1977 House Subcommittee on Aging: Swann and Puthoff testify

On September 23, 1977, the U.S. House Select Committee on Aging held a hearing titled "Brain/Mind Research: Implications for Aging." The committee was chaired by Representative Claude Pepper of Florida. The hearing was nominally about geriatric medicine and cognitive function. Two of the witnesses called to testify were Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ of Stanford Research Institute, presenting on their CIA-funded work in remote viewing.

The Puthoff-Targ testimony was the first public, on-the-record discussion of remote-viewing research by the principals of the SRI program in front of a U.S. congressional body. They described the methodology they had developed at SRI. They described, in general terms, the results they had obtained. They did not name the CIA as a sponsor. They did describe the work as being supported by U.S. government contracts.

The hearing transcript itself is not part of the declassified Stargate archive. It is a public record of the U.S. Congress, archived through the Government Publishing Office. Its inclusion on this site is as a contextual moment in the program's history: the first time the public could read, in an unclassified federal record, a description of what was happening inside the SRI contract.

The hearing's effect on the program was indirect. It increased public interest in parapsychological research and helped establish the Puthoff-Targ team's public reputation. It also placed the work inside a formal congressional record that later journalists and historians could cite as a sourced baseline. The hearing did not change the program's funding posture, which remained classified, and did not lead to congressional oversight of the remote-viewing work specifically. That formal oversight would not arrive until the 1995 AIR review almost two decades later.