Project Stargate was a real, decades-long CIA and US Army program (1970s–1995) that investigated “remote viewing”—the use of claimed psychic abilities to gather military intelligence. It was declassified in 1995 and its original documents are publicly housed at Rice University in the “Archives of the Impossible.” The program was run by secular physicists, cost over $20 million, and was driven by Cold War pragmatism—the US, Soviet Union, and China all pursued similar programs. The host argues that the program’s existence and documented “hits” (accurate psychic descriptions of hidden targets like military bases, tunnel systems, and nuclear test sites) challenge materialist assumptions about consciousness and reality, and raise deep questions about ontology and metaphysics.
How Remote Viewing Worked
A remote viewer sat in a room, was given only an anonymized reference number for a target (e.g., a military base or location), and then sketched and recorded all sensory impressions received psychically.
Sessions were structured using worksheets and were led by trained military personnel, often physicists.
Targets included physical locations, hidden infrastructure (trucks, submarines under structures), and even specific moments in time—such as a rocket engine test with a white dust cloud that appeared in the viewer’s drawing.
Some viewers drew maps or tunnel systems that were later verified.
Documented “Hits” and Evidence
Physical location matches: Viewers produced drawings closely matching targets like the Stanford Shopping Center, nuclear test sites, and hidden tunnel systems—despite having no prior knowledge of the target.
Temporal anomalies: Remote viewing was not always simultaneous. Viewers sometimes depicted sites as they appeared decades earlier (e.g., Pat Price drew water tanks around a Palo Alto swimming pool that no longer existed but were confirmed in a 40–50-year-old photograph) or even in the future.
Hidden targets: Some of the most striking hits involved things invisible to an on-site observer, such as concealed trucks or submarines beneath structures.
The host emphasizes that these are original CIA documents, not fabrications, and that the sheer improbability of the matches demands explanation.
Why the Superpowers Invested in Psychic Espionage
Cold War pragmatism: During wartime, governments care about what works, not what sounds credible. The US, USSR, and China all funded parapsychological research because the potential intelligence advantage was too significant to ignore.
Cheap insurance: Even skeptics within the military acknowledged that $20 million over 20 years was negligible compared to other defense spending—and if psychic spying even occasionally worked, it was worth the investment.
Presidential-level concern: There were recommendations to the president not to build certain missile programs out of fear that the Soviet Union could psychically detect them.
The host argues that the military’s brute pragmatism gives Stargate more credibility than anecdotal psychic claims, because the military has no incentive to fund something that doesn’t work for over two decades.
Why Was Stargate Terminated?
The official 1995 review concluded the program produced no actionable intelligence and was not worth continuing.
The “Christian shutdown” narrative: A competing explanation from the remote viewing community is that conservative Christian officials within the CIA and military equated remote viewing with demonic practices and blood magic, and shut it down on religious grounds—not because it failed.
The “gaslighting” narrative: The host and interviewee suspect the program may still continue in classified form, and that the declassification of Stargate was itself a disinformation tactic—mixing real data with scops (disinformation) so the public dismisses all of it as nonsense.
The interviewee notes that secrets are often best hidden in plain sight, buried among hoaxes and ridicule.
Nature vs. Nurture: Can Anyone Remote View?
The Stargate program was built on the training model—the belief that remote viewing could be turned into a repeatable protocol usable by almost anyone.
The interviewee is skeptical of this and leans toward the gifted individual model—that remote viewing depends on special people, possibly those with trauma or unusual psychological profiles.
The Army specifically selected viewers who were not believers in the paranormal but were psychically healthy, which the interviewee thinks may have been counterproductive.
The Physics and Metaphysics of Remote Viewing
Ed May’s entropy theory: Physicist Ed May, who led Stargate in the 1980s–90s, proposed that remote viewing is more likely to succeed when the target involves high entropy (e.g., a nuclear explosion, a bomb blast). This would explain why nuclear sites and submarines were easier targets.
Materialist vs. non-materialist explanations:
Materialist (Ed May): Remote viewing is real but must have a physical explanation involving space, time, matter, and energy that we don’t yet understand. Consciousness is still ultimately physical.
Non-local consciousness: Consciousness is not locked to the body and can perceive distant locations and times because it is fundamentally non-local.
The interviewee is agnostic between these models but finds the conversation crucial precisely because Stargate was conducted by government scientists, not mystics.
Two Competing Models of How Remote Viewing Works
Clairvoyant model: Consciousness leaves the body and directly perceives the target in real time at a distance—consciousness is non-local in space.
Precognitive model (Eric Wargo): The viewer is not seeing the target now but is pre-cognitively perceiving the moment in the future when they will be shown the target image. The “hit” is actually a vision of a future feedback session.
This model struggles to explain cases where viewers accurately depicted targets they were never shown.
The Pat Price swimming pool case is ambiguous: either he clairvoyantly saw the past (when the water tanks existed) or pre-cognitively saw a photograph of the past that would later be shown to him—a “loopy” temporal paradox.
The Connection Between Remote Viewing, UFOs, and Nuclear Sites
Remote viewers frequently reported seeing UFOs during sessions, even when that was not the target.
The interviewee speculates that UFOs (which they believe may be future humans) are drawn to nuclear sites because future humans are concerned about nuclear energy and ecological destruction—consistent with a block-universe or eternal-recurrence model of time.
Ed May’s entropy theory also predicts that nuclear sites would be high-value targets for remote viewing because of the immense energy and entropy involved.
Psychokinesis: The Other Half of Stargate
Stargate had two mandates: remote viewing (sensing) and psychokinesis (influencing matter with the mind).
Psychokinesis was never successfully turned into a protocol within Stargate, but the interviewee believes it happens outside the lab.
The Gold Leaf Lady: One of the most dramatic cases in the archives—a woman in Florida who exuded gold leaf (later found to be fake gold) from her face and arms. This was documented by analytic philosopher Steven Browdy in The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Psychophysical Investigations.
Why This Matters Philosophically
The host’s core interest is not military or business applications but what Stargate implies about the nature of reality.
It represents an immanent critique of materialism: the program was run by atheist, secular, Marxist, and materialist governments (US, USSR, China) using empirical methods—yet it produced results that materialism cannot easily explain.
The host argues that if we take the results seriously, we must reconsider fundamental assumptions about consciousness, time, and whether the mind is truly confined to the brain.
The interviewee adds that the government and skeptical community engage in systemic gaslighting around paranormal phenomena, using fraud and ridicule to dismiss overwhelming experiential evidence—and that individuals don’t need government permission to know these things are real.
