Twenty-Two Years, Several Names, and Two Different Activities

The programme that ended as Star Gate began in 1972 as a Central Intelligence Agency contract with Stanford Research Institute, prompted in part by reports that Soviet institutions were funding similar work and by the reasoning that a capability one cannot rule out is a capability an adversary might have. Over two decades it passed between sponsors and acquired a series of codenames, including Grill Flame, Center Lane and Sun Streak, ending under Defense Intelligence Agency control. Throughout, it consisted of two quite different things that are routinely conflated.

One was contractor laboratory research, first at SRI and later under Edwin May at Science Applications International Corporation, run as experiments with protocols, controls and statistics. The other was an operational unit of a handful of viewers at Fort Meade who were given intelligence questions and asked to produce descriptions, with no control condition and no way to score a session except against whatever the customer later learned. The first is assessable as science. The second is not, and was never designed to be. Keeping the two apart matters for reading anything written about the programme, because a defender citing laboratory statistics and a critic citing operational failure are frequently discussing different halves of it and talking past each other.