Can you really spy on someone using just your mind? This question sounds like something out of a pulp sci-fi novel, yet during the Cold War both the United States and the Soviet Union invested serious time and money searching for an answer. In one notorious 1970 experiment, a Soviet housewife named Nina Kulagina allegedly stopped a frog’s heart using mental concentration, under the watchful eyes of military scientists. A grainy film of this unsettling feat soon made its way to the U.S. Defense Department, where it definitely grabbed the attention of anxious officials. If the story was true, it implied the Kremlin might be assembling an army of psychic warriors—and no CIA officer wanted to explain a “psychic gap” with the Soviets to the president. So began one of the strangest chapters in modern spycraft: the era of government-backed remote viewing programs.
Remote viewing was essentially controlled clairvoyance: trying to visualize distant places or hidden objects using only the mind. By 1970, U.S. intelligence reports claimed that the Soviet Union was spending 60 million rubles a year on paranormal research. In response, the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) launched a fledgling effort codenamed SCANATE (“scan by coordinate”) that same year. They turned to physicists Russell Targ and Harold “Hal” Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California, who began testing purported psychics in 1972 under contract. To the astonishment of many, early trials suggested that under certain conditions a person could describe a remote scene or object with detail well beyond random chance. Targ and Puthoff reported accuracy rates often exceeding 65%, enough to intrigue their sponsors. One celebrated test subject was Uri Geller, an Israeli magician famous for bending spoons. Geller’s apparent successes at SRI drew wide publicity—until a skeptical visiting psychologist, Ray Hyman, determined that Geller was performing magic tricks rather than miracles. Hyman’s report to the government pronounced Geller a “complete fraud,” leading SRI to lose its contract for studying Geller. But the broader research continued. Targ and Puthoff simply moved on to other volunteers (including artists, police officers, and even a Mongolian horse breeder) in their quest to find genuine psychic spies.
By the mid-1970s, this odd project—half scientific inquiry, half spy mission—had scored a few tentative wins. In 1976, an SRI-trained remote viewer named Rosemary Smith (an administrative assistant, of all things) famously pinpointed the location of a lost Soviet spy plane in Africa, a target traditional intelligence had struggled to find. These stories, though hard to verify, gave the program a sheen of credibility. The Pentagon brass, equal parts fascinated and freaked out, decided to formalize the effort. Through the late 1970s and 1980s, the psychic spying unit morphed and migrated through the bureaucracy under an array of eccentric codenames. The Army launched project Gondola Wish in 1977 to evaluate “adversary applications” of remote viewing. Soon after, an operational unit was established at Fort Meade under the name Grill Flame (1978). As funding and oversight shifted, the program was rechristened Center Lane in 1983 and later Sun Streak in 1985—whenever an old effort ended, a new one rose from its ashes, ensuring that the psychic spies always had a home. By 1991, the enterprise had largely moved out of California and into a defense contractor’s offices (Science Applications International Corporation), with physicist Edwin “Ed” May taking the reins. In its final incarnation the project acquired the name Project STARGATE, a catch-all title that would later be revealed in declassified files and ignite decades of conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union’s own paranormal programs were churning along, if anything even more extravagantly. Since at least the 1960s, Soviet researchers had probed ESP, psychokinesis, and other “extra-sensory” phenomena in military labs. They coined technical-sounding terms like psychotronics and bioenergetics to frame what one might simply call magic as a new frontier of science. (In classic Soviet fashion, even psychic powers needed a Marxist veneer.) Reports filtered to the West that Soviet scientists had tested telepathic communication with submarines and tried to weaponize telekinesis to stop a person’s heart. This wasn’t far-fetched propaganda—they really explored these things. In the late 1980s, as glasnost and perestroika swept through the USSR, the Soviet Ministry of Defense quietly stood up a unit known as Military Unit 10003 to consolidate years of psychic research. Headed by General Alexey Savin, Unit 10003 was tasked with everything from analyzing U.S. psi programs to developing methods of “energy-information impact” on enemies and shielding Soviet leaders from psychic attacks. Savin, now retired, even recounted how in 1991 Soviet “psychic soldiers” were dispatched to a desert in Kazakhstan in hopes of establishing contact with an expected alien spaceship (the UFO never showed up, unfortunately). Outlandish as that sounds, Savin claims his team achieved more down-to-earth successes, like locating minefields during the Chechen war and helping track down sniper teams. It’s hard to know how much of this is truth, exaggeration, or misdirection. But clearly the superpower rivalry wasn’t limited to nukes and spies—it also played out in the theater of the mind. Each side’s belief in the other’s “psychic edge” drove them to push further. By the 1980s the U.S. Army feared a paranormal arms race so much that a 902nd Military Intelligence report warned of a looming “psychic gap” if American aversion to weirdness let the Soviets pull ahead.
Inside the U.S. remote viewing program (which, by the way, never had more than a few dozen personnel at a time), there was a curious mix of true believers and healthy skeptics. Major General Albert Stubblebine, who oversaw Army intelligence in the early ’80s, became one of the program’s champions. Stubblebine was utterly convinced psychic phenomena were real; he even reportedly attempted to train himself to walk through walls in the Pentagon—with painful results. (This incident would later inspire a scene in the 2009 film The Men Who Stare at Goats, where a fictional general runs headlong into a wall in an attempt to phase through it.) Under Stubblebine’s watch, the Fort Meade unit carried on, honing techniques for “seeing” Soviet installations or secret American test sites from thousands of miles away. The star remote viewers, such as Ingo Swann (an artist-psychic who helped develop the SRI protocols) and Joseph McMoneagle (an Army warrant officer with hundreds of missions), became somewhat mythic figures in intel circles. Their session reports read like surrealist art: pages of sketches and impressions that might mix spot-on details about, say, a new enemy submarine alongside completely random ramblings. There were indeed moments of eerie accuracy. For example, in one case a viewer described distinctive cranes and “silos” at a mystery site in the USSR, which later seemed to match overhead satellite photos of a secret Soviet weapons factory. But for every apparent hit, there were countless misses and wild-goose chases. One DIA analyst later lamented that the “data” produced was so vague and often so wrong that it was effectively useless. By the mid-1980s, skepticism was mounting. When Stubblebine was replaced by a more conventional general, Army support dried up. The unit survived a bit longer by burrowing into the DIA, but the writing was on the wall (one that even a psychic general couldn’t walk through).
The coup de grâce came in 1995. With the Cold War over and budgets tightening, Congress transferred the last iteration of Project Stargate back to the CIA for a final evaluation. The CIA brought in outside experts—most notably Jessica Utts, a statistics professor open to paranormal effects, and Ray Hyman, the same skeptical psychologist who had debunked Uri Geller decades earlier—to pore over two decades’ worth of remote viewing experiments. Their dueling conclusions were as polarized as one might expect. Utts argued that the data showed small but statistically significant results, evidence that “psychic functioning” (particularly precognition, seeing future events) was real. Hyman, in contrast, insisted that any successes could be explained by chance, sloppy protocols, or selective reporting. In his report, Hyman wrote that the few “hits” scattered among an “overwhelming” amount of vague and incorrect data were exactly what one would expect from subjective validation—in other words, if you give an analyst enough ambiguous sketches and statements, they will eventually find something that seems to match reality. A subsequent review by the American Institutes for Research sided firmly with Hyman’s view. The overall finding was that remote viewing never provided actionable intelligence—no secrets were uncovered solely by psychics, without other clues. Moreover, the AIR investigators found reason to suspect that even some of the program’s much-touted “success stories” might have resulted from the viewers being inadvertently tipped off by prior knowledge or contextual clues. In the end, the CIA declared the $20-million, 23-year saga a failure and pulled the plug in 1995. To many in the intelligence community, it was a long-overdue reality check. “There’s no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community,” said David Goslin of AIR, bluntly summarizing the final verdict. Parapsychology research, once the weird darling of a few three-star generals, was relegated back to the academic fringe.
Yet, even as officials pronounced remote viewing dead, the idea gained a life of its own in popular culture. In 2004, journalist Jon Ronson published The Men Who Stare at Goats, a non-fiction book that revealed with wry humor the U.S. Army’s bizarre forays into psychic warfare (including that wall-walking general and attempts to kill barnyard animals by staring intensely). The book was adapted into a 2009 movie starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor, turning these once-classified programs into mainstream satire. In one memorable scene, Clooney’s character concentrates his psychic fury on a goat until the poor creature keels over—an allusion to an actual claim from the Army unit that a goat’s heart was stopped by psychic effort. The film’s absurdist comedy worked because it was just barely exaggerating real history. Around the same time, declassified files and news features began feeding public fascination. The notion that serious scientists and soldiers had dabbled in ESP and clairvoyance was irresistible. It prompted a wave of documentaries, from the sober to the sensational, reexamining Project Stargate’s legacy. Even TV shows like The X-Files and Stranger Things wove in references: shadowy government experiments, psychic kids peering into alternate dimensions, secret Russian mind-warriors, and so on. Remote viewing left a permanent imprint on the cultural imagination as a symbol of how far we might go when fear—and hope—push us beyond the bounds of consensus reality.
A scene from the satirical film The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009) depicts U.S. soldiers attempting to psychically fell a goat, a cheeky reference to real military experiments. The public’s ongoing fascination with these programs springs from a mix of genuine curiosity, skepticism, and the comforting thought that however strange our private beliefs might be, our governments have believed stranger things.
A Practical Guide
So, after all this, you might be wondering: Can you try remote viewing at home? The answer is yes—at least in the spirit of an open-minded experiment. In fact, the basic protocols used by the CIA and SRI researchers can be replicated by anyone with a friend and a bit of patience. While you probably won’t be uncovering enemy submarines in your living room, you can get a taste of what those lab sessions felt like. Here’s a step-by-step exercise based on real remote-viewing methods:
Set up a hidden “target.” Ask a friend (or someone in your household) to select a target for you. This could be an image cut from a magazine and sealed in an envelope, a photo saved on their phone—anything visual that you won’t see in advance. The friend should place the target out of sight. In official experiments, targets were often randomly assigned coordinates or code numbers to keep them secret; at home, you can achieve secrecy with an envelope or by having the friend simply think of a specific location they’ve been to. The key is that there’s something unknown for you to attempt to perceive remotely.
Find a quiet space and clear your mind. Remote viewing sessions typically took place in a distraction-free room. Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and take a few minutes to relax. Some practitioners use meditation or breathing exercises to reach a calm, focused state. You want to dial down your logical brain and become aware of subtle impressions—this is often described as turning off the “analysis” and letting intuitive sensations come. In the lab, viewers sometimes even wore eye masks or used white noise to reduce sensory input. At home, just make sure you’re not going to be interrupted and that you’re in a receptive frame of mind.
Record impressions, don’t analyze. Now, concentrate on the essence of the hidden target. Don’t consciously try to guess what it is (no fair thinking “Okay, it’s probably a photo of the Eiffel Tower” and then concocting details). Instead, note the very first shapes, colors, textures, or feelings that pop into your awareness. Maybe you see a vague form that is round, or the color red, or a sense of water, or the word “cold”—whatever comes, jot it down or sketch it. The golden rule in remote viewing is often stated as “describe, don’t identify.” In other words, write down descriptive elements (curved, metallic, bright, roaring sound, etc.) rather than declaring what you think the target is. Even if an image flashes in your mind (“I see a bridge”), break it down into components like long span, cables, tall structures, open air. This mimics the actual protocols used by government psychics, where they focused on raw perceptions and left interpretation for later. Don’t worry if you feel like you’re making it up—just keep going for perhaps 10-15 minutes, recording all the impressions that surface, no matter how odd or fragmentary.
Finalize your notes and only then reveal the target. When you sense that you’ve exhausted whatever impressions you can get (or simply when your time is up), put aside your pen. It’s important to separate the viewing from the feedback. In official tests, the viewer would often only get feedback after all judging was done, to prevent them from second-guessing themselves in future trials. In your casual at-home version, once you’ve committed your description to paper, have your friend show or tell you what the target actually was. This is the moment of truth: compare your sketches and notes to the target image or location. Look for any surprising correlations. Did you draw wavy lines, and the photo turns out to be an ocean scene? Did you write “red, rough texture” and the target was a close-up of a red brick wall? Individual bits might match even if your overall guess was off. Of course, chances are you also described a bunch of things that don’t match at all. That’s normal. The fun (and humility) of remote viewing is in seeing just how fuzzy and elusive that mind’s-eye vision can be.
Try it again (and again). One experiment won’t tell you much. Researchers did hundreds of trials to tease out whether results were above chance. If you’re intrigued, turn it into a game over several sessions. Swap roles with your friend and see if either of you scores a direct hit now and then. Use a variety of targets. Keep the atmosphere light and curious—remember, even the best government psychics often produced gibberish next to an occasional gem. By repeating the process, you might notice slight improvements in how you focus or discern subtle impressions. At the very least, you’ll be participating in a real-world exercise that entertained (and baffled) some of the best minds in the intelligence community for years.
As you explore this DIY ESP experiment, keep in mind the broader lesson of the remote viewing exercise. The idea of psychic spies and midnight séances in Army bunkers reveals something profound about human nature. When faced with existential threats—whether nuclear Armageddon or terrorist plots—our leaders were willing to peer into every dark corner of possibility, no matter how far-fetched. The scientists involved weren’t fools; many were respected physicists and engineers. The soldiers and intelligence officers were driven by the pressing need to gain any edge they could. Their openness to the unknown, however unorthodox, was both a strength and a vulnerability. They reminded us that curiosity doesn’t always color within the lines, and sometimes even very smart people will earnestly pursue what others consider impossible. Were the psychic spies ultimately proved “real”? No, not by conventional standards. The consensus is that the world’s militaries found no reliable sixth-sense superspy. But in another sense, these programs succeeded in expanding the conversation about what the human mind might be capable of. They pulled concepts from the paranormal fringe into rigorous testing, and in doing so, forced skeptics and believers alike to sharpen their arguments.
Today, virtually no one in the intelligence community expects to recruit a telepathic 007. Yet the legacy of Project Stargate and its Soviet counterparts isn’t entirely gone. A new generation of researchers, in fields like consciousness studies and cognitive science, quietly ponder questions about intuition, perception, and the limits of awareness that sound a lot like what the psychics were trying to do. The topic has also prompted society to ask how we should approach extraordinary claims. With healthy skepticism, yes, but perhaps without ridicule—because history shows public opinion can swing from dismissal to serious consideration and back again as new evidence (or new fears) emerge. In the end, whether or not you believe anyone can spy with their mind, the remote viewing story offers a cautionary tale and an inspiring one. It’s cautionary in that it teaches us the importance of scientific rigor and not letting wishful thinking override hard evidence. But it’s inspiring in the sense that it encourages a spirit of open-minded exploration. Humans have an innate desire to push against the boundaries of the known, to test the doors of perception (occasionally by trying to run through literal walls). Sometimes we’ll crash and get a lump on the head, but sometimes we might glimpse something genuinely new about ourselves.