Stargate Project

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Stargate Project

U.S. Army investigations of psychic phenomena

This article is about the U.S. government remote-viewing program. For alleged transit-portal devices and sites in NHI/SSP testimony, see

Stargate

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From 1977 to 1995, the United States intelligence community operated a classified remote viewing program — known successively as SCANATE, GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK, and finally Stargate Project (also styled STARGATE or Project STARGATE) — to investigate the potential of psychic phenomena for military and domestic intelligence applications. The program was conducted at Fort Meade, Maryland, under INSCOM, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and eventually the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with civilian research performed at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. According to participants, the program grew out of concern that the Soviet Union had weaponized psychic research — so-called "psychotronics" — and was using it for intelligence gathering against the United States.

The program's work primarily involved remote viewing, the purported ability to psychically perceive events, sites, or information from a great distance. A 1995 American Institutes for Research (AIR) review commissioned by the CIA concluded that remote viewing produced statistically significant effects in the laboratory but was insufficiently reliable for operational intelligence use, and the program was formally terminated and declassified that year. Former participants have since publicly disputed that framing, and the program has become central to the civilian remote viewing community and to subsequent UAP research.

Soviet backdrop and initial funding

By 1970, United States intelligence estimated that the Soviet Union was spending roughly 60 million roubles annually on "psychotronic" research. In response, the CIA initiated SCANATE ("scan by coordinate") the same year, and in 1972 approached physicist Hal Puthoff, then working on laser research at SRI, to investigate paranormal abilities. Puthoff and physicist Russell Targ led the research team at SRI; early subjects included Israeli performer Uri Geller, artist and self-described psychic Ingo Swann, and former Burbank police commissioner Pat Price.

Ray Hyman, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, was asked by Air Force psychologist Lt. Col. Austin W. Kibler (1930–2008) — then director of Behavioral Research for ARPA — to visit SRI and specifically evaluate Geller. Hyman's report to the government called Geller a "complete fraud", and as a consequence Targ and Puthoff lost their government contract to work further with him. The result was a publicity tour for Geller, Targ, and Puthoff to seek private funding for further research work on Geller.

According to Puthoff's later recollection, Swann's first day at SRI centred on a shielded magnetometer several floors below ground. As Swann focused on the device, the monitoring scientist reportedly observed the needle "moving wildly — the device was malfunctioning. This scene was repeated several more times, each time exactly when Swann was 'seeing' the magnetometer." Puthoff has separately described inviting Swann to examine a quantum-chip device inside multiple layers of electromagnetic, magnetic, superconducting, and acoustic shielding; after Swann apparently affected the chip's output and sketched its interior geometry, the CIA approached Puthoff and funded an initial contract of roughly $50,000–60,000.

In 1973, Swann allegedly conducted a remote viewing of Jupiter and reported observing a thin ring around the planet — a claim considered implausible at the time, which Puthoff says was subsequently corroborated when Pioneer 10 described the ring's existence.

Establishment as an Army unit (1977–1978)

In 1977, the Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) Systems Exploitation Detachment (SED) started the GONDOLA WISH program to "evaluate potential adversary applications of remote viewing." Army Intelligence formalized the effort in mid-1978 as an operational program designated GRILL FLAME, based in buildings 2560 and 2561 at Fort Meade in Maryland, under INSCOM "Detachment G." The unit was small-scale — roughly 15 to 20 individuals, run out of what former participants described as "an old, leaky wooden barracks."

The unit was overseen until 1987 by Lt. Frederick Holmes "Skip" Atwater (born 1947), an aide and "psychic headhunter" to Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, and later president of the Monroe Institute. Atwater was responsible for selecting and tasking viewers; Stubblebine, then commanding the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), was a key internal sponsor and reportedly required his battalion commanders to learn to bend spoons à la Uri Geller, himself attempting several psychic feats.

The program's genesis is credited to a proposal by Major Keel and then-Lieutenant Frederick "Skip" Atwater of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, submitted to INSCOM for evaluation. The officer assigned to assess it, Joseph McMoneagle, reviewed Soviet and Chinese intelligence documents indicating that foreign powers were already researching combat veterans' apparent psychic experiences as collection tools, and recommended the US develop its own capability. During his evaluation McMoneagle conducted a test session at SRI with Russell Targ in which he described a salt-processing facility down to the rusted colour of its Quonset hut — an experience he credited with convincing him the phenomenon was real.

Background

According to Joseph McMoneagle, the CIA and DIA reacted to reports that the Soviets were actively researching parapsychology by approving and funding their own research programs. McMoneagle wrote that reviews for these programs were made semi-annually at the Senate and House select committee level, and that standard operating procedure for remote viewing was that the results were kept secret from the "viewer" so failures would not damage the viewer's confidence and skill. McMoneagle defines remote viewing as an attempt to sense unknown information about places or events, normally performed to detect current events, but during military and domestic intelligence applications viewers claimed to sense things in the future, experiencing precognition.

Methodology

Operations were conducted in dedicated remote-viewing rooms at Fort Meade built to strict protocol specifications. Viewers worked under double-blind protocols, with targets identified only by geographic coordinates or sealed envelopes; according to Puthoff, the SRI lab director would make up long target lists, store them in his safe, and experimenters would retrieve a sealed envelope, drive to the designated location, and have the viewer describe what they perceived without any contact with the outbound experimenter. According to McMoneagle, standard operating procedure required withholding results from the viewer so failures would not damage confidence, and the unit would only receive a mission after all other intelligence attempts, methods, or approaches had already been exhausted. Angela Ford, who served in the unit at Fort Meade from 1985 to 1995 as Viewer #079, characterised the methodology as rigorously blind-targeted and indistinguishable in mechanism from traditional psychic ESP — "remote viewing" serving, in her account, as institutional language to make the work fundable by Congress.

Ingo Swann developed Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV), also called Controlled Remote Viewing, a structured protocol in which the viewer is given only geographic coordinates and no other identifying information. Swann reportedly drew the approach from protocols developed by French chemical engineer René Warcollier. Puthoff and Targ claimed that a minimum accuracy rate of 65% required by their clients was often exceeded in the later experiments. McMoneagle has said that at peak manpower there were over 22 active military and civilian remote viewers providing data, and people leaving the project were not replaced so that when the project closed in 1995 this number had dwindled to three, one of whom was using tarot cards; he attributes the program's vulnerability to what he calls the "giggle factor" inside the Army.

A CIA inspector who reportedly arrived at SRI specifically to find evidence of fraud was placed, at Puthoff's insistence, in the role of remote viewer himself; his sketch matched the outbound experimenter's location. Puthoff says the inspector returned to the CIA, reported that the program worked, and subsequently became one of its strongest staff viewers.

Published research

Puthoff and Targ published their findings in Nature in 1974, bringing controlled remote viewing results to scientific attention, and followed with unclassified results in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1976 after a successful replication at Bell Labs supported peer review. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab at Princeton University, led by engineering dean Robert Jahn, subsequently replicated the remote-viewing results independently over a two-year program. A principal empirical finding claimed by Puthoff was that remote viewing ability appeared to be broadly distributed rather than restricted to gifted individuals, following a bell curve comparable to athletic or musical ability. Experiments conducted aboard submarines at depth reportedly established that the effect persisted through seawater, which the researchers said ruled out low-frequency electromagnetic transmission as the mechanism.

Code-name history

The program's designation changed repeatedly, driven according to participants by repeated public exposure:

According to McMoneagle, the program was renamed CENTER LANE after President Jimmy Carter inadvertently disclosed the code name GRILL FLAME while publicly discussing how remote viewers had located a downed Soviet Tu-22; further name changes followed each successive leak or congressional disclosure, until the DIA took formal control and the program was eventually handed to the CIA with congressional instruction to "turn it totally black and bury it." In 1984, the existence of the program was publicly reported by columnist Jack Anderson, and that year it was unfavorably received by the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council; in late 1985 Army funding was terminated, but the program was redesignated SUN STREAK and funded by the DIA's Scientific and Technical Intelligence Directorate (office code DT-S).

Key personnel

Hal Puthoff

Main article:

Harold E. Puthoff

In the 1970s, the CIA and DIA granted funds to Puthoff to investigate paranormal abilities, collaborating with Russell Targ in a study of the purported psychic abilities of Uri Geller, Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Joseph McMoneagle, and others as part of the Stargate Project, of which Puthoff became a director. Puthoff worked as the principal investigator of the civilian programme. As with Ingo Swann and Pat Price, Puthoff has attributed much of his personal remote-viewing skill to his early involvement with Scientology, from which all three reportedly departed in the late 1970s. His team of psychics was reported to have identified spies, located Soviet weapons and technologies — including a nuclear submarine in 1979 — and helped find lost SCUD missiles in the first Gulf War and plutonium in North Korea in 1994.

Russell Targ

Russell Targ

Main article:

Russell Targ

Targ began working with Puthoff at SRI in 1972; the two led the research team and co-authored the 1974 Nature paper and subsequent IEEE publication.

Ingo Swann

Main article:

Ingo Swann

Swann was originally tested in "Phase One" OOBE-beacon experiments at the American Society for Psychical Research under research director Karlis Osis. A former OT VII Scientologist, Swann is credited with coining the term "remote viewing" and with developing CRV. In a 1995 letter, Edwin C. May wrote that he had not used Swann for two years because of rumors Swann had briefed a high-level person at SAIC and the CIA on remote viewing, aliens, and ETs.

Pat Price

A former Burbank, California police officer and former Scientologist, Price joined SRI after a chance encounter with Puthoff and Swann near the institute; working with maps and photographs provided by the CIA, he claimed to retrieve information from facilities behind Soviet lines, and is best known for his sketches of cranes and gantries said to conform to CIA intelligence photography. Puthoff recalls Price as a former police commissioner who had used similar impressions in solving crimes.

Joseph McMoneagle

Main article:

Joseph McMoneagle

Joseph McMoneagle (Viewer 001), a U.S. Army Warrant Officer, became the program's most decorated remote viewer. McMoneagle has said he had vivid early-childhood memories and began honing what he regarded as psychic abilities in his teens; he enlisted partly to escape a difficult home environment and became an experimental remote viewer while serving in U.S. Army Intelligence. According to the Shawn Ryan Show's introduction of him, the program provided intelligence to the CIA, DIA, NSA, FBI, DEA, National Reconnaissance Office, NASA, U.S. Special Operations Units, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, and the White House during his tenure at Fort Meade, and his service earned him the Legion of Merit. Puthoff adds that McMoneagle later received the National Intelligence Meritorious Award for more than 200 sanctioned viewings.

Edwin May

Edwin C. May joined the Stargate Project in 1975 as a consultant and was working full-time by 1976; the original project was part of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory managed by May. When contracting was transferred from SRI to SAIC in 1991, May controlled roughly 70% of contractor funds and 85% of the data, and the project moved to SAIC's Palo Alto offices, where it remained until the CIA closed it in 1995. May worked as the principal investigator, judge, and "star gatekeeper" for the project; David Marks has argued that this combined role created a conflict of interest and that May's refusal to release the names of the oversight committee, or to permit independent judging of the transcripts, was suspicious — commenting "this refusal suggests that something must be wrong with the data or with the methods of data selection."

Paul Smith

Paul Smith, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, served as a monitor and viewer from 1983 onward and later authored Reading the Enemy's Mind and The Essential Guide to Remote Viewing; he has said he co-authored the U.S. Army's official CRV training manual.

Angela Ford

Angela Ford (Viewer 079) served in the U.S. Army remote viewing unit at Fort Meade from 1985 to 1995, and worked a sustained series of cases involving hostages, fugitives, and weapons of mass destruction, often using automatic writing in addition to standard CRV protocols.

David Morehouse

David Morehouse participated as a remote viewer and later gave public accounts of the program in his book Psychic Warrior: Inside the CIA's Stargate Program (2000, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 1-902636-20-1), in which he claims to have worked on hundreds of remote-viewing assignments, from searching for a Soviet jet that crashed in the jungle carrying an atomic bomb to tracking suspected double agents.

Ed Dames

Ed Dames was assigned to the unit at the end of January 1986, initially intended as a session monitor and analyst under Atwater rather than a remote viewer, and received no formal remote-viewing training. He was used to "run" viewers and provide training and practice sessions, and established a reputation for pushing CRV to extremes, with target sessions on Atlantis, Mars, UFOs, and aliens. He has been a frequent guest on the Coast to Coast AM radio shows.

Albert Stubblebine

Albert Stubblebine

Main article:

Albert Stubblebine

Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine was a key internal sponsor of the research at Fort Meade and was convinced of the reality of a wide range of psychic phenomena; he required his battalion commanders to learn spoon-bending and himself attempted to walk through walls. In the early 1980s he was responsible for INSCOM, during which time the remote viewing project in the US Army began. After reported controversy over security violations involving uncleared civilian psychics in Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs), Stubblebine was placed on retirement, and his successor Maj. Gen. Harry Soyster — viewed as more conventional — ended the Army's participation in Stargate. Some commentators have conflated a separate "Project Jedi," reportedly run out of Fort Bragg by Special Forces, with Stargate.

James Clapper

Main article:

James Clapper

According to a 1993 briefing memorandum, Lt. Gen. James Clapper — later Director of National Intelligence — was a project leader in the 1990s.

Dale Graff

Dale Graff, the DIA's project director during a key period, recruited Rosemary Smith — a young administrative assistant credited with one of the project's successes, the 1976 location of a lost Soviet spy plane. After the program's closure, Graff recalled bafflement at the announcement that it had been a failure, writing that in his experience as an investigator it had seemed to be producing definite successes; he commented that it was unsurprising no intelligence action had ever been taken on Stargate data, since the military and intelligence authorities had never really taken the project seriously.

Senior briefings

As the program produced results, Puthoff was required to brief progressively more senior officials. He has said that briefings at lower levels often produced flat dismissals — at one early session a participant jumped up, declared it a test of gullibility, and stormed out — while very senior officials consistently responded with sustained engagement. Puthoff briefed Bill Casey, CIA Director under Reagan, in a session originally scheduled for 45 minutes; according to Puthoff, Casey dismissed his entire remaining afternoon calendar and the briefing lasted five hours.

George Stephanopoulos, in his 2024 book The Situation Room, mentions the project in discussing a May 8, 1980 Situation Room briefing for President Carter after Carter's failed hostage rescue mission on April 24, 1980. In a 2005 GQ interview, Carter said CIA director Stansfield Turner had told him the agency once contacted a California woman claiming psychic powers to help locate a missing plane.

Notable operations

Operational tasking attributed to STARGATE remote viewers reportedly included locating Soviet submarine positions, finding American hostages held in Iran and Lebanon, and identifying downed aircraft.

Additional claims reported in press coverage include locating Soviet weapons and technologies, a nuclear submarine in 1979, lost SCUD missiles during the first Gulf War, and plutonium in North Korea in 1994.

UAP-related tasking

The program also tasked viewers against unidentified aerial phenomena. STARGATE remote viewers worked the case of an Argentinian minesweeper found abandoned in the Gulf of San Matías in the early 1980s, in which multiple blind viewers independently reported a craft above the vessel and crew members being taken aboard. In 1982, Atwater tasked McMoneagle against a classified site associated with Swann's earlier work; McMoneagle perceived "a mountainous region with underground tubes, tunnels, and ball shaped objects. 'I've never seen anything like it,' he said. 'It's like walking into a place I have no familiarity with at all.'" According to Puthoff, one viewer also identified a purported UFO base at Mount Zeil in Australia that his CIA contract monitor independently reported was known locally for regular UFO activity. Pat Price is said to have conducted unsanctioned sessions targeting alleged underground non-human facilities during the Stargate period.

Ingo Swann in particular pursued the extraterrestrial applications of remote viewing, holding that non-human intelligences possessed a far greater mastery of consciousness than humans and were intervening to suppress humanity's latent psychic potential. The historian Jim Schnabel, who wrote critically about the program, repeatedly encountered ET-related targeting in its documented casework despite attempting to minimize the extraterrestrial connection. The program's UAP connection is also reported to have extended past its official closure: in 2011 Paul Smith was contracted, with Hal Puthoff as intermediary, to assemble a team to remote-view the USS Nimitz UAP incident, operating from a dedicated facility with three gray remote-viewing rooms built to the Fort Meade specification — the contracting agency possibly being AATIP or a precursor.

Transfer to SAIC and CIA closure (1991–1995)

In 1991, most of the contracting for the program was transferred from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), with Edwin May controlling 70% of the contractor funds and 85% of the data; its security was altered from Special Access Program (SAP) to Limited Dissemination (LIMDIS), and it was given its final name, STARGATE. In 1995, the defense appropriations bill directed that the program be transferred from the DIA to CIA oversight, and the CIA commissioned the AIR report.

By the early 1990s, according to Michael Salla, internal leaks threatened to expose more than the government wished to reveal, and the decision was allegedly made to declassify the program under its final STARGATE designation rather than allow uncontrolled disclosure. Ford attributes the program's vulnerability to the retirement of key supporters including Jack Vorona and Dale Graff, combined with a CIA review in which analysts were reportedly never granted clearances to read the classified operational successes; Ford and a colleague say they later visited CIA headquarters at Langley to retrieve the Fort Meade records and found them still unopened.

AIR review and declassification

The AIR review panel consisted primarily of statistician Jessica Utts, Meena Shah, and Ray Hyman. Utts and Hyman were chosen to represent both sides of the paranormal controversy, although the AIR considered both of them "fair and open-minded scientists"; Hyman had produced an unflattering report on Uri Geller and SRI for the government two decades earlier, and David Marks found Utts's appointment "puzzling" because she had co-published with Edwin May, a circumstance Marks argued was likely to make her "less than [im]partial." Utts concluded the results provided evidence of psychic functioning; Hyman argued that the conclusion that ESP — and especially precognition — had been demonstrated was premature and had not been independently replicated. Hyman concluded:

Psychologists, such as myself, who study subjective validation find nothing striking or surprising in the reported matching of reports against targets in the Stargate data. The overwhelming amount of data generated by the viewers is vague, general, and way off target. The few apparent hits are just what we would expect if nothing other than reasonable guessing and subjective validation are operating.

The review concluded:

The foregoing observations provide a compelling argument against continuation of the program within the intelligence community. Even though a statistically significant effect has been observed in the laboratory, it remains unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, has been demonstrated. The laboratory studies do not provide evidence regarding the origins or nature of the phenomenon, assuming it exists, nor do they address an important methodological issue of inter-judge reliability.

Further, even if it could be demonstrated unequivocally that a paranormal phenomenon occurs under the conditions present in the laboratory paradigm, these conditions have limited applicability and utility for intelligence gathering operations. For example, the nature of the remote viewing targets are vastly dissimilar, as are the specific tasks required of the remote viewers. Most importantly, the information provided by remote viewing is vague and ambiguous, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the technique to yield information of sufficient quality and accuracy of information for actionable intelligence. Thus, we conclude that continued use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering operations is not warranted.

Joe Nickell has written:

Other evaluators – two psychologists from AIR – assessed the potential intelligence-gathering usefulness of remote viewing. They concluded that the alleged psychic technique was of dubious value and lacked the concreteness and reliability necessary for it to be used as a basis for making decisions or taking action. The final report found "reason to suspect" that in "some well publicised cases of dramatic hits" the remote viewers might have had "substantially more background information" than might otherwise be apparent.

According to the AIR review, no remote-viewing report ever provided actionable information for any intelligence operation. Time reported in 1995 that three full-time psychics were still working on a $500,000-a-year budget at Fort Meade, which would soon close. Based on the AIR findings — which recommended higher-quality research and tighter controls — the CIA terminated the $20 million project, citing a lack of documented evidence of its value. The 1995 declassification was covered on network television; a Ted Koppel segment brought the existence of the "psychic spy" program to wide public attention, and the CRV training manual developed inside the program was subsequently released to the public.

Marks's methodological critique and cultural depictions

David Marks, in his book The Psychology of the Psychic (2000), discussed the flaws of the Stargate Project at length, identifying six negative design features: the possibility of cues or sensory leakage was not ruled out, there was no independent replication, some experiments were conducted in secret making peer review impossible, the judge Edwin May was also the principal investigator — a conflict of interest — and Marks concluded that, after two decades of research, the project had failed to provide scientific evidence for the legitimacy of remote viewing. The program was featured in the 2004 book and 2009 film The Men Who Stare at Goats, although neither mentions it by name.

CREST release

In January 2017, the CIA published Stargate Project records online as part of the CREST archive.

Legacy

Former STARGATE personnel dispersed into the civilian world following the program's termination. Ed Dames, a former program officer, became a frequent guest on Art Bell's radio program Coast to Coast AM, popularising remote viewing. Courtney Brown founded the Farsight Institute, a civilian remote-viewing organization, and trained a civilian network that included viewers such as Prudence Calabrese. McMoneagle continued working as a consulting remote viewer, and has said the Department of Defense subsequently re-hired him for additional targets, arranging for Robert Monroe of the Monroe Institute to teach him to initiate and control out-of-body experiences. Smith pursued academic research on the epistemology of psi phenomena. Morehouse gave public accounts of the program's operations and Pentagon involvement in black-project remote sensing.

Former viewers and researchers have argued that the CIA's public framing of the program as a failure was inaccurate and that effective remote-viewing programs have continued covertly after 1995.

See also

Further reading

External links

References

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Wikipedia This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Stargate Project (U.S. Army unit)", as of 2025-08-29, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

Additional details

The project leader in the 1990s was Lt.