Pat Price: the policeman whose sessions the CIA could not dismiss
A retired police commissioner walked into the SRI programme in 1973 and produced the descriptions that persuaded intelligence customers to keep funding it. He died two years later, and the argument about his results has not moved much since.
Illustration — generated
Pat Price was a former police officer and city commissioner from Burbank, California, who joined the SRI experiments in 1973. Within a short time he was producing the sessions that made the programme’s reputation with its intelligence customers — and he is the reason the funding continued.
What is documented
Price took part in a substantial number of sessions at SRI. Transcripts and sketches survive and a great deal of the paperwork is public in the CIA reading room.
His most-cited work involved descriptions of sites he was given only as coordinates, including a Soviet facility, in which he produced sketches and details that the customer regarded as strikingly close. He died in 1975.
What was claimed
That Price described classified installations in detail he could not have obtained by ordinary means — including internal features and equipment.
The problems with assessing it
Three, and they compound. Much of the assessment was done by people who knew the target, which makes it impossible to rule out generous matching. The sessions produced large quantities of material, of which the accurate portions are quoted and the inaccurate portions generally are not. And the sites in question were, in several cases, subjects of public speculation at the time.
None of that shows Price was wrong. It shows that the way his work was evaluated cannot distinguish a real effect from a plausible artefact, which is a different and more frustrating conclusion.
What remains unexplained
The confidence of the people who bought it. Intelligence organisations are not credulous customers, and Price convinced professionals who had every incentive to be sceptical and no interest in parapsychology.
That is not evidence that he was doing what he appeared to be doing. It is evidence that something about the sessions was persuasive to expert observers, which is a real fact requiring an explanation of some kind.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
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How many Price sessions were operational misses?
The hits are documented in the literature. The denominator is not, and without it the hits cannot be assessed.
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Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
CREST — the CIA Records Search Tool
Central Intelligence Agency
An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications
American Institutes for Research · 29 Sept 1995 · no public copy located
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