The death of Pat Price (July 1975)

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.