Project STARGATE: The Declassified Story of the CIA's Psychic Spy Program

For over 20 years, the U.S. government spent millions trying to weaponize psychic spies. This is the unbelievable, declassified story of what they found in the dark.

If you had told a CIA analyst in 1972 that their best shot at locating a top-secret Soviet facility would come from an artist in a quiet room in California trying to “see” it with his mind, you’d have been laughed out of Langley. The thing is, they were the ones who wrote the checks. For over two decades, while the world was focused on the space race and nuclear standoffs, elements of the US intelligence community were quietly engaged in a different kind of arms race—one fought not with technology, but with consciousness itself.

This was Project STARGATE, the ultimate umbrella codename for a series of clandestine programs run by the CIA and later the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Fueled by a palpable fear that the Soviet Union was making strides in “psychotronic” research, the US government spent upwards of $20 million on a high-stakes gamble: to see if psychic phenomena could be weaponized. They contracted with physicists at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to develop protocols for a practice they called “remote viewing.” The goal was to train a cadre of psychic spies who could perceive distant, hidden, or future events on command.

The paper trail of America’s psychic spy program. Thousands of pages like this were declassified in 1995, revealing a secret history that is stranger than fiction.

The declassified paper trail confirms the shocking truth: the program was real. However, the official documents, along with the memoirs of the psychic spies and scientists themselves, paint a deeply contradictory picture. Peeling back the layers of this operation reveals the central mystery of STARGATE: was it a bizarre, 20-year chapter of Cold War paranoia that ultimately amounted to nothing? Or did the United States government stumble upon a powerful human ability, only to find it too volatile to understand and too sensitive to admit?