The Stargate programme and the remote viewing files

Between 1972 and 1995 the US government funded research into what came to be called remote viewing — the claim that a person can describe a distant location or object without any conventional means of knowing about it. The work ran at the Stanford Research Institute and later at Science Applications International Corporation, under a sequence of programme names including Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak and finally Stargate.

The programme is unusual in this field for being extensively documented. When it was closed, a substantial part of the file was declassified, and the evaluation that ended it was published rather than buried.

How the research was run

The early Stanford work, led by the physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, used a protocol in which a viewer attempted to describe a location visited by another person, with judges later matching the descriptions to the targets. Participants included the artist Ingo Swann and, later, army personnel assigned to the operational unit.

Critics identified problems in the early protocols — cues left in transcripts, judging that was not adequately blinded — and later work tightened the procedures in response. That back-and-forth is visible across the published record and is the most useful part of it.

The 1995 evaluation

When oversight of the programme moved to the CIA, the American Institutes for Research was commissioned to assess whether it had produced anything of intelligence value. Two reviewers were engaged: the statistician Jessica Utts and the psychologist Ray Hyman, a long-standing critic of parapsychology.

That disagreement is the honest end of the story. It is not a case of one side having evidence and the other having none; it is a case of two competent reviewers differing on what a small effect size across a heterogeneous body of work is permitted to establish.

Tens of thousands of pages of programme material are now searchable in the CIA reading room, including session transcripts. They are worth reading directly, if only because they are far drier than either the advocacy or the debunking suggests.