The Iran hostage crisis remote-viewing sessions (1979 to 1980)

In the second week of November 1979, after Iranian students stormed the United States embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two Americans hostage, the Defense Intelligence Agency turned its small in-house remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade against the hostage situation. The unit had been operating for about a year under the codename GRILL FLAME. It comprised a handful of trained viewers, including Joseph McMoneagle.

The released session reports from this period, declassified with the rest of the Stargate archive in 2017, run across many pages. Viewers were asked to describe where individual hostages were being held, when they would be released, whether any were dead, and what the building interiors looked like. Some sessions used photographs of specific hostages as targets. Others used only the hostage's name on a slip of paper.

The session reports are detailed. They are also inconsistent. Different viewers gave different locations for the same hostage. Predictions about release dates were not borne out. Viewers correctly described some features of the embassy compound, but the compound's layout had been published in newspapers since 1979 and was not secret information. The unit's officer in charge wrote up monthly assessment memos for DIA leadership in which the language grew steadily more cautious about what the program had actually produced.

When the U.S. military staged the failed Operation Eagle Claw rescue attempt at Desert One on April 24, 1980, the remote-viewing unit's predictions about the operation are not in the released record. The hostages were freed on January 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, as part of the Algiers Accords.

The Iran hostage tasking was the program's first sustained operational use against a current-events intelligence target. The agency's own later assessments treated it as a stress test the program had not passed. It is also the period in which the unit's files most resemble those of a working intelligence shop: hundreds of pages of viewer drawings, location-grid markings, interview notes, and analyst comments, all of it preserved in the eventual public release.