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History
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Project Stargate and the CIA's Psychic Quest to View Ancient Mars
For two decades, the U.S. government's Project Stargate explored psychic "remote viewing" for intelligence. While results were mixed, declassified documents reveal bizarre sessions, including a 1984 viewing of a dying race and ancient structures on Mars.
The Cold War's Strangest Battlefield: The Mind
In the high-stakes paranoia of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union raced for dominance in every conceivable arena: arms, space, and even the esoteric frontiers of the human mind. While spies and satellites gathered tangible intelligence, a small, highly classified corner of the U.S. government was exploring a far stranger possibility: extrasensory perception (ESP). This effort, which would eventually be known as Project Stargate, was a two-decade-long, multi-million dollar attempt to weaponize psychic abilities, a venture that began with spying on Soviet facilities and ended, remarkably, with a supposed vision of a dying civilization on Mars a million years in the past.
What Was Remote Viewing?
At its core, Project Stargate was built around the concept of "remote viewing." The theory was that certain individuals, with or without training, could perceive information about a distant or unseen location, person, or event using only their minds. Initiated in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) by physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, the program sought to test this phenomenon under scientifically controlled conditions. The U.S. intelligence community, particularly the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), took notice. Fearing the Soviets had their own successful psychic research program, they began funding the experiments, which operated under a series of codenames including GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, and SUN STREAK before being consolidated under STARGATE in 1991.
The protocol was deceptively simple. A "viewer" would be isolated in a room with a monitor or facilitator. Elsewhere, another person would be given a randomly selected target location. The viewer would then attempt to describe the target, often sketching what they "saw." While many results were vague or nonsensical, some were astonishingly accurate. Program proponents pointed to instances like the successful location of a downed Soviet Tu-22 bomber in Africa and the detailed description of a new class of Soviet submarine being built in a secret facility, details later confirmed by satellite imagery.
The Bizarre Martian Detour
For all its terrestrial targets, the program's most infamous session took place on May 22, 1984. In a declassified transcript, a monitor gives a psychic subject a sealed envelope containing nothing but a card with geographic coordinates. The monitor instructs the viewer to focus on a specific location on the planet Mars, approximately one million years in the past. What followed was a transcript that reads like science fiction. The remote viewer described seeing pyramids, dust storms, and the smooth, polished surfaces of what seemed to be megalithic structures. More chillingly, the viewer perceived the inhabitants of this ancient Martian outpost. They were described as very tall, thin people, living inside the massive structures to shelter from a violent, storm-ravaged environment. The psychic claimed to be witnessing a dying race, looking for a way to survive a planetary cataclysm by seeking a new world to inhabit. The session ended with the viewer describing massive ships leaving a dying planet.
Legacy and Public Fascination
This Mars session, along with other strange declassified documents, has cemented Project Stargate's place in modern folklore and conspiracy theories. For many, it's tantalizing proof of hidden truths. As one online commenter noted, the persistence of the story is compelling precisely because of its source:
It’s not just one person saying they saw pyramids on Mars... It’s multiple people who worked for the government. That’s why it’s interesting.
However, the program was plagued by inconsistency and the inability to produce actionable intelligence on a reliable basis. Skeptics often point out the inherent contradiction in the program's alleged successes versus its real-world utility, with one critic wryly observing:
So... they could accurately view Mars a million years ago, but couldn't find Osama bin Laden for a decade? Makes you think.
In 1995, the CIA commissioned an independent review by the American Institutes for Research. The final report concluded that remote viewing had failed to demonstrate any value as an intelligence-gathering tool and recommended its termination. Project Stargate was officially declassified and dissolved. Yet, the story endures not just as a historical oddity, but as a reflection of how far a government is willing to go in the name of national security, and how the line between fringe science and state secret can become profoundly, and unforgettably, blurred.