The death of Pat Price (July 1975)

Viewer: Pat Price · Active: 1975

Declassified

Editorial summary

On the evening of July 14, 1975, Pat Price collapsed in a hotel restaurant in Las Vegas. He had traveled there for a conference. Witnesses said he complained of chest pain and then lost consciousness. He was pronounced dead later that night. The cause of death given on the certificate was a heart attack. He was 56.

Price had begun working with the CIA's remote-viewing research about three years earlier. He had come to it through Harold Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute after a chance meeting at a Scientology office in Los Angeles. He had spent most of his career as a police commissioner in Burbank, California. He had a wife and grown children. By 1975 he was, in the agency's internal classification, the program's most productive viewer.

In the spring of 1975 Price had transitioned out of the SRI contract and into a more direct relationship with the agency, working as an outside consultant. The CIA had begun tasking him against specific targets. The last documented CIA contact in the released Stargate file is a memorandum dated April 29, 1975, written by a case officer named Kenneth Kress, summarizing an interview with Price about a set of map coordinates.

Price's death is one of the parts of the Stargate folklore where rumor and record diverge most sharply. Some early popular accounts of the program, repeated in books published in the late 1970s and 1980s, suggested that the KGB had moved against him, either by poison or by induced cardiac event. The released CIA file contains nothing supporting that interpretation. Price had a history of heart trouble; his doctor had been treating him for it. The CIA officer who had been managing his work did not treat the death as suspicious in his contemporaneous notes or in the classified internal article he wrote about the program two years later.

What is on record is that Price's death ended the program's brief acceleration in 1975. SRI continued with other viewers. The agency continued the funding. But the man the agency's contracts had been built around was no longer available.

Editorial summary by govweird, grounded in the declassified Stargate archive and the 1995 American Institutes for Research review.

Originating agency

Central Intelligence Agency

Program era

SCANATE (SRI / CIA, 1972 to 1976)

Viewer of record

Pat Price

Target

Program document

Session date

Not documented

Activity period

1975

Public release

January 12, 2017 (bulk Stargate release)

CIA document id

CIA-RDP79-00999A000400050006-0

Topics

Remote viewing Project Stargate

Source document

The canonical CIA reading room copy of this document is filed under MORI ID CIA-RDP79-00999A000400050006-0.

Open on CIA reading room →

A bulk mirror of the complete Stargate archive is at archive.org/details/STARGATEDataset.

Transcript (extracted)

Extracted text from the source document

OTS /BAB MEMO # 163-75 29 April 1975 MEMORANDUM FOR: ATTENTION SUBJECT : Interview with Mr. Patrick H. Price re Grid Coordinates The attached report is a result of your memo of 31 January 1975. to OTS/CB wherein you provided five grid coordinates which were to be used in an experimental remote viewing; program designed to provide operational leads on various targets. The information has been recorded essentially as presented by Pat with only minor editorial changes. Little attempt was made to follow through on most of his statements, dine the primary objective of this interview was to provide you with raw data which you could review and evaluate before deciding if you want to meet and debrief Pat yourselves. Because of my deliberate effort to avoid gaining knowledge of the targets which could "tip off" Pat during the debriefing I do not know how "ep; if any, of his statements are correct. We would therefore appreciate your comments regarding this information to help us evaluate the potential to the Agency of this technique in general and Mr. Price in particular. OTS BAB CONFIDFNTIAL MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD subject; Interview with Mr. Patrick P. Price on 26 April 1975 Administrative For the record, the following administrative point were covered with Pat on 26 April 1975 during our meeting at the Key Bridge Marriott Motel: Our relationship is now an operational one. We are no longer conducting R & D. He was very pleased with this and eager to go to work. He was asked what conditions help him to work at his best? Does it help to see the person or a photograph? Can he really get there best by grid coordinates, etc.? feels we must provide more information so that he can make a positive identification of a site. Grid coordinates are ok to establish the general area of interest but then he must be told what specific point to zero in on. Photographs are very good, particularly when a person or a building is in- volved. More data is needed to help pinpoint a location in relation to a known landmark such as a city or a topographic feature. If the point is within a city then provide a locator point such as a building description. Pat was told that security will be a problem that we must face. I will not always be able to tell him everything because often I will not have all the details. The principles of "compartmentation" and "need to know" will be SOP. Also there is a potential for embarrassment if our association is played up in the press. He agreed to keep me posted on other groups he may work with and even his contacts with the press. One interview he gave to the National Inquirer about six weeks ago should be published soon. The topic was a philosophical discussion of psychokenisis and remote viewing in relation to the study of Scientology. As a general rule Pat claims that he shuns publicity and has turned down many requests for interviews. Pat was given the Personality checklist, an indirect assessment guide and a P&Q III to help him focus on the type of information we would like to get on people. Pat promised to send sketches of the areas we discussed along with a bill for his expenses. Report Based on his "study" of the coordinates I gave him on 22 April, Pat supplied the following information. The interview was taped and the three cassettes are available for study. Coordinates given Pat:

Extracted by crest-readingroom. Carbon-copy session transcripts from the 1970s and 1980s often contain OCR errors; cross-check against the source PDF for any quotation.