ESP Tests

ESP Tests and the CIA

The CIA's interest and involvement with different kinds of ESP testing started in the early 1970s when the Agency founded the Stanford Research Institute. An early project in the field of psychic research was dubbed, "Project Scanate."

Project Scanate

The goal of this project was to explore "scanning by coordinates." As part of the process, thousands of people took part in the experiments. Participants were placed in a dark room, given geographic coordinates (longitude and latitude) and asked to describe what they were able to "see" at that location.

Remote viewing was seen as important at that point in time due to concerns that the Soviet Union had already been successful in establishing a similar program.

If an intelligence service could be successful in finding people with the ability to use their psychic powers to "see" events at a distance, it would have a tremendous advantage over its counterparts in other nations. It's easy to see why the possibility of being able to harness these skills that some people believe we all possess to some degree would be very exciting to those involved in the intelligence community. It would be possible to locate any individual, object or document, no matter how well it had been hidden. If the power of the mind could be harnessed, investigators speculated that it might be possible to incapacitate a foreign leader or even an enemy army.

Operation Stargate

The public was first informed about Operation Stargate in 1995 when it was announced on the evening news. At that point, the CIA performed an assessment of the project with the goal of determining whether more research into the subject of remote viewing would lead to better results. This was no small endeavor, either; Operation Stargate was operating under a $25 million budget.

The results of the assessment were that remote viewing could not be considered a reliable method of gathering information for intelligence purposes. However, this doesn't mean that the CIA wasn't able to get some impressive results from the ESP tests it conducted.

A particular group of six participants was singled out for recognition. These individuals were referred to as "The Naturals" and according to an army officer who had been involved with the program for several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, these psychically-gifted people were responsible for accurately locating approximately 150 targets that could be not detected by more conventional sources.

One of the people in The Naturals group allegedly explained that his psychic abilities became apparent after he went through a near death experience. Some people have theorized that the level of psychic ability a person has is a natural talent that the person is born with.

Whether one's psychic ability is a natural gift or a skill that can be developed with practice, the fact remains that psychics working under Operation Stargate were able to provide information about a secret missile base the Russians were building. One of the items the psychics were successfully able to draw was a crane used in the construction process, along with a building in the shape of a dome. Both of these things were confirmed with photographs taken from a U2 spy plane at a later date.

These types of ESP tests do seem to have been successful and even useful to the government agencies involved. Perhaps with further testing it will be possible to isolate how the ability to practice remote viewing works. Certainly, the government once thought this was a worthwhile proposition.