In the early 1970s American intelligence learned that the Soviet Union was funding research into psychic phenomena. It concluded that it could not rule out the possibility that the research might work, and began funding some of its own.
The work began in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute in California, under the name SCANATE — scanning by coordinate. Two laser physicists, Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, tested subjects including the artist Ingo Swann, who was given map coordinates and asked to describe what was there. The technique was called remote viewing.
In 1977 the Army set up its own unit, which over the following eighteen years was renamed GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK and, from 1991, STAR GATE. Responsibility passed to the Defense Intelligence Agency. At its peak the unit had fifteen to twenty people. It worked out of an old wooden barracks at Fort Meade, Maryland, which leaked.
§ 01Targets
Viewers were given a target — a sealed envelope, a photograph, a set of coordinates — and produced sketches and written impressions. Most targets were conventional intelligence problems: facilities, hostages, missing aircraft. Some were not.
On 22 May 1984 a viewer was given a sealed envelope and a pair of coordinates: 40.89 degrees north, 9.55 degrees west. The card in the envelope read: “The planet Mars. Time of interest approximately 1 million years B.C.”
Ten minutes in, the viewer reported “an oblique view of a ah..pyramid or pyramid form.” It was, he added, “yellowish, ah...okra colored.” The transcript was approved for release on 8 August 2000.
40.89 degrees north
9.55 degrees west
- Origin
- CIA Records Search Tool (CREST)
- Date
- 22 May 1984
- Ref.
- CIA-RDP96-00788R001900760001-9
§ 02Evaluation
In 1995 the program was transferred to the CIA, which commissioned an outside review from the American Institutes for Research. Two evaluators were appointed. The statistician Jessica Utts concluded that the laboratory results showed an effect that chance could not explain. The psychologist Ray Hyman disagreed, and described the output as “vague, general, and way off target.”
On the question that mattered, the review agreed with itself: remote viewing had never produced information used to guide an intelligence operation. The program was terminated in 1995, having cost about $20 million. In January 2017 its records went online with the rest of the CIA’s declassified archive, where anyone can read them by ordinary means.
