History of psychic operations
In 1972, at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff began the first CIA-funded tests of trained remote viewers under the SCANATE contract — the opening of the principal documented chapter of government psychic operations, a period of systematic use of remote viewing, psychokinesis, and related psi faculties as intelligence-collection and influence tools that ran in the United States through 1995, paralleled by Soviet "bioenergetics" programs from the 1960s onward.
Origins — SRI research and SCANATE
The U.S. government's formal interest in psychic intelligence collection began in the early 1970s at SRI International (Stanford Research Institute) in Menlo Park, California, where physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff began testing civilian psychics under controlled conditions. The initial contract — designated SCANATE (scanning by coordinate) — was funded by the CIA and focused on whether trained subjects could accurately describe physical locations specified only by geographical coordinates, without any other identifying information.
Earlier precedents: Aerospace telepathic intelligence (1950s)
The documented government interest in psychic phenomena for intelligence purposes, however, significantly predated SCANATE. According to William Tompkins, systematic use of telepathic intelligence was occurring within classified aerospace programs as early as the 1950s. During his work at Douglas Aircraft Company's Advanced Design section, Tompkins described receiving technical information through what he characterized as "mental flashes" that provided engineering solutions beyond conventional design capabilities. Tompkins later came to understand that "some of us had been simply giving ourselves credit as the top thinkers, never realizing that we may be frequently receiving information telepathically from a group, or several groups, of aliens."
These early telepathic intelligence operations differed from later military remote viewing programs in their apparent spontaneous nature and extraterrestrial origin. Tompkins described receiving sudden insights about classified projects: "I just got a flash that there is a massive facility on the back side of the Moon," and noted that "information continued to appear in my mind" during defense system design work. This early integration of psychic phenomena into classified aerospace development suggests that military interest in telepathic intelligence preceded the formal establishment of remote viewing programs by approximately two decades.
Remote viewing pioneers
The earliest high-profile civilian subjects were Ingo Swann and Pat Price. Swann is credited with developing the structured Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) protocol — later formalised as Controlled Remote Viewing — which gave the military programs a replicable, teachable methodology. Puthoff recruited Swann after he demonstrated anomalous effects on a magnetometer in Puthoff's laboratory. Pat Price, a former Burbank, California police commissioner, produced some of the most operationally significant early results — including a description of a classified Soviet weapons facility at Semipalatinsk that was later noted by satellite imagery.
CIA psychokinesis testing
Israeli psychic Uri Geller was tested by Targ and Puthoff at SRI in 1972–1973; the results, published in Nature in 1974, demonstrated statistically significant performance on target-selection tasks under controlled conditions, though the paper attracted immediate controversy. Geller subsequently engaged in operational work with intelligence agencies including claiming to have participated in covert operations against Soviet nuclear programs.
Project GRILL FLAME / CENTER LANE
Following SCANATE, the U.S. Army established its own program — initially designated GONDOLA WISH, then GRILL FLAME — at Fort Meade, Maryland, training military personnel as operational remote viewers rather than relying on civilian psychics. Joseph McMoneagle was among the first military viewers, later designated "Remote Viewer #001" for the Army program. The program evolved through CENTER LANE (1983–1985) and SUN STREAK (1985–1990).
Project STARGATE
All U.S. government remote viewing programs were consolidated under the designation Project STARGATE in 1991, still operating at Fort Meade under Defense Intelligence Agency management. STARGATE was the subject of a 1995 review by the American Institutes for Research contracted by the CIA, which concluded that while the remote viewing results exceeded chance, they were not sufficiently operational to justify continued funding. The program was officially terminated in 1995.
Military unit personnel
Paul Smith and Lyn Buchanan were among the primary military CRV-trained viewers in the STARGATE era; both subsequently became civilian RV instructors and have provided public accounts of the program's operational use.
Soviet psi programs
The USSR's interest in psi research preceded the U.S. programs; Soviet psychotronic research began in the 1960s under the designation "bioenergetics" or "parapsychology." The KGB operated research programs studying Nina Kulagina (telekinesis), Wolf Messing (telepathic influence), and other documented psi practitioners. The Russian Psi-Corps is the alleged operational successor to Soviet psychic warfare programs.
Post-STARGATE civilian programs and UAP applications
Following the official termination of STARGATE, multiple former program viewers established civilian remote viewing training and operational services. Classified successor programs are alleged by multiple insiders to continue under different designations. The application of remote viewing to UAP research — including viewing of off-world locations, non-human intelligent being facilities, and classified programs — is covered in Remote viewing (UAP applications) and Project STARGATE (extraterrestrial applications).
Program documentation
Jeffrey Mishlove, who holds a doctorate in parapsychology from UC Berkeley and served as host of both Thinking Allowed (1986–2002) and New Thinking Allowed (2015–present), conducted extended on-camera interviews with the principal figures of the U.S. and Soviet psi programs — including Russell Targ, Hal Puthoff, Joe McMoneagle, Ingo Swann, and Charles Tart — producing the most comprehensive public documentary record of program history. Mishlove has described the epistemological stakes of the accumulated data: the mind's demonstrated ability to access information across space and time — "independent of distance and independent of time" — constitutes not merely an intelligence curiosity but a fundamental challenge to the materialist ontology that underlies Western institutional science, and explains the persistent institutional hostility to publicizing program results.
Russell Targ himself summarizes the program's central finding in terms that explain both its success and its suppression: "The people who particularly have trouble with that are the materialists. The physicalist says yes, there seems to be something like ESP. But I don't believe that consciousness actually does stuff. But we'll one day know how it all works on electromagnetic or other basis and I'll promise you one day the physical phenomena will come out. But of course right now there's no evidence for it." The program's evidence that consciousness does indeed "do stuff at a distance outside the body" constitutes a standing refutation of the physicalist position — which is why, Targ argues, its findings were never fully integrated into mainstream science despite 23 years of government funding.