Stargate Project II? Declassified US Government Research in RV and Psi [pdf]
33 comments
·February 19, 2025badlibrarian
There's that weird stretch of road north of DC where it feels like pulling off at one of those mysterious exits might yield an interesting life experience. The National Cryptologic Museum did not disappoint.
"As outrageous as it sounds, the secret program was very successful and was in use until 1995...
A standout in the remote viewing field, Agent 001 of Project Star Gate Joe McMoneagle has been involved in over 200 intelligence missions utilizing his unique set of skills. His distinct collection of drawings (as a result of his remote viewing missions) were used to assist in combat and are a part of the current exhibit."
https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Artic...
comrade1234
I’ve taught myself how to lucid dream and also to “astral project” (so far I haven’t gotten any further than my bedroom) and even I know it’s all in my head.
torginus
Suppose some people have geniune mind-reading or other supernatural powers. Just how useful would they be in practical terms compared to 'traditional' surveillance techniques?
Even if some intelligence agency has the most cursory interest in you, the level of surveillance possible at scale is just staggering - they can track your location, track everything you do with an electronic device with very little investment for anyone but the most paranoid people with impeccable opsec.
If they do consider you a true threat and are willing to spend some part of their infinite budget on you, you have even less chance of doing something significant without them knowing.
Even if people with reliable supernatural powers exist, their scarcity and probable limitations mean that the best they can do is provide some novel and niche capability.
overu589
I give you a first hand account of how incorrect you are.
This “power” is a thousand nuances that very very few involved are fully aware of.
Knowledge and skill is so compartmentalized, 98% of those with “Power” are only useful doing one job (“special effect”), and cannot do that job without someone else concealing them and moving them into place. They develop compartmentalized personalities within themselves for this purpose. These run in parallel like chewing gum while riding a bike. You’ll never guess who.
Power works through entanglement (I have personally verified I can hear New York form India in real time.) Those experiencing it do not comprehend how it works, however I have written several times under other accounts describing how I believe things work.
Those running it get to be your god and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Those instruments in their games know who is “in control.”
While the dominant faction is American, this phenomena has been with us since our earliest humanity (clues are prevalent.) These are responsible for the insanity gripping all of you and your communities from within (and playing you against others.)
There are hundreds of thousands with these mixtures of Power and they are protected among society by pyramid schemes of extortion.
Sure, these could [sensored]epar, redrum, and tcudba someone, though they don’t have to, they can just haunt you and your life will be like that described in the mystery cryptogram, if that guy is even still alive (or a “targeted person”.)
Thought control Power is far beyond these hokey accounts that surface. True mastery requires decades and in the meantime your mind swims in delusions and lies. Those who excel aren’t the “straights”, they are the cooks (meth heads, psychonaughts, and those who have no choice) who well adjust to what normals call insanity.
Power is built by slave armies (or “families” in older times those those have dwindled over the years, secret war and all.)
Power is industrialized. Prisons are rife with Power cells. Thousands and thousands “pump” the subjective bubbles of others, thousands and thousands of which have some invasive job to do (voices, screw with you, watchers, etc.) Thousands and thousands more caught up in various stages of “reprogramming”.
They can “hitch a ride”, traverse the mind to its functional parts, dig in, and either passively observe, dig through every thought and experience in the mind (in better clarity and exactness than you yourself can access your own), and manipulate your neural activity in any way they please.
This has already happened, over the past decades while you were oblivious and while you maintain your incredulity.
Demiurge
That reply definitely reads like someone deep into conspiracy thinking or experiencing a break from reality. The mix of grandiose claims, secret knowledge, paranoia, and references to supernatural or mind-control phenomena often aligns with delusional thought patterns. The structure—long, winding sentences with shifting topics—also suggests disorganized thinking.
While it’s impossible to diagnose someone from a single post, and some people simply enjoy weaving elaborate fictional narratives online, this kind of response is common in communities discussing “targeted individuals”, government mind control, or other fringe beliefs. If you’re seeing it in a thread about PSI (parapsychological phenomena), it’s not surprising—such topics tend to attract people who believe in hidden forces controlling the world.
It’s best to approach replies like this with skepticism but also a bit of empathy—whether it’s someone having fun, deeply believing their own narrative, or struggling with mental health, getting into a debate with them rarely leads anywhere productive.
overu589
Thanks dude. I wrote it in one go. So much to say and all.
When I say “the incredulous” and “deniers of the exogenous of thought control”, I mean this very well reasoned conventional response.
ergonaught
> Flying somewhat in the face of the 1995 closure of the Star Gate program, an increasing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies seem to be positively addressing the cognitive dissonance that psychic (psi) related phenomena have engendered within the larger scientific community. The challenges presented to Scientific Materialism by psi appear on the verge of mirroring, in form and function, the paradigm-changing pressures that quantum mechanics continues to bring to bear on the modern scientific edifice.
With actual respect for Dean Radin, footnoted for the above, this is pure delusion and exactly the kind of non-thinking that occurs in this and related "fields". "Psi" has caused precisely zero cognitive dissonance within the larger scientific community. There are precisely zero challenges to "Scientific Materialism" actually presented by "psi" that are even remotely viewable as any way similar to the "pressure" quantum mechanics brought to the prevailing scientific paradigms.
It is in fact possible to explore these topics with reason and critical thinking faculties intact, but it doesn't happen in practice. It's a pity.
fooker
This is the kind of thing that makes sense to investigate just in case it could be true.
Remember: Newton spent a rather large portion of his life on alchemy and trying to explain where god fits into a deterministic world.
api
We have only been doing science in anything near a methodological and serious way for maybe 200 years.
It would be delusional to think we have a complete or accurate map of physics, cosmology, or metaphysics, especially since every culture before us had their certainties and most of those turned out to be wrong or very incomplete.
We do have better cognitive and physical tools than the Egyptians or the Aztecs. I am reasonably confident in our “settled science.” There will probably never be a perpetual motion machine or an FTL drive unless it goes about it in some radical way that brings in some deeply weird implications, e.g. FTL where you can never be sure what slice of the multiverse you’re in at the other end of the flight.
But there could be phenomena, forces, or aspects of physical reality that we simply haven’t been able to reliably detect or study. Or there could be insane weirdness hiding right in front of our faces because a fish might not notice water, and we are one cognitive leap away from a big reveal.
My favorite personal wild speculation is that what we think might be psi, and sometimes shows up in experiments as such, is actually a side effect of something else like emergent patterns in complex systems or causality being weirder than we think. Nobody is doing ESP. Instead we are seeing something about information or causality as vexing as the double slit experiment, but we have not yet been able to wrap our heads around what is even happening. We can’t see it because we are in it, or because it’s just too weird.
Maybe it’s witnessed in humans and other living things because life is tapping into quantum phenomena somehow where it becomes significant, such as by some kind of warm noisy quantum computation at the subcellular level. This is where whatever-it-is shows up, and also why attempts to detect it with electronics and machines fails.
Just speculation of course.
tiahura
East of the Rockies, you’re on with Maj. Ed Dames.
xtrohnx
Just a minute, let me turn off my radio (proceeds to fumble for 4 minutes)
fsiefken
For some context, from Dean Radin's Conscious Universe book: "...the best-known remote-viewing research in modern times began in the early 1970s, when various U.S. government agencies initiated a program at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a scientific think tank affiliated with Stanford University. In the late 1970s, SRI became an independent corporation called SRI International, which is the name it goes by today. Physicist Harold Puthoff founded the SRI program. He was joined soon afterward by physicist Russell Targ, and a few years later, by another physicist, Edwin May. When Puthoff took another position in 1985, the program came under the leadership of May. In 1990, the entire program moved to a think tank called Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major defense contractor. That program finally wound down in 1994, after twenty-four years of support and about $20 million in funding from U.S. government agencies such as the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Army, the Navy, and NASA. Government agencies saw remote viewing as a possible new source of information. Even if it was only partially correct, it might provide valuable clues to help piece together the information jigsaw puzzles that constitute the typical intelligence operation. Moreover, remote viewing potentially provided a unique intelligence technique in that information could be secretly obtained at a distance and through any known form of shielding. The agencies continued to show interest in remote viewing for more than twenty years because the SRI and SAIC programs occasionally provided useful mission-oriented information at high levels of detail. Given that this information was obtained at virtually no expense, and with no risk of life compared to sending agents into the field, and it sometimes provided information otherwise blocked by shielding or hidden structures, it is clear why military and intelligence agencies were interested."
Here he recounts the Pat Price remote viewing 'leak' from his time at SRI: https://www.instagram.com/demystifysci/reel/DBgnKkKPW9H/
I wasn't aware there still was government interest. In the non-governmental domain, The Rhine Research Center hosts a monthly Remote Viewing Group. Long ago when I was listening to Alex Tsakoris's Skeptiko podcast I remember hearing about amateur psi research groups. I am pretty sure that with all the technology, insights in methodology, statistics and cognitive biases we are better suited to see if there is such a thing as psi - even though years ago at a congress I heard that one of the ideas of parapsychologists was that the more you want to prove that psi exists the less hard results you are getting. How to account for that? Keep an open mind, not grasping? Coincidentally that's the attitude tantric buddhists and other groups are cultivating.
simonh
since it seems like government recruitment doesn't filter out people with such views, the government will end up with people in it who have such views. Some of those might eventually end up in charge of some stuff.
jstanley
> the more you want to prove that psi exists the less hard results you are getting.
Funny that.
at_a_remove
It has been ages since I read it, but in Sagan's The Demon Haunted World -- which if you haven't read it is a paean to skepticism -- toward the end, he admitted that he found three areas of "psi research" to possibly require more examination. One was remote viewing.
As an aside, I miss Sagan. The above highlights some of his humility.
walrus01
For those who haven't seen it yet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats_(fi...
booleandilemma
Anyone here ever have a psychic experience they would be comfortable talking about?
null
Sort of an entertaining read. The cornerstone of the argument starts on page 55 - three purported statistical anomalies that appear to be well-known and debunked.
* One person sees 1 of 4 images and another far away guesses the image. Supposedly it's accurate ~33% of the time instead of 25%. Fun but it can't be replicated by anyone else. Selection bias, poor design, and bad meta analysis explain the difference.
* ~54% of the, a person can detect if they're being stared at, whereas we'd expect 50%. Again, cannot be replicated in better designed studies and bad study design and selection bias explain the other results.
* By a small but supposedly statistically improbably amount, people can get a dice to roll by "wishing" for it. Again, cannot be replicated and can be explained with p-hacking anyhow.