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Stargate's Red Secret: The Declassified Story of the CIA's Psychic Spies on Mars

For over two decades, the U.S. government secretly funded Project Stargate to weaponize "remote viewing" for intelligence. While results were mixed, declassified files revealed a bizarre 1984 session depicting pyramids and a dying race on Mars a million years ago.

Stargate's Red Secret: The Declassified Story of the CIA's Psychic Spies on Mars

The Cold War was a conflict fought not only with spies and satellites but in the shadowed corners of human consciousness itself. It was an era so steeped in paranoia and one-upmanship that the United States government spent over two decades and millions of dollars on a top-secret program to weaponize psychic abilities. This was Project Stargate, an audacious and ultimately bizarre chapter in the history of American intelligence.

The Psychic Arms Race

In the early 1970s, whispers from behind the Iron Curtain suggested the Soviet Union was pouring significant resources into “psychotronic” research—investigating telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis for military purposes. Fearing a “psi gap,” the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) decided they couldn't afford to be left behind. They contracted physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the prestigious Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to investigate whether a phenomenon they termed remote viewing was real and, more importantly, controllable.

An Unorthodox Intelligence Protocol

The concept was straightforward, if incredible. A “viewer” would be isolated in a room and given a target—often just a set of geographic coordinates sealed in an envelope. Their task was to quiet their mind and describe the images, sounds, and feelings that emerged. These sessions were conducted under strictly controlled conditions in an attempt to lend scientific credibility to the process. Over the years, the program, operating under various codenames like GRILL FLAME and SUN STREAK before settling on STARGATE, claimed a number of successes, including locating a downed Soviet bomber in Africa and describing the layout of a secret weapons facility in the USSR.

A View of Ancient Mars

While many of Stargate's targets were terrestrial, one declassified transcript from May 22, 1984, stands out for its sheer strangeness. In this session, a monitor gave the program’s top psychic, Joseph McMoneagle, an envelope containing only a card with coordinates and a time: “Mars. Time of interest approximately 1 million years B.C.” What followed was a detailed and haunting description of a world long dead. McMoneagle, referred to simply as the “Subject,” described seeing immense, smooth-sided pyramids and towering megalithic structures suffering under the strain of a catastrophic environmental event.

I'm seeing... it's like a perception of a shadow of people, very tall, thin. They're wearing some kind of very silky clothes... They're ancient people. They're... they're dying. It's past their time or age. They're looking for a way to survive and they're not.

The subject went on to describe these beings as a race of giants, sheltering from apocalyptic storms inside massive structures, fully aware that their civilization was at its end. The monitor pressed for details, asking them to go to other sites on the planet, where the psychic described similar scenes of decay and a people waiting for a journey to a new world—a journey they would seemingly never make.

The Program's Demise

Despite tantalizing transcripts and anecdotal hits, Project Stargate was consistently plagued by ambiguity. For every seeming success, there were countless sessions that produced vague, unverifiable, or flatly incorrect information. By the 1990s, with the Cold War over, the program's novelty had worn thin. In 1995, the CIA commissioned the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to conduct a final, definitive evaluation. The AIR report was damning, concluding that remote viewing had failed to produce any actionable intelligence of value. It stated that the phenomenon was not a reliable tool for intelligence gathering, and the program was promptly terminated.

Today, Project Stargate exists in a liminal space between historical fact and modern myth. The declassified documents prove the program was real, a testament to the lengths the government would go in the name of national security. But the content of those documents, particularly the chilling vision of a dying Martian civilization, continues to fuel speculation, ensuring that the legacy of America's psychic spies remains as strange and unsettled as the visions they claimed to see.

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