The 1984 SRI Joint Services Working Group report

In 1984 SRI International, the successor organization to Stanford Research Institute, prepared a comprehensive report for the program's Joint Services sponsors. The report's working title was "Target Search Techniques," though it is referred to in the released archive under several variants of that name. It ran several hundred pages. Its purpose was to summarize the previous decade of SRI's remote-viewing research and to establish a methodological baseline for further work.

The Joint Services review was an interagency document. Its readership was DIA, the CIA, the Army Intelligence and Security Command, and the technical-services arms of several allied research organizations. It did not advocate for the program. It described, in research-paper language, the experimental protocols SRI had developed, the statistical results those protocols had produced, and the open methodological questions the team believed remained.

The report's contents are unusual within the Stargate archive in that they treat the underlying claim of remote viewing as research-evaluable. Most of the operational documents in the archive assume the technique works and focus on getting answers out of it. The Joint Services report assumes the question of whether the technique works is open and asks how it could be more rigorously settled.

The recommendations the report made included tightening the procedures by which sessions were monitored, formalizing the training pipeline through which new viewers were brought into the program, and standardizing the format of session reports so that results could be statistically aggregated across different viewer-target combinations. Many of the recommendations were adopted in the SUN STREAK and STAR GATE eras that followed.

The 1984 Joint Services report is one of the most cited internal program documents in the later AIR review. It is the kind of methodological record that defenders of the program point to when arguing the work was scientifically serious, and that critics point to when arguing the methodological problems were known and were not adequately fixed.