IN 1972, AMERICAN ARTIST AND PSYCHIC INGO SWANN altered the magnetic field inside a thickly shielded vacuum container located underground for several seconds—by simply thinking about it.
As Harold Puthoff, a physicist with the Stanford Research Institute, witnessed the output from his magnetometer changing, he was mind-blown. There was no physical explanation for the reading changing the way it did. And as soon as Puthoff asked Swann to stop thinking about the apparatus, the unexplained changes in the magnetic field abruptly stopped.
“These phenomena are real. Psychic phenomena are real,” Dean Radin, Ph.D., chief scientist at the California-based nonprofit Institute of Noetic Sciences, tells Popular Mechanics. He’s been examining parapsychology, or the study of psychic events, for the past four decades.
And in the early 1970s—in the midst of the Cold War against the Soviet Union—the U.S. government agreed.
By the time Puthoff and his colleague Russel Targ, another physicist at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International), presented their results at an international meeting on quantum physics and parapsychology, the CIA had already begun working with SRI to perform top-secret research on paranormal phenomena—primarily “remote viewing” for intelligence collection. Remote viewing refers to a type of extra-sensorial perception that involves using the mind to “see” or manipulate distant objects, people, events, or other information that are hidden from physical view.
By the mid-1980s, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) took the program over, calling it “Stargate.” DIA had three main goals for its research:
- Determine how to apply remote viewing to intelligence gathering against foreign targets;
- Figure out how other countries could be doing the same thing and using it against the U.S.; and
- Perform laboratory experiments to find ways to improve remote viewing for use in the intelligence field
The program was about as clandestine as it gets. Radin, who served as a visiting scientist on the Stargate program, says security personnel would brief him and his colleagues about the incredible sensitivity of their highly classified work every two weeks, and ask them if they had any reason to believe that anyone outside of the project knew anything about it.
“You had to become a professional paranoid, essentially. It was very uncomfortable for me,” Radin says.
He remembers asking one of his supervisors what would happen if they had a breakthrough—say, coming up with a drug to make someone super psychic. The response was immediate. “It would disappear and you would never be able to talk about it again,” Radin recalls, “which is antithetical to the whole scientific process, but I also understood why.” Any weapon or intelligence tool developed under Stargate would have presumably been too valuable and too dangerous for public release.
The DIA continued the project until the mid-1990s, when the CIA began declassifying its documents on remote viewing research to facilitate an external review of the project, and the DIA quickly followed suit. In June 1995, the CIA asked The American Institutes for Research (AIR)—an Arlington, Virginia-based nonprofit tasked with evaluating and providing technical assistance in behavioral and social science research—to conduct an external review of the Stargate program.
To present a balanced review of the scientific credibility of the program, AIR asked two researchers with opposing perspectives on parapsychology to write the report: Jessica Utts, Ph.D., an accomplished statistician and now professor emerita at the University of California, Irvine, who views parapsychology as a promising science; and Ray Hyman, Ph.D., a renowned psychologist and now professor emeritus at the University of Oregon, who is a noted skeptic and critic of parapsychology.
“They sent us these boxes full of reports and papers and told us we had one summer to write this report,” Utts tells Popular Mechanics. She and Hyman separately reviewed dozens of Stargate experiments while also taking into account data from the broader scientific community at the time.
The reviewers’ individual conclusions were as expected. Utts found the statistics compelling, and believed the studies provided strong evidence that remote viewing is a human capability. One of the things she found most convincing was that the results seen across studies in different laboratories were all very similar. “And it was all statistically significant,” she says, “so that’s really hard to explain by chance, or cheating, or coincidence, or fluke.”
To that extent, Hyman agreed with Utts, but it wasn’t enough to convince him that remote viewing is real. He found what he considered to be potential flaws in the experimental methods, such as using the same person to judge psychic ability in each trial, and determined that the experimental results were not consistent enough with experiments outside the program. Nonetheless, he wrote in the final report: “The case for psychic functioning seems better than it ever has been. The contemporary findings along with the output of the [Stargate] program do seem to indicate that something beyond odd statistical hiccups is taking place.”
Despite what may be viewed as an optimistic review, the Stargate program no longer exists, and as far as we know, the U.S. government hasn’t continued such research. “I’m sorry it ended, because I really do think that there’s much more to be discovered there,” Utts says.
But maybe it hasn’t ended. Maybe it’s just top secret. Only a true psychic would know.
Kimberly is a freelance science writer with a degree in marine biology from Texas A&M University, a master's degree in biology from Southeastern Louisiana University and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work has been published by NBC, Science, Live Science, Space.com and many others. Her favorite stories are about health, animals and obscurities.
