Did remote viewers look for the Ark of the Covenant?
Not as a search. A 19-page record from the DIA's Sun Streak program shows that on December 5, 1988, a trainee remote viewer was given the Ark of the Covenant as a training target, identified by coordinate. The viewer described a wooden, gold and silver container inside another container, hidden underground somewhere in the Middle East and guarded. The file is a practice session with a monitor's note on technique, not an operation, and no location was named.
What the record is
What the viewer described
What the monitor wrote
Why the file travels so well
Where to read it
What the documents say, and what people claim
What the record is
The CIA Reading Room lists the file as "SUN STREAK PROJECT 0209," with the session number left blank and "CRV VIEWER: 032," 19 pages, originally Secret, dated December 5, 1988, and released May 17, 2000, under the number CIA-RDP96-00789R001300180002-7. Sun Streak was the name of the Fort Meade remote viewing unit after it moved from the Army to the Defense Intelligence Agency in late 1985; see What was Project Star Gate?.
The cover sheet gives project number 0209, the date, a start time of 0915 and an end time of 1045, the method as CRV (Coordinate Remote Viewing) at the training stage, and the viewer as number 032. The mission line asks the viewer to access and describe the target identified by coordinate; a handwritten note beneath says training target 0209 is the Ark of the Covenant.
The rest is a typed session summary, handwritten session notes and ideograms, and several sketches; the machine-read text of the handwritten pages is unreadable.
What the viewer described
The typed summary, for viewer 032 on 5 December 1988, opens: "Target is a container. This container has another container inside of it. The target is fashioned of wood, gold and silver." The viewer compared the shape to a coffin, marking that comparison as AOL (analytical overlay, the unit's term for a guess from memory), and said it was decorated with seraphim, with a sketch on page 16.
The viewer placed it "somewhere in the Middle East" because people present seemed to speak Arabic, saw buildings with what might be mosque domes, and described people dressed in white with black hair and dark eyes. The target was hidden underground in a dark, wet place. Its purpose, the viewer wrote, was to bring a people together, with aspects of ceremony, memory, homage and resurrection, and of knowledge far beyond what we now know.
The summary ends with the guardians. The target is protected by entities and can only be opened by those authorized, and not until the time is deemed correct. Anyone opening it by prying or striking would be destroyed by the protectors through a power unknown to us.
What the monitor wrote
The cover sheet carries the monitor's evaluation, and it is about technique, not the Ark. Viewer 032 attained excellent site contact, was doing very well with the stage structure, and showed the ability to keep AOL to a minimum, with a caution to watch editing. In the unit's 1985 CRV working paper, training sessions are run as "Class C," with a monitor who knows the site; see What is the CRV remote viewing manual?. This was a lesson, graded on form.
Nothing in the file names a country, city or building. No follow-up is attached and no one is tasked to go anywhere. The Ark served as a vivid, well-known object for a trainee to practice on.
Why the file travels so well
The summary reads like a film treatment: a hidden gold box in a wet cavern, guardians, a lock that opens at the appointed time. Add "CIA" and "Ark of the Covenant" and the page writes its own headline. The file is real and the words are the viewer's. What retellings leave out is the first page, which says training target, and the monitor's note, which grades the viewer's structure and says nothing about where the Ark might be.
The documents say: a 90-minute training session on December 5, 1988; a trainee's description of a wood, gold and silver container, hidden underground in the Middle East and guarded; a monitor's note praising the trainee's technique. No place, no search, no result.
People claim: that the CIA "found" or "located" the Ark, that the session gives its hiding place, or that the file was an operation. The cover sheet says training target. The summary names no location. The claim that the Ark was found is not in the file.
Last updated November 4, 2026.
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Star Gate remote viewing, answered: What Project Star Gate was, what the 1995 review found, the Mars session, the Ark of the Covenant target, the CRV manual, Uri Geller at SRI and more, with CIA record IDs.
What is the CRV remote viewing manual?: The 1985 Army working paper on Coordinate Remote Viewing, now in the CIA Reading Room: its six stages, ideograms, analytical overlay and session rules.
Did the Army remote view Mars in 1984?: A nine-page 1984 transcript in the CIA's Star Gate files describes a remote viewing session with Mars, one million BC, as the target. What it says.
What was Project Star Gate?: Star Gate was the last name of a US remote viewing effort that ran from the 1970s to 1995. Dates, agencies, cost and the 1995 review, from the records.