Albert N. Stubblebine III

Albert N. Stubblebine III was born on February 22, 1930, in Manila, then in the U.S. Philippine Commonwealth. His father, Albert Stubblebine Jr., was an Army officer; the family moved frequently during his childhood as his father's postings changed. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in the class of 1952, was commissioned as an infantry officer, and spent the first two decades of his Army career in a series of intelligence and intelligence-administration postings.

In May 1981 Stubblebine, by then a major general, was assigned to command United States Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. INSCOM is the Army's umbrella for human intelligence, signals intelligence, and counter-intelligence work. The command's roughly fifteen thousand personnel were scattered across more than a hundred locations worldwide. The remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade was a small administrative tenant of INSCOM during this period, attached to the command for budget and personnel purposes while reporting operationally up the Defense Intelligence Agency chain.

Under Stubblebine's command the Fort Meade unit was renamed Project CENTER LANE in 1983. Stubblebine was unusually open in his support for the work. He briefed senior officers on the potential of psi research. He read widely in parapsychology, in Eastern meditation traditions, and in unconventional approaches to perception. He kept an autographed photograph of Uri Geller in his office. He believed, and said publicly in interviews later in life, that with enough mental concentration a person could pass through a solid wall. He once attempted it. He walked into the wall.

Stubblebine also championed the First Earth Battalion concept developed by Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon, a fellow Army officer whose 1979 unpublished manuscript proposed integrating meditation, indigenous combat traditions, and unconventional training methods into Army doctrine. The First Earth Battalion was never implemented as an official program. The concept became more widely known through the journalist Jon Ronson's 2004 book The Men Who Stare at Goats and the 2009 film loosely based on it.

In March 1984 Stubblebine was reassigned out of INSCOM. He retired from active service later that year. The specific internal circumstances of his departure remain partially redacted in the released INSCOM records; contemporaneous reporting suggested that his openness about the program's research had become a political liability with senior Army leadership.

Stubblebine spent his retirement in Florida. He gave talks on parapsychology and on alternative-medicine subjects. He married Rima Laibow, a psychiatrist with similar interests, and the two co-founded the Natural Solutions Foundation, an advocacy organization focused on health-freedom issues. In the 2000s he became publicly associated with doubts about the official account of the September 11, 2001 attacks, particularly the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. He died of heart failure in Naples, Florida, on February 6, 2017. He was 86. The CIA had released the full Stargate archive twenty-five days earlier.