General Albert Stubblebine and the Army INSCOM era (1981 to 1984)

From May 1981 to March 1984, the commanding general of United States Army Intelligence and Security Command was a tall, soft-spoken career intelligence officer named Albert N. Stubblebine III. INSCOM is the Army's umbrella for human, signals, and counter-intelligence work, headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. During his three years in command, Stubblebine became one of the most senior public advocates inside the Department of Defense for taking remote viewing and other parapsychological phenomena seriously as a research subject.

Stubblebine briefed senior officers on the potential of psychic functioning. He read books on meditation and martial-arts traditions. He kept a signed photograph of Uri Geller in his office. He believed, and said publicly later in life, that with enough concentration a human being could pass through a wall. He once attempted it. He walked into the wall.

Under his command, the Army's remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade was reorganized and rebranded as Project CENTER LANE. Stubblebine pushed for the unit's research to expand into adjacent areas, including the First Earth Battalion concept developed by Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon, which proposed integrating meditation, music, and unconventional training methods into Army doctrine.

Stubblebine retired in 1984 after a series of internal Army disputes about the program's scope and direction. The general public learned the details of his interest in remote viewing only later, partly through the journalist Jon Ronson's 2004 book The Men Who Stare at Goats and the 2009 film loosely based on it. He spent his retirement giving talks on parapsychology and, in later years, on conspiracy subjects further from the original program. He died in February 2017, less than a month after the CIA released the full Stargate archive.

The released INSCOM records from his command document the program's bureaucratic side: budget allocations, viewer recruitment, contract management, analyst review. The strangeness was real, but it lived mostly in the meeting rooms and the briefings, not on the page.