Role in the Stargate Program

The DIA's involvement in psychical research grew out of its broader Cold War mandate to track Soviet and Warsaw Pact military research, including reported Soviet interest in extrasensory perception for intelligence purposes. Where the CIA had initiated and funded the earliest remote viewing experiments at SRI International in 1972, the DIA progressively took on a larger administrative role during the 1980s, working alongside Army intelligence to manage the effort under the Fort Meade based unit that eventually became known publicly as the Stargate Project after its declassification. The DIA continued to sponsor sessions targeting foreign military installations and other intelligence problems through the program's final years, working with the same core group of remote viewers and researchers who had passed through SRI and its successor contractor, Science Applications International Corporation.

When the CIA commissioned the American Institutes for Research to conduct an outside evaluation in 1995, the DIA cooperated with the review and, after the report concluded the program had produced no clearly actionable intelligence, worked with the CIA to complete the declassification of Star Gate documents that made the program's history public in the years that followed, closing out one of the longest running instances of a government intelligence service directly funding parapsychological research.