The RV research at the Stanford Research Institute, SRI, and the Science Applications International Corporation, SAIC, is unique in the speculative science of parapsychology. It’s the only long-term psychic research program known to have been funded by the US government’s Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, including the CIA. They studied using applied psi, psychic phenomena, for intelligence and espionage purposes. Most of the information is classified; however Congress declassified a small portion of the documents and evaluated StarGate, a twenty-four year long program. The $20 million StarGate Project, in the 1970s and 1990s, also investigated out of body experiences, tested subjects for precognition, the ability to foresee the future and read hidden documents.
Pat Price: Initial Soviet RV Experiment
Early SRI research, initiated by physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, focused on several gifted individuals, including Ingo Swann and Price. Both men sparked the military’s interest in using RV for espionage.
Price’s sessions were consistently accurate. A former CIA official said that "He was extraordinarily accurate, unbelievably accurate.” Price, in his first RV test for psychic spying on the Soviets, was given the coordinates of an R & D facility in the USSR. He described and drew, with remarkable detail, a major structure at the site – a gantry crane.
The rivalry between Pat & Ingo at SRI was intense. After Price died suddenly, in 1975, allegations of his being a double agent surfaced.
Pat Price: Experimental RV Information Accurate
In the summer of 1973, Puthoff, who was acquainted with Price, asked him to try to use RV to check out geographic coordinates in West Virginia. The target was a CIA employee’s vacation cottage. Price gave him a long description of something else. He described big underground storage areas that resembled a former missile site and mentioned “personnel, Army Signal Corps.” He stated that there were folders inside of a cabinet that were labeled “cue ball,” 14 and 8 balls and rack up.
He described a secret National Security Agency, NSA, communications facility a few miles from the cottage. CIA officer Ken Kress, who helped monitor research at the SRI, wrote, in an official memo, that Price had no military or intelligence background, but he gave a list of project titles associated with activities and the site’s codename. Other information about the site’s layout was accurate.
Price began working directly with the CIA. In July 1975, during a long CIA RV project involving a suspected Libyan terrorism facility, Price died of an apparent heart attack in Las Vegas. His death was an excuse to end the agency’s official connection with RV. Two years later, when CIA Director Stansfield Turner was asked about allegations that the CIA was engaged in applied psi, he said the organization briefly worked with a man who appeared to have some psychic ability, “but he died and we haven’t heard from him since.”
Pat Price: Allegations of Double Agent Psychic Spying
There were curious circumstances surrounding his death. An unidentified person showed up the hospital where paramedics took Price, showed personnel his medical records and persuaded them to waive an autopsy. Although Price had a history of heart disease and unhealthy habits, Puthoff said many people suspected that he was poisoned by a Soviet agent.
A few years later, after the FBI raided the Church of Scientology’s Los Angeles office, agents found records that Price, a Church member, gave to a senior Scientology official about his SRI and CIA RV research. These included descriptions of highly secret operations and names of clandestine agents that Price had agreed, in CIA and SRI contracts, to keep undisclosed.
The FBI’s raid on the Scientology offices was part of a long investigation concerning the church’s alleged accessing US government offices and stealing documents that resulted in plea deals and jail sentences. This made people wonder if Price’s RV information was fed to him by a Scientology spy network in the US intelligence community.
When government officials informed Puthoff about this, he said it was the biggest duplicity he had experienced.
Kress wondered, via a 1999 document, whether Price’s 1973 remote viewing of the NSA site had been information supplied by others so a psychic double agent could gain access to information that he could give to his superiors. Kress suspected that Price obtained target-related information from CIA officials. During a foreign embassy related project by CIA agent “Frank,” Price said he liked the muted red and green décor around the stairs and “Frank” replied he was impressed with the Italian marble.
In the past, Kress was criticized within the CIA community for his enthusiasm about Price and the SRI. By 1999, he was skeptical and concluded that the most remarkable talent of “psychics,” like Price, was their ability to implant the belief in unexplainable abilities in naïve people.
Pat Price’s Psychic Spying not New
Psychic abilities have been used in espionage since WW I. In 1919, Czechoslovakian soldiers were hypnotized and asked to use psychic spying to gather information about the Hungarian Army.
During WW II, the Nazi Occult Bureau was established to use applied psi for espionage and mind control. The Thule, an occult secret organization, trained Hitler and his followers to use psychic abilities. British and American intelligence used psychics to anticipate psychic advice that was given to the Nazis. The Allies employed psychics, using remote viewing, to gather information about strategic locations inside enemy lines.
The Soviets experimented with using psychic abilities during the Cold War. Moscow’s Institute of Psychology conducted research involving remote hypnotic manipulation.
Dowsing was also used by the military during WW II and in Vietnam. Also called radiesthesia, dowsing locates hidden underground and underwater objects. This art was used successfully by the Allied and Axis forces during WW II. The German Navy used it to locate Allied ships. The British Admiralty used the services of two dowsers during the war to map-dowse enemy harbors for ships, with a 75% success rate. British and Australian Navies discovered dowsing could successfully locate German submarine wolf packs. US armed forces used dowsers to locate water wells in Africa. General Patten had two dowsers transferred to his unit for this purpose. The US Army used dowsers during in Viet Nam to locate underground mines.
Although Project StarGate “officially” ended years ago, is it possible psychic espionage is still being used?
Sources:
- H. E. Puthoff, PhD, “CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute,” www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/CIA-InitiatedRV.
- Jim Schnabel, “Psychic Spies: Whatever Happened to America's Remote Viewers?” Fortean Times, February 2011.“
- Project StarGate: Unique in the History of the Field of Parapsychology,” PSIExplorer Website, www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vision_remota/esp_visionremota_33.htm.
- Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience, HarperSanFransico, 1991.
- Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970.
Jill Stefko - I'd rather deal with the paranormal than human abnormal - having dealt extensively with both.
