Project Star Gate

Star Gate is the umbrella name for the U.S. government's remote viewing program: a succession of classified efforts (Scanate, Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak, and finally Star Gate) that ran from 1972 to 1995, attempting to use psychic perception for intelligence collection. It is the documented intersection of the intelligence community and the paranormal, and its personnel and lore thread through ufology's modern history.

The CIA funded initial research at Stanford Research Institute in 1972, run by physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, partly on Cold War anxiety that the Soviets were investing in psychic research. Artist Ingo Swann helped design the protocols, including "coordinate remote viewing." An operational Army unit followed at Fort Meade from 1978, with the DIA managing later years.

Viewers were tasked against real targets: Soviet facilities (the famous Semipalatinsk crane descriptions), hostage locations, submarines, and lost aircraft. The program produced thousands of session transcripts, a training methodology (controlled remote viewing, systematized with viewer-trainer Ingo Swann), and internal claims of operational successes alongside long runs of noise. Congress shifted it between agencies; the CIA reacquired it in 1995 and commissioned an external review by the American Institutes for Research. Reviewers Jessica Utts (statistician) and Ray Hyman (psychologist) split famously: Utts concluded a statistically significant effect existed in laboratory settings; Hyman concluded flaws and inconsistency precluded that conclusion; both agreed the product had not proven useful for intelligence. The CIA terminated the program and declassified the archive, roughly 90,000 pages now public.

Puthoff and Targ (research), Swann and Pat Price (foundational viewers), Joseph McMoneagle (Army viewer 001), Ed Dames and David Morehouse (later, controversial alumni), and program managers including Dale Graff.

Terminated in 1995. The archive lives in the CIA's reading room. Alumni built a civilian remote viewing industry whose UFO-adjacent claims (Mars, craft, futures) far exceed anything in the program record, and Star Gate lore feeds modern "psionics" claims in the Barber-era disclosure scene.

The Utts-Hyman split is the permanent scientific argument. Within ufology, the program matters doubly: its personnel (Puthoff above all) migrated into NIDS, AAWSAP, and TTSA, and its declassified sessions include viewers tasked, unofficially and officially, on UFO-adjacent targets, records both camps cite selectively. Skeptics treat the program as 23 years of failure to produce one decisive product; proponents treat the Utts statistics and star sessions as signal the review buried.