Remote Viewing, The CIA Project That Lasted 20 Years.

Imagine sitting in a locked room with nothing but a pencil and being asked to describe a place you’ve never been, maybe on the other side of the planet. You close your eyes, let your mind wander, and then you start sketching. Hours later, your drawing looks suspiciously like a Soviet airbase you couldn’t possibly know existed. That was remote viewing, and for more than two decades the CIA quietly paid people to do exactly that.

The programme was called Stargate. Officially, it was about testing psychic potential. Unofficially, it was about keeping pace with the Soviets, who were rumoured to be running their own paranormal experiments. The Americans recruited people with unusual perception and trained them to “see” across distance and time. To the surprise of more than a few hardened analysts, some of the results were difficult to explain away.

One viewer, Joseph McMoneagle, produced sketches that lined up uncannily with foreign military installations. Another, Ingo Swann, described rings around Jupiter before Voyager captured them. Then came stranger moments: transcripts where viewers claimed to glimpse the surface of Mars a million years ago, complete with towering structures and non-human inhabitants (The Sun). Elsewhere, viewers spoke of the Ark of the Covenant, hidden in Ethiopia and guarded by something they could not define (NY Post).

The files show moments where the ordinary laws of information gathering seemed to bend. It was not every session, and it was not every viewer, but when it worked, it worked with a precision that unnerved the officials reading the reports. Enough so that the project remained funded for over twenty years, across multiple administrations. This was not a brief curiosity. It was an enduring pursuit, hidden in plain sight until it was declassified.

Why, then, have you barely heard of it? Officially, the project was written off as inconclusive. But there’s an unspoken truth in intelligence work: very little survives that long unless somebody, somewhere, is getting useful results. And even after the doors closed in 1995, those who were part of it never stopped talking about what they saw. Some still insist the mind can reach further than we allow ourselves to believe.

The notion is unsettling because if remote viewing is possible, even occasionally, then our understanding of perception and reality is incomplete. What else lies beyond the reach of our senses? What might we discover if the experiments had continued, or if they never really ended at all?

Perhaps remote viewing was nothing more than Cold War paranoia wrapped in mysticism. Or perhaps, in quiet corners far away from press releases, it remains very much alive. After all, you do not fund psychics for two decades unless they show you something that makes you sit up in your chair.

Close your eyes for a moment and try it. Think of a place you’ve never been. Picture what lies there. If even a fragment matches, you’ll understand why the CIA once thought the future of intelligence might not come from satellites, but from the human mind itself.

It would be comforting to think it’s all nonsense. Comforting, but perhaps not entirely true.