By What happened to the Stargate project? Why did the documents that talked about it cause so much controversy when they were declassified? What conclusions did it leave? In this article we will try to answer these questions.
During the 1970s there was a kind of boom around the so-called “psychics” or people with exceptional mental abilities, related to supernatural abilities , such as telepathy and “remote viewing.” This was the Stargate project, a United States Government program dedicated to the registration and verification of these unusual abilities.
The plan was initially a secret program and remained so until 1995, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) declassified all documents related to it . The plan ended because its directors considered it no longer useful.
Basically, Stargate sought out and recruited people who seemed to have exceptional abilities , assessed their skills , and determined whether the government could use them for specific purposes. The results were mixed and the program was ended, but the experience led to a book and movie called The Men Who Stare at Goats .
“The mind is everything. What you think you become.”
-Buddha-
The origin of the Stargate project
In the early 1970s, American intelligence services began randomly investigating people who presented themselves to the world as “psychics .” It is believed that the Soviet Union was doing the same at the same time.
They have become increasingly interested in the phenomenon known as “remote viewing.” This is defined as the ability to receive information about situations or people at great distances. It is a phenomenon of “extrasensory perception” for which there is no scientific evidence to support it.
In 1972, physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff began testing people who seemed to have the ability to see remotely . The results were considered encouraging enough to spark the interest of the White House , to the point of hiring psychologist Ray Hyman to analyze a young man named Uri Geller , who seemed to have great abilities.
The Hyman report’s findings branded Geller a complete fraud. However, other people who were tested, and not as well-known as the Israeli, continued to arouse interest . The most obvious case was that of Rosemary Smith, who enabled the location of a Soviet spy to be found in 1976, supposedly through “remote viewing.”
What is known about the project
Most people had no idea what the Stargate project was. In fact, it only became famous in 1995 when it was declassified. Writer Jim Popkin was perhaps the first person to publish some of the details of the plan, in a lengthy press report .
He said that they invested $20 million in the project and that they used it to find secret training camps in Libya and identify the places where kidnapped citizens were being held. Popkin said that the phenomenon of remote viewing was fully demonstrated with this project, but there is not enough evidence to corroborate his claim.
There are claims that while the Stargate project itself has ended, the activities that were carried out have not ceased . They apparently moved from the CIA to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). In fact, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense once told Newsweek that “the study of the power of the mind is and remains an important endeavor.”
Truth or myth?
When the Stargate documents were declassified , the American ABC network made a television programme in which Robert Gates, former director of the CIA, and Edwin May, one of the scientists at the head of the plan, participated. The two gave diametrically opposed versions: while Gates described the experiment as useless, May claimed important achievements.
In any case, there is no evidence that the project was continued in any form or that it yielded any useful results . To date, there is also no scientific evidence for “remote viewing.”
The only thing that could support this are some declassified documents in which there are episodes that are difficult to explain . There are also testimonies such as that of Army Petty Officer Joseph McMoneagle, considered the “agent 001” of the experiment. Beyond this, the supposed “paranormal abilities” of the human being are still lacking.