During the height of the Cold War, the CIA ran tests on people with paranormal abilities in an effort to unlock top-secret intel on foreign targets.
In 1972, American artist and psychic Ingo Swann altered the magnetic field inside a thickly shielded vacuum container located underground for several seconds—by simply thinking about it.
As Harold Puthoff, a physicist with the Stanford Research Institute, witnessed the output from his magnetometer changing, he was mind-blown. There was no physical explanation for the reading changing the way it did. And as soon as Puthoff asked Swann to stop thinking about the apparatus, the unexplained changes in the magnetic field abruptly stopped.
“These phenomena are real. Psychic phenomena are real,” Dean Radin, Ph.D., chief scientist at the California-based nonprofit Institute of Noetic Sciences, tells Popular Mechanics. He’s been examining parapsychology, or the study of psychic events, for the past four decades.
And in the early 1970s—in the midst of the Cold War against the Soviet Union—the U.S. government agreed.
By the time Puthoff and his colleague Russel Targ, another physicist at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International), presented their results at an international meeting on quantum physics and parapsychology, the CIA had already begun working with SRI to perform top-secret research on paranormal phenomena—primarily “remote viewing” for intelligence collection. Remote viewing refers to a type of extra-sensorial perception that involves using the mind to “see” or manipulate distant objects, people, events, or other information that are hidden from physical view.
By the mid-1980s, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) took the program over, calling it “Stargate.” DIA had three main goals for its research:
- Determine how to apply remote viewing to intelligence gathering against foreign targets;
- Figure out how other countries could be doing the same thing and using it against the U.S.; and
- Perform laboratory experiments to find ways to improve remote viewing for use in the intelligence field
The program was about as clandestine as it gets. Radin, who served as a visiting scientist on the Stargate program, says security personnel would brief him and his colleagues about the incredible sensitivity of their highly classified work every two weeks, and ask them if they had any reason to believe that anyone outside of the project knew anything about it.
Read More – Inside the CIA’s Secret Mission to Use Mind Control to Spy on the Soviet Union.
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