What is Project Stargate?

During the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were dealing with nuclear arms, space exploration, and other things, they were also trying to understand psychic abilities and to see if it had to do with espionage. The Soviet Union even went so far as to invest in parapsychology, including Remote Viewing, thinking that it could help to get intelligence and help to spy on the United States government.

This caused Washington to go to the CIA to figure out its own programs to find out if Remote Viewing was real and if it would hurt or help national security. The idea that the Soviet Union might have something on the United States or that they could gather information caused there to be a race to find out more about psychic gifts.

The CIA’s Secret Obsession with Remote Viewing

Back in the 1970s, the CIA started pouring money, over $20 million, into a quiet little program at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). On the surface, it sounded like science fiction: they wanted to find out if people could “see” things with their minds. Not in a metaphorical sense, but literally. Could someone sitting in a room describe a hidden object, or tell you what was happening thousands of miles away, using nothing but their consciousness?

What started as an experiment to debunk psychic abilities ended up doing the opposite. Under the direction of physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, the project uncovered some truly strange and surprisingly accurate results.

The original plan was simple: prove that Remote Viewing was nonsense. But instead, the results pointed to something real, something that couldn’t be explained away by luck or imagination.

What They Found Shocked Everyone

The participants in these early SRI experiments weren’t supposed to be psychic. Many had no previous training. But somehow, they kept getting things right.

• Describing hidden targets with shocking accuracy, even when they had no physical cues.
• Tuning in to distant locations and naming details they had no way of knowing.
• Consistently outperforming chance, with results that had odds like 1 in 10,000 of being random.

This wasn’t just a fluke. It happened again and again, in controlled environments. And before long, other intelligence agencies started paying attention. The CIA wasn’t alone, but the NSA and the DIA jumped in too, wanting to see how far this strange new skill could go.

When Remote Viewing Got Real

Things took a wild turn when Ingo Swann, a key figure in the program, sat down for a session and described something that didn’t make sense: rings around Jupiter. The catch? No one knew Jupiter had rings at the time. But in 1979, years after Swann’s session, NASA’s Pioneer 10 confirmed he was right.

Coincidence? The CIA didn’t think so. Swann also described features on the Moon and Mars that were some that weren’t confirmed until decades later. His drawings of Martian landscapes lined up closely with what we eventually saw. He even hinted at structures and possible signs of life, which set off a quiet storm of speculation inside the program.

And he wasn’t the only one. Here is a list of things that happened in the real world that you can look at over time:

• Jupiter’s Rings: This was one of the most famous discoveries and was made by Ingo Swann in 1973. He was part of the Remote Viewing Program. This happened years before NASA discovered the rings.
• Moon and Mars: Remote Viewing sessions were also conducted by Ingo Swann, which showed the Moon and Mars. He reported possible extraterrestrial activity, but his idea of Martians aligned later with the geographic areas, which made more people support his ideas.

Joe McMoneagle: The Government’s Psychic Spy

Speaking of Joe McMoneagle, he was such a key figure in the Remote Viewing world was Joe McMoneagle. This guy wasn’t just good, but he was legendary.

• He accurately described the location of a massive Soviet submarine, later confirmed with satellite imagery.
• He predicted the landing site of the International Space Station before it was public knowledge.
• He revealed that the Titanic split in two before sinking, something historians didn’t confirm until Robert Ballard’s dive years later.
• He gave such precise details in a kidnapping case that a U.S. Army General was rescued within the hour.
• And President Carter himself admitted that Remote Viewing helped locate a downed Soviet bomber, confirming, in his own words, that the program actually worked.

McMonagle even drew detailed layouts of foreign facilities, later verified by satellite. These weren’t vague guesses. They were specific, actionable, and, more often than not, he was correct.

So Why Did They Shut It Down?

After two decades of research, the government pulled the plug in 1995. Officially, the CIA claimed the data was “inconclusive” and said the intel was too vague to be useful. But many believe that was just a convenient excuse.

• Because if it really didn’t work, why did they keep funding it for 20 years?
• Why did 15 of the country’s 17 largest intelligence agencies rely on it?
• And why did so many sessions lead to verified discoveries?

Some insiders believe the truth was too uncomfortable. If consciousness could reach across time and space, if psychic abilities were real, then it would rewrite everything we thought we knew about the mind, science, and even reality itself. That’s not the kind of revelation the government is quick to embrace publicly.

The Universities Took It Further

Even after the government stepped away, research into Remote Viewing didn’t stop. Several top universities picked up the torch, and what they found was just as mind-blowing.

University of Colorado

Researchers asked Remote Viewers to predict movements in the stock market. Out of ten predictions, seven were correct, way beyond what chance would allow. It raised questions about whether intuition could play a role in financial forecasting.

Columbia University

Their controlled experiments saw Remote Viewing success rates hovering around 77% accuracy, with reliability hitting 78%. That’s on par with traditional psychotherapy outcomes, which is huge.

Princeton’s PEAR Lab

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program spent decades studying how human consciousness interacts with the physical world. In over 336 trials of remote perception, their success rate was 15–30% above chance, sometimes even higher. And that was just the beginning.

• Participants mentally influenced random number generators, producing results with odds against chance greater than 1 in 10 million.
• They found that time and distance didn’t matter. People could describe targets across the world or even in the past and future.
• Many hit 50 %+ accuracy, compared to the expected 25% if they were guessing.

This wasn’t just repeatable but it aligned almost exactly with the CIA’s own data from SRI. Which meant this wasn’t a one-time fluke. It was something real.

Meta-Analysis, the Monroe Institute, and the Bigger Picture

A massive review of 36 different studies, all spanning decades, showed an average increase in Remote Viewing accuracy of nearly 20% above chance. That’s a strong effect, and one that held steady across different protocols, timelines, and researchers.

The Monroe Institute, which has long studied altered states of consciousness, found that Remote Viewing consistently outperformed other extrasensory testing methods. And these results weren’t cherry-picked. There was no publication bias, no manipulation. Just real data, quietly stacking up.

With over 1.5 million words of declassified material on Remote Viewing, it’s one of the most well-documented psychic research efforts in U.S. history.

Why It Still Makes People Nervous

Part of why Remote Viewing hasn’t gone fully mainstream is because of its strange connection to MKUltra, the government’s dark past with mind control experiments. That history created a cloud of suspicion around anything to do with psychic research.

Combine that with Cold War secrecy, political pressure, and a public wary of anything that sounds “New Age,” and it’s no surprise the program lost funding even if it never really stopped.

After the Cold War, priorities shifted. Budgets tightened. Intelligence agencies leaned more on tech: satellites, surveillance, and digital tracking. Psychic spies didn’t fit the new narrative. But behind the scenes, the Remote Viewers never stopped working.

The Psychic Program That Refused to Die

Even after Congress said no, Remote Viewing lived on. Reports show over 1,200 Remote Viewing sessions were done for the CIA alone. And many agencies, both from military intelligence to law enforcement, have quietly continued asking for psychic support.

Why? Because when it worked, it really worked. This wasn’t about fortune-telling. It was about actionable intelligence. From military ops to missing persons to identifying threats, Remote Viewing gave insights that no satellite or spy plane could.

And while the official stance may still be “inconclusive,” the evidence is sitting in declassified files, waiting for people to look a little closer. Because maybe, just maybe, our minds are more powerful than we’ve ever been taught to believe.

Final Thoughts

Remote Viewing has been challenging because people don’t consider it to be real. Remote Viewing can be questioned because people want to know how it aligns with things like the quantum field theory or the string theory, which allows things to be seen without the human eye.

This is a conspiracy that might never be solved and is one of the strangest ones. It shows that many people believe that our conscious mind extends further than what we see in the physical world. But the real question isn’t if Remote Viewing is real, it has strong evidence that it is, the real question is what does Remote Viewing tell us about the nature of humans and the nature of reality?