Stargate Project was a secret United States Army unit established in 1977 at Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a California contractor, to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications. The project, and its precursors and sister projects, originally went by various code names — including "Gondola Wish", "Grill Flame" and "Center Lane" under INSCOM, "Sun Streak" and "Star Gate" under the United States Army Foreign Intelligence Command (USAFIC) in 1993, "Star Gate" and "SCANATE" under the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and "Project CF" — until 1991, when they were consolidated and collectively renamed the "Stargate Project". The Stargate Project's work primarily involved remote viewing, the purported ability to psychically "see" events, sites, or information from a great distance. The project was overseen until 1987 by Lt. Frederick Holmes "Skip" Atwater (born 1947), an aide and "psychic headhunter" to Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, and later president of the Monroe Institute. The unit was small-scale, comprising about 15 to 20 individuals, and was run out of "an old, leaky wooden barracks". The Stargate Project was terminated and declassified in 1995 after a commissioned review by the CIA concluded that it was never useful in any intelligence operation. Although statistically significant effects were observed in laboratory experiments, the reviewers were uncertain whether this was the result of errors, and the information provided by the program was vague and included irrelevant and erroneous data. The program was featured in the 2004 book and 2009 film The Men Who Stare at Goats, although neither mentions it by name.
Background According to Joseph McMoneagle, the CIA and DIA reacted to reports that the Soviets were actively researching parapsychology by approving and funding their own research programs. McMoneagle wrote that reviews for these programs were made semi-annually at the Senate and House select committee level. According to McMoneagle, standard operating procedure for remote viewing was that the results were kept secret from the "viewer" so that failures would not damage the viewer's confidence and skill. McMoneagle defines remote viewing as an attempt to sense unknown information about places or events, and said that it is normally performed to detect current events, but during military and domestic intelligence applications viewers claimed to sense things in the future, experiencing precognition.
History
1970s In 1970, United States intelligence sources believed that the Soviet Union was spending 60 million rubles annually on "psychotronic" research. In response to claims that the Soviet program had produced results, the CIA initiated funding for a new program known as SCANATE ("scan by coordinate") in the same year. Remote viewing research began in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. Proponents (Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff) of the research said that a minimum accuracy rate of 65% required by the clients was often exceeded in the later experiments. Physicists Targ and Puthoff began testing psychics for SRI in 1972, including Israeli Uri Geller, who would later become an international celebrity. Their apparently successful results garnered interest within the United States Department of Defense. Ray Hyman, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, was asked by Air Force psychologist Lt. Col. Austin W. Kibler (1930–2008) — then director of Behavioral Research for ARPA — to go to SRI and investigate. He was to specifically evaluate Geller. Hyman's report to the government was that Geller was a "complete fraud", and as a consequence Targ and Puthoff lost their government contract to work further with him. The result was a publicity tour for Geller, Targ, and Puthoff to seek private funding for further research work on Geller. One of the project's successes was the location of a lost Soviet spy plane in 1976 by Rosemary Smith, a young administrative assistant recruited by project director Dale Graff. In 1977, the Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) Systems Exploitation Detachment (SED) started the Gondola Wish program to "evaluate potential adversary applications of remote viewing". Army Intelligence then formalized this in mid-1978 as an operational program Grill Flame, based in buildings 2560 and 2561 at Fort Meade in Maryland (INSCOM "Detachment G").
1980s In early 1979, the research at SRI was integrated into "Grill Flame", which was redesignated INSCOM "Center Lane" Project (ICLP) in 1983. In 1984, the existence of the program was reported by Jack Anderson, and in that year it was unfavorably received by the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council. In late 1985 the Army funding was terminated, but the program was redesignated "Sun Streak" and funded by the DIA's Scientific and Technical Intelligence Directorate (office code DT-S). George Stephanopoulos, in his 2024 book The Situation Room, mentions the project in discussing a May 8, 1980, Situation Room briefing for President Jimmy Carter, after Carter's failed hostage rescue mission in Iran on April 24, 1980. In a 2005 GQ magazine interview, Carter said CIA director Stansfield Turner told him the agency once contacted a California woman who claimed to have psychic powers to help locate a missing plane.
1990s In 1991, most of the contracting for the program was transferred from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), with Edwin May controlling 70% of the contractor funds and 85% of the data. Its security classification was altered from Special Access Program (SAP) to Limited Dissemination (LIMDIS), and it was given its final name, STARGATE.
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