Project Stargate was a secret U.S. Army unit established in 1978 at Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and SRI International (a California contractor) to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications. Below are the key aspects of the project:
Background and Purpose
- Cold War Context: Initiated during the Cold War, Project Stargate was part of a broader series of programs investigating whether psychic phenomena could be used for espionage and intelligence purposes, motivated in part by reports that the Soviet Union was conducting similar research.
- Objectives: The primary goal was to determine if so-called “remote viewing”—the ability to psychically “see” events, sites, or information from a great distance—could be used to gather intelligence.
Key Phases and Activities
- Remote Viewing: Participants, often called “viewers,” attempted to describe locations, objects, or events they had never seen, often while in a meditative or altered state.
- Methodology: Various protocols and controls were implemented to test the validity and reliability of remote viewing. This included blind and double-blind experiments where neither the viewer nor the monitor knew the target information.
- High-Profile Cases: Some claims of success included locating missing individuals, identifying enemy locations, and other intelligence-gathering activities. These cases, however, remain controversial and often anecdotal.
Notable Figures
- Ingo Swann: A key figure in the development of remote viewing protocols. Swann is credited with developing the controlled remote viewing (CRV) technique.
- Pat Price: A former police officer turned psychic who participated in many remote viewing experiments and is noted for several high-profile remote viewing successes.
- Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ: Physicists at SRI International who were instrumental in the early scientific studies and methodologies of remote viewing.
Findings and Conclusion
- Mixed Results: The results of Project Stargate were mixed and controversial. While some experiments suggested that remote viewing had a statistically significant effect, others failed to reproduce these results under controlled conditions.
- Official Closure: The project was officially terminated in 1995 after an evaluation by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), which concluded that remote viewing had not been proven useful in any intelligence operations. The final report recommended the termination of the project due to a lack of reliable results.
- Public Release: Many documents related to Project Stargate have since been declassified and are available for public review, providing insight into the methods and outcomes of the experiments conducted.
Cultural Impact and Legacy
- Continued Interest: Despite its official closure, Project Stargate continues to be a topic of interest in popular culture, often featured in books, documentaries, and movies about paranormal phenomena and government secrecy.
- Skepticism and Belief: The project remains a point of contention between skeptics, who argue the results were not scientifically valid, and proponents, who believe that the government may have prematurely ended valuable research into human consciousness and psychic abilities.
Project Stargate is an intriguing chapter in the history of government research into the paranormal, reflecting the tension between scientific skepticism and the quest for unconventional intelligence-gathering methods.