The kidnapping of Brigadier General James Dozier (Italy, 1981)

On the evening of December 17, 1981, four members of the Italian terrorist group the Red Brigades broke into the apartment of Brigadier General James L. Dozier in Verona, Italy. Dozier was a senior NATO logistics officer. He was bound, gagged, and taken to a safe house in the city of Padua. The Italian government opened a national manhunt. The U.S. Department of Defense, working through the Defense Intelligence Agency, tasked the remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade against the kidnapping within days.

The Dozier sessions are some of the best-documented operational tasking in the released Stargate archive. The DIA unit produced location descriptions, building sketches, and verbal reports across more than a hundred sessions over six weeks. Some of the reports described features of an upper-floor apartment in a multi-story building. Others described street-level details and what viewers understood to be guards or watchers nearby.

Italian carabinieri freed Dozier on January 28, 1982, in a raid on an apartment in a residential building in Padua. He had been held for forty-two days. The raid itself was the result of conventional law-enforcement work: an informant inside the Red Brigades had given Italian authorities the address.

The U.S. internal post-mortem on the remote-viewing tasking, included with the closing-out memos in the released file, treated the Dozier sessions as an instructive disappointment. The viewers had produced material the unit's officers found internally coherent and detailed. None of it had been operationally useful in the actual recovery of the general. The session reports did not point Italian police to the Padua address. The success belonged to the informant.

The case is sometimes cited as a positive Stargate example because some of the viewer drawings, in retrospect, resemble the actual building. The released analyst notes treat that resemblance as the kind of thing that becomes visible only after the answer is known.