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For more than twenty years, parts of the US government paid people to try to describe hidden or faraway targets using only their minds. The paperwork is public. The CIA's 2021 summary says that, at Congress's request, "we placed the entire collection of declassified records from all three organizations on CIA.gov in the FOIA Electronic Reading Room." The three are the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the US Army. One briefing in that collection defines the term: "REMOTE VIEWING - The Acquisition and Description, by Mental Means, of Information Blocked from Ordinary Perception by Distance, Shield, or Time." This article reads the memos the way a historian would: who wrote each one, when, and for whom.
A 1995 evaluation says: "CIA's program began in 1972, but was discontinued in 1977." The CIA's own 2021 page agrees on the dates. The early work was done at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and code-named SCANATE, short for "Scanning by Coordinate." In one kind of trial, SRI researchers gave a subject, Ingo Swann, "a target location by latitude and longitude only, for which he had to provide an immediate response of what he saw." The same document adds its own caution: results from that kind of training exercise "can be taken as indicative only," because someone could do well from memory or, on the researchers' own hypothesis, pick up the data subliminally. In 1977, SRI scientists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ presented a paper on the work at an IEEE convention. They wrote that their first subject in a formal series, Pat Price, took part in nine experiments. They credited him with sometimes describing buildings, docks, roads and gardens correctly, at times in great detail, and also said his descriptions generally contained inaccuracies as well as correct statements (paraphrased; the scan's right edge is cut off). In 1995, reviewing the early SRI operational examples, statistician Jessica Utts wrote that some of the information was verified to be highly accurate. She added that "the evaluation of operational work remains difficult, in part because there is no chance baseline for comparison." She also wrote: "we do not know to what degree the results in the reports were selectively chosen because they were correct."
In 1977 the Army's intelligence command set up a project called GONDOLA WISH. A year later the Army's intelligence staff cancelled it and started Project GRILL FLAME. An Army memo dated 8 October 1980 says that in September 1978 the command was told "to establish a training familiarization program using specially selected INSCOM personnel." It also says that starting in September 1979 the unit began "operational sessions directed against real world intelligence gaps," and it counts "385 operational sessions" as of the memo's date. The Army kept going after it ended its formal involvement in GRILL FLAME. A later briefing says the command ended its formal involvement at the end of 1982 but kept the effort alive in a "special access program called CENTER LANE." A trip report from 28 March 1984 carries a CENTER LANE marking.
By February 1985, steps were under way to move CENTER LANE to the Defense Intelligence Agency, and by September 1985 the DIA effort was called SUN STREAK. A DIA memo of 19 September 1985 states what the program itself believed: GRILL FLAME "established that remote viewing (RV) was a human behavior (real phenomenon) which could be enhanced through training and that RV had potential for US intelligence application." That is the program's own claim, not an outside finding. By the early 1990s the DIA program was called Star Gate. On the research side, Utts writes that the SRI program "was in existence until 1989," and that government sponsorship then moved to a program at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) under Dr. Edwin May. The two reviewers give different start dates for SAIC, so this article says only that the move came around 1990 to 1992. The evaluation says operations "continued until the Spring of 1995, when the program was suspended."
At Congress's request, the CIA was considering taking over the program. In June 1995, the CIA's Office of Research and Development hired the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to evaluate it. The report is dated September 29, 1995, and lists Michael D. Mumford, Andrew M. Rose and David A. Goslin as authors. AIR brought in two outside reviewers: Dr. Jessica Utts, a statistics professor at the University of California, Davis, and Dr. Raymond Hyman, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon. They were "selected to represent both sides of the paranormal controversy," and AIR called them "fair and open-minded scientists." The report says "the two reviewers agreed far more than they disagreed." The report says both reviewers note that the laboratory evidence indicates "a statistically significant effect has been obtained."
Utts wrote: "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established." She also wrote that the size of the effect "appears to be in the range between what social scientists call a small and medium effect," and that "what is not so clear is that we have progressed very far in understanding the mechanism for anomalous cognition." Hyman agreed on the numbers: "We agree that the effect sizes reported in the SAIC experiments are too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes." He disagreed on what they mean: "Inexplicable statistical departures from chance, however, are a far cry from compelling evidence for anomalous cognition." The report sums up the split this way: "The major remaining area of disagreement concerns attribution of causality." Hyman also wrote: "I tend to agree with Professor Utts that real effects are occurring in these experiments." The report adds that both reviewers agreed on one unaddressed weakness in the lab work: "only one judge-apparently the Principal Investigator-was used in assessing matches throughout these experimental studies."
On practical use, the report's conclusions were negative. It said that "the conditions under which the remote viewing phenomenon is observed in laboratory settings do not apply in intelligence gathering situations," and that end users said that, although some accuracy was observed with regard to broad background characteristics, the reports "failed to produce the concrete, specific information valued in intelligence gathering." It added: "In no case had the information provided ever been used to guide intelligence operations. Thus, Remote viewing failed to produce actionable intelligence." Its executive summary concludes: "Thus, we conclude that continued use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering operations is not warranted." Its overall conclusion on the lab work was: "at this juncture it would be premature to assume that we have a convincing demonstration of a paranormal phenomenon." It also said: "This is not to say definitively that paranormal phenomena do not exist." The CIA's 2021 summary says the report found that "enough accurate remote viewing experiences existed to defy randomness, but that the phenomenon was too unreliable, inconsistent, and sporadic to be useful for intelligence purposes. We decided not to restore the program." Edwin C. May, who directed the research for 10 of its 24 years by his own account and so is an interested party, answered in a 1996 commentary that the review examined only the final, troubled period of operations, did not contact end users he had named, and was, in his words, "restricted to preclude positive findings" in the review's design. He also printed a later letter in which Utts wrote that the reviewers "were shown very little of the 'operational' remote viewing work." A companion Explore article, "Remote Viewing With AI: How to Test a Surprising Claim Fairly," walks through a fair blind test.
The files are in the CIA's FOIA Electronic Reading Room, in the STARGATE collection. A few habits help. Check the date and the "Approved For Release" stamp. Note who wrote the page: the program itself, a contractor, or an outside reviewer. Separate claims, such as "established that remote viewing (RV) was a human behavior (real phenomenon)," from evaluations, such as "failed to produce actionable intelligence." Expect errors in the scans, because many are scanned typewriter pages. Also compare sources. The CIA's 2021 summary and the 1980s memos list the program's code names in a different order. When they conflict, this article follows the memos, because they were written at the time. The AIR report, citing Swets and Bjork's 1990 summary of a 1988 National Research Council report, says: "little or no support was found for the usefulness of many other techniques, such as learning during sleep and remote viewing." We cite that summary, not the original book.
The CIA funded remote viewing research with SRI starting in 1972. The Army ran GONDOLA WISH from 1977 and its part of GRILL FLAME from 1978 (the DIA had its own GRILL FLAME effort), then CENTER LANE. The DIA ran SUN STREAK from 1985 and Star Gate in the early 1990s. Operations were suspended in the spring of 1995. The CIA's 1995 outside review used two reviewers from both sides of the debate. The report says both found "a statistically significant effect" in the lab studies. They disagreed on whether it showed anything paranormal. On real operations, the report said: "Remote viewing failed to produce actionable intelligence," and that "continued use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering operations is not warranted." The CIA did not restore the program.
In your own words: (1) Using the 1980s memos, list the code names with their dates, then say where the CIA's 2021 page tells it differently. (2) What did Utts and Hyman agree on, and where exactly did they disagree? (3) Why did the 1995 review conclude remote viewing wasn't useful for intelligence, even though a statistically significant lab effect was reported?
Reading a good explanation feels like understanding it. Usually it isn't the same thing — and you don't find out which one you've got until someone asks you to explain it back.