CIA Used ‘Mind Readers’ to Spy on the Soviets in the 1970s

Project Star Gate began in 1972 when a secret report claimed that the Soviet Union was funding ESP and psychokinesis (the power to manipulate objects with one's thoughts) research for espionage reasons, causing a stir in the United States military and intelligence communities. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) responded by establishing its own clandestine research center in Menlo Park, California, known as the Stanford Research Institute.

In the latter part of that year, the SRI research group summoned Uri Geller, a former Israeli paratrooper who had gained worldwide fame for his telepathic abilities, to Menlo Park for an evaluation. Even though Geller gained fame for his purported meddlesome mental metal-bending abilities, the CIA was more intrigued by another of his claimed talents: the capacity to perceive and manipulate the thoughts and emotions of others.

According to Annie Jacobsen's book Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, CIA analysts were interested in studying Geller's "mind projection" abilities and how they could be utilized for national security reasons, according to declassified documents.

Jacobsen claims that Geller was instrumental in launching the United States government's study into extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. The author states that during the winter of 1975, Geller was also subjected to a battery of secret psychokinesis experiments at a facility in Livermore, California, where researchers were working on cutting-edge laser systems, nuclear warheads, and other military technology.

After ESP's involvement with the CIA was phased down in the late 1970s, the program was transferred to Fort Meade, Maryland, under the United States Army and was subsequently supported by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The majority of the next 20 years saw Congress maintaining funding for the remote watching program.

According to North Carolina Representative Charlie Rose, "It seems to me a hell of a cheap radar system" was said during a 1979 discussion about psychic research by other members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. "And we're in deep trouble if the Russians have it while we don't."

Among the covert program's remote watchers, Army veteran Joseph McMoneagle was notable. In an interview with the Washington Post, McMoneagle revealed that he was engaged in about four hundred and fifty operations from 1978 to 1984. Among these missions, he assisted the Army in locating Iranian hostages and directed CIA operatives to the shortwave radio hidden in a suspected KGB agent's pocket calculator that was apprehended in South Africa.

Angela Dellafiora Ford, another remote viewer, recently repeated the story on the CBS News show 48 Hours, saying that in 1989, someone begged her for her aid in locating a former customs agent who had gone on the run. While U.S. Customs was taking him into custody, she managed to establish his exact location as "Lowell, Wyoming," 100 miles west of the Wyoming town Lovell.

In the 1980s, facts of the government's trials with psychics began to seep out, although the Pentagon publicly maintained its denial. At long last, a 1995 CIA study confirmed the long-rumored U.S. government involvement in remote viewing for espionage and military objectives; the report had been prepared by the non-governmental American Institutes for Research.

Aside from calling Star Gate a bust, the study said that "it remains unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, has been demonstrated." Based on their findings, the analysts decided that the information given by remote viewing was too imprecise and unclear to provide "actionable intelligence," even if they did recognize that some experiments had been effective and that "something beyond odd statistical hiccups is taking place."

The government's fascination in paranormal events continued even after the program was shut down that year. Jacobsen reports that in 2014, a program worth over $3.85 million was initiated by the Office of Naval Research to study the intuitive abilities of sailors and Marines. These abilities are sometimes referred to as a "sixth sense" or a "Spidey sense," after the web-throwing superhero. Even after Star Gate was shut down, its former chief of research, Dr. Edwin May, persisted in defending ESP as a valid instrument for domestic and military espionage. After receiving funding from the non-profit Bial Foundation, May's most recent ESP research "is probably the best experiment in the history of the field," he told Newsweek in 2015.

The general public in the United States has long believed in the capabilities of extrasensory perception (ESP), regardless of potential espionage applications: A Gallup study conducted in 2005 found that 33% of Americans have faith in the paranormal, with 41% of those people claiming to have faith in extrasensory perception (ESP).

References

https://www.history.com/news/cia-esp-espionage-soviet-union-cold-war