Project Stargate: Did the CIA Really Pay for Psychic Spies?
For more than two decades, US intelligence agencies paid for research into "remote viewing," the claimed ability to see distant places with the mind.
Yes. From 1972 to 1995, US intelligence agencies funded research into remote viewing, the claimed ability to see distant places with the mind. A 1995 review found it too unreliable for intelligence use, and the program was not restarted.
According to the CIA's own history staff, the agency's interest in ESP goes back to a 1948 memorandum "speculating on whether hypnotized people could be used for long-distance communication." The CIA did not run its own research until the summer of 1972, when it worked with scientists to test whether certain people could "see" places and objects around the world without being there, an ability called "remote viewing." The CIA ended this research in 1977 and handed the program to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The effort went through a string of code names. The Federation of American Scientists lists GONDOLA WISH (1977), GRILL FLAME (1978, at Fort Meade, Maryland), CENTER LANE (1983), SUN STREAK (late 1985, under the DIA) and finally STAR GATE (1991). The CIA's own 2021 account gives a different order, saying STARGATE was the DIA's first name for the program and that it was later renamed GRILL FLAME. FAS estimates that "some $20 million were spent on STAR GATE and related activities" over more than two decades.
In the mid-1990s the program went back to the CIA, which agreed to review it only if an independent group evaluated it. Researchers from the American Institutes for Research published their findings in September 1995. The CIA sums up the conclusion: "enough accurate remote viewing experiences existed to defy randomness, but that the phenomenon was too unreliable, inconsistent, and sporadic to be useful for intelligence purposes." The reviewers disagreed. Statistician Jessica Utts said a significant effect had been shown in the laboratory; psychologist Ray Hyman did not accept that.
The CIA decided not to restart the program. At the request of Congress, it worked with the DIA and the Army to gather and declassify the records, which it placed in its FOIA Electronic Reading Room. In January 2017 the records reached a much wider audience when the CIA put its CREST database of declassified documents online. The CIA also points readers to Kenneth Kress's declassified article "Parapsychology in Intelligence" as a summary of its part in the program.
The CIA's own summary of the 1995 review concedes that remote viewing results seemed to "defy randomness." The agency still dropped the program as too unreliable to use.
The Federation of American Scientists reports that the "CIA concluded that there was no case in which ESP had provided data used to guide intelligence operations." Ray Hyman argued that the laboratory results were premature and had not been independently replicated.
