The Stargate Project

An icebreaker

For over twenty years, the CIA, Army, and Defense Intelligence Agency funded research into 'remote viewing,' training people to describe distant or hidden targets. Government reviewers who evaluated the results disagreed sharply with each other about whether anything real had been shown.

Ask one of these · tap to take it

Could a trained mind perceive things beyond the senses?
How would you test a claim like that fairly?
Why fund something this fringe for twenty years?
What would count as real proof either way?

copy the questions

Worth knowing · 1 of 5

How did the program actually start?

In 1972, two physicists at the Stanford Research Institute began studying a New York artist who claimed lifelong experiences of perceiving distant places. A small CIA contract followed, and the research eventually grew into a $20 million, multi-decade program.

Worth knowing · 2 of 5

What did participants actually do in a session?

A viewer, given only a coded reference to a hidden target, would describe impressions, shapes, or scenes that came to mind, often sketching them. Sessions were structured into stages meant to separate raw impressions from the viewer's own analysis or guessing.

Worth knowing · 3 of 5

How was the program finally evaluated?

In 1995 the CIA commissioned two outside researchers to assess it: a statistician who concluded the results showed a real effect, and a psychologist who argued methodological flaws made that premature. The program was ended that year.

Worth knowing · 4 of 5

Did both evaluators agree on anything?

Yes. Even setting aside whether any effect was real, both agreed that the intelligence remote viewing produced was too vague and inconsistent to be useful for actual operations, which was the practical reason cited for ending it.

Worth knowing · 5 of 5

Is remote viewing accepted by mainstream science?

No. An earlier 1984 review by the National Research Council had already found no scientific evidence supporting it, and it is generally treated as a pseudoscience by the broader scientific community, despite the CIA's decades of funding.

Words to know

Remote viewingThe practiced claim of perceiving a distant or hidden target using only a coded reference, without ordinary sensory contact.

SRIThe Stanford Research Institute, where the earliest CIA-funded remote-viewing research took place starting in 1972.

Sun Streak / Star GateLater code names for the same government remote-viewing program after it moved between agencies through the 1980s and 1990s.

More words

AIR reportThe 1995 outside evaluation, by the American Institutes for Research, that led the CIA to end the program.

A voice · 1 of 4

Harold Puthoff · Physicist who co-founded the research

Beginning in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute, he and a colleague studied an artist's claimed ability to describe distant locations, then developed a structured protocol they argued let ordinary people be trained to produce accurate target data.

A voice · 2 of 4

Ingo Swann · Artist whose claims began the research

He described a lifelong ability to perceive distant places and worked with SRI physicists to develop a staged method for remote-viewing sessions, which he maintained could be taught rather than relying on innate talent alone.

A voice · 3 of 4

Jessica Utts · Statistician who reviewed the program in 1995

Evaluating the program's data for the 1995 outside review, she concluded that the statistical evidence was strong enough to reject chance as an explanation, meaning she judged something beyond guesswork appeared to be happening in the experiments.

A voice · 4 of 4

Ray Hyman · Psychologist who reviewed the program in 1995

Reviewing the same data, he argued that methodological flaws made any claim that paranormal functioning had been demonstrated premature, and that independent replication was still needed before drawing that conclusion.

A line to leave them with

Twenty years and twenty million dollars, and the reviewers still split.