Per John Kiriakou, the CIA ran a remote-viewing program he calls Project Stargate that he says failed for decades before the agency gave up on it. [1] He has separately dated the effort to the 1950s and ’60s, running until 1974 and wasting millions of taxpayer dollars, before it was mostly dropped in 1975 amid the Church and Pike Committee investigations; he says he understands it is being revisited with newer technology.[2] A separately produced narration segment inserted into the same program — addressing Kiriakou in the third person rather than quoting him — describes Stargate as a legitimate U.S. intelligence program that operated from the early 1970s through 1995, originally as an Army intelligence effort. [3]
‘I don’t have time for this’
John Kiriakou says he never sat in a Project Stargate briefing and dismissed the psychic-spying effort as “so out there” — telling a colleague he needed intelligence “from the source’s mouth,” not from “some guy going into a trance.” He drew a sharp line between Stargate and clinical hypnosis, which he found genuinely effective.[4][5][6] A separately produced narration segment names Stanford Research Institute scientist Russell Targ as an originator of the program’s remote-viewing protocols.