Project Stargate: When the U.S. Government Paid Psychic Spies

For about two decades, the United States government paid people to sit in quiet rooms and describe places they had never seen. The bill came to roughly $20 million, and the paperwork is now public.

That is not a rumor from the fringes. The CIA says so itself, on its own website, and the declassified files sit in its Freedom of Information Act reading room. The program picked up several code names over the years, and the last one stuck: Star Gate.

The strange part is not that it happened. The strange part is how seriously it was taken, how long it lasted, and how awkward the final verdict turned out to be.

Two laser physicists and an artist

The story starts at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, a contract research shop that was no stranger to classified work. In April 1972, according to an internal CIA history written by the project's own officer, Kenneth Kress, two SRI laser physicists named Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ approached the agency about investigating psychic abilities.

The CIA was curious enough to pay. Kress records a first demonstration costing $874 in August 1972, followed by a $50,000 expanded effort that October. By the standards of Cold War research budgets it was pocket change, the kind of sum an agency spends to rule something out.

The star subject in those first months was Ingo Swann, a self-described psychic who is credited with suggesting the name "remote viewing" for the skill being tested. The idea was simple to state. A viewer would be given a target, sometimes nothing more than a set of map coordinates, and asked to describe what was there.

The Pat Price episodes

The sessions that kept the money flowing mostly involved a second viewer, Pat Price. Kress describes a test in which Price was handed the coordinates of a vacation property in West Virginia and started talking about a military-style facility instead. Investigators later noted that a sensitive government installation sat a few miles away.

Then came the test that became program legend. Price was asked to describe a Soviet research site that analysts called URDF-3. He sketched a large crane, and analysts judged the crane a fair match for one at the site.