CIA Star Gate Archives

IRVA is proud to offer its members direct access to the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified Star Gate Archives- one of the most significant collections of government documents ever released on human consciousness research.

The archive presented here draws from the CIA’s full STARGATE collection of over 12,000 declassified records, released publicly in 2017 through the CIA FOIA Reading Room. IRVA’s curated selection highlights the most historically and scientifically significant documents, organized for easy exploration- with direct links to primary sources at the CIA.

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Introduction

For 23 years, the United States government ran a classified psychic espionage program. Millions of dollars. Dozens of operatives. Real intelligence targets. When it was finally declassified, 12,473 documents became public record: session transcripts, operational reports, foreign threat assessments, science papers, and the full bureaucratic paper trail of one of the most extraordinary programs in intelligence history.

IRVA members have them all. Not summaries. Not someone’s interpretation. The actual documents, exactly as the intelligence community created and filed them.

Exploring the Star Gate Archives is a lot like working a detective story. Much of the tale of what became known as Project Star Gate is here to be found, but it takes some digging and piecing together to ferret it out. A little diligence brings considerable reward. These are not secondhand accounts or historical summaries. You are reading the primary source material itself: the classified documents that drove real decisions inside the U.S. intelligence community for more than two decades.

Among these documents are actual remote viewing session transcripts by people whose names you’ve heard: Joe McMoneagle, Mel Riley, Gabrielle Pettingell, Lyn Buchanan, and others. There are operational project reports, science papers detailing experiments and findings, intelligence correspondence tracing the interactions of various agencies on the remote viewing question, and even reports from skeptical investigators tasked with evaluating the program’s legitimacy. Some documents are extraordinary. Some are mundane. The work of separating the signal from the noise is yours, but the raw material is all here.

The IRVA archive gives you direct access to this collection in two ways: a curated set of 50 landmark documents organized into searchable categories, and the complete CIA STARGATE folder archive spanning 15 folders and thousands of files. Together, they represent the most comprehensive organized access point to this material available to the public research community.

What you will find in these pages is not mythology. It is bureaucracy, and that is precisely what makes it compelling. Budget spreadsheets. Indoctrination statements. Session transcripts filed alongside congressional briefing packages. The mundane machinery of a genuinely remarkable government program, preserved exactly as it was created.

The CIA released the full Star Gate collection in January 2017 as part of its CREST (CIA Records Search Tool) archive of 12,473 documents available through the official CIA FOIA Reading Room. Documents are identified by file numbers such as CIA-RDP96-00789R001100020002-6, a number printed on every page of the original physical document.

A note on completeness: many documents in the archive are partially redacted. Some pages have been removed or blanked where portions remain classified; text within documents is sometimes redacted without explanation. Draft copies are included alongside finals, and appendices occasionally appear as separate entries. This is the nature of a working intelligence archive, and part of what makes it so authentic.

Historical Background

The documents in this archive date from 1972 through 1995 and include five main categories:

• Research documents from the SRI-International and SAIC research programs (plus documentation provided by sub-contractors);
• Operational documents, including reports on remote viewing projects as well as raw remote viewing sessions by the various military viewers;
• Remote viewing training sessions performed by various viewers;
• “Foreign assessment” documentation (articles, surveys, etc., from or about foreign experimentation in or application of parapsychology, used to compile intelligence reports about the state of overseas involvement in the field); and
• Administrative documents (memoranda for record, contracts, letters of instruction, transmittal, etc., disposition forms, indoctrination statements, budgetary documentation, and so on) from both research and operational remote viewing activities.

The research program began in the summer of 1972 at SRI-International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute) and continued to 1995, by which time the program had been moved to SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation; this transition took place approximately 1990). In the early-to-mid 1970s the program used the nickname “SCANATE,” formed from the words “scanning by coordinate.”

Some of the people associated with the research program:

Name	Dates
Harold E. Puthoff	1972–1985
Ingo Swann	1972–1989
Russell Targ	1972–1982
Pat Price	1973–1975
Hella Hammid	1973–1982
Ed May	1976–1995
Keith Harary	ca 1976–1982

Note: Joe McMoneagle and Ken Bell (see below) continued research work with SRI and SAIC after their respective retirements from the Army.

The military operational RV unit went through a series of cover names over its history, reflecting changes in sponsoring headquarters and administrative oversight:

There is also a period from approximately 1975 to around 1979/80 during which the Air Force managed the program under the leadership of Dale Graff. Documents from this period may appear mixed throughout the archive. AMSAA (an Army organization at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD) carried on a fairly intensive remote viewing program for a short time during roughly 1978–1979.

Some of those assigned to the military RV unit: (Listed alphabetically, independent of which program cover name they served under.)

*Sometimes the same number was re-used after a source left the unit. Dates of service should make clear which person is referred to in the Archives.

The viewer/source numbers are useful for sorting out who served as viewer and who served as monitor on any given session. A number of viewer numbers from the Grill Flame years have not yet been definitively identified, partly because viewers at that time were sometimes assigned several numbers used interchangeably as a security measure.

Commanders of the Ft. Meade unit, and their tenures:

Name	Period of Service
Maj. (later LTC) Murray “Scotty” Watt	1978 onward
LTC (later Col.) Robert Jachim	until Jul 1983
CPT F. Holmes Atwater	Jul–Aug 1983
LTC Brian Buzby	Aug 1983–1985
Maj. William G. “Bill” Ray	1985–Jun 1987
LTC William “Bill” X.	Jun 1987–Jan 1988
Fernand “Fern” Gauvin	Feb 1988–Fall 1990
Dale Graff	Fall 1990–Jun 1993
Al G.	1993–Jun 1995

Note: Three of the commanders also appear in the list of viewers. Gauvin and Ray both served as viewers before becoming commander (also known as “branch chief”). Atwater served as interim commander between Jachim and Buzby while simultaneously serving as operations officer and training officer.

Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Key Figures:

The Defense Intelligence Agency figured prominently throughout the remote viewing saga. By the late 1970s, under chief scientist Jack Vorona, DIA had become a major supporter of and contractor for the SRI research, a role it maintained up to the program’s demise in 1995. Beyond the research angle, DIA absorbed the Army’s operational unit starting in 1985, with the official transfer from Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) taking effect on 30 January 1986.

Important figures in the DIA effort:

• Dr. Jack Vorona (deputy director in charge of science and technology intelligence issues)
• Dale Graff (who transferred to DIA in about 1980 when the Air Force discontinued its program)
• Jim Salyer (who monitored the SRI program for DIA from the 1970s through about 1990)
• John Berberich (replaced Vorona in early 1990)

Most primary DIA-related activities took place at the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center (DIAC) located on Bolling Air Force Base, across the Anacostia River from metropolitan Washington, DC. DIA’s actual headquarters, however, were in the E-ring of the Pentagon, where the Director’s office was situated at the time.

Despite the common label “The CIA’s Star Gate Program,” the Central Intelligence Agency never actually ran the Star Gate program. In 1994, Congress ordered DIA to turn the program over to the CIA. On the day the CIA took control (June 30, 1995), the Agency terminated the program as a functioning element. No military remote viewers ever actually worked directly for the CIA as viewers.

Projects and project numbers: The operational remote viewing projects conducted at Ft. Meade were numbered with the year and the order in which the tasking was received. For example: project 8709 (the project targeting the Stealth aircraft) was the ninth project received in 1987. In the Archive, the actual target of a given project is often missing, making it difficult to determine the mission’s purpose without additional context, though reports included with sessions frequently provide useful clues, and in some cases tasking information is included directly. Training sessions are more transparent: most come with feedback attached, making it possible to assess how accurately a viewer described the intended target.

Browse the Archive Contents

The IRVA Project STARGATE archive is organized into two complementary layers: a curated collection of 50 landmark documents selected for their historical and research significance, and the complete CIA STARGATE folder archive containing the full breadth of the declassified collection across 15 browsable folders.

50 Landmark Documents: Curated Categories

These 50 documents were selected to provide the clearest entry points into the archive: the papers that defined the program, the sessions that demonstrated its operational reach, and the assessments that ultimately shaped its fate. They are organized into five categories and accessible through a searchable, filterable interface.

Complete Archive: 15 Browsable Folders

Beyond the curated selection, IRVA members have access to the complete CIA STARGATE collection organized across 15 browsable folders, encompassing the full breadth of the declassified material — session transcripts, administrative records, operational tasking documents, foreign intelligence assessments, research correspondence, training files, and budget documents spanning 1972–1995.

Glossary

The following terms appear throughout the archive and its supporting documentation.