Remote viewing and the Stargate Project

What it is

The claimed ability to describe a distant location, object or event that is shielded from ordinary perception — the target usually designated by coordinates, by a random number, or by a sealed envelope.

The procedure in its formalised version: the viewer, knowing nothing about the target, produces sketches and written impressions over a structured session. A judge, blind to which target was assigned, later compares the transcript against a set of candidate targets and ranks them.

Where it came from

Stanford Research Institute, 1972. The physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff began work with the artist and self-described psychic Ingo Swann, who coined the term. Their 1974 paper in Nature — reporting successful remote perception with Swann and with the former police officer Pat Price — is one of very few psi papers published in a first-rank general science journal, and Nature published it with an unusually defensive editorial note explaining why.

The work attracted CIA funding almost immediately. Over twenty-three years the programme moved between agencies and cover names — Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak — and is known collectively by its final designation, Stargate. It was housed for much of its life at Fort Meade, and total funding is generally estimated at around $20 million.

Joseph McMoneagle, "Remote Viewer No. 1", is its best-known operational participant and received a Legion of Merit — for his broader intelligence career, though supporters cite it in this context.

In 1995 the CIA commissioned an evaluation from the American Institutes for Research as the programme was closed, and the two reviewers reached different conclusions from the same data. This disagreement is set out under parapsychology: Jessica Utts held that a statistically significant effect had been demonstrated; Ray Hyman agreed the numbers were anomalous but held that methodological flaws, particularly in judging procedure, accounted for them. Both agreed the programme had produced nothing of operational value, and it was terminated.

How it is done

Through a session protocol — Ingo Swann's "Coordinate Remote Viewing" and its descendants specify stages, from initial ideogram through sensory impressions to sketching, with rules intended to separate raw impression from the viewer's own interpretation. A commercial training industry grew around these protocols after declassification.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the programme was real and its documents are public. This is not a conspiracy claim. The CIA released the files, and tens of thousands of pages are searchable in its online reading room. Anyone can read the actual session transcripts, which is worth doing, because they are much vaguer than the popular accounts imply.

We can say the judging procedure is the crux. A transcript full of impressions — "a tall structure, water nearby, something circular" — is matched against candidate targets by a judge. Whether that produces above-chance matching depends enormously on how targets are selected, whether the pool is diverse, whether the judge is genuinely blind, and whether transcripts have been edited. Hyman's critique was that these controls were inadequate in the SRI work, and that the same target pool was used repeatedly so that viewers and judges could learn its characteristics.

We can say the famous cases are weaker in the documents than in the retellings. Pat Price's description of a Soviet facility at Semipalatinsk, frequently cited as a hit, contains correct elements alongside a great deal that was wrong, and the accuracy assessment was made by people who already knew the answer. This is the general pattern: impressive summaries, ambiguous transcripts.

We can say the operational record is the strongest evidence available and it is negative. A government spent twenty-three years and twenty million dollars with access to the best-regarded practitioners, unlimited targets and every incentive to succeed. Intelligence agencies are not squeamish and are not required to publish. The programme was closed because it did not produce usable intelligence — which is a far more consequential test than any laboratory study, and it was failed in the most practical way possible.

We can say the underlying state is not mysterious. Sitting quietly and reporting spontaneous imagery is scrying with a clipboard. That such imagery arises is not in doubt. Whether it carries information about a distant target is the entire question.

We cannot say the anomaly Utts identified has been explained to everyone's satisfaction. What we can say is that after declassification, with the protocols public and anyone free to test them, no independent group has produced a replicable result — and that the agency which paid for it concluded it did not work.

Further reading

• The CIA's declassified Stargate collection, in its online reading room.
• Utts and Hyman's 1995 AIR evaluations, read together.
• Targ and Puthoff, "Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding" (Nature, 1974).