He drew one. In a four-day experiment on a Soviet research site code-named URDF-3, Pat Price sketched a rail-mounted gantry crane that an analyst who knew the site called a remarkable likeness. The same analyst, in a 34-page report dated December 4, 1975, concluded that the experiment was unsuccessful: Price also described many things that were not there, got the site's main underground building wrong, and the test had not ruled out his being told what to draw.
What the record is
What the analyst reviewed
Day by day
The verdict
Where to read it
What the documents say, and what people claim
What the record is
The CIA Reading Room lists it as "AN ANALYSIS OF A REMOTE-VIEWING EXPERIMENT OF URDF-3," 34 pages, originally Confidential, dated December 4, 1975, released October 27, 1998, record number CIA-RDP96-00791R000200240001-0. The author's name is redacted. He writes that he was asked to analyze and judge the validity of the experiment, that he was "quite familiar" with the chronology and layout of URDF-3 and the terrain and technical areas within 40 miles, and that if he had any bias it was that he wanted remote viewing to work.
Later accounts place URDF-3 (Unidentified Research and Development Facility 3) near Semipalatinsk in Soviet Kazakhstan; the FAS program history refers to the 1974 Semipalatinsk data. Price, a former Burbank police officer, worked with SRI's remote viewing research in the early 1970s; see What was Project Star Gate?.
What the analyst reviewed
The data were two cassette tapes from the first two days, 79 pages of transcripts from the third and fourth days, and 30 sketches, plus the site records available to him. The analyst paid particular attention to what Price had been told, because that decided how original anything he said could be.
Day by day
Day one. Price correctly described the location and type of target, but the analyst notes that information had been given to him by the experimenters. He failed on the layout and the types of buildings. He mentioned a gantry crane for heavy lifting. He tended to say he would come back to specifics and seldom did, and he twice avoided drawing the perimeter when asked. The analyst found nothing in the first day that validated remote viewing.
That evening an experimenter phoned Price and told him to concentrate on the crane and its relation to the dominant three-story building, and to draw the perimeter fence. On day two Price produced the sketch of a rail-mounted gantry crane that the report calls the most positive evidence yet. The analyst finds it hard to imagine how Price drew such a likeness unless he saw it by remote viewing or was told what to draw by someone who knew the site, and notes the experiment was not controlled against Price talking to others. The same day, Price described several landmark objects that did not exist at the site.
Day three. Shown a sketch of the operations area and told it was the target, Price said only one of four headframes remained, which was wrong. Worse, he read the four surface protrusions of Building 1, an underground building, as four separate buildings on a concrete apron, and when asked directly whether they might be parts of an underground building he said no. The analyst calls this his most negative evidence. Day four produced a detailed concept of the site's operation but nothing checkable.
The verdict
The summary opens by saying the experiment "proved to be unsuccessful" and closes: "After careful analysis of all the data presented, I have concluded that Price's remote-viewing experiment of URDF-3 was unsuccessful." In between, the analyst makes the point that matters for anyone using such reports: name enough objects and one will exist, and a customer cannot tell fact from fiction.
That is the problem the 1995 review of the whole program would describe again twenty years later; see Is remote viewing real?.
The documents say: Price drew a crane that closely resembled the real one, after being told by phone to concentrate on the crane; he also described many objects that did not exist and misread the site's underground building; an analyst who knew the site and wanted the method to work judged the experiment unsuccessful.
People claim: that Price drew the crane in exact detail and that the CIA confirmed a hit. The sketch is real and the analyst was impressed by it. He also wrote that the test could not rule out Price being told what to draw, and his verdict is the word unsuccessful. The sketch is usually quoted; the verdict is not.
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.
Is remote viewing real? What the 1995 review found: The 1995 AIR evaluation found a small laboratory effect but no proof of a paranormal cause, and no case where remote viewing ever guided an operation.
What did SRI find when it tested Uri Geller?: An August 1973 SRI write-up of eight days of picture-drawing tests with Uri Geller, now a CIA record. What it claims, and what critics found later.
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.