Star Gate was the final code name of a US government effort to use remote viewing, the claimed ability to describe a distant place by mind alone, for intelligence work. It began with CIA-funded research at SRI in 1972, ran as an Army unit at Fort Meade from 1978 under the names Grill Flame, Center Lane and Sun Streak, and closed in 1995 after an outside review found it had never produced intelligence anyone acted on.
One program, five names
Who ran it and what it cost
What the viewers did
How it ended
Star Gate and the Gateway report
Where to read it
What the documents say, and what people claim
One program, five names
The name changed every time the program changed hands. By the Federation of American Scientists' summary, the CIA began funding a research effort called SCANATE ("scan by coordinate") in 1970, and laboratory work on remote viewing began at Stanford Research Institute in 1972 under physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff. In 1977 the Army opened its own study, Gondola Wish, to judge what an adversary might do with the method.
In mid-1978 the Army made it an operational unit at Fort Meade, Maryland, called Grill Flame, under the Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM); the SRI research was folded in during 1979. The unit became Center Lane in 1983 and, after Army funding ended in late 1985, moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency as Sun Streak. In 1991 the research contract passed from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and the effort took its last name, Star Gate.
A 1995 CIA memo puts the agency's own early role plainly: it funded research at SRI from about 1972 to about 1977 and then stopped. The memo calls the programs "modest programs, involving few personnel and dollars."
Who ran it and what it cost
The FAS summary counts more than forty people over the years, about 23 of them remote viewers, with as many as seven full-time viewers at the mid-1980s peak and three left from 1990 to July 1995. Spending over more than two decades came to about $20 million.
Reports went to the requesting agencies as raw data. A 1982 session file spells out the rule: the viewer's impressions "are provided as raw intelligence data, and as such, have not been subjected to any intermediate analysis, evaluation or collation." The customer decided what the words meant.
What the viewers did
Three methods appear in the files: Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV), a staged written procedure taught from about 1982 and described in a 1985 Army working paper (see the CRV manual), Extended Remote Viewing (ERV), and Written Remote Viewing (WRV), introduced in 1988 and controversial inside the unit, according to the FAS summary.
Targets ranged from Soviet facilities to hostages. Famous files include the 1974 session on a Soviet site (Pat Price), the 1982 search for General Dozier, and a 1984 session whose sealed target was the planet Mars.
How it ended
The fiscal year 1995 defense appropriations act moved the program to the CIA, which hired the American Institutes for Research to evaluate it. AIR's report, dated September 29, 1995, and released November 28, 1995, found a small statistical effect in the laboratory, could not say what caused it, and found no case in which remote viewing had guided an intelligence operation. It recommended ending the program, and the CIA did; see Is remote viewing real?.
The files went online in the CIA's Reading Room in January 2017 as the STARGATE collection, thousands of records.
Star Gate and the Gateway report
The 1983 Army report on the Monroe Institute's Gateway Process sits in the same collection, which is why many people call it a CIA document. An INSCOM officer wrote it in June 1983, and the Army's 1978 Gondola Wish assessment treated out-of-body training at the Institute as separate from remote viewing. See the Gateway Process documents and Why did the Army send soldiers to the Monroe Institute?.
The documents say: a small, long-running program, mostly Army and DIA, with CIA money at the start and a CIA review at the end; about $20 million over two decades; raw reports handed to customers unanalyzed; closed in 1995 on the finding that none of it had guided an operation.
People claim: that the CIA ran psychic spies for decades, that the program was closed because it worked too well, or that it still runs in secret. The record shows a program the CIA funded briefly in the 1970s and closed in 1995 on its reviewers' advice; nothing in the released files supports a secret continuation.
Last updated November 4, 2026.
READ THE DOCUMENTS OFFLINE, IN LUCID DREAM TRAINING & JOURNAL
The 1983 Gateway report from this collection is one of the four public-domain documents bundled, readable offline, in our Android app Lucid Dream Training & Journal.
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 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.