Stuff You Should Know - How Project Star Gate Worked

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

In yet another testament to how amazingly great the 70s were, in 1975 the US started a program that tried to harness the powers of clairvoyance to remotely spy on the Soviet Union. Since clairvoyance doesn’t seem to exist, it wasn’t super successful. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's Josh and Chuck, your friends, and we are here to tell you about our upcoming book that's coming out this fall, the first ever Stuff You Should Know book, Chuck. That's right, what's the cool, super cool title

we came up with? It's Stuff You Should Know, colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right, and it's coming along so great. We're super excited, you guys. The illustrations are amazing, and there's the look of the book.

It's all just, it's exactly what we hoped it would be, and we cannot wait for you to get your hands on it. Yes, we can't, and you don't have to wait, actually. Well, you do have to wait, but you don't have to wait to order. You can go pre-order the book right now, everywhere you get books, and you will eventually get a special gift for pre-ordering,

which we're working on right now. That's right, so check it out soon, coming this fall. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. [♪ upbeat music playing I saw her. Yes, Jerry is here in the flesh. She does exist.

She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real.

She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real.

She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real.

She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real. She's real.

She's real. I'm sure they would just once in a while as a joke put it to their forehead. Right. But they would give them like an envelope with maybe somebody's picture. Maybe a note card that has latitude and longitude typed on it. Maybe somebody's name. That was it. And they were told to think about that latitude and longitude or told to concentrate on that

person's picture or think about their name. And they wanted all the information that came. So when it was latitude and longitude, typically you would know like you're supposed to be viewing remotely a like a site or some sort of secret base or some sort of weapon or satellite dish or radar dish or something like that. And if it was a person, you know, who knows, maybe they were a lost person. And some of these people, some of these remote viewing subjects would, would say like I need a little more info or something like that and then it would kind of get them going.

And then they would write down what their impressions were. They would maybe dictate it. They would draw it. Maybe they would do all three. And then after 20 minutes, 30 minutes, however long they dedicated to it, they would stop and all of their info would be taken away and then analyzed, analyzed by a defense intelligence analyst, CIA analyst, an NSA analyst who knows. Somebody whose job was going through intelligence that was given to them by spies and satellites

and all that. Would every once in a while get a package slipped to them between 1975 and 1995 that somebody had literally pulled out of thin air and put down in words and here you go. See if this, this holds up or helps you in any way in figuring out what's in that mountain in the Urals. Yeah, so there was a guy named Joseph McMonigal and he was, he worked as a, he was a recruit for, for grill flame and he worked into the nineties and he has some pretty good stories. And there's a lot of good stories in here and is this stuff true as the thing?

No. Like it was frustrating. You think this stuff is all made up? I, here's the thing. For every one of his stories, I went and tried to cross from it with declassified CIA documents. I couldn't find anything. Like all of the guy's stories are anecdotal. Here's the problem.

They get reported, not necessarily as fact, but they get reported in like, you know, an actual profile of the guy in the Washington Post or Newsweek or something like that. And then all of a sudden, right. And then all of a sudden when somebody cross references some weird thing they read in some fringy book, it pops up in a Washington Post article too. That's true. That's true. It's just bad reporting that is, that is continuing this to go on.

But as far as I know, I could not find any corroboration from any declassified documents for any of his stories. So one of his examples in 1979, he said that he was, he could see where Skylab, the very famous satellite in the 1970s and 80s was going to crash 11 months before. So this is also precognition, which is another part of SCI. And in 1981, and supposedly that was correct. And in 1981, he also got another tip, a mental hot tip, that there was a hostage, Brigadier General James Dozier that was being held in, I don't know if it's Padua or Padua, Italy.

I think it's Padua. Neither one. I think it is Padua. And supposedly the tip arrived in Italy and the day that he was released in that very town. What else? What about the KGB agent? This one's pretty great.

So there was a KGB agent in South Africa that the CIA had been watching in, I guess, 1980. And they couldn't figure out how he was contacting his KGB handlers back in Mother Russia. And I guess McGonagall or McMonagall was focused on a calculator. He saw that this guy really was obsessed with his calculator. And it turns out when the CIA looked at his calculator, they figured out it was a short wave radio. Yeah. And also just check the guy's calculator.

Sure. Like check all the electronics that he has. He has a cigarette lighter and a calculator. We looked at the cigarette lighter, found nothing, we just gave up after that. Yeah. And the calculator and held it upside down, it just said boobless. Here it was one of those, remember the professor ones with the mortar cap and all that? No.

What are you talking about? Oh, you don't. There was one that had a drawing of like an old wise man with a graduation cap on. It was a pretty famous like 70s calculator for kids. Oh, you mean the calculator itself? Yeah. No, I think I know what you're talking about. I thought you meant some weird trick where you type in numbers and turn it upside down,

it says. Oh, and it looks like a guy. Oh, I see. I was like, that's pretty impressive. You're like, I can just type boobs. So in 85, the DIA took control of this program, I guess took it back from the army. It seems like nobody wanted it. Like every few years, they would just be like, who wants to take this over now?

But the thing is, it kept getting funding and from what I read, either Targ or Edwin May who comes in later as the director of this program, like they said it was year to year funding, but it kept getting funding every year for 20 years. For 20 years. And I would think too that like once it went from one agency to another, maybe it would survive once, but it survived all these transitions. Yeah. So they take it back in 85 and started funding, SRI again, international, they're back on

the scene, and then another contractor, private contractor came on called Science Applications International Corporation, also in California. And this is where they name it Stargate in 1991. And it had to be after the movie, right? I don't think so, man. I think the movie came out a few years after that. Really? I'm going to look.

That's easy enough to check. Let's find out. It was the whole time I was wondering about that. And that was the name from 1991 until it's end in 1995. And I'm sorry, not end in 1995, 1995 is when the CIA took it back over. Right. And then the CIA finally said, you know what, we're just, we're not sure about this anymore. We're just going to defund this thing and let it go away.

And this was 1995 and five years later, they declassified, as far as we know, everything that had anything to do with it, I think some of the people like McMonagall who were involved are saying, no, there's still plenty of classified stuff you guys don't know about that really proves everything. Right. They're just not showing you the good stuff. Yeah. But I read this, I read a, I guess a transcript of a Skeptoid, our buddy Brian Dunning's podcast.

Yeah. And we went, we had a flame war with over whether or not it could rain frogs. Did we? Yeah, we did. Well, he tried to start one. I just ignored him, but. When was this? This was when we had the, can it rain frogs episode.

I know, but that was years ago, wasn't it? Yeah. Okay. Have a long, long memory. I can hold a grudge. But anyway, on Skeptoid, he was basically saying like the very fact that like all these people are allowed who were verifiably in this program run by the CIA for 20 years, the fact that they're allowed to walk around and talk about this and haven't been like, haven't disappeared,

just lens further credence to the idea that there was nothing that came of this. Right. Because they would all just be vanished. Kind of. I think the CIA is not above that kind of thing. Well, at any rate, the CIA said, it's not worth this money that we're spending. So let's just get a very, you know, the typical thing. Let's get a third party report and that'll solve it all.

And in 1995, the American Institutes for Research published an evaluation of remote viewing colon research and applications and said, you know what? This is pretty compelling stuff, but we can't use it for intelligence because you note the word intelligence and they shut it down to shut it down in 1995. They did 20 years, $20 million, looking for everything from new Soviet submarine designs to lost gun missiles to people being held by foreign kidnappers, all of it just down the toilet. That's right.

And in the old days, this would be the end of the episode, but in today's stuff you should know it's our first message break. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? You'll leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when

the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. That might be a record, Chuck, a 30 minute first act.

25. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's right. I was looking. We started a little late after we started recording 25 that I don't think that's the record. All right. So should we keep talking about Project Stargate just because it's fun?

Yeah. Let's. So, yeah, and I don't mean like I'm not trying to poo poo like people's imagination. I've got the same thing. I love the same stuff. It's just, my eyes have been opened and they can never be closed again. Did you just say, my eyes? Yes.

And again. Oh goodness. So with Stargate, right, the whole basis of this was that it was allowed to continue on for 20 years because the people involved were very much impressed with what they saw. Yes. And what they saw kind of went a little bit like this. Like the earliest tests, I think the ones that Russell Targ was doing were basically like, tell me about some Soviet submarine floating around somewhere in the world.

Let's see what you can do. Just really free, loosey, goosey hippie stuff, right? And then a guy named Dr. Edwin May came along and he took over in, I think 1985, but he'd been working on the project starting at the Stanford Research Institute beginning back in 1975. And so he was on this project, I believe, for the full 20 years in one capacity or another. And when he took over. They weren't even paying him for the last 10.

No, he was just hanging around. Taking off of saltines and great Kool-Aid. That's right, with his red stapler. But he instituted way stricter protocols for conducting these remote viewing experiments and tests too. Not just remote viewing experiments were conducted. He wanted to kind of show that these things could work too. So he came up with something called ranked order judging, which is part of a larger type

of test called force choice. Yeah, and I'm going to get you to explain that in a second because I didn't fully get the redo. But May is a pretty interesting guy. He was a doctor. He was a PhD in nuclear physics. And while it's easy to sort of cast someone like this as just sort of a loopy hippie type, he's really intelligent guy, but he was also a loopy hippie type.

He got his postdoc in San Francisco in the 1960s. So you know what that means. And he literally used the words, he became a professional hippie, did a lot of drugs, did a lot of psychedelics, and got into parapsychology and did what you do. If that is your path, you go to India at some point, just hoping to sort of soak up some cool esoteric knowledge. Bump into Rupert Sheldrake. Yeah, perhaps.

And he came back and didn't really get a lot out of, I'm sure he had a great time and everything. Sure. But didn't come back. The food there. He didn't come back with anything he could use. Came back in 75. And then that's where he got a job as a research assistant at SRI International, working with

telekinesis. And he was like, this is it for me, baby, this is the job you pay me for this. And he just kind of took off from there. And I guess took over as director in 1985, right? Yeah. So he was the one that started this different sort of testing method called force, not first choice, but forced choice. Right.

It just wasn't quite, it wasn't anywhere near as like free and easy as the free response ones. It was basically, it kind of went like this, okay. So let's say, let's say that you're holding one of these tests. Ideally you have three people involved. You have the remote viewer. You have the sender who's actually thinking of the thing that the remote viewer is supposed to be tapping into and gaining information from, and then you have a judge, okay?

Ideally you said that that's very important. Yeah. And also ideally, the sender and the remote viewer should not be in contact with one another before or during the experiment. It's another kind of important one too. And these are things that like Edwin May was instituting that really kind of scientificified the whole thing. It definitely gave it a more legitimate glean for sure.

But so what happens is the sender chooses a photo from 100 photos in a National Geographic photo set. That's usually what they use. And I also ideally, we could point out that they would use way more than 100 photos and not those same photos over and over. That's a big one too, as we'll see for sure. Yeah. That's a big problem if you use the same photo set and the same remote viewers, right?

Yes. So the person who is the sender would sit there and they would pick a photo and then they would think about that photo. And the remote viewer would be ideally somewhere else thinking about that, what the sender was thinking of. And then they would write down their impressions. They would draw their impressions. And then they would compile this little document basically of what they saw during the remote

viewing session. Okay. That's the first step. Yes. That is that you take four other, maybe five other pictures from that same National Geographic photo set and you could even physically put them as printed photos into an envelope. And then you give that to the judge who has nothing to do with any of this to this point. They've just now been given an envelope of photos.

And then they've also been given the remote viewers document that they whipped up from their remote viewing session. And so the judge is supposed to take the remote viewers impressions and basically match them to one of the photos. And so they rank the photos. If you have six photos, there's one photo that's your number one photo that you're saying like this is what the remote viewer was seeing. This one is the second likeliest, the third likely is fourth, fifth and sixth likeliest.

So you rank the photos. If the remote viewer got it right, then the photo the judge chose as the number one photo should be the photo that the sender was thinking of when the remote viewer got their impressions. Yeah. Okay. Sure. It's actually in a weird way, very scientific because you can insert statistical analysis into this whole thing and they did and they found that over time, some remote viewers

did do much better than chance, just random chance where out of every hundred tries, any photo should be chosen out of a set of five, you know, twice. Yeah. I think the direct quote was from the report was far beyond what is expected by chance. Yes. That supposedly came from a true believer statistician who had done an analysis of this. But yes, there was this idea that some of these people were capable of drawing impressions of what somebody else in a different room was thinking based on a photo they were looking

at. And then there are, now we can talk about all the explanations of how that probably wasn't any sort of clairvoyance. Yeah. And what bugs me just before we even get to that is in the report, it said it was far beyond what is expected by chance. Mm-hmm. Like, tell me what percentage chance is and what percentage they got, not your opinion

on what is far beyond and what isn't. Right, right. So that bugs me right off the bat. That's a big one right there. There's also subjectivity running through this big time because the judge is doing a subjective analysis too, right? Yeah. And if they're picking, like I mentioned, another one of the problems is they use the

same set of 100 Nat Geo images. So I imagine after a couple of times, they know it's going to be something about nature at the very least. Yeah. And if they say, let's say, lion attacking elk, they're like, no, but it's a tiger attacking an antelope. You win. Right, exactly.

You know? And then if that is the only photo with anything like a lion and an elk or whatever, a tiger, in the photo set, the rest is like an oil derrick and a lake and some other stuff, then of course that's the one that's going to win, that the judge is going to choose, and they're going to have a hit. So there's a lot of real problems with this. Even though they tried to add science to the whole thing, you just can't do it. Just add science.

Right, exactly. And then so that was just the experiments that they conducted to kind of show and demonstrate that this worked. A lot of the stuff that they used for intelligence, that was much more along the lines of the free association one. It's not called free association. What is it called? Oh, the free response experiments where they're just like, tell us about the Soviets, any

new submarine designs the Soviets are working on or something. So can we tell some of these stories that were supposedly successes? Yes. All right. The West Virginia site is the first one. Dr. Targ relayed this story, and these were from the early days in the early 70s in which a remote viewer in California was given the longitude and latitude coordinates of somewhere in West Virginia and said, what do you see?

And the remote viewer said, described like what was going on with the terrain above the ground and about a secret underground government site and supposedly provided names of personnel who worked there, code words used for the top secret projects. And apparently the description was really, really accurate, so accurate that the CIA said, I don't know if it was the CIA, I assume it was, but they said that we've got a leak and we need to find out what's going on and investigate this. Right. That's the kind of thing.

I think, like you said, that was in early 70s, Dr. Targ one. Something like that that prompts an investigation into a leak, that will get you more funding for a while. That like definitely will cement your reputation. Scare them into giving funding? Yeah, for sure, especially, yeah, if people are jumpy about what the Soviets might be on to this kind of thing too and we got to get on it, sure. And apparently that same remote viewer saw or remotely saw an underground site that was

similar in Russia, in the Ural Mountains, described that, that was supposedly verified as, quote, substantially correct by the CIA. Yeah. So that was one of the big ones that people kind of tout as evidence that Project Stargate worked, right? Sure. There's also one called the Microwave Generator Report. It was a good one.

This one was with Dr. May, Dr. Edwin May. And the remote viewer was, as is typical, just given longitude and latitude, may be given like a little more evidence. I think they were told that it was a technical site in the U.S. and the remote viewer started describing a microwave generator on site. And the most astounding thing about it is that the remote viewer said that this microwave had a beam of divergence angle of 30 degrees, which is not something that you should be able to glean from somebody telling you the latitude and longitude coordinates of a technical

site. Sure. So that is pretty impressive. And then later on, Dr. May took the whole description, which as we'll see is rare in these cases, and determined that the specs of the generator itself were 80% accurate and that the site as a whole were 70% accurate. 70% reliable, though. Okay.

70% reliable. No idea how you would conclude that or quantify that kind of thing. But again, this is the kind of thing like you're starting to build like a lore around this department, this agency, that people who are already kind of into the existence of this kind of thing can come and participate in and talk about with their friends and wow people at cocktail parties. The Russian crane, this one came from Dr. Targ. Remote viewer was given, again, coordinates of a site near a city in the former Soviet

Union. And there was a, and like what do you see, what the drawing detailed was a large industrial crane called a gantry crane. And they said, you know what, there's no way that this person could have known how to draw all this gantry crane unless they saw it through remote viewing or someone told them this. No other explanation. Yeah. And that was the analyst who's handed this was like, wow, that's really impressive.

So the Russian crane stands on its own too. And then there's also one called the Lowell fugitive. There's a woman named Angela Ford who was a longtime participant in Project Stargate. And she used a kind of medium ship where she had three different spirit guides who would cause her to carry out automatic writing. That's how she did her remote viewing. And she, and this is, you know, she would go down to Fort Meade at the barracks and do this right under army supervision, which is so bizarre, but that's what would happen.

So Angela Ford was given the name of a guy named Charles Jordan, who was an interesting cat in and of himself. He was, he called himself the ruler of the Florida Keys. He was a crook. I thought that was Jimmy Buffett. He was a crook. And he's the prince of the Florida Keys. He was the, he was a crooked customs agent who had turned into a drug smuggler down there

and also was very easily bribed so that other drug smugglers could smuggle their drugs. So it was Jimmy Buffett. He got caught and went on the run. And so they were looking for him. So they asked Angela Ford if she could find him for him. That's right. And she said, I'm seeing, or my friends or my ghost friends are telling me and I'm automatically riding this city, Lowell, Wyoming.

And it turned out that he was apprehended a hundred miles west of Lovell, Wyoming with a V, but a hundred miles west of a place that she still didn't name. Some people say though that Charles Jordan admitted to being in the town on the day Angela Ford did her remote viewing session proven, right? So you've got all this stuff, all of these anecdotes that are just coming together and to like, get this, check this out, get a load of this, where all these things that you can point to and write books on and say that like this is for real and that the Washington Post can report on.

And that's what's kept this legend, this stuff about Project Stargate being for real, going all these years. And if you dig into it, it's really, really hard to pull apart because the people who were there will tell you in an interview like, oh, this person said this, but then if you interview somebody else to say, well, no, they didn't say that, she didn't say Lowell. She said Northern Wyoming. Somebody else would say, no, she just said, you know, somewhere in the West or something like that.

So as the story of Charles Jordan being captured in Yellowstone comes out later, the story of Angela Ford remotely viewing him in Wyoming gets piled on and added to over the years until you have her just missing the letter of the word or the word by one letter and then seeing him in that town on the day that it happened. And that's how like this stuff goes. It's just anecdotal stuff that really did happen. Like she really did have this remote viewing session, but the accuracy of it is what's always been in doubt.

The problem is, Chuck, is there are examples of people doing some really spectacularly amazingly accurate hits over the years that really kind of lend credence to it in some way. So much so that that American Institute of Research paper still said, look, there are some weird unexplainable stuff in here. Does it prove that remote viewing is real and that it exists? No. There's a lot of things that could explain these spectacular, accurate hits. But overall, no, it doesn't show that this is real because these are the hits.

There was so much garbage produced that by the time 1995 rolled around, the CIA was like, this is even if remote viewing does exist, it's so useless as an intelligence tool that we're not going to fund it anymore. Should we take another break? Yeah. All right. Let's take a break and we'll be right back after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. It was an AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist. So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step.

Not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you listen to podcasts. All right, so here's the deal. And this is sort of the big question, which you've kind of answered before the break. Sorry. Is it? No, that's all right. It's a nice tease. Is it a useful spy tool because we can have fun all day funding something and doing these

fun experiments and getting them sort of right or not. But the whole purpose of all of this was, can we actually use this stuff as actionable evidence or intelligence? And you can't really. Like we said, they are anecdotal. They might be impressed by a certain part of a thing. And you mentioned that it's rare that they ever included like the full drawing or the full discourse on whatever they supposedly saw or didn't see.

They would sort of pick out something that was right and say, look, they got this one part right. That's amazing. But that's sort of where it ended. With the gantry crane, you know, they got that gantry crane right, but there was so much stuff that was wrong that they said, we can't use this. And that's sort of the point of all this is we can't use this stuff as intelligence because it's just partial people that defended it would say, and Jordan McMonigal is one of

them said, this isn't supposed to be the end all be all. This is supposed to work alongside real intelligence and just see if it could help support some of this stuff or give them a hint in the right direction to start using real intelligence. And it was never supposed to be a standalone that you go and like raid a Russian village because some remote viewers said there was a nuclear weapon there or something. Yeah, yeah. And I think the CIA always viewed as that too, and that like it was benign. It was very cheap and inexpensive.

It can be done easily. But the problem is, is like, if you have somebody who's producing tons and tons of garbage intelligence, the analyst still has to sift through that. And in some of that garbage intelligence, there may be something that leads them down the wrong path and while they're doing that, they miss some other intelligence that actually is useful and good. And so it's kind of like a metaphor for what pseudoscience in general does to society. It like throws garbage on there that kind of distracts you from the stuff that you could

be doing that would actually be beneficial. That's what it did to intelligence analysts too. And that's why they ultimately abandoned the whole program. Right. But for 20 years, they thought, you know, there were three big reasons why it was attractive and they all kind of boiled down to why not, which it's a passive operation. So it doesn't require a lot of resources. It's, you know, I don't know how many people they had remote viewing at their max, but

I doubt if it was that many. It didn't cost a lot. Six million bucks a year isn't that much money in a defense budget. And then it's what's known as no known defense. So even if it's working, let's say, then the enemy can't really stop this, I guess, except for rooting these people out and tracking them down and killing them. But aside from that, those are the three reasons for 20 years, they threw six million bucks a year at it.

And I'm sure that kind of wavered in and out, but you know, they spent over a hundred million dollars. Oh, no, I think they spent $20 million over 20 years. Oh, is that all? Yeah, man. That was it for the whole, the whole time they spent six million a year. No, I think it might have been up to like six million dollars at the end of it. Okay.

Over the course of it. And I don't think this is really necessarily adjusted for inflation, but starting in 75 and ending in 95, $20 million, you know, on paper is what got spent. Gotcha. So those first years, it was like, here's $100,000 in a bucket of weed. Kind of, I think so, and some grape, kool-aid, and saltine. All right. Well, 20 million bucks.

But yeah, that's not a lot of money for, you know, if you're talking overall defense budgets. No, it's not. It's so cheap that we're even vaguely promising or vaguely helpful. The CIA would have been fools not to keep funding this or the defense department would have been fools not to keep funding it somebody. Yeah. You and I could have kept funding it if we really put our minds to it, but it not only

wasn't useful, it did not, it was actually harmful as far as an intelligence tool is concerned. I think what I gather from them finally cancelling it. Yeah. And this, you know, this last bit about the representative from North Carolina, Charlie Rose, not the TV guy who's turned out to be quite a jerk. But he kind of summed it up, and this is what I think the deal is, and this is what started it to begin with.

If you think the Soviets are doing this, you can't just sit back, or at least that's the rationale. You can't just sit back and say, well, it's probably so silly and not even real, but we're certainly not going to let them be the only ones trying this. Yeah. Yeah. Like if the Ruskies have it, we sure as heck better be on it ourselves. Exactly.

And luckily, well, I was going to say luckily that mentality faded with the Cold War, but it's back everybody. Hey, the 80s are back. Yeah, they are big time. People wearing fanny packs, and apparently there's, what's that one thing where like you'd touch the shirt and like your handprint would be a color? Oh, sure. Like the heat shirts or whatever.

I can't remember what they were called, but anyway, they're apparently back. Yeah. Very cool. The 80s are back. So that's it. That's Project Stargate. There's a lot to read about it if you were fascinated by it, whether you're fascinated by it, it's just a completely crackpot thing, or you're like, nope, I don't believe you,

Josh and Chuck, I think you're covering up for the government and the Illuminati, whatever. Go read more about it. And in particular, I want to direct you to Mars Exploration, May 22nd, 1984. It's a declassified transcript from a remote viewing session of Mars where they asked, I think, Joseph McMonagall to wander around Mars in the year 1 million BCE, and it's fascinating stuff. But it also tells you everything you need to know about Project Stargate. If you want to know, I already said that kind of thing, didn't I, Chuck?

I guess it's time now for Listener Man. I'm going to call this a heroin podcast, and this is from Anonymous. Yo, thanks for your heroin podcast. You spoke fairly about something that is usually wrought with bias. I grew up in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. It's one of the largest drug markets in the world, most of which is heroin. We are ground zero now for the opioid epidemic. Growing up around so much heroin messes with you.

My childhood best friends turned to sex work to pay for it while we played video games upstairs. People were ODing in middle school. The class clown's dad was one of the biggest runners in the city, so when he was arrested, the kid was never the same. It's very difficult to explain what being around groups of people on heroin is like. The link below is an excellent New York Times article about the Kensington Avenue area. Luckily for me, I suppose, I got out relatively unscathed.

A lot of people see people who are addicted as animals and criminals. I struggle with where I stand. I know as a group, it's a public health issue, but it is also hard when looking at the individual's actions. Kensington was a middle-class haven from the early to mid-19th century until the crack epidemic of the 80s. According to my parents, a Sunday event was walking to the shops on Kensington Avenue. It did not happen after that.

And that, here's the article, it is called Trapped by the Walmart of Heroin by Jennifer Percy from New York Times, October 2018. And that is from Anonymous. Man alive, Anonymous. I'm glad you made it out alive. Totally. And that is very scary stuff. What a man.

It's crazy. It makes you realize what a lottery birth is, you know? Not just in like your socioeconomic class or your race or what country you're born into, but like what neighborhood you're born into to, you know? I know. I never heard of it. Yeah, I had neither. I'm going to read that article.

That looks good. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot. And we appreciate you getting in touch with us. And if you want to get in touch with us, please do. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult-classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.