CIA's STARGATE Program: A Look at Two Decades of Psychic Research
In July 1974, a retired police officer named Pat Price participated in a remote viewing session, describing a crane located in Soviet Kazakhstan. This session was part of a CIA-funded program known as STARGATE, which operated for two decades and consumed around $20 million in public funds. The program emerged during a period of heightened paranoia about Soviet advancements in psychic research, prompting U.S. intelligence agencies to explore similar avenues.
The funding for this initiative began around 1970 with a project called SCANATE, and by 1972, laboratory work commenced at Stanford Research Institute under physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff. The program underwent several name changes, including GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, and CENTER LANE, as it transitioned between different intelligence agencies.
During Price's session, he was provided with coordinates and maps of the target site, which was a military research area. Although he accurately sketched a crane that matched satellite imagery, many of his other details were incorrect, leading a CIA analyst to conclude that the experiment was unsuccessful. This contradiction highlights the complexity of interpreting results from such sessions.
In October 1974, Targ and Puthoff published their findings in the journal Nature, claiming that independent judges matched viewer transcripts to actual locations at rates significantly above chance. However, subsequent studies, including those by psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann, challenged these conclusions, suggesting that the SRI transcripts contained cues that could lead to accurate matches without any psychic ability.
The debate continued for years, with statistician Jessica Utts asserting that the evidence supported the existence of psychic functioning, while psychologist Ray Hyman criticized the methodology of the earlier studies. Ultimately, the American Institutes for Research recommended terminating the program, concluding that no intelligence operations had been effectively guided by remote viewing data.
In 2017, twelve million pages of records related to the STARGATE program were declassified, revealing a mix of intriguing successes and numerous failures. The public's fascination with the program often focuses on its most sensational results, overshadowing the many instances of inaccurate predictions. This selection bias raises questions about the validity of the findings and the nature of psychic research in intelligence operations.
The STARGATE program remains a controversial chapter in the history of U.S. intelligence, illustrating the challenges of validating extraordinary claims in the realm of psychic phenomena.
