Grill Flame to Stargate: the programme and its many names
The US military remote viewing effort ran for over twenty years under at least six code names, across three agencies. The renaming is not mysterious — but the sequence is the clearest way to understand what the programme actually was.
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People talk about "Project Stargate" as though it were one thing. It was the last name of a sequence, and the sequence is the most useful map of what actually happened — because each renaming marks a change of owner, of budget, or of purpose.
The sequence
SCANATE, from the early 1970s, covers the earliest CIA-funded work at SRI — the scientific phase, testing whether the effect existed at all.
GONDOLA WISH, from 1977, marks the Army’s entry: an intelligence assessment of the potential threat if adversaries were doing this.
GRILL FLAME, from 1978, is where an operational Army unit is formed. This is the transition from research to attempting to use it.
CENTER LANE, from 1983, is the Army Intelligence and Security Command running the unit directly.
SUN STREAK, from 1986, marks the transfer to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
STAR GATE, from 1991, is the final consolidated designation under the DIA, and the name under which the whole effort was declassified in 1995.
What the sequence tells you
Read as a whole it describes a programme that migrated from research towards operations and then found no permanent home. Three different organisations owned it. Each renaming coincides with a change in who was paying and what they wanted.
That is the profile of a capability nobody could quite make work and nobody quite wanted to cancel — which is precisely how the 1995 evaluation described it.
How it ended
In 1995 the CIA commissioned the American Institutes for Research to evaluate the whole effort. Two reviewers, Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman, produced assessments that disagreed about the laboratory evidence. They agreed on the operational question: the programme had not produced intelligence of demonstrable value.
It was closed and declassified the same year, which is why so much of it is now public.
Why the archive matters
Declassification released a very large quantity of paperwork into the CIA reading room — session transcripts, protocols, assessments and internal correspondence. It is freely searchable and it is the most complete primary record of any government psi programme anywhere.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
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What happened to the personnel after 1995?
Several went public and several did not. Tracing where the expertise went is the obvious way to test claims of a continuing programme.
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See also
Everything this piece touches
Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications
American Institutes for Research · 29 Sept 1995 · no public copy located
CREST — the CIA Records Search Tool
Central Intelligence Agency
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