The CIA ran a secret $20M psychic spy program (Stargate Project) for 20 years — declassified in 2017

For decades, the U.S. government dismissed claims that it had investigated psychic espionage as the stuff of science fiction. Yet between 1975 and 1995, the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Army quietly spent $20 million funding exactly that—a classified program called Stargate that operated out of Fort Meade, Maryland, tasking remote viewers with describing Soviet military installations and hostage locations using purported psychic abilities alone.

The program existed because officials took the possibility seriously. During the Cold War, American intelligence agencies worried that the Soviet Union might be developing psychic weapons or intelligence capabilities. Rather than cede any potential advantage, they funded research into remote viewing—the claimed ability to perceive distant or hidden locations through consciousness alone. Remote viewers like Ingo Swann and Pat Price claimed they could sketch Soviet facilities, identify submarine deployments, and locate missing hostages with surprising accuracy.

For two decades, this wasn't conspiracy theory whispered in the margins of fringe media. It was government-funded research with institutional backing, classified budgets, and official protocols. The program generated thousands of pages of documentation. Yet publicly, official channels dismissed remote viewing as pseudoscience, offering no acknowledgment that taxpayers were funding its investigation.

The turning point came in 1995 when the CIA terminated Stargate. An independent review acknowledged something remarkable: statistician Jessica Utts, who analyzed the data, found that remote viewing results consistently exceeded chance by 5 to 15 percent. The effect appeared statistically replicable. Yet the same review concluded that despite these anomalies, remote viewing had never produced actionable intelligence that actually guided any operation or prevented any threat.