The CIA Really Did Investigate Psychic Spies

For years, parts of the American intelligence community investigated whether people could acquire useful information about distant places, objects or events without ordinary sensory access.

The practice became known as remote viewing.

And no, this part is not conspiracy theory.

The CIA itself says it began investigating remote viewing in 1972, later handing the work to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Programs operated under several names over the years, with STARGATE eventually becoming the best known.

The surviving declassified archive is wonderfully strange.

There are session reports in which viewers attempted to describe geographic locations and intelligence targets. One declassified GRILL FLAME report, for example, documents remote viewing conducted in connection with the U.S. Embassy hostage situation in Tehran.

This naturally raises the interesting question.

Did it work?

That depends on what "work" means.

When the program was reviewed in 1995, evaluators disagreed over the significance of some experimental results, but the practical conclusion was much less exciting.

Remote viewing was not reliable enough for intelligence operations.

According to the CIA's own summary, the assessment found results that some researchers believed could not be explained entirely by chance, but the information produced was too inconsistent and sporadic to be useful for intelligence purposes.

The program was not restored.

That is less satisfying than either extreme.

The official story is neither "psychic spies were proven real" nor "the government never did anything this ridiculous."

The government absolutely did something this ridiculous.

It did it for years.

And there is a perfectly rational reason intelligence agencies sometimes investigate ideas that sound absurd.

If there were even a small chance an adversary had discovered a useful technique, ignoring it could be expensive.

During the Cold War, stranger possibilities received budgets.

The fascinating part of STARGATE is therefore not proof of paranormal powers.

It is proof that somewhere in the bureaucracy of modern intelligence, somebody genuinely had to evaluate whether a person sitting in one room could mentally observe another place.

Human history is generous like that.