
CIA Stargate Collection - bookofjoe
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/stargate
======
graedus
I had to look this up. From Wikipedia:

Stargate Project was the code name for a secret U.S. Army unit established in
1978 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, went by various code
names—GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK, SCANATE—until 1991
when they were consolidated and rechristened as "Stargate Project".

~~~
danbruc
The really interesting thing to me is how recently those experiments were
conducted. I find it somewhat mind-boggling that the US still searched for
witches in the 1980s.

~~~
dmix
The benefits of black budgets and zero public pressure for measuring ROI.

They probably invented some ridiculous justification about "not being able to
disprove the unknown" and that every abstract hypothetical threat we can
invent should be taken seriously, something something Ruskies.

~~~
njstraub608
This. The Pentagon buried a McKinsey study detailing out $125 billion in waste
with almost no pushback from the public and then comes a proposal for an
additional $300 billion budget increase with no effort to optimize existing
processes. Going to the cloud and modernizing technology will only solve some
of the problems, the rest are non-technical (bureaucratic).

~~~
hospes
Just to put things into perspective, if pentagon optimizes it's spending and
saves $125 Billion, all public colleges can be tuition free and government
will still have ~$62 Billion left. [1]

Side note: Public colleges can also be made tuition free if government scraps
financial aid programs that it has (~$69 Billion) and directly pays for all
students that go to public colleges. [1]

[1]
[https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/heres-e...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/heres-
exactly-how-much-the-government-would-have-to-spend-to-make-public-college-
tuition-free/282803/)

~~~
Nuzzerino
Does that include the cost of retrofitting the colleges to handle the
increased demand?

~~~
hospes
There certainly will be some increased demand, but it can be easily controlled
by just simply taking top X% of performers, where X% makes as many students as
particular university is capable of handling.

Even now, when public colleges are not tuition free, any decent university
still has limited capacity. You need to have certain level of performance to
be accepted, not just money.

------
rdtsc
I like reading the handwritten notes:

This one is a gem: [https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00789...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00789R003500150002-6.pdf)

They were trying to describe nuclear testing sites or activity? And at some
point they ended up drawing a cute teapot with musical notes coming out of its
spout.

This one has a drawing of a military building, with a little truck and man
next to it:

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00789...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00789R000400240005-7.pdf)

A rather details rocket engine or a satellite payload:

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00789...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00789R000300510002-1.pdf)

~~~
dmix
This would make a good Tumblr or blog picture series. Doodles/drawings from
CIA Agent Classified Notes.

~~~
rdtsc
Definitely or an art gallery as a sibling comment suggested

------
MAXPOOL
It's easy to forget how little time ago parapsychology was still considered
open question even by top minds.

Everybody knows about Turing test and many can name and reference the seminal
paper: A. M. Turing (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 49:
433-460.
[https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf](https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf)

> (9) The Argument from Extrasensory Perception

> I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory
> perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy,
> clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena
> seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit
> them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is
> overwhelming.

In the end Turing suggests that there is need for "telepathy-proof room" for
Turing test if telepathy is admitted.

\-- edit --

my favorite CIA file from project SUN STREAK. Oct 1988:
[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00789...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00789R001401150001-9.pdf)

The goal of experiment was to identify the picture inside a folder by psychic
means. It was the picture of Albert Einstein.

~~~
ddalex
Wholly molly... I'm not sure if this is authentic and the real result of the
experiment, but there are too many coincidences and close points to dismiss
'parapsychology' altogether.

~~~
MAXPOOL
Notice: "Viewer needed prompting in verbalization."

This would be amazing if it was double blind study but I don't believe it was.
The monitor knew the picture and was unintentionally affecting the outcome.

------
jasonkostempski
I think this is what "The Men Who Stare Goats" is based on.

~~~
coffeeacc
The men who star at gates? (excuse me)

~~~
nickelcitymario
Why would you stare AT goats? Doesn't making any f'n sense. To stare goats is
a well defined and common practice among those of us in the psychic community.
Only a rube would think goats are to be stared at...

~~~
jasonkostempski
HA! "Staring goats" sounds like a variation on "stink-eye". I misread
coffeeacc at first too, which also lead me to realize I left out the "at". I
finally realized they were just making a pun. Which, by the way coffeeacc, I
always excuse, no matter how bad. Yours was pretty good though :)

------
jeffreyrogers
There's a lot of criticism that this was a waste of effort because obviously
you wouldn't find evidence of psychic phenomena, but was it really that
obvious at the time? Lots of scientific things seem bizarre and we still know
very little about how the mind works, so it's not obvious to me that you could
say at the outset that this was a fruitless research direction, though that is
now obvious in hindsight.

~~~
grillvogel
>now obvious in hindsight.

the data that shows that it worked is still classified

------
sandworm101
>> The surface quality of these objects was rough and slightly yielding [see
diagram]. Analytic responses to the site include broken down _pier pilings_ or
a group of _elephant seals_.

Actionable intel received. Drone strike inbound. Cannot wait to sea the
remote-viewed damage assessment. It will be either craters or ice cream trucks
everywhere.

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00789...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00789R000500100002-4.pdf)

Remote-viewing of a UFO / extraterrestrial probe:

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00789...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00789R000700690003-7.pdf)

"A remote action investigation with marine animals" (ie how Aquaman talks to
fish. Not joking. They were attempting this in 1987!!!)

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00787...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00787R000300070001-3.pdf)

------
Pywarrior
Came here looking for a gateway to another galaxy.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
I came for a better explanation of the Time Cube.

~~~
ben_w
Isn’t that just an arrangement of 12 twigs of said herb arranged in the
obvious manner in the famous New York square with all the bright video
displays?

------
zackmorris
It would take hundreds, maybe thousands of people and millions of dollars, but
I wish a government agency would run a large-scale Ganzfeld experiment:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment)

It probably doesn't work, but if there is any deviation from chance then they
could move on to variations:

* Can information travel instantly?

* Can information be sent forwards/backwards in time (like precogs in Minority Report)?

* Can such a noisy channel be used to transmit binary information (something like Project Sanguine or rfc1149 or [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6667599/](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6667599/))?

All it takes is one replication :-)

------
taxicabjesus
The basic summary of the Stargate program is that a U.S. Intelligence agency
got wind of a Soviet "psychic spying" program. They laughed, said, "stoopid
soviets", but then had an oh-shit moment: what if it works? WE DONT HAVE AN
EQUIVALENT PSYCHIC SPYING PROGRAM.

Thus, to perform a proper threat analysis, the CIA went to the Stanford
Research Institute [0] (separated from the university in 1970) and gave them
money to perform a threat analysis.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International)

Later it came out that the soviets weren't actually doing psychic spying, it
was something of a mis-translation - 'bio-information transfer' would have
been more appropriate.

Ingo Swann was the artist who helped put this CIA program together. In the
1960's (?) Mr. Swann had done experiments with some parapsychologists in NYC,
and was pretty good at getting information at a distance.

I went to two of Ingo's talks in Las Vegas (2004/2006). He said the
government's intelligence agents always hated their research program with a
passion, so they had to get results from the very beginning. Mr. Swann said
the Government spook's work is predicated on secrecy. When humans have the
ability to retrieve information at a distance there are no secrets.

When the Soviet Union went away, the spooks said, essentially, 'oh thank god
we can finally get rid of this damn program'. When the first media reports
came out, the CIA's official response was something like, 'we spent 25 years
studying this and we're 100% sure we never got any results whatsoever.'

Ingo's website was
[http://www.biomindsuperpowers.com/](http://www.biomindsuperpowers.com/) \-
this now redirects somewhere else, but the old site was cooler (check
archive.org?). According to Mr. Swann, four of humanity's "superpowers" are
memory, imagination, intuition and the "telepathic transfer of information".
They are superpowers because they "transcend space and time as one major
category of activity, and energy and matter as another major category."

    
    
      Put simply, for there is no other way to put it, 
      the superpowers of the human biomind are defined 
      as those indwelling faculties of our species 
      which can transcend space and time as one major 
      category of activity, and energy and matter as 
      another major category. 
      
      The full extent of our species faculties of 
      memory, for example, transcend the known laws of 
      matter and time, as do the faculties for human 
      imagination. Memory and imagination, therefore, 
      are among the many superpowers -- although they 
      have not been identified this way within the 
      prevailing wisdom of the Modern Age.
      
      In addition to memory and imagination which are 
      universally shared by all specimens of our 
      species, the several formats of intuition and of 
      the telepathic transfer of information are also 
      very broadly shared. 
    

In 2004 Mr. Swann told me not to spend $100 for a used copy of his book:
"you'll find a copy". 12 years later I found the prophesied copy at the annual
VNSA booksale [1] in Phoenix - it'd been miscategorized as 'adult/erotica',
and the people with scanners (looking for valuable books to resell) hadn't
found it.

[1] [http://vnsabooksale.org/](http://vnsabooksale.org/)

~~~
klenwell
> They laughed, said, "stoopid soviets", but then had an oh-shit moment: what
> if it works? WE DONT HAVE AN EQUIVALENT PSYCHIC SPYING PROGRAM.

"Mr. President, we must not allow a stargate gap!"

[https://getyarn.io/yarn-
clip/c00b94e5-bbb3-4ea9-a078-7a1a21b...](https://getyarn.io/yarn-
clip/c00b94e5-bbb3-4ea9-a078-7a1a21b87bc5)

~~~
danburbridge
Yeah, it had me thinking of that scene in Dr Strangelove too. Such a wonderful
piece of cinema.

------
syyvius
I guess this guy can create a voltage difference between his hands for
electrotherapy.

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00787...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP96-00787R000500090007-3.pdf)

------
JoeDaDude
These experiments, or at least similar experiments on remote viewing and
telepathy, treated briefly by a NOVA documentary: "The Case for ESP".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rOXwwIu5gk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rOXwwIu5gk)

~~~
Fnoord
Also see all the work from Ingo Swann [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann)

------
partycoder
tl;dr

Psychic experiments didn't work.

~~~
api
I'm still glad such experiments were done and even that they continue to be
done. We should be open minded enough to ask crazy questions from time to
time.

~~~
komali2
That was my theory when I defended a firm that had made a (so, so minor)
investment into solar road research on Reddit. I couldn't believe the vitriol,
on a subreddit devoted to futuristism no less.

I don't know how to classify this phenomena but its characteristics are:
lofty, haughty, condescending, dismissive language - a desire to be "right"
about the "true boring nature of the world - high cynicism paired with disgust
for optimism - absolute conviction even lacking more than a trickle of
experimental evidence.

In the case of the solar roads, people were "promising" me that it would never
be a viable solution not because of any good thermodynamics calculations or
anything, but merely because the roads were pretty expensive right now, and
kinda slippery right now, and because it seems to make more sense _right now_
to just build solar panels in the Mojave desert or whatever.

Never mind that freeways are arteries across the nation, never mind that maybe
someone will whip up some crazy asphalt mixture that you can plug a cord into,
nope, it's not ever going to be a thing, TRUUUUST USSSS.

~~~
api
I call it the "boring universe brigade." They go far beyond criticizing fringe
science and pseudoscience, tending to also pile onto pretty much anything that
is too new even if its entirely within known laws of physics.

~~~
carapace
"Planet Without Laughter" by Smullyan

[https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/smullyan.html](https://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/smullyan.html)

> Once upon a time there was a universe. In this universe there was a planet.
> On this planet there was virtually no laughter. Nothing like ``humor'' was
> really known. People never laughed, nor jested, nor kidded, nor joked, nor
> anything like that. The inhabitants were extremely serious, conscientious,
> sincere, hard-working, studious, well wishing, and moral. But of humor they
> knew nothing. All except for a small minority who had some feeling for what
> humor was. These people occasionally laughed and joked. Their behavior was
> extremely alarming to everyone else and was regarded as an obviously
> pathological phenomenon. These few people were called ``laughers,'' and they
> were promptly hospitalized.

------
golfer
Sadly, a search for Treadstone returns no results </bourne>

