The Stargate shutdown sessions (1995)

On November 28, 1995, the Central Intelligence Agency formally announced the termination of the remote-viewing program. The announcement followed by two months the publication of the American Institutes for Research review that Congress had ordered. The agency cited the AIR review's conclusion that the program had not produced intelligence of operational value and that the methods used had not been adequately validated.

The closing months of the program are documented in a series of administrative memoranda in the released archive. There is a final personnel review, in which the remaining active viewers were transitioned to other DIA and Army assignments or separated from federal employment. There is a contract-closeout document covering SRI's residual research funding. There is a records-handling memo describing the disposition of session files, target photographs, and viewer assessment material, much of which would later form the basis of the 2017 bulk declassification.

The decision to shut the program down was not unanimous inside the intelligence community. Several senior officers had argued in the months before the AIR review that the program's intelligence contribution had been undervalued. Others, including the program's most consistent advocates inside SRI, argued that the methodological criticisms in the AIR review pointed at fixable problems, not fundamental ones. The agency's decision turned on the absence of demonstrable operational value, not on the underlying scientific question.

The November 1995 closeout was, in the agency's account, the end of federal sponsorship for any remote-viewing research. Several program alumni continued working in the field commercially after 1995. None of that subsequent work has been funded by the U.S. government, and none of it appears in the released Stargate archive, which closes with the November 1995 memos.