Pat Price
The ex-police commissioner who became the CIA's most operationally used psychic, described four underground alien bases unprompted, and died suddenly in 1975. The lore never let go.
Reference note. This guide explains the basics of well-known UFO and UAP cases, people, and claims: what happened, who was involved, and what supporters and skeptics say. Milky Way News takes no position. Further investigation, skepticism, or belief is up to you.
01Who They Are
Pat Price (1918-1975) was a former Burbank, California police commissioner and businessman who became the SRI program's most startling remote viewer and, by the declassified record, the one the CIA used operationally. His alien-bases claims and his abrupt death made him ufology's favorite Star Gate figure.
02Background
Price came to SRI in 1973 after contacting Hal Puthoff, claiming lifelong psychic experiences he had used, he said, in police work. His scanate sessions against coordinate targets impressed monitors enough that the CIA worked with him directly, outside SRI, in his final period.
03Role in Ufology
The record holds two Prices. The documented one produced the program's most cited operational sessions: the Semipalatinsk viewing describing a giant gantry crane at a secret Soviet site (with misses alongside), and detailed viewings of a West Virginia NSA-adjacent facility, including code words that triggered a security investigation. The lore's Price volunteered, unprompted, descriptions of four extraterrestrial bases hidden under Mount Ziel (Australia), Mount Perdido (Spain), Mount Inyangani (Zimbabwe), and Alaska's Mount Hayes, describing occupants, functions, and craft, material preserved in program-adjacent notes and popularized decades later.
04Key Claims and Contributions
His contribution is the operational file skeptics must actually argue with. The bases material is claim only, tasked by no one and checked by nothing, though it seeded underground-base lore that Bennewitz-era disinformation later fertilized.
05Criticism and Controversy
Price died suddenly of a heart attack in Las Vegas in July 1975, at 57, reportedly after handing off his autopsy-waived remains quickly, details that built an assassination legend (Soviet interest in him is documented; foul play is not). Skeptics note his celebrated sessions include documented misses and monitor-feedback problems, and read the bases as imagination in a permissive setting. Program colleagues, Puthoff included, maintained he was the real thing. Both files remain open in their different ways.
06Where They Are Now
Price's sessions are in the CIA's declassified collection; his legend is load-bearing across remote viewing and underground-base culture alike.
- The CIA Star Gate collection's Price materials
- Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers (1997)
- Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena (2017)
- Puthoff's retrospective accounts of the Semipalatinsk sessions
Milky Way News Editorial · Reference entry · Last updated September 1, 2026