Central Intelligence Agency
Project Stargate
A twenty-three-year experiment in whether trained subjects could describe distant targets they had never seen.
In the autumn of 1972, the CIA's Office of Technical Service quietly funded a small contract with Stanford Research Institute, a nonprofit research lab on the San Francisco peninsula. Two physicists at SRI, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, had been running informal experiments with an artist named Ingo Swann, asking him to describe sealed targets in distant rooms. The contract was to find out, under tighter conditions, whether Swann's apparent ability to do this was real, and whether other people could be trained to do the same thing.
The contract turned into a program. Across the next twenty-three years it changed hands and code names: SCANATE at CIA, then GONDOLA WISH and GRILL FLAME at the Defense Intelligence Agency and Army INSCOM, then CENTER LANE, then SUN STREAK, and finally STAR GATE under the CIA again. Roughly two dozen subjects passed through the program at SRI and Fort Meade. Some of them, including Joseph McMoneagle and Pat Price, were tasked against real intelligence targets in real time: Soviet weapons facilities, missing hostages, kidnapped officers, foreign weapons systems.
In 1995 the program ended. Congress asked the CIA to evaluate it; the CIA contracted the American Institutes for Research to do the review; the AIR report concluded that whatever the program had produced, it was not actionable intelligence. The records were boxed up. In 2017 the agency released the entire archive: roughly twelve thousand documents, more than ninety thousand pages, every session transcript and management memo and viewer-recruitment file.
The pages below catalog the sessions and documents that defined the program. Each links out to its source on the CIA reading room. Where the document itself is terse, we draw on the AIR review, the published memoirs of the viewers, and contemporaneous reporting for context.
Documents in collection
12,473
Sessions cataloged
25
With editorial
25