Telepathy at SRI: The Secret History of America's Psychic Research Program
For roughly twenty years, the United States government paid physicists to find out whether the human mind could gather information at a distance. This is not folklore. The program was real, it was funded by the CIA and later the Defense Intelligence Agency, and most of its paperwork was declassified in 1995. This article walks through what happened, in order.
The Cold War Context
American interest in psychic research did not begin at SRI. J.B. Rhine had been running card-guessing experiments at Duke University since the 1930s, coining the term "extrasensory perception" and popularizing the five-symbol Zener deck. By the late 1960s, Western intelligence agencies had picked up reports that the Soviet Union was funding its own parapsychology laboratories.
Whether or not the Soviet work was any good, the perceived gap was enough. If there was even a small chance that an adversary could read a sealed document or describe a submarine pen from a thousand miles away, the reasoning went, it was cheaper to investigate than to ignore.
1972: The Program Begins
The work landed at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. SRI had been founded by Stanford University trustees in 1946 and formally separated from the university in 1970, becoming SRI International in 1977. It was a serious contract research shop, best known for engineering and computing work, which is part of why the arrangement mattered: this was not a fringe institute.
Two laser physicists ran the program. Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ began working with Ingo Swann, a New York artist who claimed he could describe distant places on demand. Early CIA funding followed a set of demonstrations, and the research got a code name: SCANATE, short for "scan by coordinate," because targets were specified to the subject only as geographic coordinates.
The term the SRI team settled on was remote viewing, chosen deliberately to sound neutral and clinical rather than occult. Strictly speaking, remote viewing describes perceiving a distant place rather than reading another person's mind, so it is closer to clairvoyance than to telepathy. But the early SRI work included both: some experiments used a "sender" at the target site, which makes them telepathy experiments in the classical sense.
The Nature Paper
In 1974, Targ and Puthoff published "Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding" in Nature, one of the most prominent scientific journals in the world. The paper described experiments with Uri Geller and with Pat Price and reported results the authors considered statistically significant.
Publication in Nature did not mean the field accepted the findings. The journal ran an unusual editorial note explaining why it had published a paper on such a contested subject, and critics attacked the protocols almost immediately, particularly the possibility of sensory leakage and cueing during the Geller sessions. That argument never really ended.
Pat Price and the Semipalatinsk Session
The single most cited episode in the program involves Pat Price, a retired Burbank police commissioner. Given only map coordinates, Price produced descriptions and sketches of a site at Semipalatinsk in the Soviet Union, including a large gantry crane and a sphere under construction.
Supporters point out that elements of the description were later judged to correspond to a known Soviet facility. Critics point out that other elements did not match, that the judging was done after the fact, and that a sketch of industrial equipment is not a hard identification. Both readings survive in the declassified files, and readers of those files tend to find what they came looking for.
From Laboratory to Army Unit
By the late 1970s the interest had spread from the CIA to the military. The Army's Intelligence and Security Command established an operational unit at Fort Meade, Maryland, drawing on SRI's training methods and using soldiers as viewers rather than laboratory subjects.
The program's name changed repeatedly as sponsorship and classification shifted:
- SCANATE (from 1972) - the original SRI coordinate work
- GRILL FLAME (late 1970s) - the joint research and operational effort
- CENTER LANE (1983) - the Army INSCOM unit
- SUN STREAK (1986) - after transfer to the Defense Intelligence Agency
- STARGATE (1991) - the umbrella name applied to the DIA program, and the one the public remembers
The renaming was mostly bureaucratic, but it explains why the same project appears in the record under half a dozen labels.
The Move to SAIC
In 1991 the research contract moved from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation, with Edwin May as research director. May had joined the SRI effort in 1975 and ultimately spent about two decades on the program, longer than either of its founders.
1995: The Review and the End
In 1995 the CIA commissioned the American Institutes for Research to evaluate whether the program had produced anything of intelligence value. Two reviewers assessed the laboratory evidence and reached famously opposite conclusions.
Jessica Utts, a statistician at the University of California, concluded that the experimental effect was statistically robust and had been replicated across laboratories. Ray Hyman, a psychologist at the University of Oregon and a longtime critic of parapsychology, agreed the statistics were unusual but argued that methodological flaws and the absence of any known mechanism made the results uninterpretable.
The practical finding was less ambiguous: the reviewers agreed the program had never produced information specific and reliable enough to act on. Stargate was terminated in 1995, and a large volume of material was declassified. Much of it is now public through the CIA's CREST archive, where anyone can read the session transcripts directly.
What the Record Actually Supports
It is worth being precise about what is and is not established here.
Well documented: The program existed. It ran for roughly two decades. It was funded by the CIA, the Army, and the DIA. Serious physicists ran it, respected journals published some of it, and the government spent something in the range of twenty million dollars.
Contested: Whether any of it demonstrated a real transfer of information. Mainstream science does not accept telepathy as a proven phenomenon, and the most common explanations offered for the SRI results are sensory cueing, loose judging procedures, and selective reporting of hits.
The honest position is that the history is remarkable and the physics is unresolved. You can find the primary documents yourself and form your own view, which is a rare luxury in a subject this contested.
Try it: Search the CIA CREST reading room for "remote viewing" and read one raw session transcript end to end, including the misses. The unedited sessions are far stranger and far more mixed than either the believers' or the skeptics' summaries suggest.
- Use our gematria calculator to compare the numerical values of the program's code names side by side.