In 1972, physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute received CIA funding to study whether psychic phenomena could be weaponized. By 1978, the US Army had formalized the research into a military intelligence unit stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland. By the time the program was terminated in 1995, the US government had spent approximately $20 million on 23 years of psychic research.

The program went through several names — Project GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK — before settling on STARGATE. It was real. The people who ran it had security clearances. Their reports went to the DIA and the CIA.

What Remote Viewing Claimed to Do

Remote viewing — the term Targ and Puthoff coined — was a protocol in which trained subjects attempted to perceive distant locations, objects, or events using no conventional sensory information. A viewer would be given coordinates or a sealed envelope, placed in a controlled environment, and asked to describe what was there.

The program's proponents documented dozens of claimed successes. Viewers described details of Soviet military installations. One viewer reportedly described a secret Soviet submarine base before it was confirmed by satellite imagery. Ingo Swann, one of the program's star subjects, claimed to have remotely viewed Jupiter's rings before the Voyager probe confirmed they existed.

The Scientific Problem

The program's results were evaluated in 1995 by the American Institutes for Research, which contracted statistician Jessica Utts and psychologist Ray Hyman to review the data. Their findings diverged. Utts concluded that the statistical evidence for remote viewing was stronger than for many accepted scientific phenomena and recommended further study. Hyman concluded that the results did not meet scientific standards for proof and could not be distinguished from chance and methodological flaws.

The CIA sided with Hyman and shut the program down. The official conclusion: remote viewing had no demonstrated operational intelligence value.

The Operational Record

Declassified records show that remote viewing was used in actual intelligence operations. Viewers were tasked against hostage locations (the Iran hostage crisis), drug trafficking operations, and Soviet military sites. In most cases, the operational results were ambiguous — accurate enough to be interesting, not accurate enough to be actionable.

The program's former director, Edwin May, maintains that the statistical record demonstrates a genuine phenomenon. Most mainstream scientists remain unconvinced.

"The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance." — Jessica Utts, statistician, in her AIR review, 1995.

Verdict

PLAUSIBLE. Project Stargate is confirmed. The US government ran it for 23 years. The statistical debate about whether remote viewing is real is unresolved — which is different from the program being a hoax. It was a genuine government program whose results were genuinely inconclusive.