Project Stargate: The Government's Psychic Spies

They hand you a sealed envelope, tell you nothing about it, and ask you to describe whatever sits at the coordinates written inside. You have never been there. You close your eyes and start sketching a building you have no way of knowing, and across the table a government analyst writes down every line.

Psychic spies on the payroll

For more than twenty years the United States paid people to try to see across distance with their minds. The effort ran under a shifting set of code names — Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak — before being consolidated as the Stargate Project, and it involved the CIA, the Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Cold War logic was blunt: the Soviets were reportedly funding parapsychology, and no one wanted to be caught missing a real weapon, however unlikely.

The laboratory work centred on the Stanford Research Institute in California, where the physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff began experiments in 1972. Their key collaborator was the artist Ingo Swann, who helped develop "coordinate remote viewing," a protocol in which a viewer given only map coordinates or a sealed target tried to describe the location. The most celebrated operational viewers, Pat Price and Army officer Joseph McMoneagle, produced sketches that supporters say matched Soviet installations and hidden hardware.

Hits, misses, and statistics

The program's defenders point to specific, checkable descriptions; its critics point to everything around them. Remote viewing sessions produced vague impressions alongside occasional strong matches, and the difficulty was always telling a genuine signal from the human talent for making a rough sketch fit a target after the fact. Over its life the effort cost around twenty million dollars and generated thousands of sessions of uneven quality.

In 1995 the CIA commissioned the American Institutes for Research to evaluate it. Two reviewers reached famously different readings of the same data: the statistician Jessica Utts concluded the experiments showed a real, statistically significant effect, while the psychologist Ray Hyman argued the results were explained by methodological flaws and could not be replicated on demand. The CIA sided with the skeptical reading, judged remote viewing useless for actual intelligence, and shut Stargate down.

What declassification left behind

When the files were declassified in 1995, they neither vindicated nor buried the idea. The strongest cases, McMoneagle's descriptions and some of Price's sketches, are impressive in the retelling and slippery under scrutiny, because we rarely see the misses that surround the hits. That asymmetry is the whole debate in miniature.

Still, it is a matter of record that serious institutions spent two decades and real money on this, that a professional statistician looked at the numbers and did not laugh, and that the program was closed for being unreliable rather than for being obviously fraudulent. That is a stranger verdict than either camp usually admits.

Below, readers have filed their own experiences of knowing things they should not have known, and voted them True, Fake or Not sure. Read the declassified verdict, then add yours.