They Spent $20 Million on Psychics. Then Said It Didn't Work.

In 1995, the CIA officially terminated Project Stargate — a 23-year program that used "psychic spies" to gather intelligence on Soviet military installations, hostage locations, and classified facilities.

"No remote viewing report ever provided actionable information for any intelligence operation."

Case closed. Move on. Nothing to see here.

Except — the data tells a different story.

The numbers that don't add up

Joseph McMoneagle, designated "Remote Viewer #001," was used for over 450 missions during his active service. He was awarded the Legion of Merit in 1984 — one of the highest military honors — for providing:

"Critical intelligence reported at the highest echelons of our military and government, including such national level agencies as: the Joint Chiefs of Staff, DIA, NSA, CIA, DEA, and the Secret Service, producing crucial and vital intelligence unavailable from any other source."

Read that again.

Unavailable from any other source.

Why would the U.S. government award its highest honors to a man for doing something that "didn't work"?

The $20 million question

The Stargate program evolved through multiple code names:

• SCANATE (1972–1975)
• GRILL FLAME (1978–1983)
• CENTER LANE (1983–1985)
• SUN STREAK (1985–1991)
• STARGATE (1991–1995)

Each rename came with continued funding. Each continuation required justification.

19 intelligence agencies used the program's services. The return rate? 89.5% — meaning agencies kept coming back.

You don't keep funding something for 23 years because it doesn't work.

The successes they can't deny

The Tu-22 bomber (1979)

A Soviet reconnaissance aircraft crashed in Zaire. Satellite surveillance failed to locate it. The CIA consulted viewer Rosemary Smith.

Given only a map of Africa, she marked the crash site.

The aircraft was found within 3 miles of her marked location.

President Jimmy Carter publicly acknowledged this in 1995, calling it the program's most significant achievement. His exact words: "We focused our satellite cameras on that point and the plane was there."

Pat Price and the NSA facility (1973)

Given coordinates intended for a CIA agent's summer cabin, viewer Pat Price instead described a nearby classified NSA listening post — correctly naming personnel and reading classified code words from file folders.

The accuracy triggered a Pentagon security investigation.

They had to determine if there was a leak — because the alternative explanation was too uncomfortable.

McMoneagle and the Typhoon

Before satellite surveillance confirmed it, McMoneagle described a never-before-seen Soviet submarine design — the twin-hulled Typhoon class — at a shipyard in the Arctic.

The 1995 verdict: reading between the lines

The American Institutes for Research conducted the final evaluation. Two reviewers. Two different conclusions.

Jessica Utts, UC Davis statistician:

"Using the standards applied to any other area of science, psychic functioning has been well established."

Statistical analysis showed subjects scoring 5–15% above chance with p-values less than 10⁻²⁰. For context, that's a probability so small it essentially rules out chance.

Ray Hyman, the skeptic reviewer, agreed the effects were "too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes" — but argued it was "premature" to conclude anything.

Here's what most people miss:

The CIA closed the program on June 30, 1995 — three months before receiving the evaluation results.

The decision came first. The justification came after.

What are we not being told?

Programs don't survive 23 years on wishful thinking. Intelligence agencies don't award Legion of Merit medals for failure. An 89.5% customer return rate doesn't happen with a useless product.

So what's the real story?

Option 1: It worked, and they don't want us to know.

Option 2: It worked inconsistently — valuable enough to fund, too unreliable to admit publicly.

Option 3: The "official closure" was exactly that — official. Not actual.

The honest answer? We don't know with certainty. The architecture of classified programs means we may never know.

But the declassified documents tell us enough to know one thing:

The official narrative doesn't match the evidence.

Why does this matter?

Because if the U.S. government spent $20 million and 23 years studying human consciousness — and the data suggests it produced results — then the implications extend far beyond intelligence gathering.

It means consciousness operates in ways that mainstream science doesn't acknowledge.

It means human perception might not be limited by the five senses.

It means there's something worth investigating that the institutions stopped talking about in 1995.

I've spent the last year going down this rabbit hole. Not just reading the declassified files — but testing the protocols myself.

What I found will be the subject of future posts.

For now, I'll leave you with one question:

If it didn't work, why did they keep using it?

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This is the first entry in Project Black Swan — documenting what governments studied, what they classified, and what actually happens when you run the protocols yourself.

Related investigations: the Gateway Process, the U.S. Army's binaural-beat consciousness program; and Jacobo Grinberg, the UNAM neurophysiologist who claimed to measure consciousness transfer between subjects in separate Faraday cages — and then vanished.

Sources

• CIA Reading Room: Stargate Collection (12+ million declassified pages)
• American Institutes for Research Evaluation (1995)
• President Jimmy Carter's public statement on the Tu-22 operation
• Joseph McMoneagle's Legion of Merit citation (1984)
• Jessica Utts, An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning (1995)