The CIA Paid Psychics to Spy on the Soviets for Two Decades — and Some of It Actually Worked

If you pitched this as a movie premise, the studio would probably pass. It's too on the nose. Too absurd. The CIA — the most powerful intelligence agency on the planet, the same organization that ran covert operations across four continents and helped shape the outcome of the Cold War — secretly hired psychics to gather military intelligence by thinking really hard about faraway places.

And yet.

Project Stargate was real. It ran from the early 1970s all the way to 1995. It was funded by the U.S. government. It involved trained remote viewers sitting in quiet rooms, attempting to mentally observe Soviet nuclear facilities, submarine bases, and military installations they had never visited and could not physically access. And while the program was ultimately shut down, the reason it lasted 20-plus years is that it kept producing results that nobody could entirely explain away.

How a Superpower Ended Up Hiring Mind Readers

The story starts, as many strange Cold War stories do, with paranoia.

In the late 1960s, U.S. intelligence agencies became aware that the Soviet Union was investing significant resources into psychic research — what they called "psychotronics." The Soviets believed, or at least wanted to believe, that the human mind might be weaponizable. That was all the CIA needed to hear.

The logic was straightforward, if surreal: if the Soviets were doing it, the U.S. couldn't afford not to. This same arms-race thinking had driven the nuclear program, the space program, and roughly a dozen other Cold War initiatives. Now it was driving a program to develop ESP.

Research began at Stanford Research Institute in California, where physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff started testing a man named Ingo Swann, a New York artist who claimed he could perceive distant locations using only his mind. Their early results were strange enough to attract government attention, and by the mid-1970s, the program had a budget, a code name, and a roster of trained remote viewers on the federal payroll.

What Remote Viewers Actually Did

The process, called remote viewing, was deliberately stripped of anything that sounded too mystical. Viewers were given coordinates — latitude and longitude, or sometimes just a sealed envelope with a target description inside — and asked to sketch or describe what was at that location. They weren't told what they were looking for. The idea was to reduce expectation bias and produce raw, unfiltered impressions.

Some of what they produced was vague and useless. But some of it was not.

In one frequently cited case, a remote viewer named Joe McMoneagle was given coordinates in the Soviet Union and asked to describe the site. He sketched a large building with an unusual roof structure and described what appeared to be a massive submarine under construction inside. Months later, satellite imagery confirmed the existence of a new Soviet submarine facility matching his description — including a submarine that analysts hadn't previously known about.

In another instance, remote viewers were reportedly used to locate a downed Soviet aircraft in Africa, providing coordinates that helped a search team find the wreckage. Former President Jimmy Carter later referenced this episode in a public speech, which is a sentence that still feels slightly unreal to type.

The Part Where It Gets Complicated

Here's where the story resists a clean narrative: Project Stargate's results were deeply inconsistent.

For every hit that made intelligence analysts sit up straight, there were misses, vague impressions that could mean anything, and sessions that produced nothing useful at all. When the American Institutes for Research conducted a formal review of the program in 1995, they concluded that while remote viewers had demonstrated a statistically significant effect under controlled conditions, the intelligence produced wasn't reliable or actionable enough to justify continued use in real operations.

The program was declassified and shut down that same year.

But the review's findings were more nuanced than the shutdown suggested. The statistician brought in to analyze the data — Dr. Jessica Utts of UC Davis — actually concluded that the effect was real and warranted further scientific study. Her colleague on the review, psychologist Ray Hyman, disagreed about the interpretation but acknowledged the statistical anomalies were genuine. They just couldn't agree on what those anomalies meant.

Why the Government Kept Writing the Checks

The most revealing thing about Project Stargate isn't that it happened — it's that it kept happening for two decades.

Government programs don't survive 20 years on wishful thinking alone. At various points, the program was reviewed, nearly canceled, restructured, and revived. Different agencies took it over. The name changed multiple times. And still, someone kept signing the budget approvals.

The most plausible explanation is that the results were just ambiguous enough to keep the program alive. Not convincing enough to expand it into a mainstream intelligence tool, but not dismissible enough to kill outright. In the high-stakes uncertainty of the Cold War, that ambiguity had real value.

If there was even a 10% chance that the Soviets were successfully using psychic intelligence gathering, the U.S. government wasn't going to be the one that stopped funding research to find out.

The files were declassified in 1995. You can read them. And if you do, you'll find something that the whole story quietly insists on: the line between what sounds completely made up and what actually happened is thinner than most people are comfortable admitting.