Discoveries
The CIA Paid Psychics for Two Decades — and Kept the Files
Declassified STARGATE records show US intelligence funded 'remote viewing' research from the 1970s until 1995, before an independent review concluded it had never produced actionable intelligence.
27 October 2026 · InMillhouse
For more than twenty years, the United States government paid people to try to see distant places with their minds.
The programme, best known by its final name STARGATE, began in the early 1970s with CIA-funded experiments at the Stanford Research Institute and later passed to Army and Defense Intelligence Agency management under a succession of codenames, including GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE and SUN STREAK [1].
The released files contain session transcripts in which 'viewers' were handed sealed coordinates and asked to describe the target. Some sketches are strikingly vague; a handful were judged by the programme's own staff to be intriguing.
In 1995 the CIA commissioned an evaluation by the American Institutes for Research. Its conclusion was blunt: remote viewing had never provided information that helped guide an intelligence operation [2]. The programme was closed the same year.
What the record shows, then, is not proof of psychic powers but something arguably more revealing: how Cold War anxiety about Soviet parapsychology research was enough to sustain an official programme for two decades.