The CIA used psychics as spies.

Harold Puthoff, a physicist at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), was astonished when the magnetometer began to change. There was no physical explanation for the changes in the magnetic field the device was measuring. Just as Puthoff asked Swann to stop thinking about the device, the changes in the magnetic field suddenly stopped.

“ These phenomena are real. The paranormal is real, ” said Dean Radin, Ph.D., chief scientist at the California-based nonprofit Noetic Sciences Institute.

But even before that, during the Cold War, the US government, led by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), cooperated with SRI to conduct secret research on extrasensory perception for remote intelligence gathering, focusing on the ability to use the mind to "see" or control objects and people.

In the mid-1980s, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) took over the top-secret program and called it “Stargate.”

The Stargate Project was disbanded in 1995. In 2003, 73,000 pages of documents about the project were declassified, but 17,700 pages of documents remained unreleased. By 2017, all of these documents were public.

Radin, one of the scientists who worked on the project, said that every two weeks, security staff held meetings to remind him and his colleagues of the sensitivity of the work, as well as to find out if they thought anyone outside the program knew about the project.

“ You basically have to become a professional paranoid. It's a nasty thing ,” Radin said.

The Stargate Project initially recruited about 20 people who were believed to have psychic abilities for training. They had to undergo the necessary scientific tests, as well as practice in a systematic way to become members of the psychic spy army. These people would sit in a dark room and put themselves under hypnosis, then they would describe images of a faraway place that appeared in their minds.

The first target of the Stargate Project was a secret Soviet scientific research center located in the Republic of Kazakhstan, which the CIA codenamed URDF-3 (Unidentified Research and Development Center 3). The most active and important participant in this initial project was the psychic Pat Price.

Price was given the geographic coordinates of the target. After "getting into it," Price opened the search function and later described seeing a "giant crane system." Later, a CIA officer analyzing reconnaissance satellite images of the URDF-3 center exclaimed in admiration because Price's description was accurate down to the smallest detail.

In 1976, the CIA used Stargate to search for a Soviet plane that had been shot down in the African wilderness after all other efforts, including satellite imagery, had failed. Psychic Rosemary Smith pinpointed the location within a few miles. A team was then sent to the area and found it.

There are many other cases of Stargate success, the most famous being the 1979 spy mission on a Soviet naval base. At that time, American psychics described the Soviets as building some kind of weapon that looked like a “shark.” Later, satellite images showed that the facility was storing Akula nuclear submarines, and Akula also means “shark” in Russian.

The DIA continued the project until the mid-1990s, when the CIA began declassifying documents on its remote viewing research to facilitate an outside review of the project. In June 1995, the CIA asked the American Institute for Research (AIR)—a nonprofit organization based in Arlington, Virginia, tasked with evaluating and providing technical assistance in social and behavioral science research—to conduct an outside review of the Stargate program.

To present a balanced assessment of the program's scientific credibility, AIR asked two researchers with opposing views on parapsychology to write the report: Dr. Jessica Utts, a talented statistician and now professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine, who sees parapsychology as a promising science; and Dr. Ray Hyman, a renowned psychologist and now professor emeritus at the University of Oregon, who is well known for his skepticism and criticism of parapsychology.

“ They sent us boxes full of reports and papers and said we had the summer to write a review ,” Utts said. She and Hyman reviewed dozens of Stargate experiments individually, as well as data from the scientific community at the time.

Utts found the statistics compelling and believed the studies provided strong evidence for human ESP. Hyman, meanwhile, agreed that the results were “statistically significant,” but noted potential flaws in the testing methodology, such as using the same person to assess ESP in each test, and determined that the results were not consistent enough with tests outside the program. However, Hyman admitted in his final report that “there seems to be something more than just a statistical glitch.”

The Viet (Source: Synthesis)

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