SRI International

Stanford University's trustees founded the Stanford Research Institute in 1946 as an applied research organization intended to support economic development in the western United States and to give the university's faculty and graduates an outlet for contract research with industry and government, structured from the outset as a nonprofit separate from the university's academic departments.

The Institute grew rapidly through defense, computing and engineering contracts over the following decades, contributing to work that included early computer networking research and the invention of the computer mouse, and by the late 1960s had become one of the largest independent contract research organizations in the country. Its closeness to defense funding made it a target of student protest during the Vietnam War, when demonstrators at Stanford argued that SRI's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded work effectively made the university part of the military industrial complex; the pressure contributed to SRI formally separating from Stanford University in 1970, becoming a fully independent nonprofit corporation. It adopted its current name, SRI International, in 1977 to reflect its increasingly global client base, while remaining headquartered in Menlo Park, California, near the university with which it retained an informal but no longer institutional relationship.

In 1972 the laser physicist Harold Puthoff, soon joined by fellow physicist Russell Targ, began a program of parapsychological research at SRI after conducting preliminary tests with the psychic claimant Ingo Swann, coining the term remote viewing for a procedure in which a subject attempted to describe a distant or hidden location known only to another experimenter.

The work quickly attracted U.S. intelligence agencies concerned that the Soviet Union was pursuing similar research, and the Central Intelligence Agency began funding SRI's program that same year, later joined by Army intelligence and, from the 1980s, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which took over management of the effort under the classified program eventually made public as the Stargate Project. Puthoff and Targ reported statistically significant results across many trials and published some of their work in the journal Nature and the Proceedings of the IEEE, claims other researchers, including psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann, argued could be explained by sensory and editorial cues in the judging process rather than genuine psychic perception. SRI's remote viewing contract ended in 1991 when the program's management moved to the private contractor Science Applications International Corporation, and the wider government effort was finally terminated in 1995 after an external review concluded any real effect was too weak and inconsistent to be of intelligence value, closing a chapter that remains the best documented instance of a Western government funding psychic research.