Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Well, you know how it is. Our minds just naturally drift towards the big questions, right? What's out there? What don't we know? And lately, for so many of us, that curiosity is really...
dialed into UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Right, and the whole possibility of life beyond Earth is captivating stuff. Exactly. But what if I told you that our exploration today, our deep dive, is going to take a turn down a really unexpected path? Oh. Yeah, one that winds through the declassified history of...
Well, government funded psychic research. Ah, okay. Yes. We're talking about the U.S. government's serious investment in understanding psychic phenomena, specifically remote viewing. Right. And you might be surprised, honestly, to find some intriguing, though, you know, definitely debated links to those very questions about UAP and...
Well, unconventional intelligence gathering. Totally. And we've got a fascinating stack of sources here. Some official CIA reports, declassified stuff from the Stanford Research Institute or SRI. Yeah. And academic analyses looking at that research, plus context from places like Wikipedia on key people, projects,
You know, Stargate, even Skinwalker Ranch. And it's key to remember, a lot of this only came out because the government became a bit more transparent back in the 90s. Yeah, that openness really unlocked this chapter. So our goal today isn't to say, yes, UAP are aliens or remote viewing is definitely real. Nope.
Not at all. Instead, we want to unpack this history, pull out the surprising bits, the insights, and really try to understand why the government got so involved in these, well, pretty out there areas. Areas that, as we'll see, seem to overlap thematically with UAP research and that whole search for intelligence beyond what we normally expect. Exactly. Okay, so.
Let's get into it. Where did this whole government remote viewing thing even begin? It sounds like something out of a movie. It really does. The start of it at SRI is kind of wild. It all kicks off around 1972. You've got like serious laser research going on. Right. Standard stuff. Someone's pitching ideas about quantum biology and that this artist from New York, Ingo Swann, he just suggests maybe look into parapsychology. OK, hold on. For someone totally new to this, what is remote viewing? Like what were they actually trying to do in an experiment?
Good question. So remote viewing basically is the idea that someone, a viewer, can perceive information about a distant target, a place, an object, whatever, just using their mind. No normal senses involved. Right. In a typical early setup,
The viewer might get, say, coordinates or maybe just a keyword to focus on. Then they just describe what comes to mind. Shapes, feelings, colors, maybe what the thing does. And someone records all this. Exactly. And crucially, often neither the viewer nor the person guiding them actually knew the target beforehand. That's the double blind part. Ah.
Okay. To prevent bias. Right. You don't want someone accidentally hinting, does it feel metallic? If the target's a tank, you know. Gotcha. So back to Swan in 72, his suggestion leads to this informal test with a magnetometer. Yeah. At Stanford University's physics department.
And the story goes, swan not only seemed to affect its readings from afar. Which is psychokinesis, basically. Right. Mind over matter. But then he also apparently described its internal construction, stuff that hadn't been published. Wow. Okay.
You can see how that might impress people. It's almost like trying to perceive something hidden, like some UAP reports. Yeah. Something beyond normal sensors. It is fascinating how these different threads came together. Swan's demo, it definitely got the attention of the researchers there, Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. And pretty soon after...
The CIA shows up. The CIA, just like that. Well, they knew one of the researchers had a background in naval intelligence and the NSA, so they felt they could speak frankly. Their main worry...
the soviets ah the cold war angle exactly they were hearing about soviet efforts in parapsychology esp research that kind of thing and their thinking was look even if our scientists think it's bunk if the soviets think it's real and are pursuing it then we need to know what's possible we can't afford to be caught flat-footed so they needed a quiet place outside academia to check it out and sri fit the bill seems so they asked if they could run some tests with swan
simple stuff like hiding objects in a box. - Okay. - And in one famous instance, Swan describes something small, brown, irregular, maybe like a leaf, but definitely a live fluttering. - And what was it?
A live moth. Whoa. Okay. Not just something brown, but alive, fluttering. That's specific. Yeah. Specific enough to pique their interest, apparently. Yeah. These early results led to an eight-month pilot program. They called it the Biofield Measurements Program. Biofield. Interesting name.
Russell Targ, another laser physicist with an interest in this stuff, joined Hal Puthoff. And that's when the formal experiments into remote viewing for Intel purposes really began. So this wasn't just academic curiosity anymore. This was about potential spying. Absolutely. Which leads to the next question. What kind of secrets were they actually trying to uncover with this psychic spying? Well, yes, some of those early targets are pretty eyebrow raising, especially with the Cold War humming in the background.
A big one was Semipalatinsk in the USSR. The Soviet nuclear test site. Hugely important. Highly secret. Exactly. And think about it, trying to get details on a hidden, distant, technologically advanced site using mines.
It kind of mirrors the challenge of understanding UAP, doesn't it? Trying to pierce the veil around something unknown and potentially advanced. It's a great parallel. That drive to find unconventional ways to know the unknowable. So at SRI, they ran these double-blind experiments, viewers trying to describe the layout, the building. And that crane. Yes, the multi-story gantry crane. Apparently, it was quite unusual. And the fact that viewers described this specific, not widely known piece of hardware was
Well, the client, the CIA, presumably saw that as a big plus, a significant hit. So the viewer couldn't have just read about it somewhere. They described that crane. OK, that does sound compelling, more than just a wild guess. That was the assessment, yes.
And the research evolved. Phase, I was totally blind. Phase two, the client reps knew the general target area. They were witting. They got more involved. Trying to refine it, maybe? Probably. And focus still on Semipalatinsk. The idea was to get data they could check against other intelligence they already had. See if it matched up. Verify the method. Right.
Then came phase three, trying to get unverifiable data, stuff the client didn't know but wanted to, operational intelligence. - Okay, now that's the real test, isn't it? Did they get anything useful there, anything specific?
According to the sponsor's evaluation, yes. They felt several details about the site's technology and some large structures were described correctly, although they did note there was noise inaccuracies mixed in. So not perfect, but maybe usable nuggets as info. That seemed to be the hope. And they didn't just look at semi-palatins. They also tried viewing things like cipher machines, encryption devices. Wow.
complex tech. Yeah. And even trying to tell which sealed envelopes had secret writing inside. The declassified docks have more detail on those op-ems. It really shows how seriously they were taking this, exploring any possible avenue, however strange it sounds now,
to get information they couldn't get otherwise. Absolutely. It's that same impulse, you could argue, driving the UAP investigations today, trying to understand technology or phenomena that defy easy explanation. Definitely. And these early results, flawed or not, they generated buzz within the government. Oh, yeah. Big time. More clients, more money, more contracts. The program grew from a small pilot study into this multi-client thing. And eventually became...
Stargate. That's right. It evolved into the Joint Services Stargate project run by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA. They needed more viewers, too. So they recruited people believed to have the ability, brought them in as consultants. People like Joe McMoneagle. Exactly. Figures who became quite well known later on. Which brings us to the next stage.
As this program matured, what were they actually using it for? What threats were they trying to counter? Well, it seems like after '75 or so, the focus kind of shifted. A big part of the work at SRI became figuring out if other countries could use remote viewing against the US. Ah, the threat assessment angle, makes sense. Yeah. So they started tasking the viewers with looking at known US facilities, our own tech, even predicting like,
Rocket launch timings or results of underground nuclear tests. Trying to see if our secrets were vulnerable. Exactly. And locating our own personnel. It's like you said, that classic intelligence posture. Yeah. Develop the capability, but also figure out the defense against it.
It mirrors the UAP question, too, in a way. Is this their tech we're seeing or is it potentially ours that's being observed? Maybe in ways we don't understand. Right. And it wasn't just happening in secret labs. There were hints of this reaching pretty high levels, weren't there? Like that story President Carter told. Yes, that's a famous one. Carter mentioned it in a speech years later in 95. During his presidency, a plane went down in Zaire. Satellites couldn't find the wreckage.
So apparently, unbeknownst to Carter at the time, his CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, consulted a psychic. Seriously? The CIA director? That's the story. And according to Carter, this psychic gave specific latitude and longitude coordinates. They pointed the satellites there and boom, there was the plane. Coming from a former president. That's pretty startling. It is. And Admiral Turner himself later confirmed using a remote viewer for that.
He named Pat Price specifically. Wow. Plus, you had Major General Ed Thompson, who was high up in Army intelligence in the late 70s, early 80s. He said briefings from SRI impressed him enough that he started a small internal Army RV unit. So this wasn't just some fringe experiment. You had buy-in or at least serious consideration at very senior levels of intelligence and military. It certainly seems that way. It adds this layer of, well, intrigue, doesn't it?
Especially when we think about UAP today and wonder who knows what at high levels. Definitely. And there was that study about the MX missile system, too. Right. During the Carter administration debates, the plan was this mobile basing system shuttling missiles between silos to make them hard to target. The shell game idea. Exactly. SRI was tasked to see if remote viewing could find vulnerabilities.
Their report suggested that, yeah, using sophisticated statistical averaging of RV data. Statistical averaging, meaning? Like looking at multiple viewing attempts, finding the common elements, filtering out the noise to get a clearer picture, essentially, and
They argued this could potentially let an adversary figure out the missile locations, undermining the whole strategy. So they presented this to policymakers. They did. The report went to the relevant government offices circulated among the threat analysts. Now, we don't know if it actually changed policy on the MX missile. Probably a lot of factors went into that. Absolutely. But it shows the kind of potentially policy relevant questions they were tackling. High stakes stuff. It makes you wonder, doesn't it?
if unconventional info, maybe even UAP-related whispers, ever filters into strategic thinking today in ways we don't know about. It's a tantalizing thought. The very fact these RV programs existed and got funded at high levels shows a government interest in exploring the weird, the unconventional when seeking intelligence,
It's that same drive maybe that fuels the UAP quest. Yeah. And eventually the government did kind of sort of admit this was going on, right? It wasn't all secret forever. Not entirely. In 1995, the CIA did publicly confirm they'd been involved in RV research. Right. And there was an unclassified report done for the CIA by the American Institutes for Research, the ARR report, looking back at the Stargate program. It confirmed both CIA and DIA involvement and stated...
pretty clearly that government folks had used remote viewers for actual military operational tasks. So official acknowledgement, even if maybe downplayed. Right. Which leads us to the people involved. Who are the main players in this strange story? Well, the guys running the show at SRI initially were Harold Puthoff, Hal Puthoff, and Russell Tark.
Principal investigators. And their background was lasers, right? Not parapsychology. Exactly. Which is kind of interesting. Physicists who took this leap, they even got some early results published in Nature, which is a top-tier science journal. That's pretty remarkable. A mix of expertise, physicists stepping way outside their usual lanes, and then, of course, Ingo Swann, the artist who kind of sparked it all. Yeah, his magnetometer demonstration describing the insides. Yeah. That was key to getting Puthoff
Targ and later the CIA interested though. We should remember those initial psychokinesis claims affecting the machine Those got debunked later or at least seriously questioned, right? That's important context initial results aren't always what they seen definitely then there was Pat price he was involved early on did some of the semi-palatine viewings and
considered one of the most successful early viewers. Didn't he supposedly describe a U.S. base too? That's part of his legend, yes. Yeah. And his background has interesting ties to Scientology. And his death was sudden, wasn't it? Controversial. Yes, he died suddenly in 1975. Officially a heart attack.
But because he'd been involved in viewing sensitive targets, especially Soviet ones, there's always been speculation in paranormal circles about, well, other causes. No proof, though. Just speculation. Understandable, given the context. Yeah. And then Joe McMoneagle, viewer number one. Right. Joseph McMoneagle, number one.
Military background credited within the program with providing intel on lots of targets. Soviet subs, SCOD missiles. He even got an award, the Legion of Merit. He did, though that likely covered his whole military intelligence career, not just the RV work. But he was a key figure for a long time, late 70s into the 90s, first in the military, then as a consultant. And he's still active in the field, talks about his experiences. Very much so.
Which brings us to what happened to the program itself after SRA? Well, in '91, it moved over to SEIC Science Applications International Corporation and got the official name, Stargate Project. Then 1995 was the big year. Lots of the research materials got declassified.
That's why we know so much now. There was a public summary released about the SRI history and how Stargate began. And 1995 was also when the hammer came down, right? The CIA evaluation. Yeah. That same year, the CIA released this really critical report on Stargate. The conclusion was pretty blunt. After all that time, all that money, remote viewing hadn't produced reliable, actionable intelligence.
And, they said, it lacked a solid scientific basis. Ouch. Decades of work and that's the official verdict. It's a stark contrast, isn't it? Makes you think about the whole endeavor, especially when comparing it to things like UAP research, where evidence is also elusive and controversial. It really does. And that CIA report echoed criticisms that scientists and skeptics had been making for years. They pointed to major methodological flaws. Like how they ran the experiment. Exactly.
Issues with how targets were picked, the procedures during the viewing sessions, how the results were judged, often subjectively. They just weren't following standard experimental psychology practices consistently. So it wasn't just about getting hits or misses, but the way they were measuring success was flawed from the start. That was the core criticism. Big concerns about sensory leakage.
Subtle cues, maybe unintentional, being given to the viewers or the judges evaluating the descriptions. Independent reviews found weaknesses. Researchers outside the program argued Puthoff and Targ didn't really address these flaws properly. And that kind of pushed remote viewing outside of mainstream science. There was a lot of debate. And even inside SRI, there were doubts, right? Not everyone was on board. That's a crucial point.
Two other scientists there, Charles Raybert and Leon Otis, experts in EEG and psychology,
They were much stricter with methodology in their own related work. OK. And they apparently objected strongly to what they called fraudulent and slipshod work by others, demanding their own experiments not be included in some of the RV publications. That kind of internal dissent is pretty damning. Wow. Yeah, that speaks volumes. And then you had outspoken critics like James Randi weighing in. Oh, yeah. Randi, the magician and skeptic. In his book, Flim Flam, he tore into their methods.
Alleged things like peepholes, assistants accidentally giving clues, just sloppy protocols. And he looked into the magnetometer thing with Swan, too. He did. Contacted the manufacturer, concluded the readings Swan supposedly influenced were just normal machine fluctuations, not psychokinesis. So a lot of the early wow moments might have had...
pretty mundane explanations if you look closely enough. That's the skeptical argument, yes. It highlights how tricky it is to study these things rigorously. You need incredibly tight controls, which is a constant challenge in UAP research too, right? Absolutely. And other researchers, Ray Hyman and James McLennan, did a replication study, found no real evidence for RV, but did show how easily unintentional cues could make it look like it was working. Hyman basically said, nope,
No convincing scientific case here. So the mainstream scientific view became pretty negative. Largely, yes. Lack of solid proof, no good theory for how it would work, couldn't reliably repeat the positive results under strict conditions. It got labeled pseudoscience by people like Martin Gardner and Michael Shermer. Gardner also mentioned put off Scientology connection, didn't he? As a potential influence. He did raise that question, yes. Wondering if prior beliefs might have shaped the research or interpretation.
So fundamentally, it boils down to a lack of rigorous controls and repeatability, the bedrock of science, a lesson for any investigation into the unusual UAP included. Exactly. Which then begs the question, if the science is so shaky, why the persistent fascination? Why did people think it worked?
The sources touch on some theories, but we have to stress these are not scientifically accepted. Okay, so purely speculative, but what ideas were floated? Well, you hear things like non-local consciousness, the mind isn't just stuck in the brain, or maybe psi fields, some kind of information field. Hmm, more conventional ideas. Subconscious cue detection, maybe viewers were just really good at picking up subtle hints without realizing it.
Then you get into more fringe stuff, borrowing from quantum physics entanglement, zero point field interactions, the idea that consciousness taps into some fundamental universal energy. Quantum consciousness. And finally, more spiritual or metaphysical explanations, soul's universal mind, that sort of thing. But again, crucial caveat.
These are ideas, speculations, not backed by solid experimental evidence accepted by science. It's interesting, though, how that persistent belief in unconventional perception runs parallel to the UAP mystery.
Both seem to tap into this deep human desire to find explanations beyond the ordinary, beyond the physical, maybe. That's a great way to put it. Which brings us to someone who seems deeply invested in both those areas. Robert Bigelow. Ah, yes. The aerospace billionaire. His name comes up a lot.
It does. He's had this long, very public interest in UAP and the paranormal. Some say it stems from personal experiences, but whatever the reason, he's put serious money into it. Like funding UFO research groups. Yeah. Back in 95, he funded the UFO Research Coalition. Then in 96, he founded NIDS, the National Institute for Discovery Science.
Explicit goal, study UAP and other weird stuff scientifically. NIDS is linked to Skinwalker Ranch, right? That infamous place in Utah. Correct. Bigelow bought Skinwalker Ranch in 96. NIDS spent years there investigating all the claims, UAP, strange creatures, cattle mutilations, you name it. Did they find anything conclusive? Well...
They didn't release any definitive physical proof publicly despite years of work. Later, Bigelow formed Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies. And that's where the government contract comes in. Exactly. Bigelow got that $22 million DIA contract for AWS SAP, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Applications Program, studying UAP. And yes, Skinwalker Ranch was reportedly used as a research site for AWS A2.
They produced a massive report, hundreds of pages, plus dozens of technical papers on related topics. So a direct line from private paranormal investigation at the ranch to a government-funded UAP study program. That's quite a connection. It really is. It shows this convergence of interest, doesn't it? Bayass even worked with MUFON, the UFO network, looking into alleged alien implants. Wow.
OK, but, you know, this all came with controversy. Critics called a lot of it pseudoscientific, given the topics and the lack of peer reviewed results. Still, Bigelow's interest clearly continued. He eventually sold the ranch to Brandon Fugel, who's carrying on research there now. Which brings us right to the ranch itself.
What is it about Skinwalker Ranch that makes it such a magnet for all this weirdness, mixing UAP and paranormal stuff together? Well, the place is just soaked in legend, isn't it? It's in northeastern Utah, Uinta Basin. The name Skinwalker comes from Navajo folklore shapeshifting witches, dark magic. Not a friendly name.
Not at all. Local lore even talks about curses, old conflicts between Navajo and Ute tribes. And the weirdness reports go way back, even before the family who made it famous, the Shermans. Some people point to ancient petroglyphs in the area, suggesting they might depict strange beings or portals. Maybe early UAP sightings. Who knows? But it was the Shermans in the mid-90s.
who really put it on the map. Totally. Terry and Gwen Sherman, reports in the Deseret News detailed their experiences over the couple of years they owned it. And the range of stuff they reported was just wild. Like what? Okay, UAP sightings, everything from little boxy things to huge silent craft, football field size with intense lights, doing impossible maneuvers. Okay, classic UAP reports. But then also...
really disturbing cattle mutilations, surgically precise, no blood, and sightings of bizarre creatures. Creatures. Yeah, like a giant wolf, supposedly immune to bullets, a tall humanoid figure, other things they couldn't identify. It really blends what we think of as ET phenomena with stuff that sounds more like folklore or paranormal encounters. A bulletproof wolf. Yeah.
Yeah, it's definitely crossing some lines. It's bizarre how all these different types of phenomena seem to cluster there. It really is. It challenges our neat categories. And beyond the big sightings, they and later investigators reported all sorts of electromagnetic weirdness gear failing, radiation spikes, weird radio frequencies. Physical anomalies, too. Yeah.
Crop circles appearing, strange sounds out of nowhere, and this thing they called the hitchhiker effect. Hitchhiker effect. People reporting strange things happening at their own homes after visiting the ranch, like the phenomenon followed them. Okay, that's unsettling. Yeah. So it's just this persistent, diverse phenomenon.
Weirdness that keeps drawing researchers back, people interested in UAP, paranormal, the edges of reality. Pretty much. You've had the Shermans trying to document it, then NIDS doing more formal research, then AAWSP using it, now Brandon Fugel's team. Decades of scrutiny. And still no definitive answers. Nope.
Lots of theories. Believers talk about aliens, interdimensional portals, maybe linking UAP to other realities. Skeptics point to natural explanations, hoaxes, psychological factors, lack of hard evidence. Others suggest maybe secret military tech or weird geology. It's still a mystery. A hotspot for the unexplained, where UAP might just be one thread in a much weirder tapestry. That's a perfect way to describe it. A place where reality seems flexible.
OK, so that brings us towards the end of this deep dive. We've gone from government psychic spies to bulletproof wolves. What are the main things we should take away from all this, especially thinking back to our interest in UAP? Well, I think the first big takeaway is just the sheer fact of this history, the
the U.S. government for decades seriously invested time, money, resources into something as seemingly fringe as remote viewing. Right. Driven by Cold War fears mostly and that relentless intelligence drive to know the unknown gain an edge. Exactly. And we see that same drive, that willingness to explore unconventional avenues
reflected in the ongoing now more public interest in UAP. It shows this persistent human impulse to push boundaries when facing profound mysteries. But the flip side is crucial to the official conclusion from the CIA anyway, was that remote viewing didn't work for spying. Right. And the scientific community largely agreed, pointing to major flaws, lack of repeatability. That's a really important counterpoint. The allure is strong, but the evidence under scrutiny often falls apart. So it's a cautionary tale, perhaps.
about chasing the extraordinary without rigorous methods, a lesson relevant to UAP studies too. I think so. It highlights the immense challenge of studying phenomena at the edges of our understanding. But the fact that the government did explore RV, just like they're now openly studying UAP, tells you something about human curiosity and the willingness to consider the seemingly impossible when faced with the unknown. So for you listening, if you came here curious about UAP, about aliens,
This detour through remote viewing history, it doesn't give easy answers, but it shows this fascinating, controversial chapter in our quest to understand what's out there and maybe what's in here in our own minds. It really underscores the draw of these mysteries, but also the pitfalls, the need for skepticism and open mindedness, maybe. Yeah. Which leads to maybe a final thought to chew on.
Given this documented history of the government exploring psychic phenomena for intelligence and the current UAP situation, what does it all suggest about how we define intelligence? Ooh, interesting question. And what methods are we, or maybe governments, willing to explore when faced with something truly unknown, truly strange?
whether it's a potential psychic ability or an inexplicable object in the sky. Could the UAP investigations today be seen as a modern echo of that same impulse that drove the Stargate project?
A reaching beyond the conventional, fueled by that fundamental need to understand. It definitely gives you a different lens through which to view the ongoing UAP story, doesn't it? Thinking about this longer history of grappling with the unexplained. It absolutely does. A reminder that our quest to understand the universe, and maybe ourselves, often takes us down some very unexpected paths.