The inner life
Stargate Project
Direct answer
Stargate Project: The Stargate Project is the name by which the United States government programme on remote viewing is known. It ran under several code names from the early 1970s and was closed in 1995.
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At a glance
- Also called
- Project Stargate, Star Gate programme, CIA remote viewing program, Grill Flame
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Remote Viewing, Clairvoyance, Parapsychology
The Stargate Project is the name by which the United States government programme on remote viewing is known. It ran under several code names from the early 1970s and was closed in 1995.
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What was the Stargate Project?
For more than twenty years American intelligence and military agencies paid for research into whether people could describe distant sites by clairvoyance, and kept a small unit of viewers who were set tasks such as locating hostages or lost aircraft. The effort had several code names in turn, among them Grill Flame, Center Lane and Sun Streak. Star Gate was the last, from 1991, and has become the name for the whole.
The programme cost about twenty million dollars in all, a small sum by the measure of such budgets. When the Central Intelligence Agency took it over in 1995 it commissioned an outside review, which found that no remote viewing report had ever guided an operation, and it ended the work.
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What sets Stargate Project apart
Stargate stands out among tests of such claims because it was not an experiment at heart but an attempt to put the thing to work: viewers were asked real questions by real agencies. That gives it a measure the laboratories lack, which is whether anything they said ever helped. The review that closed it found no case where a report had guided a decision; the reviewer who rated the statistics kindly left practical use outside her report.
- Ran: early 1970s to 1995 under a series of code names
- Code names: Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak, Star Gate
- Base: Fort Meade, Maryland, for the unit of viewers
- Cost: about twenty million dollars in all
- Review: American Institutes for Research, 1995: Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman
Often mistaken for something else: Remote viewing is the method; Stargate is the government programme that paid for it and tried it in practice, and whose closing is the best documented verdict on it.
The story behind Stargate Project
The research side began at the Stanford Research Institute in 1972 and moved to another contractor in 1991. The operational unit worked at Fort Meade in Maryland from the late 1970s. The review of 1995, carried out by the American Institutes for Research, included a favourable statistical report by Jessica Utts and a critical one by Ray Hyman. The files were released to the public over the following years.
Why Stargate Project matters
Stargate Project shows what became of the claim when a body with money, secrecy and a strong wish for it to work put it to practical use.
How to read Stargate Project
Writers cite it both as a sign that governments took the claim seriously and as the fullest record of its failure in practice.
Stargate Project in practice: an example
A viewer at Fort Meade is handed a sealed envelope holding a photograph and asked to describe where the person in it now is.
Where readings of Stargate Project go wrong
That a government paid for the work shows interest in the claim, not that the claim held.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- Project Stargate, Star Gate programme, CIA remote viewing program, Grill Flame
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What was the Stargate Project?
A United States government programme, under several code names from the 1970s to 1995, that funded research on remote viewing and kept a small unit of viewers for intelligence tasks.
How much did the Stargate Project cost?
About twenty million dollars over more than twenty years, according to the figures given when it was closed and declassified in 1995.
Why was the Stargate Project shut down?
An outside review in 1995 concluded that remote viewing had never supplied information of use in an operation, and that the laboratory findings were disputed and unrepeated. The agency then ended the funding.
