Stargate Project and Remote Viewing: a very deep dive
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Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today we're stepping into a really fascinating and often pretty controversial area.

Remote viewing. Right. The idea that you could perceive something distant, maybe something hidden, just using your mind. Exactly. And look, science generally puts this in the pseudoscience category, doesn't it? It does. Mostly because there's a, well, a lack of solid repeatable proof and some real questions about how the early experiments were even done. Yeah. The standards are high for claims like these. Extraordinary claims. Extraordinary evidence, as they say. Mm-hmm.

But what makes this really interesting, I think, is that the U.S. government actually poured, you know, serious time and money into this. That's the hook, isn't it? This wasn't just some fringe theory somewhere. We're talking about the Stargate project. Yeah. And thanks to declassified CIA documents, we can actually dig into this. A real government program exploring if remote viewing could be used for, well, spying, basically. Intelligence gathering. Yeah. We'll look at where it came from, who the key players were and, you know, why it eventually got the

plug pulled. And you really can't understand why they even started without thinking about the Cold War context Kenya. Absolutely not. The U.S. and the Soviets were locked in this intense rivalry. Everything was competition intelligence especially right. And there were these whispers these reports maybe unfounded maybe not about Soviet research into parapsychology. So the U.S. side started thinking

OK. What if there's something there? Any edge? Any unconventional method? They were looking for anything basically. Yeah. Which brings us to the early 70s, 72 or so, at SRI Stanford Research Institute. That's where it really kicked off. You had these interesting figures involved, physicists Hal Putthoff and Russell Targ. And this artist, Ingo Swann, quite a character apparently. He actually coined the term remote viewing, didn't he? He did. And he came with his own background.

In Scientology, talking about exteriorization. Exteriorization. Yeah, the idea that your consciousness can leave your body. He was the one who reached out to Hal Puthoff at SRI. So he initiated it. Okay. And I read he wasn't exactly shy about showing off what he thought he could do.

There's this story about a magnetometer. Ah, yes, the magnetometer incident. It's pretty foundational to the whole story. Tell us about that. It was at Stanford University. Right, in a physics lab. They had this incredibly sensitive magnetometer designed for detecting quarks, shielded inside a vault, super protective. And Puthoff's account says, "Swan from outside the shielded area somehow perturbed it, made the readings fluctuate." From outside the shielding. That's the claim.

Maybe even more impressively, he apparently drew a sketch of its internal workings, stuff that wasn't public knowledge. Okay, wow. You can see how that would get put off attention and presumably the CIA's too. Definitely. Remember, they were already primed by those Soviet concerns and looking for, you know, quiet people.

place to maybe run some tests, SRI fit the bill. So what were those very first experiments like before it got more formalized? Really basic stuff initially, like CIA folks would hide an object in a box, just a simple box, and Swan had to describe it. Any examples stand out? Well, the famous one is the moth. They hid a live moth, and Swan apparently described something small, brown, and irregular, like a leaf, but

Very much alive, even moving. And it was a moth. It was indeed a live moth. Now, were all the results that spot on? Probably not. But enough hits like that. It was intriguing. Enough to start a proper pilot study. Which became the Biofield Measurements Program. Sounds very scientific. It does, yeah. Though it was really more exploratory. Seeing if there was, you know, anything to measure, anything repeatable. And that's when Russell Targ, the other physicist, came on board with Puthoff.

Got it. So the CIA is interested, put off and target running this pilot program. What were some of the early results that made people think, OK, maybe there is something here worth chasing? A big focus became the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in the USSR, a major intelligence target. Right. High value. In what they called phase I and II experiments, Swan gave descriptions like of a large gantry crane, a multi-story crane and the layout of buildings before getting any specific targets.

target info. Just based on coordinates or... Details are a bit fuzzy on the exact protocol then, but the point is the intelligence clients observing this, they felt, okay, this could be actual target acquisition. A multi-story crane is, well, it's specific, isn't it? Not a random guess. It's pretty specific. Yeah. They didn't stop there. There was a phase three. What was that about? That was trying to get information that wasn't available through normal spying.

unverifiable stuff, but potentially very valuable. Things they couldn't see with satellites, for example. Exactly. And the reports claim some details about like the technology there, large structures. They seem to match up with the clues from other intelligence sources. But it wasn't perfect, I gather. You mentioned noise earlier. Right. Crucial point. These apparent hits were often mixed in with a lot of incorrect information.

Signal versus noise. It wasn't a clean channel. So tantalizing bits, but unreliable. Were there other early tests besides Semipalatinsk? Yeah, they tried other things like trying to view the insides of cipher machines, you know, code machines, or telling the difference between sealed envelopes, some with secret writing, some without. Did those work?

The report suggests some level of success enough to keep the interest going, build some cautious optimism in certain government circles. And all this early stuff, this apparent promise, it led to the program getting bigger, more government interest. Exactly. More funding started flowing in, more agencies got interested. It grew beyond just SRI and eventually became this joint services thing under the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA. And that's when other names start popping up.

up other viewers. Yes. People like Pat Price who was a former police officer and Joe McMoneagle who became quite famous within the program. Right. McMoneagle. We'll come back to him. But first Ingo Swann. Didn't he do that Jupiter viewing. Ah yes. The Jupiter viewing in 1973. Very famous. Very controversial. He described seeing crystals high in Jupiter's atmosphere. Yeah. Giant ice crystals and crucially a ring around the planet. A ring.

Before the Voyager probes got there. Years before Voyager actually photographed Jupiter's rings in 79. So that sounds amazing, right? It does. But the rings aren't in the atmosphere. They're much farther out and the crystals remain unconfirmed. So it's this classic remote viewing example.

A startling potential hit mixed with significant inaccuracies. A partial hit, as you said. Easy for believers and skeptics to latch on to different parts of it. Precisely. Then you have Pat Price. He did another viewing of Semipalatinsk in 74, didn't he? He did. And his descriptions were apparently quite detailed. Very detailed. He described that large crane again, but also things like large spheres, underground facilities...

Stuff that wasn't necessarily common knowledge. And Puthoff claimed this matched satellite photos really well. Puthoff asserted a high degree of consistency, yes. But again, the caveat.

We lack independent, fully blinded confirmation. How much was interpretation after the fact? Hard to say. The ambiguity problem again. Exactly. Price also claimed to view a secret U.S. military base on the West Coast. Described a specific bagel, even a pool inside it, its layout. Wow. So, OK, we have Swan, Price, these early SRI experiments, growing government interest. This is all building towards the official Stargate project then? That's the trajectory.

In 1977, it gets formalized. Stargate is born, evolving out of an earlier Army program called Grill Flame. And the goal now is explicitly intelligence applications. Yes. Can this actually be used for spying?

Hal Puthoff stayed on as the main investigator, Targ was still involved. The Joe McMann Eagle emerges as a key figure here. Viewer number 001. That was his designation. And he's credited with quite a few operational tasks, though the details are often classified or hard to confirm officially. Such as? Things like providing intel on a new type of Soviet submarine being built in a specific hidden facility.

Locating hidden Eschede missiles? Even, allegedly, helping in the search for kidnapped U.S. General James Dozier in Italy. Helping find General Dozier. That's a big claim. It is.

Official confirmation is scarce, but it's part of his legend. He did receive the Legion of Merit in 1984. Which is a significant military decoration. Very significant. Though the citation is usually framed around his overall intelligence contributions, likely encompassing more than just remote viewing. And we should mention others too, like Lynn Buchanan, another prominent viewer in the Stargate era.

Okay, so years go by, lots of activity, these claims of success, but ultimately Stargate was shut down. Why? What was the final verdict?

The end came in 1995. The CIA commissioned an independent evaluation of the whole program. Two outside researchers reviewed everything. And their conclusion? Pretty blunt, actually. They concluded that remote viewing had consistently failed to produce reliable, actionable intelligence, information you could actually use. And based on that, the program was terminated. Ouch. After all that time and money. So this evaluation report.

Did the reviewers agree on everything? Not entirely, but on the main points, yes. There was significant agreement. For instance, they agreed that the laboratory research, the controlled experiments back at SRI and elsewhere, did show a statistically significant effect. An anomaly, they called it. An anomaly. Meaning something was happening that wasn't just chance. Exactly.

Statistically, the results were better than random guessing, often quite significantly so. But, and this is a huge but, they also agreed this didn't prove it was a paranormal ability. So something weird was happening in the lab, but they didn't know what and couldn't say it was psychic. Precisely.

The nature and source of the effect remained a mystery. And crucially, they all agreed there was no evidence it could be useful for real world intelligence gathering. OK, so where did they disagree then? The main disagreement was about why that statistical anomaly existed in the lab results. What caused it? Right. One reviewer leaned towards procedural flaws, maybe subtle cues, problems in how the experiments were set up or judged.

That could explain the results conventionally. Okay, so experimental error, essentially. Sort of. The other reviewer felt that the consistency of the effect across so many different experiments, even with potential flaws, strongly hinted at something genuinely anomalous, maybe paranormal, even if they couldn't explain it. Interesting split. But despite that difference on the cause and the lab... They came back together on the practical side. Complete agreement.

The program was not useful for operational intelligence. Just not reliable, not consistent, not accurate enough. Couldn't bet an operation on it. And they agreed on the methodology problems too. Yes, both pointed out serious weaknesses.

Things like ensuring the judges who rated the accuracy were truly independent and blind to the targets, lack of proof that different judges would even agree, and ultimately no compelling explanation, paranormal or normal, had ever really been found for what they were seeing. So the CIA's own review was pretty damning, especially on the practical side. What about criticisms from outside the program, from the broader scientific community? Oh, there were plenty. External researchers really hammered the methodology.

Problems with how targets were chosen, how viewers might get subtle clues, how the results were judged. The judging seems like a really weak point. It was a major focus. Critics argued that standard procedures from experimental psychology designed specifically to rule out bias and cues just weren't followed rigorously enough.

And didn't some psychologists argue they could replicate the successes just using those subtle cues? Exactly. David Marks and Richard Kamen were key figures here. They argued that judges, who often knew the list of possible targets, could subconsciously mash vague descriptions to the correct target.

They even said they managed to get similar successful results just by exploiting potential cues in the transcripts. And they complained about getting access to the original data. Yes. They noted that Puthoff and Targ were initially hesitant to share the full transcripts for independent analysis, which raised red flags for transparency. Then there was James Randi, the magician and skeptic. He weighed in too, didn't he? Oh, heavily.

Randy was famously critical. He suggested potential flaws like peepholes and experimental setups, assistants inadvertently giving hints, careless talk,

He even argued those magnetometer fluctuations Swann supposedly caused were just normal noise for that type of sensitive equipment. So questioning the very foundations, did anyone else try to replicate the remote viewing findings independently? Yes, there were attempts. A notable one was by Ray Hyman and James McLennan in 1980. They tried to replicate the remote viewing protocols carefully. They found no evidence for it. Hyman's conclusion was pretty stark.

there is no scientifically convincing case for remote viewing. He basically argued the earlier positive results were likely artifacts of flawed methods. And there was also the point about Puthoff's background, wasn't there? Martin Gardner brought that up. Right. The science writer Martin Gardner pointed out Puthoff's known involvement with Scientology, suggesting that his pre-existing beliefs might have, perhaps unconsciously, influenced how he interpreted the results.

OK, so a lot of criticism, methodological issues, failed replications and the CIA's own negative verdict. Yet, were there any official voices, maybe anecdotes that seemed to support it even slightly? There are a couple that always come up. President Carter apparently told an anecdote once about a remote viewer successfully locating a downed spy plane in Zare when satellites couldn't. Carter said that?

Interesting. It's reported he did. And then there was Major General Ed Thompson, an Army intelligence figure. He went on record saying he was impressed by early SRI briefings and actually set up a small internal remote viewing unit in the Army for a while. So some people in positions of

power were intrigued, at least initially. Definitely intrigued. And even the final air report for the CIA, the one that evaluated Stargate, while critical of its usefulness, it still acknowledged that, yes, the CIA and DIA were involved. And yes, government employees did use remote viewers operationally, even if the results weren't reliable. So it wasn't entirely dismissed out of hand by everyone involved at the time. There were these little threads of maybe

threads of maybe compelling anecdotes, certainly. But you have to weigh those against the rigorous evaluations. And when you do that, the conclusion seems pretty clear. It does. While the whole Stargate saga is

Undemiably fascinating, full of strange stories, the scientific consensus backed up by that CIA review and the wider literature is that remote viewing just hasn't passed muster scientifically. The methodological flaws kept cropping up. No one could really explain how it would work. And crucially, others couldn't reliably get the same results under tight conditions. Those are the key problems, yeah. It's a classic case study in why scientific rigor is so important when you're looking at

claims that push the boundaries of known science. Absolutely. It really makes you think, though, about why we're so fascinated by these kinds of potential abilities, right? Definitely. The desire to believe in something extraordinary is powerful. So thinking about all the time, the money, the effort poured into this, what does its ultimate failure really tell us?

about belief versus evidence, maybe, about how governments and science chase the unusual. That's a great question to ponder. What does it show about confirmation bias, perhaps, or the allure of finding a secret weapon? An easy answer. And it makes you wonder what other unconventional ideas were chased with similar fervor back then or even now, and how did they pan out? Lots to think about there. Thanks for digging into this with me today. It's been quite the journey.