Stargate Project: Remote Viewing
MICHEL GANGNE,PASCAL GUYOT/AFP/Getty ImagesSaudi soldiers examine the debris of an Iraqi Scud missile that landed in downtown Riyadh on January 22, 1991 after being intercepted by US countermeasures. Allegedly, CIA psychic spies helped locate scud missiles like these during the Gulf War.
You may have seen George Clooney attempt to kill a goat with his mind in the 2009 film The Men Who Stares At Goats. But like the film’s opening credits say: More of this is true than you would believe.
Though neither that film nor the book upon which it was based mention Stargate Project by name, both took inspiration from that indeed real government project that sought to train a group of psychic spies for remote viewing (using extra-sensory perception to surveil a target without actually being physically at or near that target).
With such a top secret mission at hand, only the chairman and ranking members of the Senate and House Appropriations and Armed Services Committees knew of Stargate Project’s existence, which began in 1978.
Befitting such an off-the-grid operation, the project operated out of dilapidated, leaky wooden barracks somewhere in Fort Meade, Maryland. By all accounts, it was a miserable work environment.
Nevertheless, according to some project members at least, they accomplished some truly extraordinary things.
The Washington Post spoke to one project member, Joseph McMoneagle, who was with Stargate from its inception all the way until 1993. As the Post writes, McMoneagle claims that he and other project operatives used their remote viewing abilities to “help locate American hostages, enemy submarines, strategic buildings in foreign countries and who knows what else.”
Typically, the powers that be would give McMoneagle a sealed envelope containing a photo or document and ask him to use his remote viewing skills to provide more information about the subject of said photo or document. For example, McMoneagle’s superiors might provide him with a photo of a man and expect him, using only the powers of remote viewing, to discern where that man was currently located.
Among his more than 450 such missions, McMoneagle claims to have helped the Army locate hostages in Iran, predict where the infamous Skylab station would crash back to Earth, and pinpoint scud missiles during the Gulf War.
Through it all, McMoneagle states that the unit had a success rate of 15 percent, which, as he tells it, is better than plenty of other methods of intelligence gathering.
“Everybody’s got it all backward,” McMoneagle told The Washington Post, referring to the criticism and ridicule Stargate Project received after the CIA shut it down in 1995 and declassified the report that dealt the killing blow. “The project was approved on a year-to-year basis. This approval was based on our performance. So why the hell are they running for cover now?”
But run for cover is precisely what the CIA ultimately did.
The organization had first shut down an earlier remote viewing program in 1975 before Stargate began its run, over the course of which its administration was shuffled between agencies. Stargate then fell to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Department of Defense group that gathers intelligence to be used in foreign combat missions. Stargate lived with the DIA until 1994, at which point the CIA scooped it up, realized it had egg on its face, and ordered a report done on the unit’s effectiveness.
That report found that “remote viewing, as exemplified by the efforts in the current [Stargate Project] program, has not been shown to have value in intelligence operations.” The report furthermore claimed that Stargate’s findings were irrelevant and erroneous, and that project managers may have been changing the data gathered from remote viewing after the fact with the helpful hand of hindsight.
However, one of the report’s authors, UC Davis statistics professor and parapsychologist Jessica Utts, took the dissenting and ultimately marginalized position that remote viewing did in fact work. Utts, a longtime remote viewing proponent and board member of the International Remote Viewing Association, wrote in the report that:
“At this stage, using the standards applied to any other area of science, the case for psychic functioning has been scientifically proven. It would be wasteful of valuable resources to continue to look for proof. Resources should be directed to the pertinent question about how this ability works.”
On the other hand, the report’s other author, University of Oregon psychology professor Ray Hyman wrote:
“Where parapsychologists see consistency, I see inconsistency. Where Utts sees consistency and incontestable proof, I see inconsistency and hints that all is not as rock-solid as she implies.”
In the end, the CIA sided with Hyman, not Utts, and shut the project down in 1995.
At its peak, the Stargate Project employed 22 people. By the end, only three remained. For all their efforts, the project cost the U.S. government $20 million for the privilege of having merely a last-ditch, everything-is-exhausted, option in intelligence gathering.
