The Fiction of Stargate

In a dim room in Fort Meade, Maryland, sometime in the late 1980s, a man known only as “Viewer 001” sat still, a pencil in hand, his eyes closed. He wore civilian clothes, but he was a soldier of sorts—enlisted in a war of minds, not machines. On the desk before him was a blank sheet of paper. He had been given no photograph, no satellite imagery, no briefing. Only a set of geographic coordinates. He inhaled slowly, exhaled with purpose, and let his mind drift—not aimlessly, but with intense, focused intent. Shapes began to form. He drew them: angular structures, lines suggesting water, maybe a tunnel or a silo. Later, his sketches would be compared with classified images of a suspected Soviet submarine base. Some lines would match. Others wouldn’t. But to the people running the program, the accuracy didn’t need to be perfect. It only needed to be plausible. This was remote viewing, the psychic tool of an intelligence war, and for more than two decades, the United States funded it not because they could prove it worked, but because they couldn’t afford to believe it didn’t.

The program that came to be known as STARGATE wasn’t born from the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists. It wasn’t the pet project of a single powerful official. It was the collective invention of a country desperate to make sense of the unknown. During the Cold War, when fear was a living thing and uncertainty could be fatal, even the implausible became an option worth exploring. Rumors had emerged in the early 1970s that the Soviet Union was sinking millions into psychic research. Not just mind-reading or hypnosis, but something more alarming: telekinesis, extrasensory perception, and remote viewing—an ability to perceive distant places, people, or events without physical interaction. American intelligence agencies, alarmed by the possibility that their adversaries might gain a strategic advantage in a realm they didn’t understand, responded not with dismissal but with funding. If it was real, they needed to match it. If it was fake, they needed to be sure. That sliver of possibility opened the door to twenty years of classified research, half-believed results, and the most human kind of gamble: the bet that maybe, just maybe, we’re more powerful than we know.

The heart of this endeavor beat within the walls of the Stanford Research Institute. There, physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff invited self-proclaimed psychics to participate in controlled experiments. Ingo Swann, a painter from New York, became one of their stars, claiming to perceive the rings of Jupiter before NASA confirmed their existence. Pat Price, a former police officer, stunned officials with his eerily detailed sketches of secret facilities. These early successes, if that’s what they were, caught the attention of military and intelligence leaders. What began as a fringe curiosity hardened into a program with budgets, staff, protocols, and targets. Names changed—SCANATE, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK—but the goal remained the same: see what cannot be seen, know what cannot be known.

For those inside the program, remote viewing was not science fiction. It was a job. It was training. It was service. Some, like Joe McMoneagle, believed deeply in their own abilities. McMoneagle, a decorated Army veteran, claimed to have conducted over 450 remote viewing missions. He described one where he identified a secret Russian submarine from a bathtub, while in a deep meditative state. Others were less convinced but performed their tasks dutifully. Lyn Buchanan, an Army linguist, described the sessions as mentally and emotionally draining. He didn’t always believe what he saw, but he knew he had to try. Sometimes the images came like dreams—fragmented, symbolic, indistinct. But they kept at it. The targets ranged from nuclear sites to lost planes to missing hostages. Sometimes they were told what they were looking for. Other times, only numbers were provided. The structure of the mind, they believed, needed space to roam, unfettered by expectations.

Outside the program, skepticism never died. Even inside, quiet doubts lingered. Results were inconsistent. Successes could be explained away. Failures were frequent but downplayed. Yet the program endured, fed by a strange alliance of Cold War anxiety, spiritual optimism, and institutional momentum. The 1970s and '80s saw a rise in New Age beliefs, a fascination with Eastern philosophy, psychedelics, and expanded consciousness. In that cultural soil, the idea that the human mind might access distant realities didn’t seem so implausible. The boundaries between science and mysticism blurred, especially in spaces where the usual rules could be suspended. Remote viewing offered a kind of forbidden knowledge—a shadow mirror to satellite imagery, intelligence without intrusion, power without presence.

But belief alone couldn’t keep the project alive forever. As the years passed, more scientists began asking hard questions. In the early 1980s, psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann reviewed transcripts from early SRI experiments and discovered that many of the supposed hits could be traced to subtle clues—notes and feedback left in the documents from previous sessions. When those cues were removed, the results dropped to near-zero. The data wasn’t just flawed; it was contaminated by human error, wishful thinking, and the ever-present danger of self-deception. It should have been enough to end the project then. It wasn’t.

The real end came in 1995. The Cold War was over. Budgets were tightening. The CIA commissioned the American Institutes for Research to evaluate the value of the remote viewing program. Two reviewers were appointed: Jessica Utts, a statistician open to parapsychology, and Ray Hyman, a psychologist known for his skepticism. Both reviewed the same data, combed through decades of records, and issued their findings. Utts conceded there were some anomalies—some statistical deviations from chance—but nothing substantial enough to count as evidence. Hyman was more blunt. The program had failed to produce any actionable intelligence. Not once in over twenty years had remote viewing led to an intelligence success that could not have been obtained through conventional means. The data was too vague. Too interpretive. Too easily twisted to match a target after the fact. Remote viewing was a shot in the dark, every time.

The government quietly shut it down. No press conference. No public debate. No dramatic scandal. It was absorbed and dissolved like a secret it no longer needed to keep. The people involved were reassigned, retired, or left to write books. A few, like McMoneagle and Buchanan, continued to teach remote viewing privately. Others distanced themselves. The public barely noticed. One of the strangest chapters in American intelligence closed not with a bang, but with the sound of no one asking questions anymore.

What makes this story so haunting isn’t just that it happened. It’s how long it lasted. How many intelligent people let it live. How easily systems can protect a belief because letting it die would require admitting they were wrong. Remote viewing wasn’t a hoax. It wasn’t a prank. It was a fantasy born of fear and kept alive by institutional hope. No one wanted to be the person who killed it. No one wanted to be the skeptic who stood in the way of possibility. And so it endured—fragile, flickering, defended in meetings and memos by men who knew better, but didn’t have a better answer to give.

For those who believed, the end was personal. Lyn Buchanan reportedly wept when he learned the program had been shut down. He said it felt like losing something sacred. Ingo Swann, defiant to the end, insisted that the real scandal was how blind the scientific establishment had become. Joe McMoneagle argued that the failure wasn’t with the psychics, but with the bureaucracy that never knew how to use them properly. Even the skeptics, in their own way, grieved the collapse of a dream. Because remote viewing wasn’t just about spying on Soviets. It was about the idea that the mind might be more powerful than flesh and wire. That something in us could reach beyond the body. That maybe we weren’t as limited as we thought.

But science doesn’t care about belief. It cares about repeatability, verifiability, prediction. Remote viewing could not meet that standard. When tested rigorously, it failed. Not dramatically. Not disgracefully. Just quietly, completely. The viewers couldn’t do what they said they could do—not when it counted. The glimmers turned out to be coincidence. The sketches? Vague. The targets? Often guessed after the fact. The fantasy couldn’t hold, not because it was exposed as a fraud, but because reality refused to play along.

Today, remote viewing lives on in documentaries, podcasts, and niche workshops. A small community still practices it. Some claim it's real and just misunderstood. Others see it as a relic of a paranoid era. But the story matters, not because it proves or disproves psychic phenomena, but because it shows how institutions believe. They don’t believe because the evidence is good. They believe because they are afraid not to. They believe because belief is easier than doubt when the stakes are high. They believe because someone, somewhere, told them the enemy might be doing it first.

In the end, remote viewing was not defeated by scandal or shame. It was undone by something far more final: the absence of results. It didn’t fail with drama. It failed like so many bad ideas do—slowly, silently, completely. It became indefensible, not just scientifically, but intellectually, strategically, and morally. It couldn’t justify its own existence, and no one had the heart to pretend otherwise anymore.

And that is how it ended. A file closed. A program forgotten. A fantasy that once shimmered in the minds of generals and psychics alike, buried under the weight of what it never became. A hope too fragile to survive contact with the truth.