During the height of the Cold War, the US would do just about anything to get the edge over our communist adversaries. After all, the world’s fate was at stake, our very way of life. If an idea was a little bit “out there,” so what? We’d try it if we thought it might give us a leg up on the commies.
There was Project MKUltra, a CIA-led initiative exploring the possibility of mind control on unwitting subjects using a variety of unsavory techniques like sensory deprivation and dosing subjects with LSD without their knowledge.
Who could forget “Acoustic Kitty,” where the CIA used cats with implanted microphones and transmitters to spy on Soviet embassies and other targets? Spoiler alert: It didn’t work.
This next idea never made it beyond the initial planning stages, but the US government, the Air Force in particular, was working on what was colloquially called a “gay bomb.” This bizarre concept involved creating a chemical weapon that would release a hormone that would supposedly make enemy soldiers sexually attracted to one another.
The Stargate Project
In the shadow of these three genuine government initiatives, I introduce the idea of the “Stargate Project.” The Stargate Project wasn’t some bizarre left-field notion brought up in a brainstorming session, documented for posterity, and immediately tossed aside. Oh no, it was a bizarre left-field notion that the US government poured millions of dollars and decades of time and hard work into.
The ideas behind the project were so radical and out of the mainstream that they were kept secret for decades. Some of the information we present today could only be obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The idea that the project had been going on for nearly 25 years is mind-blowing.
Was the Stargate Project complete nonsense, or was there something meaningful in the madness? Read on and decide for yourself.
Extrasensory Perception (ESP)
This CIA-led program intended to use ESP to gain valuable information about our adversaries. Since the CIA is an intelligence gathering service, using ESP to gather that information isn’t too far-fetched if (and that’s a huge if) extrasensory perception exists.
So, what is ESP? In short, it refers to the purported ability to acquire information without using the known five senses (sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell) or logical inference. It is considered a type of paranormal phenomenon.
Common types of ESP include:
Telepathy: The ability to read another person’s thoughts or transmit thoughts to others.
Clairvoyance: The ability to gain information about an object, person, location, or physical event through means other than using the human senses.
Precognition: The ability to perceive or predict future events.
Retrocognition: The ability to see into the distant past.
Hard Evidence was Lacking…But They Doubled Down Anyway
Despite widespread fascination with ESP, scientific evidence supporting its existence is lacking. The field of parapsychology explores these phenomena, but many in the scientific community remain skeptical, attributing reported instances of ESP to fraud, illusion, or psychological factors such as confirmation bias.
Even without hard scientific evidence, belief in paranormal phenomena remains common worldwide. Why? Probably because it works…sometimes. It works in much the same way that a blind bird, from time to time, finds a worm.
It seems to work because humans are, as a species, desperate to glimpse the future and claim a power that others don’t possess. It’s about wishing; it’s about hope.
So, how did this form of wishful thinking and guessing make its way to the most powerful intelligence agency in the most powerful nation in the world? Physic readings were all the rage in the mid-20th century. So much so that when police departments ran into dead ends, occasionally, out of a mix of frustration and desperation, they quietly turned to psychics for advice.
From time to time, psychics gave law enforcement information that helped solve cases. In those rare instances, word tended to leak out to the public. Uh-huh, people would think, maybe there is something to this extrasensory stuff after all.
Use of the paranormal by law enforcement slowly crept from the local small-town PD, to bigger city police departments and was eventually adopted by the federal government. During the Vietnam War, some troops were known to use “divining rods” to locate the entrance to enemy tunnels.
The Soviets Employed Psychics As Well
It wasn’t just the Americans who were dabbling in the paranormal; our Cold War adversaries, the Soviets, thought there might also be something to it. On this side of the Atlantic, we don’t know much about Soviet paranormal intelligence operations. But we did know they were spending a lot of money on their program, and if they were doing it, we might as well be doing it too.
We know a good deal about the Stargate Project because of the extensive declassification of government documents in the US.
In 1972, the CIA decided to try to one-up the Soviets in the psychic department by funding a program known as Scanate. At the same time, remote viewing studies were underway at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. That program was done under the supervision of physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ.
CIA Says ESP is a Real Phenomenon
In 1975, the CIA assessed their work as shown below in this document obtained by SOFREP. The highlights are ours.
When you read the entire document, it’s not exactly glowing praise for the program, but apparently enough to keep throwing money at it.
One well-known participant in the SRI-based program was the famed psychic spoon bender, Uri Geller. Depending on who asked, Geller was regarded as either a complete fraud or a psychic marvel.
This led the government to involve a well-respected professor of psychology named Ray Hyman to conduct an independent review of Geller, who, at this point, was starting to become privy to sensitive national secrets.
In short, Hyman found Geller to be a complete charlaitain. This led to Targ and Puthoff losing their government contract money for SRI.
However, this did not end the remote viewing studies as the Army and Defense Intelligence Agency picked up the project under the name of the “Gondola Wish” program to ” evaluate the potential adversary applications of remote viewing.”
After a year, the program headquarters was moved to Fort Meade in Maryland, where the operational name was changed to “Grill Flame”. I have no idea about the idea behind the name, but you can’t make this stuff up. See below, highlighted by the author.
The overall Stargate Project remained operational until 1995, when it was shut down following the fall of the Soviet Union. Even though many documents about the project have been released to the public, much remains classified.
The Case of the Missing Soviet Spy Plane
One of the most famous successes of Project Stargate came after the crash of a Soviet Tupelov TU-22 spy plane in Africa. We knew the aircraft went down in the Zaire (The Democratic Republic of Congo) but had no idea exactly where. Our spy satellites were of no use in this case.
The case was given to Rosemary Smith, a young woman working with the program. She was told that an aircraft was missing and shown a box on a map where the aircraft might be. She went into a trance-like state, and after a while, she emerged and gave her superiors a set of coordinates where they might find the aircraft.
Two days later, the Soviet plane was located on the ground using the coordinates provided by Smith. The aircraft had been completely enveloped by the jungle canopy and was difficult to see even for persons on the ground. President Carter later mentioned the incident to the press. He said the search had been conducted without his knowledge. When he was asked how he took the news that the missing aircraft had been located by a psychic, he replied, “With skepticism.”
Joseph McMoneagle: Legion of Merit Awardee and Remote Viewer Number One
Joseph McMoneagle is an Army veteran who has claimed to have been involved in over 400 Stargate missions between 1978 and 1984. He held the designation of “Remote Viewer #1”. One of his more amazing “discoveries” occurred when he was asked to determine what was inside a large, mysterious building put up by the Soviets near the Arctic Circle.
In his report, he recalled closing his eyes and imagining himself drifting into the large industrial building. In it, he said he saw what appeared to be a large, twin-hulled submarine. McMoneagle’s report was set aside. Sometime later, satellite surveillance confirmed the presence of a large twin-hulled Typhoon class submarine.
In 1984, McMoneagle was awarded the Legion of Merit for his significant contributions to various intelligence-gathering operations.
Finding the submarine pales compared to McMoneagle’s interview of May 22nd, 1984. During that interview, he sat across a table from a moderator. On the table was a sealed envelope, and inside it was a 3×5 index card with two lines of text written on it.
McMonagle had no idea what was written on the card. Things were about to get weird. In the following excerpts of the transcript, I’ll highlight what I think are the more interesting points of the interview. “MON” designates “monitor,” and “SUB” refers to the subject, McMonagle.
The interview begins and is recorded on the transcript below:
Following the interview, the envelope was opened to reveal its contents. On the card was written:
Creepy. Keep in mind that neither McDoneagle nor the moderator had any prior knowledge of what was written on that card.
The Men Who Stare at Goats
Project Stargate inspired the 2009 George Clooney film The Men Who Stare at Goats. This fictionalized account of Jon Johnson’s 2004 book of the same name was a companion to a British miniseries called Crazy Rulers of the World.
In 1995, Stargate was handed over again to the CIA, which promptly performed a review to gauge its necessity in post-Cold War America.
They decided enough was enough, and the Stargate Project was relegated to history that year after more than 20 years and 20 million dollars had been spent on it.
There have been rumors that paranormal studies continue in some shape or form, conducted by the US government, but these are just rumors.
Harsh criticisms of the project exist for numerous reasons, namely because the experiments they conducted were not peer-reviewed (hard to do when it is Top Secret) and the results were not reproducible by others.
Project Stargate stands as a relic of the Cold War and a testament to how far one superpower will go to gain an edge (perceived or real) on the other.
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