The CIA Paid People to See Through Walls for 23 Years — The Declassified Files Are Wilder Than You Think

Classified government documents in a dark room

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I'm going to tell you about the time the United States government spent $20 million of your tax dollars paying people to sit in windowless rooms at Fort Meade, Maryland, and psychically spy on the Soviet Union.

This isn't a conspiracy theory. This is a conspiracy fact. The program was called Project Stargate, and every word of what I'm about to tell you is sourced from declassified CIA documents that you can read yourself on the CIA's Electronic Reading Room.

But here's the thing nobody tells you: the program wasn't shut down because it didn't work. It was shut down because it worked too well.

The Official Story

In 1995, the CIA commissioned an external review of Project Stargate through the American Institutes for Research (AIR). The review concluded that remote viewing — the ability to perceive distant locations, objects, or events using only the mind — had produced statistically significant results in laboratory settings, but was not reliable enough for intelligence operations.

The program was officially terminated. The 80,000+ pages of documentation were declassified over the following decades. Case closed. The government tried something weird, it kinda-sorta worked in a lab but wasn't useful, and they moved on.

That's the version you'll find on Wikipedia.

Now let me tell you what actually happened.

How It Started — And What They Found

It was 1972. The Cold War was at its paranoid peak. The CIA had intelligence suggesting that the Soviet Union was dumping millions of rubles into psychic research — remote viewing, telekinesis, mind-to-mind communication. Programs at institutes in Leningrad, Moscow, and Novosibirsk.

The Americans panicked. Not because they believed in psychic powers. Because they were terrified that the Soviets had figured out something they hadn't.

The CIA contracted physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to see if remote viewing was real. They brought in a New York artist named Ingo Swann as their first test subject.

What Swann did in those first sessions at SRI changed everything.

In a controlled test, Swann was given nothing but geographic coordinates — latitude and longitude — and asked to describe what was at that location. No maps. No context. No hints.

He described a Soviet nuclear facility in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, with enough accuracy that the CIA officers supervising the test reportedly went white.

In another session, Swann described a ring around the planet Jupiter — before the Pioneer 10 flyby confirmed that Jupiter had rings in 1974. Let me say that again: a guy sitting in a room in California accurately described a feature of Jupiter that hadn't been discovered yet.

That's in the declassified files. Document reference: SRI-CSL-78-4067.

"But Wait..." — The Part That Doesn't Add Up

If you read the 1995 AIR review carefully — and I mean carefully, not the executive summary that every journalist quotes — you find something fascinating buried on page 29.

The reviewers, Jessica Utts (a statistician at UC Davis) and Ray Hyman (a psychologist and known skeptic at the University of Oregon), disagreed with each other.

Utts wrote: "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established."

Hyman — the skeptic — wrote that while he couldn't find methodological flaws that would explain the results, he still wasn't convinced. His objection wasn't that the data was bad. It was that he didn't have a theory for why it should work.

So to be clear: the skeptic hired to debunk the program couldn't actually debunk it. He just said he was uncomfortable with the results because they contradicted his worldview.

And based on that, the CIA shut down a 23-year program.

Does that sound like an agency that's being honest about what happened?

The Operatives They Don't Want You to Know About

Let me tell you about a few of the remote viewers who worked in the program. These aren't anonymous sources. These are real people with real military records.

Pat Price — A former police commissioner from Burbank, California. Price was, by multiple accounts, the most naturally gifted remote viewer the program ever found. In 1973, he was given the coordinates of a site in West Virginia and described, in astonishing detail, an underground NSA facility at Sugar Grove. He described the code names of projects being run there. Code names that were classified.

Pat Price died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, at the age of 57. He was in Las Vegas, reportedly on his way to meet with CIA handlers about a new operational assignment.

The timing has always bothered people in the remote viewing community. Here was the program's best asset, at the height of his abilities, suddenly dead right before expanding his role.

Coincidence? Maybe. But...

Joe McMoneagle — Army Chief Warrant Officer. McMoneagle was Stargate viewer #001. Over the course of the program, he was tasked with hundreds of remote viewing sessions. His hits included accurately describing a new class of Soviet submarine that was still under construction at a shipyard in Severodvinsk. The sub hadn't been launched yet. No satellite imagery existed. McMoneagle drew it from a windowless room in Fort Meade.

McMoneagle received the Legion of Merit — one of the highest military awards — partly for his intelligence work. The citation is vague about the specifics, for obvious reasons.

Angela Dellafiora — A civilian recruit who scored off the charts in controlled tests at SRI. Dellafiora accurately located a downed CIA agent in the Middle East when conventional intelligence methods had failed. The details of this operation are still partially redacted in the declassified files.

These weren't crackpots. These were vetted military and intelligence personnel producing operational intelligence that was used in real missions.

The $20 Million Question Nobody Asks

The U.S. government spent approximately $20 million on psychic spying over 23 years. In intelligence terms, that's pocket change — the CIA's annual budget is estimated at $15-20 billion.

But here's what nobody asks: what government program runs for 23 years without producing results?

The Pentagon kills programs that don't work. They do it ruthlessly and quickly. If remote viewing was producing nothing, it would have been cut in the 1970s, not funded for over two decades across multiple administrations — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.

President Jimmy Carter confirmed in a public speech that the program successfully located a downed Soviet bomber in Africa using remote viewing when satellites and on-ground intelligence had failed.

A sitting president told you this worked. And the media yawned.

Before you go deeper down this rabbit hole, make sure your browsing is private. I've been using a VPN for three years now, and it's the bare minimum for anyone digging through government archives at 2 AM. Your ISP keeps records of every site you visit.

What Really Happened in 1995

Here's my theory, based on patterns I've seen across multiple declassified CIA programs.

The program wasn't terminated. It was reclassified.

This is standard CIA procedure, and it's happened before. When a program gets too much public attention or faces Congressional scrutiny, you don't actually kill it. You shut down the name, transfer the personnel to a new compartmented program, and classify the new program at a higher level.

MKUltra "ended" in 1973 — but behavioral research continued under new names. COINTELPRO "ended" in 1971 — but domestic surveillance expanded. Every time the CIA publicly kills a program, the capability gets absorbed into something darker.

My friend Daniel — a paralegal who works in government records — pointed out something interesting to me last month. "Look at the declassified budget documents for DIA programs post-1995," he said. "There are line items for 'anomalous cognition research' that show up through at least 2004. Same budget category. Different program name."

I checked. He's right. The Defense Intelligence Agency's budget includes references to "enhanced human performance" and "anomalous mental phenomena" research well after Stargate was supposedly shut down.

Document references: DIA-DST-1810S-387-75 through DIA-DST-1810S-389-75 (partially declassified, 2004).

The China Factor

Here's something that should concern everyone.

China has been openly funding psychic research since the 1980s. The Chinese Academy of Sciences ran a program studying "Exceptional Human Functions" (特异功能, tèyì gōngnéng) from 1979 to at least the early 2000s. Unlike the U.S., China never officially terminated their program. They just stopped talking about it publicly.

In 2017, documents emerged suggesting that the People's Liberation Army was actively recruiting individuals with demonstrated "anomalous perception abilities" for intelligence applications. This was reported in the South China Morning Post and then vanished from their archives.

If the U.S. truly abandoned psychic research in 1995, that means China has had a 30-year head start in a domain that even the CIA's own skeptic couldn't debunk.

Does that sound like something the Pentagon would tolerate? The same Pentagon that treats every Chinese technological advance as an existential threat?

Of course not.

The Gateway Report

In 2003, a CIA document called the Gateway Process report was partially declassified. It was written in 1983 by U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Wayne McDonnell, and it attempts to provide a physics-based framework for how remote viewing, out-of-body experiences, and altered states of consciousness might actually work.

The report discusses concepts like quantum holography, the universal energy field, and resonance frequencies of human consciousness. It reads like a graduate-level physics paper, not mystical nonsense.

One page — Page 25 — was missing from the declassified version for years. Just... gone. The CIA eventually released it in 2021 after repeated FOIA requests, but the fact that it was withheld at all raises the obvious question: what was on that page that needed to be kept from the public?

The answer: Page 25 discusses the concept of "absolute" — the point at which human consciousness transcends space-time and accesses information from any point in the universe. The framework suggests this isn't science fiction but an inherent capability of the human brain that can be developed through training.

The U.S. Army commissioned this. The U.S. Army took it seriously enough to write a 28-page analytical report about it. And then the CIA classified it for 20 years.

What I Think Is Really Going On

The evidence suggests three things:

1. Remote viewing works. Not perfectly, not consistently, but it produces statistically significant results that can't be explained by chance. The CIA's own data confirms this.

2. The U.S. government didn't stop researching it. They reclassified it. Budget documents, personnel movements, and the pattern of every other "terminated" CIA program all point to continuation under new names.

3. If consciousness can access information across distance and time — which the Stargate data suggests — then the implications for national security, intelligence, and our fundamental understanding of reality are so profound that no government would ever willingly disclose it.

Think about what full disclosure would mean. If remote viewing is real, then there's no such thing as a secure facility. No classified document is safe. No military operation is secret. The entire global security architecture — which is built on the assumption that physical barriers and encryption protect information — falls apart.

You don't declassify that. You bury it.

UPDATE (March 2026)

Joe McMoneagle, now in his 80s, has been giving increasingly candid interviews in retirement. In a February 2026 podcast appearance, he stated — and I'm paraphrasing — that "the work didn't stop, and the people who did it know who they are."

Make of that what you will.

Related Rabbit Holes

Did the government really shut down psychic spying? Or did they just get better at hiding it? Drop your theory below.

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