The Stargate Project (also referred to as Project Star Gate or STARGATE) was the umbrella code name for a series of U.S. government programmes investigating remote viewing — the claimed ability to perceive distant or hidden locations using extrasensory means — for potential military and intelligence use. Run primarily by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and U.S. Army Intelligence between the early 1970s and 1995, it is among the most extensively documented government-funded programmes into a claimed psychic ability, following its 1995 declassification.
Origins
Physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ began classified remote viewing research at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the early 1970s, motivated partly by concerns that the Soviet Union was investing heavily in psychic research and that the United States risked falling behind in an unconventional but potentially significant intelligence field. Puthoff and Targ are generally credited with coining the term "remote viewing" itself.
Structure and operational history
An operational Army intelligence collection unit, GRILL FLAME, was formalised in mid-1978 at Fort Meade, Maryland, following an earlier initiative known as GONDOLA WISH. The SRI research programme was integrated into GRILL FLAME in 1979, and the operation was subsequently redesignated the INSCOM Center Lane Project in 1983 before being consolidated under the Stargate name in 1991. Over more than two decades, the programme employed over 40 personnel at various times, including around 23 trained remote viewers, with as many as seven working full-time during its mid-1980s peak. Participants used several formal techniques, most notably Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV), the original SRI-developed method in which a viewer attempted to describe a location using only its geographic coordinates. Total spending across the programme's history is estimated at roughly $20 million.
Notable claimed successes
Proponents of the programme point to several specific sessions as evidence of its value. Remote viewer Pat Price reportedly provided a detailed description of a classified Soviet missile installation in Siberia, including its physical layout and security perimeter. Joseph McMoneagle, one of the programme's earliest recruits, is said to have described the location of a sunken U.S. submarine that was later found, and separately claimed to have provided detail on hostages held in Lebanon during the 1980s. Ingo Swann, another prominent participant, claimed to have remotely viewed rings around Jupiter prior to their confirmation by the Voyager space probes. These specific claims remain disputed and have not been independently verified to the satisfaction of the wider scientific community.
The 1995 AIR review
In 1995, the CIA commissioned an independent evaluation from the American Institutes for Research (AIR), a nonprofit social science research organisation. AIR selected two reviewers with deliberately contrasting expertise: statistician Jessica Utts of the University of California, Davis, and psychologist Ray Hyman of the University of Oregon, a long-standing sceptical investigator of paranormal claims. The pair reached notably divided conclusions. Utts argued the statistical evidence was strong enough to indicate a genuine anomalous effect, describing it as comparable in strength to evidence for some accepted scientific phenomena. Hyman, while acknowledging the statistical results themselves were compelling, argued that underlying methodological flaws had not been sufficiently ruled out. Both reviewers agreed, however, that even if the underlying effect were real, the information it produced was too vague and inconsistent to be operationally useful for actual intelligence work.
Termination and declassification
The CIA sided with Hyman's assessment and terminated the programme in 1995, concluding that remote viewing had not demonstrated sufficient operational intelligence value to justify continued funding. Its records were subsequently declassified, with approximately 89,000 pages released into the CIA's CREST database, making Stargate one of the most thoroughly documented real-world case studies in the history of claimed psychic research.
Legacy
Later independent meta-analyses of the programme's SRI and follow-on research databases have continued to find statistically significant departures from chance across sessions, keeping the underlying scientific debate over remote viewing unresolved even though the operational programme itself ended definitively in 1995. Stargate remains one of the most frequently cited examples on The Vault of a case where genuine government secrecy and a documented paper trail coexist with claims that remain scientifically unproven.