Psychic Spies to the Rescue?

Ukraine's recent blow to Putin's air force summons a story from the annals of America's bygone "psychic spying" program

Ukraine’s stunning destruction of a portion of Putin’s air force on June 1, 2025, recalls an episode from the back pages of parapsychology and America’s successful—yes, successful—CIA-funded psychic-spying program.

From about 1972 to 1995, the program, often called Project Stargate, employed “remote viewers” to attempt intelligence gets on foreign adversaries. In 1995, however, President Bill Clinton cut Stargate—funded at about $20 million across its run—in a spate of post-Cold War military reductions. There exists a popular shibboleth that Stargate failed to produce results. This is false.

In 2023, a team of social scientists endeavored to evaluate the remote-viewing [RV] program. They concluded in the journal Brain and Behavior that the chief thrust of Stargate—whose data was “progressively declassified” between 1995 and 2003—proved empirically sound: “In the case of RV [remote viewing], experiments with significant results greatly predominate.” [1]

With apologies to Wikipedia, what I describe has proven so again and again since parapsychology commenced as an academic science nearly a century ago thanks to the efforts of researcher J.B. Rhine.

The Unseen Legacy of Parapsychologist J.B. Rhine

A further word about Ukraine before considering how this ties into Stargate and psychic spies. The Wall Street Journal reported on June 2, 2025:

Ukraine’s unprecedented drone strikes on Russian air force bases weaken Moscow’s ability to wage war on its smaller neighbor and undermine its capacity to threaten more distant rivals such as the U.S.—a shift with potentially far-reaching geostrategic implications.

A sizable portion of the fleet Moscow uses to launch guided-missile attacks on Ukraine—and would rely on to strike adversaries in the event of a nuclear war—was damaged or destroyed in the coordinated attacks.

Russia no longer produces the decades-old Tupolev planes, meaning it has lost a cornerstone of its ability to project military power beyond its borders. . .

Of more than 100 Tupolev bombers that Russia is known to have, Ukraine said it had damaged or destroyed more than 40.

This resurrects a drama from Stargate. It is tucked away in a talk that former President Jimmy Carter delivered before a group of Emory University students in Atlanta in 1995—the same year Clinton cut the program. Carter’s observation about psychic spying appeared in a CNN news brief of September 21, 1995, which bears quoting in full:

Carter: CIA used psychic to help find missing plane

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN)—Former President Jimmy Carter said the CIA, without his knowledge, once consulted a psychic to help locate a missing government plane in Africa. Carter told students at Emory University that the “special U.S. plane” crashed somewhere in Zaire while he was president.

According to Carter, U.S. spy satellites could find no trace of the aircraft, so the CIA consulted a psychic from California. Carter said the woman “went into a trance and gave some latitude and longitude figures. We focused our satellite cameras on that point and the plane was there.”

Carter made the disclosure after two students asked if he was aware of any government evidence pointing to the existence of extraterrestrials. “I never knew of any instance where it was proven that any sort of vehicle had come from outer space to our country and either lived here or left,” the former president said.

The plane to which Carter referred was, in fact, a Soviet Tupolev-22 spy plane, which crashed in Zaire in Central Africa in May 1978. The Tupolev was on an intelligence-gathering mission when it went down—providing a potential payload of Soviet intelligence technology.

Due to the coordinates and data supplied by remote viewers—which included a drawing of the tail of a plane emerging from a river—American reconnaissance and recovery teams were able to beat Soviet counterparts to the crash site, scoring a major intelligence victory. It ranked among Stargate’s signature, if least-known, successes.

I currently have no knowledge of whether the intelligence gained in that episode contributed to Ukraine’s ability to target Putin’s aging but vital Tupolev fleet. But science has a funny way of summoning its truths beyond cultural vogue.

Among the reasons for Stargate’s perceived discrediting are rhetorical assaults on the program by progressional skeptic Ray Hyman dating to the program’s demise in 1995. At the time, the later-president of the American Statistical Association, Jessica Utts—who uses statistical analysis and meta-analysis to study psi—cried foul on the skeptic. The two exchanged papers and rebuttals in 1995. But the signal got lost in the noise. [2]

Dean Radin, MS, PhD, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Science (IONS), and the scientist I consider Rhine’s inheritor, notes:

The American Institutes for Research (AIR) report that she and Hyman were consultants on was far more positive than it is typically portrayed. Both she and Hyman agreed that the evidence for RV was statistically significant and that its methodology was sound. The only sticking point was whether it was useful for espionage, and they actually didn't evaluate any of the operational missions data because they were classified (and most of it remains classified). Still, the AIR report said that RV wasn't useful, which contradicts [remote viewer] Joe McMoneagle's Legion of Merit award when he retired.

Wonderful strides have occurred in parapsychology, but the advances are not what they could be. In the same year as the Stargate cuts , UC Irvine statistician Jessica Utts, citing the work of Dutch researcher Sybo Schouten, surmised that during the more than 110 years since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, “the total human and financial resources devoted to parapsychology since 1882 is at best equivalent to the expenditures devoted to fewer than two months of research in conventional psychology in the United States.” [3]

For comparison, the American Psychological Association reports that in 2017, $2 billion of the United States’ $66.5 billion in federal research funding went to psychological research. Think of it: the field of parapsychology has, since its inception worldwide, been funded in adjusted dollars at a rate of less than two months of traditional psychological experiments in the U.S. (experiments which, like much of the work in the social sciences, are routinely overturned to reflect changes or corrections in methodology). That is less than $333,500,000, or a little more than cost of four fighter jets. This figure compares with trillions that have been spent worldwide during the same period on physics or medical research.

Radin disputes my figure: “$333M is far too high. I'd estimate the total research dollars spent on psi research since 1882 is probably no more than $50M in today's dollars (including StarGate). That would pay for a small piece of one wing of a modern jet fighter.”

Given the recent Tupolev drama and the fighter jet’s place in the annals of Stargate, perhaps it is time for a second look.

Notes

[1] Escolà‐Gascón, Á., Houran, J., Dagnall, N., Drinkwater, K., & Denovan, A. (2023). Follow‐up on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) remote viewing experiments. Brain and Behavior, 13(6). https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.3026

[2] In 1995, Congress and the CIA commissioned Utts and University of Oregon psychologist Hyman to evaluate the results of Stargate. They produced counterpoint reports in 1995: “An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning” by Jessica Utts, “Evaluation of a Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena” by Ray Hyman, and “Response to Ray Hyman’s Report of September 11, 1995” by Jessica Utts, which appear in full in both Journal of Parapsychology, 1995, Vol. 59, No. 4 and Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1996, Vol. 10, No. 1. The reports are further reprinted in Journal of Parapsychology, 2018, Vol. 82, Suppl. Utts’ original report is rebutted by Hyman and she, in turn, responds to his rebuttal. For anyone interested in Stargate, I recommend this material amid a great deal of writing and debate on the matter.

[3] From Utts’ “Response to Ray Hyman’s Report of September 11, 1995” cited above.

For more on Stargate and related issues check out my historical podcast Extraordinary Evidence: ESP Is Real: