Stargate Project and SRI Remote Viewing Evidence

In April 1973, at the Stanford Research Institute, the artist and author Ingo Swann aimed his attention at Jupiter months before the NASA Pioneer-10 flyby. A year earlier, according to a 2002 account, Swann had got Hal Puthoff and his SRI colleagues interested in investigating the boundary between the animate and inanimate. The same account says that, to the chagrin of Swann and the SRI researchers, he found a ring around Jupiter and wondered whether he had remote-viewed Saturn by mistake, and that the Pioneer-10 flyby then confirmed the existence of rings around Jupiter. [1] That last claim is wrong: Pioneer 10 did not confirm them, the existence of Jupiter’s rings was first inferred from Pioneer 11 radiation-belt data in 1975, and Voyager 1 first observed them on 4 March 1979. [17] Proponents nonetheless cite the session as a hit, although in the session transcript Swann described bands of crystals high in the atmosphere, “maybe like rings of Saturn, though not far out like that, very close within the atmosphere”. [16]

Testing Pioneer F Spacecraft - GPN-2000-001626. Photo: NASA / Wikimedia Commons. Source

JupiterRings. Photo: NASA/JPL/Cornell University / Wikimedia Commons. Source

For the next two decades, the U.S. government kept testing whether Swann’s gift — or something like it — could be turned into a spy tool; a 1995 CIA memo on the program’s declassification speaks of the “20 year history of the intelligence community’s projects in parapsychology”. [2] The program that grew out of those SRI experiments ran under successive project names, of which Sun Streak and Stargate were the best known, and was wound up in 1995. [3] In its 1995 evaluation for the CIA, the American Institutes for Research found that the laboratory studies showed a statistically significant effect, yet concluded that remote viewing “failed to produce actionable intelligence”. [12] A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis covering remote-viewing research from 1974 to 2022 would later calculate an average effect size of 0.34 after excluding outliers. [4]

Findings

The U.S. government–sponsored psi research effort now generically referred to as the Stargate Project emerged in 1972 under the Defense Intelligence Agency, with the program’s laboratory component contracted to Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and its operational component eventually moved to Fort Meade, Maryland. The SRI remote-viewing research was led by physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ working with ‘gifted subjects’ including Pat Price and Ingo Swann. The program is usually dated 1977–1995, with DIA activity going back to 1972. [3]

SRI International main campus, Menlo Park, California, in a NASA World Wind aerial view. Photo: NASA World Wind / Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Source

Illustration: Organic biofield sensor sri puthoff fontes. Photo: Plantman77 / Wikimedia Commons. Source

The first operational Grill Flame remote-viewing session took place on 4 September 1979, when Army Intelligence tasked a session with locating a missing Navy aircraft; the Grey Dynamics article reports it was considered a success, locating the crash site within roughly fifteen miles of its actual location. [14] [3] The early SRI work reportedly produced detailed descriptions of targets such as a Soviet R&D facility at Semipalatinsk. [3] Under the related Sun Streak project, remote-viewing operations were transferred from a California research facility to Fort Meade, Maryland (home of NSA headquarters) and organized around task categories including penetration of inaccessible targets, science and technology information, and intelligence cuing. [14]

National Security Agency headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland. Photo: National Security Agency / Wikimedia Commons. Headquarters of the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. Source

A 1995 summary evaluation of 40 operational tasks, scored under a method the DIA Star Gate program office had created in 1994, concluded that “the utility of RV for operational intelligence collection cannot be substantiated”; the program was terminated later that year. [15]

A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis identified as the first meta-analysis of remote-viewing studies selected 36 studies with 40 effect sizes and reported an average effect size of 0.34 (95% CI 0.22–0.45) after excluding outliers, with no signs of publication bias and a minimal decline effect, corresponding to a 19.3% hits-score difference above chance. [4]

Forestplot01, a generic forest plot. Photo: Produnis / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). Source

Illustration: Funnelplot, a schematic funnel plot showing no publication bias. Photo: Nousernamesleft / Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Source

Illustration: PRISMA flow diagram. Photo: Atizinha / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Source

Connecting the Dots

The Jupiter session sits at the center of the Stargate story. On the evening of April 27, 1973, Ingo Swann (on the West Coast, starting at 6:00 p.m. Pacific time) and Harold Sherman of Mountain View, Arkansas (starting at 8:00 p.m. Central time) probed the planet simultaneously and compared their results by telephone after half an hour. [16] Seven months later, on December 3, 1973, NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft flew past Jupiter; no ring was detected until Voyager 1 in 1979. [17] In the transcript, Swann’s “ring” is a band of crystals “very close within the atmosphere”, likened to Saturn’s rings, and the two men’s own report claimed no validity for their results and left any verification to Pioneer 10. [16]

Illustration: Pioneer 10/11 full-scale mock-up, detail. Photo: TRW, Inc / DPLA / Wikimedia Commons (CC0). Source

Pioneer 10 Trajectory. Photo: NASA Ames Resarch Center (NASA-ARC) / Wikimedia Commons. Source

An artist’s impression of a Pioneer spacecraft on its way to interstellar space. Photo: NASA/Don Davis / Wikimedia Commons. An artist’s impression of Pioneer 10 looking back on the inner Solar while on its way to interstellar space. Source

The most revealing tension sits inside the 1995 American Institutes for Research evaluation. Mumford, Rose, and Goslin concluded that laboratory RV studies showed statistically significant hits beyond chance, but explicitly noted the effect could not be cleanly attributed to paranormal ability versus methodological artifacts such as judge or target characteristics. Jessica Utts, the panel’s statistician, went further, declaring that “psychic functioning has been well established” and that the statistical results were “far beyond what is expected by chance”. Her fellow panel member Ray Hyman took the opposite inferential step, warning that the jump from statistical significance to a paranormal mechanism was unsupported. [12] A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis of remote-viewing studies from 1974 to 2022, selecting 36 studies with 40 effect sizes, found an average effect size of 0.34 (95% CI: 0.22–0.45) after excluding outliers, corresponding to a hit rate 19.3% above expected chance, with no significant publication bias detected and only a minimal decline effect. The statistical signal has, against the broader replication crisis in psychology, proven surprisingly durable. [4]

The operational record tells a different story than the laboratory. The AIR evaluation concluded that “in no case had the information provided ever been used to guide intelligence operations” and that remote viewing “failed to produce actionable intelligence.” [12] This verdict echoes across every operational angle: the roughly $20 million program was terminated in 1995 after a CIA-commissioned review concluded it had never produced actionable intelligence, even as individual sessions remain individually striking. Such striking sessions include the first operational Grill Flame task on September 4, 1979, which reportedly located a missing Navy aircraft within roughly fifteen miles of its actual crash site. [3] Another notable case was Joseph McMoneagle’s May 1987 description of the windmill farm adjacent to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. [1] The same class of operational claim that produces coordinates of apparent precision, such as one viewer’s reported pinpointing of a Soviet listening post at 65°00′57″ N, 59°59′59″ E, sits in unresolved tension with the institutional verdict that no such precision ever translated into intelligence gain. Escolà-Gascón’s 2023 work suggests the gap may track the individual: in a believer subsample of 287 participants, RV hits were 19.5% predictable from emotional intelligence with effect sizes between 0.457 and 0.853, while non-believers showed non-significant effects, although the two groups also viewed different kinds of targets (coordinates versus images), so belief and task cannot be separated. [9]

The Other Side

The most sustained mainstream critique came from psychologist Ray Hyman, who served as the skeptic on the 1995 CIA review panel alongside Jessica Utts. Hyman granted that the SAIC experiments were free of the obvious flaws of earlier work and that their effects were too large and consistent to be statistical flukes, but argued that a single judge, the same viewers and targets across experiments, and the absence of independent replication left anomalous cognition undemonstrated. The AIR evaluation noted that operational reports were accurate mainly on broad background features, which might reflect background information available to the viewers rather than paranormal input. [12]

Whether psi effect sizes decline over time is disputed: Tressoldi and Storm (2024) concluded that, apart from the remote-viewing protocol, such a decline was a myth, while Bierman and Spottiswoode (2026) found declines within 7 of 10 protocols, including remote viewing, though not when all studies are pooled [5].

Funnel plot depicting asymmetry Sept 2015. Photo: Sardmeta1 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). Example of a funnel plot used in meta-analysis to detect publication bias and depicting asymmetry. Source

Example of a symmetrical funnel plot created with MetaXL Sept 2015. Photo: Sardmeta1 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). This is a funnel plot used in meta-analysis to detect publication bias. Source

Illustration: Generic forest plot. Photo: James Grellier / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). Source

The operational record offers limited support for intelligence value. A 1974 operational scan of the Soviet Union reportedly located a radio listening post at 65°00′57″ N, 59°59′59″ E; the only verification on record is the sponsor’s own statement that the description was “substantially correct”, with no independent check against Soviet records. [1]

What We Actually Know

The investigation surfaced a more mixed record than either the enthusiastic or the dismissive version of remote viewing suggests. On the evening of April 27, 1973, Ingo Swann described glittering crystal bands high in Jupiter’s atmosphere, “maybe like rings of Saturn, though not far out like that”. The session was run in parallel with Harold Sherman, who probed Jupiter at the same time from Arkansas. [16] Jupiter’s faint rings were first inferred from Pioneer 11 radiation-belt data in 1975 and first observed by Voyager 1 on 4 March 1979, almost six years after the session. [17] The 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis — the first to cover all remote-viewing studies up to December 2022 — selected 36 studies with 40 effect sizes and returned an average effect size of 0.34 (95% CI: 0.22–0.45) after excluding outliers, translating to a 19.3% hit-rate advantage above chance, with no signs of publication bias. [4] Even the 1995 American Institutes for Research evaluation, conducted for the CIA, acknowledged that laboratory RV studies showed statistically significant above-chance hit rates. The first operational Grill Flame session in September 1979 reportedly located an aircraft crash site within roughly fifteen miles of its actual location. [3]

Saturn’s rings, dark-side mosaic taken by the Cassini spacecraft. Photo: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Saturn eclipsing the Sun, seen by the Cassini spacecraft on 15 September 2006. Photo: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Saturn and its rings from the Cassini orbiter, October 2004. Photo: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Jovian Ring System PIA01623. Photo: NASA/JPL/Cornell University / Wikimedia Commons. Mosaic of Galileo images of the jovian rings with an explanatory scheme. Source

The Stargate Project was wound up in 1995 after the CIA-commissioned review concluded it had never produced actionable intelligence, and its later phase was directed by Edwin C. May, a nuclear physicist by training, from 1985 to 1995 [6]. CIA declassified documents are publicly accessible through the Reading Room and the CREST database [7]. Persinger (2002) published a peer-reviewed neuropsychological profile of Swann in connection with his remote-viewing work [8].

Plausible-but-uncertain findings form a second tier. Pat Price’s 1974 Faraday-cage remote viewing of Palo Alto’s Rinconada Park pool reportedly described pool dimensions that were close to actual — “about 100 ft” for a 110-ft circular pool, “60 by 80 ft” for a 75-by-100-ft rectangular pool — along with two water tanks and a water-purification plant that did not exist in 1974 but appeared in a 1913 photograph, cited as an example of “retro-cognition”. Joseph McMoneagle’s 1987 viewing of the Lawrence Livermore Electron Accelerator using only a name and Social Security Number yielded 77 per cent overall accuracy and 78 per cent reliability by Fuzzy Set Analysis. [1] The 2023 Escolà-Gascón follow-up using 634 participants split the result along belief lines: non-believers (N=347) produced non-significant effects while believers (N=287) showed significant RV effects correlated with emotional intelligence, although the two groups also used different targets (coordinates versus images), so belief and task cannot be separated [9]. The AIR evaluation itself remained internally divided — Utts’s positive findings and Hyman’s skeptical assessment were never reconciled within the report. [12]

Speculative threads remain unresolved. Whether Swann’s description of crystal bands “very close within the atmosphere” should count as a ring prediction at all is doubtful, since Jupiter’s rings were first observed by Voyager 1 almost six years after the session. [17] Puthoff, Targ, and May’s claim that free-response remote viewing showed accuracy independent of distance up to 10,000 km and of time up to several days into the future rests on single-source attribution. And whether Stargate produced any operational intelligence value at all remains contested — the AIR review concluded no, while program defenders cite unverified cases. [10]

The 1975 US 10-cent stamp commemorating Pioneer’s flight to Jupiter. Photo: US Post Office; Bureau of Engraving and Printing / Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Source

The mainstream scientific consensus, stated honestly, characterizes remote viewing as having no supporting scientific evidence and as generally regarded as a pseudoscience, with experiments criticized for lacking proper controls and repeatability. The PEAR laboratory closed in February 2007 after running from 1979, folded into the International Consciousness Research Laboratories, with critics citing lack of scientific rigor, poor methodology, and statistical misuse [11]. A 2012 meta-analysis reported physiological anticipation 0.5–10 seconds before seemingly unpredictable stimuli; studies within it that tested for expectation bias found it could not explain the effects. [13]

What remains genuinely open is the question that has haunted this field since 1995: did Stargate produce any documented, independently verified “actionable intelligence” at the operational level, despite the AIR’s negative conclusion? The case-level operational claims that circulate through program defenders have not been corroborated against declassified records, and the AIR report itself concluded that the conditions supporting laboratory effects did not apply to operational intelligence gathering. The investigation found the laboratory signal. The operational signal remains unresolved. [12]

References

[1] Clairvoyant Remote Viewing: The US Sponsored Psychic Spying — https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/sa/sa_jan02srm01.html (accessed 2026-07-28) [Academic]

[2] STAR GATE RECORDS DECLASSIFICATION — https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00791r000200030015-8 (accessed 2026-07-28) [Academic]

[3] Intelligence Past the Tangible World: CIA’s Stargate Project — https://greydynamics.com/intelligence-past-the-tangible-world-cias-stargate-project/ (accessed 2026-07-28)

[4] Patrizio Tressoldi and Debra Katz (2023). Remote Viewing: A 1974-2022 Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of Scientific Exploration. DOI: 10.31275/20232931 (accessed 2026-07-28)

[5] The Decline of Effect Size in Psi Research — https://journalofscientificexploration.org/index.php/jse/article/view/4003/2610 (accessed 2026-07-28)

[6] Ingo Swann and Hal Puthoff Remote Viewing Training of Turhuck, 1981-06 (Rice University archives) — https://archives.library.rice.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/335745 (accessed 2026-07-28) [Academic]

[7] CIA’s CREST declassified database is now online. Thanks MuckRock and others! — https://freegovinfo.info/node/11546/ (accessed 2026-07-28)

[8] Michael A. Persinger (2002). Remote viewing with the artist Ingo Swann: neuropsychological profile, electroencephalographic correlates, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and possible mechanisms. Perceptual and Motor Skills — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12081299/ (accessed 2026-07-28) [Academic]

[9] Álex Escolà‐Gascón, James Houran, Neil Dagnall, Kenneth Drinkwater, and Andrew Denovan (2023). Follow‐up on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) remote viewing experiments. Brain and Behavior. DOI: 10.1002/brb3.3026 (accessed 2026-07-28) [Academic]

[10] Russell Targ (2019). What Do We Know about Psi? The First Decade of Remote-Viewing Research and Operations at Stanford Research Institute. Journal of Scientific Exploration. DOI: 10.31275/2019/1669 (accessed 2026-07-28)

[11] Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalies_Research_Lab (accessed 2026-07-28) [Reputable]

[12] Michael D. Mumford, Andrew M. Rose and David A. Goslin (1995). An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications. American Institutes for Research — https://www.scribd.com/doc/92017954/Air-Report (accessed 2026-07-28)

[13] Julia Mossbridge, Patrizio Tressoldi and Jessica Utts (2012). Predictive physiological anticipation preceding seemingly unpredictable stimuli: a meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology — https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00390 (accessed 2026-10-04) [Academic]

[14] A Brief Overview of Project Sun Streak (CIA-RDP96-00789R002100240001-2) — https://archive.org/download/CIA-RDP96-00789R002100240001-2/CIA-RDP96-00789R002100240001-2_djvu.txt (accessed 2026-10-04) [Academic]

[15] Summary Report, Star Gate Operational Tasking and Evaluation (CIA-RDP96-00791R000200300006-8) — https://archive.org/download/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00791r000200300006-8/cia-rdp96-00791r000200300006-8_djvu.txt (accessed 2026-10-04) [Academic]

[16] An Experimental Psychic Probe of the Planet Jupiter (NSA-RDP96X00790R000100040010-3) — https://archive.org/download/cia-readingroom-document-nsa-rdp96x00790r000100040010-3/nsa-rdp96x00790r000100040010-3_djvu.txt (accessed 2026-10-04) [Academic]

[17] Rings of Jupiter — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Jupiter (accessed 2026-10-20) [Reputable]