# The U.S. government spent two decades studying psychic spies

**Verdict: Proven.** The program is documented fact: real SRI research, a real Army unit, and thousands of declassified files. What is not established is that its "remote viewing" ever produced reliable intelligence; the 1995 CIA-commissioned review found no evidence it did.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: Cold War era · First circulated: 1970s · Believed by: A durable niche of paranormal researchers and ex-participants; the program's existence is now accepted history, its efficacy is not.
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/project-stargate

## Summary
For more than twenty years, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. Army really did fund an effort to gather intelligence by clairvoyance, a program eventually code-named Star Gate. That the program existed is beyond dispute; it was declassified in 1995 and its files fill the CIA's reading room. Whether "remote viewing" ever actually worked is a separate question, and the government's own final review answered it in the negative.

## The claim
That the U.S. government secretly ran a Cold War program using psychics ("remote viewers") to spy on Soviet installations, locate hostages and describe distant targets by paranormal means, and that this ability was real and operationally useful.

## Origin and timeline
- 1972: Physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ begin studying alleged psychic abilities at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, with early CIA funding. Artist Ingo Swann is among the first subjects.
- 1973: SRI runs an early CIA-backed effort nicknamed SCANATE ("scanning by coordinate"), in which subjects such as Ingo Swann and former police officer Pat Price attempt to describe locations given only map coordinates. Uri Geller is also tested at SRI around this period.
- 1977: Army intelligence launches its own effort, GONDOLA WISH, to assess remote viewing as a counter-intelligence threat and tool.
- 1978: The Army establishes an operational remote-viewing unit, GRILL FLAME, at Fort Meade, Maryland. Joseph McMoneagle becomes one of its best-known viewers, later dubbed "Remote Viewer No. 001."
- 1983: The Army program is reorganized as CENTER LANE under the Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM).
- 1986: Oversight shifts to the Defense Intelligence Agency, which runs the effort as SUN STREAK.
- 1991: The umbrella program is renamed STAR GATE, and most research contracting moves from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), with physicist Edwin May as lead investigator.
- 1995: Oversight is transferred to the CIA, which commissions the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to evaluate the program. The AIR report concludes remote viewing had no proven operational value; the CIA terminates and declassifies Star Gate.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The government secretly paid psychics to spy for the United States.
  Evidence: Proven. Declassified CIA, DIA, and Army records (over 12,000 documents released through the CIA's FOIA reading room) confirm a continuous program from the early 1970s to 1995, run under the successive names SCANATE, GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK, and finally STAR GATE, at a total cost of roughly $20 million.
- Claim: Remote viewing was scientifically validated by government research.
  Evidence: Not established. The 1995 AIR review split: statistician Jessica Utts judged the laboratory statistics anomalous and worth further study, while psychologist Ray Hyman attributed them to methodological flaws and chance. Mainstream science does not accept remote viewing, and no replicable mechanism has ever been demonstrated.
- Claim: Psychics produced real, actionable intelligence for the U.S.
  Evidence: Not established. The AIR report concluded that the information remote viewing produced was too "vague and ambiguous" to be useful and found no documented case in which it provided actionable intelligence. Some celebrated "hits" (like Pat Price's description of a Soviet site) are known largely through participant accounts, not independently verified records.
- Claim: The program was shut down because it was too effective and got classified.
  Evidence: Contradicted. The declassified record shows the opposite: the CIA absorbed the program in 1995, had it independently evaluated, found it operationally useless, and then cancelled AND declassified it, releasing the files rather than burying them.

## Why people believe it
- The core premise is true: the government really did fund this for twenty years and really did keep it secret, which makes every further claim feel plausible by association.
- The 1995 review contained a genuine dissent (Jessica Utts, a respected statistician, argued the effect was real) and a single credentialed voice on the 'yes' side is powerful cover for belief.
- Cold War secrecy plus paranormal glamour is an irresistible story, endlessly retold in books, films, and the tale that inspired The Men Who Stare at Goats.
- Former participants like Joseph McMoneagle and Russell Targ have spent decades publicly insisting the ability was real, lending firsthand authority to the claim.

## Open questions
- How to interpret the laboratory statistics that even skeptics acknowledged were above chance. Utts and Hyman agreed the numbers weren't purely random; they disagreed sharply on whether that reflects psi, subtle sensory leakage, optional-stopping and selection effects, or flawed protocols.
- Whether any operational session ever produced verifiable, decision-changing intelligence. The anecdotal 'hits' are striking but were typically scored after the fact, and the AIR review found no clean documented example.
- How much the 'best' results depended on a handful of star viewers and a small circle of true-believer researchers who designed, ran, and scored their own experiments.
- Why the program survived roughly two decades and $20 million despite consistently marginal results, a question as much about bureaucratic momentum and Cold War anxiety as about the paranormal.

## Sources
- STARGATE Collection (declassified program documents), CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/stargate
- An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications (the AIR report), American Institutes for Research / CIA FOIA Reading Room (1995): https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00791r000200180005-5
- An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning (Utts's contribution to the AIR review), Jessica Utts, University of California (1995): https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/air.pdf
- An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications (archived AIR report copy), National Security Archive, George Washington University (1995): https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB438/docs/doc_57.pdf
- STAR GATE [Controlled Remote Viewing]: program overview, Federation of American Scientists (Intelligence Resource Program): https://irp.fas.org/program/collect/stargate.htm
- The CIA Recruited 'Mind Readers' to Spy on the Soviets in the 1970s, HISTORY: https://www.history.com/articles/cia-esp-espionage-soviet-union-cold-war
- Stargate Project (U.S. Army unit), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_unit)

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