The Stargate Project was a secret U.S. Army unit established in 1977[1][2] at Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and SRI International (a California contractor) to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications. The project, and its precursors and sister projects, originally went by various code names – 'Gondola Wish', 'Stargate', 'Grill Flame', 'Center Lane', 'Project CF', 'Sun Streak', 'Scanate' – until 1991 when they were consolidated and rechristened as the "Stargate Project".
The Stargate Project's work primarily involved remote viewing, the purported ability to psychically "see" events, sites, or information from a great distance.[3] The project was overseen until 1987 by Lt. Frederick Holmes "Skip" Atwater, an aide and "psychic headhunter" to Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, and later president of the Monroe Institute.[4] The unit was small scale, comprising about 15 to 20 individuals, and was run out of "an old, leaky wooden barracks".[5]
The Stargate Project was terminated and declassified in 1995 after a CIA report concluded that it was never useful in any intelligence operation. Information provided by the program was vague and included irrelevant and erroneous data, and there were suspicions of inter-judge reliability.[6]: 5–4 The program was featured in the 2004 book and 2009 film, both titled The Men Who Stare at Goats,[7][8][9][10] although neither mentions it by name. George Stephanopoulos, in his 2024 book The Situation Room, mentions the project by the name Grill Flame, in discussing a May 8, 1980, Situation Room briefing for President Carter, after Carter's failed hostage rescue mission in Iran on April 24, 1980.[11]
^Mumford, Michael D.; Rose, Andrew M.; Goslin, David A. (September 29, 1995). An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications(PDF) (Report). The American Institutes for Research – via Federation of American Scientists. [R]emote viewings have never provided an adequate basis for 'actionable' intelligence operations – that is, information sufficiently valuable or compelling so that action was taken as a result.
^Clarke, David (2014), Britain's X-traordinary Files, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 112: "The existence of the Star Gate project was not officially acknowledged until 1995... then became the subject of investigations by journalists Jon Ronson [etc]... Ronson's 2004 book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, was subsequently adapted into a 2009 movie..."
^Shermer, Michael (November 2009), “Staring at Men Who Stare at Goats” @ Michaelshermer.com: "... the U.S. Army had invested $20 million in a highly secret psychic spy program called Star Gate. ... In The Men Who Stare at Goats Jon Ronson tells the story of this program, how it started, the bizarre twists and turns it took, and how its legacy carries on today."
^Krippner, Stanley and Harris L. Friedman (2010), Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential Or Human Illusion?, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/Greenwood Publishing Group, p. 154: "The story of Stargate was ... featured in a film based on the book The Men Who Stare at Goats, by British investigative journalist Jon Ronson (2004)".