Project SCANATE: the CIA charter for psychic-research funding (1972)

In the late summer of 1972, the CIA's Office of Technical Service signed a small research contract with Stanford Research Institute. The contract number was given the unclassified cover name SCANATE, a shortening of "scan by coordinate." The work was funded out of an OTS line item ordinarily used for unconventional research and development. The two SRI principals were Harold Puthoff, a physicist who had previously worked on laser research at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Russell Targ, a laser engineer at Sylvania.

The premise the contract was set up to test was specific. An artist named Ingo Swann, who had been working with the American Society for Psychical Research in New York, had performed informally for Puthoff in a sealed-room experiment in the spring of 1972. He appeared to describe the contents of containers he could not see. The CIA's interest was not in whether Swann was paranormal in some general sense. It was in whether his apparent ability could be reproduced with other people, on demand, against geographic coordinates of intelligence value.

The SCANATE contract authorized a year of work. Swann would attempt to describe sealed-envelope targets, and would also describe geographic locations given only by latitude and longitude. The case officer assigned to the work was an OTS scientist named Kenneth Kress. Funding ran to roughly fifty thousand dollars in the first year.

The contract's first major result was the demonstration that Swann was not unique. By early 1973, Pat Price had joined the SRI program as a second viewer, recruited after a chance meeting with Puthoff at a Scientology center. The results Price produced against coordinate targets, including the Sugar Grove West Virginia site, persuaded OTS leadership that the work was worth continuing.

The SCANATE contract documents themselves were declassified along with the rest of the Stargate archive in 2017. They are the foundation paperwork for everything the program became across the following twenty-three years.