The 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 United States Army Foreign Intelligence Command (USAFIC) in 1993, "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.Marks, David. (2000). The Psychology of the Psychic (2nd ed.). Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books. pp. 71–96. . The project was overseen until 1987 by Lt. Frederick Holmes "Skip" Atwater (born 1947"I'm where I am right now at 77 years old...", January 2, 2025 Shawn Ryan Show, Episode #154 transcript .), an aide and "psychic headhunter" to Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, and later president of the Monroe Institute.Atwater, F. Holmes (2001), Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul: Living with Guidance; Hampton Roads Publishing Company. 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,Heard, Alex (10 April 2010), "Close your eyes and remote view this review" , The San Diego Union-Tribune, Union-Tribune Publishing Co. [Book review of The Men Who Stare at Goats]: "This so-called "remote viewing" operation continued for years, and came to be known as Star Gate."Clarke, David (2014), Britain's X-traordinary Files, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 112: "The existence of the Star Gate project was not officially acknowledged until 1995... then became the subject of investigations by journalists Jon Ronson [etc]... Ronson's 2004 book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, was subsequently adapted into a 2009 movie..."Shermer, Michael (November 2009), “Staring at Men Who Stare at Goats” @ Michaelshermer.com: "... the U.S. Army had invested $20 million in a highly secret psychic spy program called Star Gate. ... In The Men Who Stare at Goats Jon Ronson tells the story of this program, how it started, the bizarre twists and turns it took, and how its legacy carries on today."Krippner, Stanley and Harris L. Friedman (2010), Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential Or Human Illusion? , Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/Greenwood Publishing Group, p. 154: "The story of Stargate was ... featured in a film based on the book The Men Who Stare at Goats, by British investigative journalist Jon Ronson (2004)". 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.
Physicists Targ and Puthoff began testing psychics for SRI in 1972, including Israeli Uri Geller, who would later become an international celebrity. Their apparently successful results garnered interest within the United States Department of Defense. Ray Hyman, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, was asked by Air Force psychologist Lt. Col. Austin W. Kibler (1930–2008) — then director of Behavioral Research for ARPA — to go to SRI and investigate. He was to specifically evaluate Geller. Hyman's report to the government was that Geller was a "complete fraud", and as a consequence Targ and Puthoff lost their government contract to work further with him. The result was a publicity tour for Geller, Targ, and Puthoff to seek private funding for further research work on Geller.Interview, Ray Hyman, in An Honest Liar, a 2014 documentary film by Left Turn Films; Pure Mutt Productions; Part 2. Filmworks. (The quoted remarks commence at time index 21:45.)
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". Army Intelligence then formalized this in mid-1978 as an operational program Grill Flame, based in buildings 2560 and 2561 at Fort Meade in Maryland (INSCOM "Detachment G").
1980s In early 1979, the research at SRI was integrated into "Grill Flame", which was redesignated INSCOM "Center Lane" Project (ICLP) in 1983. In 1984, the existence of the program was reported by Jack Anderson, and in that year it was unfavorably received by the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council. In late 1985 the Army funding was terminated, but the program was redesignated "Sun Streak" and funded by the DIA's Scientific and Technical Intelligence Directorate (office code DT-S).
George Stephanopoulos, in his 2024 book The Situation Room, mentions the project in discussing a May 8, 1980, Situation Room briefing for President Jimmy Carter, after Carter's failed hostage rescue mission in Iran on April 24, 1980. 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.
Closure (1995) In 1995, the defense appropriations bill directed that the program be transferred from DIA to CIA oversight. The CIA commissioned a report by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) that found that remote viewing had not been proved to work by a psychic mechanism, and said it had not been used operationally. The CIA subsequently cancelled and declassified the program.
In 1995 the project was transferred to the CIA and a retrospective evaluation of the results was done. The appointed panel consisted primarily of Jessica Utts, Meena Shah and Ray Hyman. Utts and Hyman were appointed because, in addition to their extensive scientific credentials, they represented both sides of the paranormal controversy, although the AIR considered both of them 'fair and open-minded scientists'. Hyman had produced an unflattering report on Uri Geller and SRI for the government two decades earlier, but the psychologist David Marks found Utts' appointment to the review panel "puzzling" given that she had published papers with Edwin May, one of the main researchers on the Stargate Project, considering this joint research likely to make her "less than [im]partial".
A report by Utts claimed the results were evidence of psychic functioning; however, Hyman in his report argued Utts's conclusion that ESP had been proven to exist, especially precognition, was premature and the findings had not been independently replicated.Evaluation of a Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena by Ray Hyman. Hyman came to the conclusion:
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."The Evidence for Psychic Functioning: Claims vs. Reality" by Ray Hyman; Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 20.2, Mar/Apr 1996.
The review concluded:
Joe Nickell wrote: 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."Remotely Viewed? The Charlie Jordan Case" by Joe Nickell; Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 11.1, Mar 2001.
According to the AIR review, no remote viewing report ever provided actionable information for any intelligence operation.
Based upon the collected findings, which recommended a higher level of critical research and tighter controls, the CIA terminated the 20 million dollar project, citing a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community. Time magazine stated in 1995 three full-time psychics were still working on a $500,000-a-year budget out of Fort Meade, Maryland, which would soon close.
David Marks in his book The Psychology of the Psychic (2000) discussed the flaws in the Stargate Project in detail. Marks wrote that there were six negative design features of the experiments. The possibility of cues or sensory leakage was not ruled out, no independent replication, some experiments were conducted in secret, making peer-review impossible. Marks noted that the judge Edwin May was also the principal investigator for the project and this was problematic, making a huge conflict of interest with collusion, cuing and fraud being possible. Marks concluded the project was nothing more than a "subjective delusion" and after two decades of research it had failed to provide any scientific evidence for the legitimacy of remote viewing.