Funding Psychical Research: The Stargate Program

From 1972 the CIA provided funding to the Stanford Research Institute for experiments in what its researchers termed remote viewing, an attempt to describe distant or hidden locations through purported extrasensory means, motivated by concern that the Soviet Union was pursuing parallel psychic research for espionage purposes. The program passed through several code names and organizational homes over the following two decades, eventually run jointly with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Army under the umbrella that became publicly known, after declassification, as the Stargate Project, and involved sessions targeting Soviet military installations, hostage situations and other intelligence problems using psychics working at Fort Meade, Maryland.

In June 1995 the CIA's Office of Research and Development contracted the American Institutes for Research to conduct an independent evaluation, and the resulting report, principally authored by statistician Jessica Utts and psychologist Ray Hyman, reached a split verdict: Utts argued the statistical evidence for an anomalous effect was significant, while Hyman argued any effect was too small and inconsistent to explain, but both agreed the program had never produced clearly actionable intelligence. The CIA terminated its support that same year, and declassified documents released afterward showed the Agency found no case in which the program's results had meaningfully guided an actual intelligence operation.