Pat Price and the West Virginia underground site (1973)

In the summer of 1973, before Pat Price was formally under contract with the CIA, the agency had Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute run him through a series of demonstration sessions to see whether his apparent ability to describe distant places was usable. One of the targets was a set of map coordinates inside the state of West Virginia, near the unincorporated community of Sugar Grove in Pendleton County.

Price reportedly described an underground military complex carved into a mountainside, with long corridors and rooms full of electronic equipment, and what he understood to be a code-name written on a sign inside. He gave words and letter sequences. He drew rough floor plans of what he believed he was seeing.

The location at those coordinates was a National Security Agency facility. The Sugar Grove Naval Communications Station had been operating since the early 1960s as a signals intelligence site, collecting transmissions from Soviet communications satellites. The agency's presence there was technically classified, but had been written about in regional newspapers and was visible in commercial road atlases. The site was not, in 1973, a deeply hidden installation.

The CIA case officers who reviewed Price's notes were divided. Some of the details he described, including specific code-name fragments, were said to match information that should not have been publicly available. Other details were generic enough that they could have fit many large secured government installations. The session is one of the few in the early Stargate record where the full collection of viewer drawings, notes, and post-session analyst comments has been released in close to their original form.

The Sugar Grove session is sometimes cited as one of the program's foundational results. It is also the one most often pointed at by skeptics as evidence that the program's early advocates were overestimating how secret their targets actually were. Both readings of the session are supported by material in the declassified file.