Stargate Project was a secret United States Army unit established in 1977 at Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a California contractor, to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications. The project, and its precursors and sister projects, originally went by various code names — including "Gondola Wish", "Grill Flame" and "Center Lane" under INSCOM, "Sun Streak" and "Star Gate" under the DIA, "Star Gate" and "SCANATE" under the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and "Project CF" — until 1991, when they were consolidated and collectively renamed the "Stargate Project".

The Stargate Project's work primarily involved remote viewing, the purported ability to psychically "see" events, sites, or information from a great distance. The project was overseen until 1987 by Lt. Frederick Holmes "Skip" Atwater (born 1947), an aide and "psychic headhunter" to Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, and later president of the Monroe Institute. The unit was small-scale, comprising about 15 to 20 individuals, and was run out of "an old, leaky wooden barracks".

The Stargate Project was terminated and declassified in 1995 after a commissioned review by the CIA concluded that it was never useful in any intelligence operation. Although statistically significant effects were observed in laboratory experiments, the reviewers were uncertain whether this was the result of errors, and the information provided by the program was vague and included irrelevant and erroneous data. The program was featured in the 2004 book and 2009 film The Men Who Stare at Goats, although neither mentions it by name.

Background

According to Joseph McMoneagle, the CIA and DIA reacted to reports that the Soviets were actively researching parapsychology by approving and funding their own research programs. McMoneagle wrote that reviews for these programs were made semi-annually at the Senate and House select committee level. According to McMoneagle, standard operating procedure for remote viewing was that the results were kept secret from the "viewer" so that failures would not damage the viewer's confidence and skill.

McMoneagle defines remote viewing as an attempt to sense unknown information about places or events, and said that it is normally performed to detect current events, but during military and domestic intelligence applications viewers claimed to sense things in the future, experiencing precognition.

History

1970s

In 1970, United States intelligence sources believed that the Soviet Union was spending 60 million rubles annually on "psychotronic" research. In response to claims that the Soviet program had produced results, the CIA initiated funding for a new program known as SCANATE ("scan by coordinate") in the same year. Remote viewing research began in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. Proponents (Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff) of the research said that a minimum accuracy rate of 65% required by the clients was often exceeded in the later experiments.

One of the project's successes was the location of a lost Soviet spy plane in 1976 by Rosemary Smith, a young administrative assistant recruited by project director Dale Graff.

In 1977, the Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) Systems Exploitation Detachment (SED) started the Gondola Wish program to "evaluate potential adversary applications of remote viewing". In a 2005 GQ magazine interview, Carter said CIA director Stansfield Turner told him the agency once contacted a California woman who claimed to have psychic powers to help locate a missing plane.

1990s

In 1991, most of the contracting for the program was transferred from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), with Edwin May controlling 70% of the contractor funds and 85% of the data. Its security classification was altered from Special Access Program (SAP) to Limited Dissemination (LIMDIS), and it was given its final name, STARGATE. Hyman came to the conclusion:

<blockquote>Psychologists, such as myself, who study subjective validation find nothing striking or surprising in the reported matching of reports against targets in the Stargate data. The overwhelming amount of data generated by the viewers is vague, general, and way off target. The few apparent hits are just what we would expect if nothing other than reasonable guessing and subjective validation are operating.</blockquote>

The review concluded:

Joe Nickell wrote:

<blockquote>Other evaluators — two psychologists from AIR — assessed the potential intelligence-gathering usefulness of remote viewing. They concluded that the alleged psychic technique was of dubious value and lacked the concreteness and reliability necessary for it to be used as a basis for making decisions or taking action. The final report found "reason to suspect" that in "some well publicised cases of dramatic hits" the remote viewers might have had "substantially more background information" than might otherwise be apparent.</blockquote>

According to the AIR review, no remote viewing report ever provided actionable information for any intelligence operation.

David Marks in his book The Psychology of the Psychic (2000) discussed the flaws in the Stargate Project in detail.

In January 2017, the CIA published records online of the Stargate Project as part of the CREST archive.

Methodology

According to Joseph McMoneagle, the Stargate Project created a set of protocols designed to make the research of clairvoyance and out-of-body experiences more scientific, and to minimize as much as possible session noise and inaccuracy. He wrote that the term "remote viewing" emerged as shorthand to describe this more structured approach to clairvoyance. McMoneagle said Project Stargate would only receive a mission after all other intelligence attempts, methods, or approaches had already been exhausted.

McMoneagle claims that at peak manpower there were over 22 active military and civilian remote viewers providing data, and people leaving the project were not replaced so that when the project closed in 1995 this number had dwindled down to three, one of which was using tarot cards. According to McMoneagle, "The Army never had a truly open attitude toward psychic functioning", hence, the use of the term "giggle factor". and the saying, "I wouldn't want to be found dead next to a psychic".

Civilian personnel

Hal Puthoff

In the 1970s, CIA and DIA granted funds to Harold E. Puthoff to investigate paranormal abilities, collaborating with Russell Targ in a study of the purported psychic abilities of Uri Geller, Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Joseph McMoneagle, and others as part of the Stargate Project, of which Puthoff became a director.

As with Ingo Swann and Pat Price, Puthoff attributed much of his personal remote viewing skills to his involvement with Scientology whereby he had attained, at that time, the highest level. All three eventually left Scientology in the late 1970s.

Puthoff worked as the principal investigator of the project. His team of psychics is said to have identified spies, located Soviet weapons and technologies, such as a nuclear submarine in 1979 and helped find lost SCUD missiles in the first Gulf War and plutonium in North Korea in 1994.

Russell Targ

thumb|180px|Russell Targ

In the 1970s, Russell Targ began working with Harold Puthoff on the Stargate Project, while working with him as a researcher at Stanford Research Institute.

Edwin May

Edwin C. May joined the Stargate Project in 1975 as a consultant and was working full-time in 1976. The original project was part of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory managed by May. With more funding in 1991 May took the project to the Palo Alto offices at SAIC. This would last until 1995 when the CIA closed the project. under research director Karlis Osis. A former OT VII Scientologist, who alleged to have coined the term 'remote viewing' as a derivation of protocols originally developed by René Warcollier, a French chemical engineer in the early 20th century, documented in his book. Swann's achievement was to break free from the conventional mold of casual experimentation and candidate burn out, and develop a viable set of protocols that put clairvoyance within a framework named "Coordinate Remote Viewing" (CRV). In a 1995 letter Edwin C. May wrote he had not used Swann for two years, because there were rumors of him briefing a high-level person at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and the CIA on remote viewing, aliens, and ETs.

Pat Price

A former Burbank, California, police officer and former Scientologist who participated in a number of Cold War era remote viewing experiments, including the U.S. government-sponsored projects SCANATE and the Stargate Project. Price joined the program after a chance encounter with fellow Scientologists (at the time) Harold Puthoff and Ingo Swann near SRI. Working with maps and photographs provided to him by the CIA, Price claimed to have been able to retrieve information from facilities behind Soviet lines. He is probably best known for his sketches of cranes and gantries which appeared to conform to CIA intelligence photographs. At the time, the CIA took his claims seriously.

Military personnel

Lieutenant General James Clapper

The project leader in the 1990s was Lt. Gen. Clapper who later would serve as the Director of National Intelligence.

Major General Albert Stubblebine

thumb|180px|Albert Stubblebine

A key sponsor of the research internally at Fort Meade, Maryland, Maj. Gen. Stubblebine was convinced of the reality of a wide variety of psychic phenomena. He required that all of his battalion commanders learn how to bend spoons Uri Geller, and he himself attempted several psychic feats, even attempting to walk through walls. In the early 1980s he was responsible for the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), during which time the remote viewing project in the US Army began. Some commentators have confused a "Project Jedi", allegedly run by Special Forces primarily out of Fort Bragg, with Stargate. After some controversy involving these experiments, including alleged security violations from uncleared civilian psychics working in Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs), Stubblebine was placed on retirement. His successor as the INSCOM commander was Maj. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, who had a reputation as a much more conservative and conventional intelligence officer. Soyster was not amenable to continuing paranormal experiments and the Army's participation in Project Stargate ended during his tenure.

David Morehouse

In his book, Psychic Warrior, Morehouse claims to have worked on hundreds of remote viewing assignments, from searching for a Soviet jet that crashed in the jungle carrying an atomic bomb, to tracking suspected double agents.

Joseph McMoneagle

McMoneagle claims he had a remarkable memory of very early childhood events. He grew up surrounded by alcoholism, abuse and poverty. As a child, he had visions at night when scared, and began to hone his psychic abilities in his teens for his own protection when he hitchhiked. He enlisted in the Army to get away from home. McMoneagle became an experimental remote viewer while serving in U.S. Army Intelligence.

Ed Dames

Ed Dames' role was intended to be as session monitor and analyst as an aid to Fred Atwater rather than a remote viewer, Dames received no formal remote viewing training. After his assignment to the remote viewing unit at the end of January 1986, he was used to "run" remote viewers (as monitor) and provide training and practice sessions to viewer personnel. He soon established a reputation for pushing CRV to extremes, with target sessions on Atlantis, Mars, UFOs, and aliens. He has been a frequent guest on the Coast to Coast AM radio shows.

Archives of the Impossible

The Archives of the Impossible (AOTI) of Rice University at Houston, Texas is a special collection founded in 2014 by Jeffrey J. Kripal, a professor of religion.

Further reading

  • Caroll, Robert Todd (2012). "Remote Viewing". In The Skeptic's Dictionary. John Wiley & Sons. .
  • Hines, Terence (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books. .
  • Hyman, Ray (1996). "Evaluation of the Military's Twenty-year Program on Psychic Spying". Skeptical Inquirer 20: 21–26.
  • Morehouse, David (1996). Psychic Warrior, St. Martin's Paperbacks, . Morehouse was a psychic in the program.
  • Ronson, Jon (2004). The Men Who Stare at Goats. Picador. . Written to accompany the TV series Crazy Rulers of the World. The US military budget cuts after the Vietnam war and how it all began.
  • Smith, Paul (2004). Reading the Enemy's Mind: Inside Star Gate: America's Psychic Espionage Program, Forge Books.
  • Report from 1995 about the program from American Institutes for Research
  • Declassified analytical report (1983) related to the project
  • Declassified documents about the project on the website of the CIA
  • Shawn Ryan Show, Episode #154 Transcript