STARGATE PROJECT (Fraud)

Stargate Project was a secret U.S. Army unit established in 1978 at Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and SRI International (a California contractor) to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications. The Project, and its precursors and sister projects, originally went by various code names – 'Gondola Wish', 'Stargate', 'Grill Flame', 'Center Lane', 'Project CF', 'Sun Streak', 'Scangate' – until 1991 when they were consolidated and rechristened as "Stargate Project".

Stargate Project's work primarily involved remote viewing, the purported ability to psychically "see" events, sites, or information from a great distance.[1] The project was overseen until 1987 by Lt. Frederick Holmes "Skip" Atwater, an aide and "psychic headhunter" to Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, and later president of the Monroe Institute.[2] The unit was small scale, comprising about 15 to 20 individuals, and was run out of "an old, leaky wooden barracks".[3]

The Stargate Project was terminated and declassified in 1995 after a CIA report concluded that it was never useful in any intelligence operation. Information provided by the program was vague and included irrelevant and erroneous data, and there were suspicions of inter-judge reliability.[4]: 5–4  The program was featured in the 2004 book and 2009 film, both titled The Men Who Stare at Goats,[5][6][7][8] although neither mentions it by name.

Information in the United States on psychic research in some foreign countries was poorly detailed, based mostly on rumor or innuendo from second-hand or tertiary reporting, attributed to both reliable and unreliable disinformation sources from the Soviet Union.

According to AIR, which performed a review of the project, no remote viewing report ever provided actionable information for any intelligence operation.[17][4]: 5–4 

Based upon the collected findings, which recommended a higher level of critical research and tighter controls, the CIA terminated the 20 million dollar project, citing a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community. Time magazine stated in 1995 three full-time psychics were still working on a $500,000-a-year budget out of Fort Meade, Maryland, which would soon close.[17]

David Marks in his book The Psychology of the Psychic (2000) discussed the flaws in the Stargate Project in detail.[1] Marks wrote that there were six negative design features of the experiments. The possibility of cues or sensory leakage was not ruled out, no independent replication, some of the experiments were conducted in secret making peer-review impossible. Marks noted that the judge Edwin May was also the principal investigator for the project and this was problematic making huge conflict of interest with collusion, cuing and fraud being possible. Marks concluded the project was nothing more than a "subjective delusion" and after two decades of research it had failed to provide any scientific evidence for the legitimacy of remote viewing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project