FAS summary reports the government viewers were correct about 15 percent of the time), and that the AIR review's negative verdict was the outcome a careful evaluator should expect when nothing in the data could be checked against independent ground truth.

Legacy

Stargate is one of the most documented examples of state-sponsored parapsychology. Its declassified files are available through the CIA's Electronic Reading Room, and its history is a regular reference point in discussions of 'black budget' secrecy, the ufological interest in remote viewing, and the public appetite for psychic intelligence. Remote viewing later re-entered popular culture through books, films and documentaries, and Targ and Puthoff's work is often cited in ufology on the question of whether non-human intelligence might communicate through the mind. The program's own record, however, is a story of persistent interest and no operational payoff.