"The most extensively government-funded psychic research programme in history — the CIA and Department of Defense's Stargate Project ran for over two decades, spent tens of millions of dollars, and produced a classified archive of remote viewing sessions used for actual intelligence operations. The full story, now declassified."
Remote viewing is the practice of perceiving information about a distant or hidden target — a person, place, or object — through psychic means, without any normal sensory access to that information. Unlike the spontaneous psychic perception of clairvoyance, remote viewing as developed by Ingo Swann and the Stanford Research Institute is a structured, trainable protocol: specific methods for entering a receptive state, for recording impressions without premature interpretation, and for producing actionable intelligence from perceptual data that cannot be obtained through normal channels.
The term "remote viewing" was coined by Ingo Swann and Hal Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1970s specifically to distinguish the structured, experimental protocol from the looser traditions of clairvoyance and second sight. The deliberate framing as a skill rather than a talent — something that could be trained and evaluated through rigorous experimental methods — was central to both the scientific credibility and the military utility of the programme. If remote viewing were a talent possessed only by rare individuals, its military value would be limited; if it were a trainable skill, it could potentially be taught to selected military personnel.
The CIA Reading Room, which made millions of pages of declassified documents available online in 2017, includes extensive documentation of the Stargate Project and its predecessor programmes — the actual session transcripts, the evaluations of their intelligence value, the internal assessments of successes and failures, and the final review conducted by the American Institutes for Research in 1995 that led to the programme's termination. This primary source material is publicly available and represents one of the most extraordinary archives in the history of parapsychology.
The CIA's interest in psychic phenomena in the early 1970s was driven primarily by intelligence reports that the Soviet Union was investing heavily in psychic research for military purposes. The 1972 report "Controlled Offensive Behavior — USSR" suggested that Soviet programmes were investigating psychic espionage, telepathic communication, and psychokinesis, with potential military applications. Whether or not the Soviet threat was accurately assessed, it provided the bureaucratic rationale for a U.S. programme: if the Soviets were doing it, the U.S. could not afford not to investigate.
The initial CIA funding went to Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, where physicist Hal Puthoff had been conducting preliminary experiments with Ingo Swann. The SRI programme, funded under the classified project name SCANATE (scanning by coordinate) from 1972, produced results that convinced the CIA to continue and expand funding. The programme passed through various classification names — GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK — before being consolidated as STARGATE in 1991. It ran continuously for 23 years, from 1972 to 1995, and involved over 20 million dollars in funding.
The programme operated at multiple sites simultaneously — SRI for research, Fort Meade in Maryland for the military operational unit, and later Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) for continued research. The military unit at Fort Meade comprised a small number of trained remote viewers — typically six to eight at any time — who were tasked with operational intelligence work: attempting to remotely view Soviet military installations, track missing persons, locate hostages, and provide intelligence on specific targets that conventional methods could not reach.
The CIA's declassified Stargate files, now available at the CIA Reading Room (cia.gov), contain the actual session transcripts from hundreds of remote viewing operations — the raw data of what viewers perceived, the target coordinates or descriptions they were given, and in some cases the subsequent evaluation of their accuracy against ground truth. Reading these documents is a remarkable experience: the sessions are conducted with a discipline and seriousness that is far from the popular stereotype of psychic performance, and the occasional accuracy of the impressions — sometimes striking, often vague, sometimes completely wrong — gives a realistic picture of what remote viewing actually produces.
Among the most frequently cited declassified sessions are the Semipalatinsk weapons facility viewing by Pat Price (1974), which produced a description of a large gantry crane and metallic sphere structure that was partially confirmed by satellite imagery; the remote viewing of a downed Soviet aircraft in Africa in 1976, where viewer Rosemary Smith provided coordinates that reportedly helped locate the aircraft; and multiple sessions targeting specific Soviet military facilities and personnel that were evaluated by the Defence Intelligence Agency as providing intelligence that "had value to the analyst."
The 2017 CREST (CIA Records Search Tool) release included over 930,000 pages of documents, including Stargate files, making this one of the most extensively documented paranormal research programmes in history. Academic researchers, journalists, and independent investigators have only begun to work through this material systematically. The declassified record is not the triumphant vindication that remote viewing advocates claim, nor the straightforward debunking that sceptics prefer — it is a complex, ambiguous record of a genuinely unusual research programme that produced genuinely unusual results.
The official termination of the Stargate programme in 1995 did not end remote viewing as a practice. Several of the programme's key figures — Joe McMoneagle, Lyn Buchanan, Paul Smith, Mel Riley — continued remote viewing work independently, offering training, conducting research, and applying remote viewing to various practical contexts. The Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, under Edwin May, continued formal research. Multiple remote viewing training organisations were established, offering courses in Controlled Remote Viewing to civilians.
Independent research on remote viewing since Stargate's end has produced mixed results, consistent with the programme's own record: some studies replicate above-chance results under controlled conditions; others do not. The variation appears to depend heavily on the ability of individual viewers — remote viewing, unlike micro-PK, seems to be a skill that varies significantly across individuals even after training — and on experimental conditions that are not fully understood.
The most significant post-Stargate research contribution has been Dean Radin's work at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Stephan Schwartz's applied remote viewing research. Schwartz has documented multiple cases of applied remote viewing — archaeological discoveries, location of missing persons, market predictions — that demonstrate practical utility beyond laboratory conditions. His website (stephanaschwartz.com) maintains a database of verified applied remote viewing cases that provides a different kind of evidence from laboratory statistics.
The declassification story is complex: The CIA's release of Stargate documents was not a straightforward act of transparency — it was a selective release of materials that had been through a declassification review process. Some documents remain classified; others were released with redactions. The claim that "the CIA released everything" is not accurate. The released material is extensive and genuinely valuable, but it is not the complete record of a 23-year programme.
What termination actually means: The official end of Stargate in 1995 is often presented as the government's verdict that remote viewing doesn't work. The reality is more complicated. The programme was terminated for a combination of reasons: budget pressure, the end of the Cold War rationale, the AIR review's negative operational assessment, and bureaucratic politics. The programme's scientists disputed the AIR review's methodology and conclusions; the termination was a policy decision, not a scientific finding. Several intelligence community figures have subsequently stated that remote viewing continued informally after the official termination.
The commercial distortion: The post-Stargate remote viewing training industry has produced significant distortion of what the programme actually found and what remote viewing actually does. Marketing claims that remote viewing can reliably locate buried treasure, predict markets, or solve crimes go well beyond what even the programme's most enthusiastic advocates claim was demonstrated. The structured discipline of the original CRV protocol — with its emphasis on suspending interpretation, recording raw impressions, and honest evaluation of results — has frequently been replaced by less rigorous approaches that produce more entertaining but less reliable results.