Pat Price reads the Semipalatinsk Soviet test site (July 1974)

In the summer of 1974, an SRI consultant named Pat Price was given a piece of paper with map coordinates on it. He was told the coordinates pointed to a place in the Soviet Union. He was not told what the place was. Price had spent most of his working life as a police commissioner in Burbank, California. He was now in his late forties and had become, in the words of one CIA officer who later wrote about him, the program's most consistent producer of accurate remote-viewing data.

The coordinates were for the Semipalatinsk Test Site, on the steppes of what is now eastern Kazakhstan. Inside that broader testing area was a complex the CIA had given the code name URDF-3, for Unidentified Research and Development Facility 3. The agency knew almost nothing about what went on inside it. That was why they were asking Pat Price.

Price's session transcript, declassified with the rest of the Stargate archive in 2017, described a large industrial site with overhead cranes and gantries, several large pieces of equipment under construction, and what he understood to be the testing of some kind of high-energy particles. He drew sketches of the buildings and the cranes.

Some of what Price reported lined up with what United States satellite imagery later confirmed about URDF-3, including the cranes and the general scale and orientation of the complex. Other parts of his description, including specifics about the particle-beam research he believed was happening there, did not match anything the agency was later able to verify.

The CIA case officer who ran the experiment was Kenneth Kress, an officer in the Office of Technical Service. Kress wrote a classified article in 1977 for the agency's internal Studies in Intelligence journal in which he argued that Price's session contained enough specific accurate detail to be worth taking seriously, even if the broader claim of psychic functioning remained unproven. The article was itself declassified in 1996.

The 1995 American Institutes for Research review, which ended the Stargate Project, was more skeptical. It treated the URDF-3 session as the kind of result that, taken in isolation, was suggestive but not conclusive.