Project Stargate

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Putting the psycho in
Parapsychology
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Men who stare at goats
By the powers of tinfoil
Not to be confused with the Stargate science fiction franchise, which is usually understood to be complete fiction. Usually.[note 1]

Stargate or Star Gate is the umbrella name[note 2] of a series of secret projects investigating remote viewing that were run by various intelligence agencies of the US government from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. What few first-hand documents on the subject are available indicate that the projects were at absolute best no more accurate than random chance - the predictions given by remote viewers did, on some occasions, happen to vaguely resemble reality, but these instances were rare, seemingly random, and impossible to replicate.

The series of projects was instigated during the Cold War, when claims of Soviet advances in "psychic research" started circulating in the West. If the Soviets were performing similar research it appears to have been even less effective than American forays into the field.

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Notes[edit]

  1. You can probably guess where this is going — yes, there are people out there who believe that the Stargate franchise is a cover for a real-life program of similar purpose. To their credit, the producers of Stargate SG-1 parodied this conceit by having that conspiracy theory be true within the show's universe; at least two episodes were devoted to a fake sci-fi series created in consultation with the main characters.
  2. Different sources use different forms of the name. They also don't agree whether it was an "Operation", a "Program" or a "Project" and whether "Project" should go before or after the code name.