Stargate: Inside the CIA’s bizarre psychic spy program

Written By Shawn Geddes

In the 1970s something peculiar was happening at a secure army facility in Fort Meade Maryland. A group of scientists and Army soldiers set out to do something that sounded more like science fiction than government work: find a way to use psychic powers to spy on the country’s enemies.

The program became known as the Stargate project. It was born in 1977 under the military’s primary intelligence agency. Stargate had help from a California research Institute known as SRI International, which lended scientists and its scientific expertise to the project.

Stargate’s mission seems strange: to investigate whether a tactic called "remote viewing" could effectively be used for military and intelligence reasons. Remote viewing is the ability to mentally find people places or events at any time in history. More on remote viewing below.

For almost 20 years the program operated in the shadows. It went by a number of code names: Grill Flame, Center Lane, and Sun Streak. In 1991, the CIA settled on the final name of Stargate.

Throughout the duration of the project, the number of people in the program was kep intentionally small. The program was carefullyl guarded. People who often didn’t mix in those days shared in the responsibilities. Military officers, contractors, and scientist worked together. Their mission was to find hostages and foreign prisons, locate missile sites in foreign countries, and try to anticipate enemy moves without ever leaving base.

Origins of Stargate

The origins of the program go back to the early 1970s. American intelligence agencies heard reports that the Soviet Union was developing what was known as psychotronic research, programs that would explore the military application of psychic phenomena.

The CIA was understandably alarmed.

To counter the Soviets, it launched its own experiments, enlisting physicist such as Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff to test whether the tactic known as “remote viewing” could be real.

By 1977, the work moved to Fort Meade under the Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency. The thinking was straightforward.

What if the Soviets were making real progress in this new game of psychic spying? If it were true, U.S. officials realized that America could not afford to be left behind.

What is remote viewing?

Remote viewing was used as the primary method in Stargate to find intelligence. Remote viewing doesn’t enlist special gadgets, satellites or other gear. Rather, it is a mental exercise that uses strict protcols.

A person called a “viewer” would try to describe a target using only scant clues, such as a random number. The target could be anything from a building to a battlefield. Supervising the session and leading the viewer was a person called a monitor. The monitor guided the viewer, avoiding giving too many hints that could affect the credibility of the viewer’s report.

The method was intentionally designed to take guesswork or sensory clues out of the equation. Viewers would enter a relaxed, almost trance-like state before sketching or describing impressions of the target. Sometimes, the descriptions were eerily close to reality. Other times, they were wildly off.

Was the program effective? What was the final verdict?

Over the years, believers inside the program claimed that remote viewing occasionally produced statistically significant results under lab conditions. But skeptics in the scientific community remained unconvinced.

In 1995, the CIA commissioned an outside audit to determine whether Stargate had ever delivered actionable intelligence. The conclusion was straightforward: the information was too vague, too inconsistent, and too often wrong to be useful. Because of this assessment, Stargate was shut down and declassified.

A legacy of mystery

Today, the Stargate Project is remembered as one of the most peculiar chapters in Cold War history. It has inspired books, documentaries, and even Hollywood comedies like The Men Who Stare at Goats.

To some, it’s a cautionary tale about chasing pseudoscience.

To others, it serves as a reminder that in the shadowy world of intelligence, even the strangest ideas can get their day in the sun.

Further reading

Shawn Geddes
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