From a Psychic Studio to a Classified Program

Remote viewing has a specific, datable origin. Around 1971, the artist and self-described psychic Ingo Swann, working informally with the American Society for Psychical Research in New York, proposed the term for a controlled procedure in which a subject would attempt to describe a real target location known only by a set of geographic coordinates or a sealed photograph held by someone else.

In 1972, physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at SRI International (then Stanford Research Institute) began formal experiments with Swann and other subjects, most famously Pat Price, a retired police commissioner. Early success, real or perceived, in a series of trials against secret U.S. government sites drew the interest of the Central Intelligence Agency, and funding grew across the following two decades to include the Defense Intelligence Agency and other agencies, eventually run under the classified program name Star Gate. Over 22 years the program cost the government roughly twenty million dollars and involved a shifting roster of viewers attempting to describe hostage locations, foreign weapons facilities, and other intelligence targets from Washington offices, entirely from coordinates or codewords, with no travel and no normal sensory access to the target.