Pat Price

Patrick Henry Price was born in 1918, in or near Detroit. His early life is sparsely documented in the public record. By the 1950s he had moved to Southern California and joined the Burbank Police Department. He rose to police commissioner of Burbank, a position he held through much of the early 1960s.

Throughout his time in police work, Price quietly used what he described to friends as an unusual ability to picture distant locations. He told colleagues that during cases of missing persons or fleeing suspects, he would sit at his desk, close his eyes, and try to describe where the person was. He said he sometimes drew sketches. Within the department his reputation for these methods stayed quiet; he was understood to be unusual, but not eccentric in a way that drew official attention. He left active police work in the mid-1960s and moved into private business, eventually settling in the Lake Tahoe area.

In the autumn of 1972 Price visited the Los Angeles Org of the Church of Scientology, which Harold Puthoff was also visiting. The two men met by chance. Price described his earlier police-work experiences. Puthoff invited him to come to Stanford Research Institute to repeat them under controlled conditions. Within months Price had become the second principal subject of the CIA-funded SRI program that had begun with Ingo Swann.

Price's results across the next two years were the program's strongest single body of work. Three sessions in particular became foundational. In 1973 he was asked to describe a set of map coordinates in West Virginia, which turned out to be the National Security Agency's Sugar Grove listening station; his description of an underground complex with electronic equipment and code-name fragments became one of the program's signature results. In 1974 he was asked to describe coordinates in eastern Kazakhstan, at the Soviet research site the CIA called URDF-3 inside the broader Semipalatinsk testing complex; his sketches of cranes and gantries were later compared to U.S. overhead imagery. His case officer, Kenneth Kress of the CIA's Office of Technical Service, wrote a classified internal article in 1977 arguing that Price's results were worth taking seriously even if the underlying claim of psychic functioning remained unproven.

In the spring of 1975 Price was transitioning from SRI's contract into a more direct working relationship with the CIA, working as an outside consultant on operational tasking. The April 29, 1975 case-officer memorandum that closes his agency file is the last documented CIA contact in the released record.

On the evening of July 14, 1975, Price collapsed in a hotel restaurant in Las Vegas, where he had traveled for a conference. He was pronounced dead later that night. The certificate listed heart attack as the cause. He was 57.

In the years after his death, popular accounts of the Stargate program circulated rumors that the KGB had moved against Price, by poison or induced cardiac event. The released CIA file contains nothing supporting that interpretation. He had a documented history of heart trouble. He left behind a wife and grown children.