Forbidden History - Project Stargate: Did the CIA Discover Real Psychic Powers?

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Could psychic powers be the ultimate spying weapon? Former CIA officer Lindsay Moran joins us to explore Project Stargate, the secret programme that investigated whether the human mind could uncover intelligence beyond the reach of conventional espionage. Cast List: Eric Meyers: Narrator Lindsay Clancy: Former CIA Officer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Okay. my business. I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my head of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivatewealth.com. Welcome to the forbidden history.

podcast. Be sure to catch our Patreon exclusive Inner Circle series, featuring live expert interviews and deep dives into your favorite topics. Thanks for supporting the show. Over its 80-year life, the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California has given the world's speech recognition, VPNs, and laser printing. It's filed over 13,000 patents and generated more than 50 spin-off companies. But back in August, 1972, it embarks on an unusual experiment. Its purpose to explore a potential new espionage technique that will become known as remote viewing. This was the idea that certain individuals might be able to perceive distant places or events using extrasensory perception. I mean, that's kind of a euphemistic way of sense.

saying like, psychics. It sounds like something from the pages of science fiction. But as Ingo Swan, an artist and self-described psychic, sits down to begin the experiment, it is very real. His task is to use his psychic abilities to describe what another participant elsewhere on the Stanford campus can see. In intelligence work, there's always

going to be this tension between skepticism and curious If you dismiss unusual ideas too quickly, you might be missing something real. Remarkably, Ingo meets with some success. He produces descriptions such as a large open courtyard, a building with columns, and a fountain-like structure. In further experiments, Ingo describes locations when given nothing more than a latitude and a longitude. The results are so intriguing that the CIA invests fifty-year-old. $30,000 to pay for a formal study.

This investment would turn out to be only the beginning. What would result is a multi-million dollar research program that would capture the attention of several U.S. government departments and become known as Project Stargate. For the next 23 years, researchers would rigorously experiment with extrasensory perception in the hopes that it would one day become a tool in America's intelligence gathering arsenal. It's one of the most bizarre and intriguing stories in American intelligence history. And to take us through it, former CIA agent Lindsay Moran. Project Stargate shows us how there's this constant tension in the world of intelligence

between skepticism and between imagination. In theory, if the descriptions consistently matched the real targets, that would suggest some kind of anomalous perceptual, really psychic ability. This wasn't the first or last time that the CIA dabbled in the idea of mind control, which they're probably still doing to this day. Welcome to the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies. I'm Eric Myers, and this is forbidden history. Cold War rivalry between America

and the Soviet Union leads to the space race, projects to create ever more deadly nuclear weapons, and a scramble to spread competing ideologies around the world. But behind these public competitions is another more secretive contest, the one between opposing intelligence agencies. The 1970s were this period of really intense technological and also psychological competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. I grew up in the 1970s and grew up very much

with kind of this mentality that the world was separated into Tupo. We were the good guys and the Soviets were the bad guys. And my own upbringing was very much shaped by this Cold War mentality. And in fact, it's what drew me to have a fascination with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc and to go into the world of intelligence. It really was this like race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Just, you know, a real kind of spy versus spy world at that time. Due to the clandestine nature of this rivalry, it's difficult for opposing intelligence

agencies to know what the other one is doing to get ahead. Intelligence agencies in the 1970s, they were constantly worried about being surprised by some kind of breakthrough, some new capability that the other side had discovered first. Agencies occasionally test unusual hypotheses or improbable hypotheses because the cost of missing a breakthrough, that cost can be very high. A wide variety of research projects are born simply from the notion that each side can't afford to leave any stone unturned. From high altitude reconnaissance aircraft, like the U-2, to biological and chemical weapons

research. But just sometimes, intelligence reports and the good old-fashioned rumor mill can lead agencies to begin research projects that are off the wall. So at that time, there were reports that the Soviets were investing in research related to mind control phenomenon, like parapsychology. So whether those reports were true or exaggerated or not, nevertheless, it created a sense inside the U.S. national security community that we couldn't afford to ignore the possibility that they were pursuing this. In intelligence work, there's always going to be this tension between skepticism and curiosity. If you dismiss unusual ideas too quickly, you might be missing something real. The idea that psychics can use extrasensory perception to spy on the enemy is certainly an unusual idea.

But is it a real one? Those initial experiments at Stanford aim to put it to the test. And when the results are positive, if inconsistent, the CIA is fueled by the fear that the Soviets could be on to something. Things move fast. That small experiment becomes a funded, structured, and classified program, initially called scanate, short for scanning by coordinate. The early scientific work was conducted by these researchers at Stanford Research Institute. And this included physicists and psychologists who were interested in studying unusual cognitive phenomena. So within the government, it was a small number of intelligence and defense officials who oversaw the program.

The project lead is an electrical engineer and parapsychologist called Harold or Hal Putoff. Put-Off had earned his PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University. In the 1960s, he had worked as a researcher at the National Security Agency, undertaking classified research in electronic intelligence and advanced communications. He is also a member of the Church of Scientology. Scientology was where he had first become interested in altered states and perception, and also where he had met Ingo-Swan, that first test subject. And now his task is to find further promising subjects to study, people with apparent psychic abilities.

He and his team cast a wide net. So the physicists and psychologists would conduct these cognitive experiments, and sometimes they would use, you know, internal personnel, but oftentimes they would find people who had been known to advertise that they had unusual perceptual ability. There was also an effort and outreach effort made to find these in, you know, who are people who advertise themselves as psychics or who are known to have these kind of abilities and to draw those people in and use those people in the experiments. These could have been like, you know, magicians and psychics. Really, it could run the gamut. But they would have to sign secrecy agreements and agree that any of their participation in these experiments that they would not talk about it or or discuss it with anyone.

The cohort of psychics and magicians are given the far more professional term, remote viewers, and their abilities are put to the test carefully and methodically. In a typical remote viewing experiment, a participant would sit quietly and try to describe a location or object that they had never seen based only on a set of coordinates

or like a coded reference number. And the idea was that if the phenomenon were real, if the remote viewing were real, the person might be able to sketch or describe features of the target, like a building, a landscape, machinery, or equipment, and to be able to do all this without physically being there. Before the remote viewers attempt to look at the USSR, they first must prove they can find a building down the road.

And so, for these initial experiments, participants are given locations easily verified by the CIA, such as nearby industrial sites and local landmarks in the Bay Area. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and Game Sense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you,

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Find your advisor at IGPrivatewealth.com. In conducting the experiments, you had to have some known factors. You know, you had to have some knowledge of what the kind of information that your remote viewer was providing, if that was actually true or not. And that's the only way they could vet these experiments to see if this really was, you know, like a viable phenomenon. So researchers would then compare those descriptions or the sketches with the actual location to see whether or not there were any meaningful matches. These sessions were conducted under very controlled conditions designed to prevent the participant from receiving clues in any ordinary ways. So, you know, it's almost like imagining. like a juror or a jury being sequestered.

And in theory, if the descriptions consistently matched the real targets, that would suggest some kind of anomalous, perceptual, really psychic ability. The early results are mixed. As you might expect, the majority of sessions produce nothing of interest. And yet, in a few experiments, when the remote viewers are given latitude and longitude and no contextual information. They do come up with accurate terrain types and verifiable large structures.

The results are not strong enough to be reliable, but they are intriguing enough to stop the CIA from walking away. And there's another factor at work. Due to Project Lead Hal Put-Off's experience as a physicist, combined with his interest in parapsychology, he is able to explain psychic perception using the language of physics. This makes a fringe phenomenon look like hard science.

And so the project moves forward to the next stage. Remote viewers are tasked to describe locations within America's adversary, the USSR. In a few cases, remote viewers were asked specifically to describe the layout of foreign installations. Sometimes they were asked to identify structures at what might just be a suspected military site or a suspected spy installation. Sometimes they were asked to provide impressions about what are the activities taking place there.

In other experiments or in other cases, they were also asked to focus on objects, like, for example, the location of a missing aircraft or a submarine. The results of the experiment are then compared with intelligence gathered through more traditional means. The intelligence officers could take supplementary information that we already had, like satellite imagery, and compare it against what these remote viewers were describing to see, you know, are there real overlaps here?

One of the more promising candidates is a former police commissioner called Pat Price. During his time spent working in California law enforcement, He had become known for telling his colleagues that he could see distant locations during missing person cases. In the experiments, he describes a Soviet facility with a large crane system, complete with internal layout details. His visions aren't perfect, but they are eerily similar. And yet despite these apparent successes, as the program continues, doubts begin to set in. The problem, though, was that while some sessions produced striking similarities, many, many others did not.

And so the inconsistency made it extremely difficult to treat remote viewing as a dependable intelligence tool. Intelligence organizations need methods that work reliably, not just occasionally. Within the CIA, some are still curious about the experiments and what they're. could potentially offer. Others are simply embarrassed that they are even happening. Then in July, 1975, Pat Price dies. The believers had lost their star performer, and the voices of the skeptics drown them out. The CIA's enthusiasm for the project collapses. But it isn't the end of the project entirely. Instead, it drifts around different American intelligence agencies, Because while few people believe in it, no one dares kill it either.

First, the Army takes up the project through its own intelligence agency, the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, or INS.com. Now, under the name Grill Flame, it builds a small group of full-time psychic spies and tries to use them to locate hostages, missing aircraft, and Soviet military sites. The results are once again mixed, but occasionally striking enough to keep the program alive. But after a few years, the program comes to the attention of the Army Inspector General, who doesn't just question the science, but also whether the Army should be running a psychic program at all. To survive the scrutiny, INSCOM turns the program into a special access program, under the name Center Lane. Center Lane is conducted in extreme secrecy under greater military discipline. But in 1985, the Pentagon decides that the Army shouldn't have sole ownership of this exotic

method of intelligence gathering and transfers it to the DIA. People tend to think of the CIA as the main intelligence collection apparatus in the United States. And it is. But there are also various other intelligence agencies. And one of the most important is the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is also known as the DIA. They also conduct intelligence, recruit human sources, generally focus on military targets, but they work in tandem with the CIA. And many times, you know, the Defense Intelligence Agency will pursue a project that is ultimately handed over to the CIA or vice versa.

Ultimately, it was consolidated under this Stargate name, but the basic goal was simple and it was the same. Test whether this phenomenon existed. And if it did, could it be harnessed for intelligence purposes? Could it be used? How could we use it? Under the DIA, the program is a quiet, tightly contained intelligence oddity. The DIA doesn't believe remote viewing to be a reliable intelligence tool. But at the same time, the program is cheap, it does occasionally produce intriguing results, and they don't want to be the agency that kills it altogether. But with the end of the Cold War, the justification for maintaining such an unconventional intelligence capability decreases.

And by 1995, Congress wants to know why money is still being spent. It asks the CIA to take back ownership of the program. them. But the CIA do not want to inherit it without a full scientific verdict on its effectiveness. It therefore hires the American Institute for Research to conduct a thorough review. The review puts in writing what everyone had really known all along. The statistical results are far beyond what would be expected by chance, but that the information was impossible to use in any meaningful way. And so in 1995, the project is finally wound down after 23 years of experimentation and research.

The fact that it was such a bizarre project which had survived for so long seemed surprising to say the least. But while 23 years had never proven that remote viewing worked, it also had failed to conclusively prove that it didn't. I think some people see Project Stargate as an example of cold war. anxiety, pushing agencies to explore very unconventional and, you know, maybe meaningless or useless ideas. But others see it as a scientific experiment that simply didn't pan out, no harm, no foul.

Other people treat it with a sense of humor because it sounds so strange compared to the more traditional tools of intelligence work. I think for me, the most important takeaway from Project Stargate is it kind of shows how intelligence agencies really have to be open-minded in a way that sometimes they're not. I think when intelligence agencies become close-minded and rigid, I think that holds them back. It holds them back from breakthroughs in different ways to collect intelligence, and it keeps them sort of out of touch with the mainstream.

So I think Project Stargate, you know, rather than something embarrassing or laughable or a waste of time, I feel like it shows us how there's this constant tension in the world of intelligence between skepticism and between imagination. In the paranoid world of the Cold War, even that slight chance that it could one day give America an edge was too much to ignore. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you liked this episode, don't forget to leave a comment below. And feel free to leave us a rating or review.

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