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".
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.
I'm actually OK with this:
1. truly insignificant portion of government spending
2. keeps "muscle memory" for HOW to investigate truly bizarre phenomena
3. keeps "muscle memory" for HOW to conduct research outside of the known-to-be-flawed academic peer review system
I guess the people handing out the money are laymen unable to discern science that lies outside the mainstream from crack-pot theories.
Governments probably want to fund all kinds of weird research in fear of missing out on the next atom bomb. But there was a long and rich history of rigorous science leading up the the development of the atom bomb. I imagine the same is true about the development of ICBMs ect.
The Trinity test was 2.5 years after the first man-made self sustaining nuclear reaction and 12 years after the idea of a nuclear chain reaction was first proposed. The R-7 ICBM first flew 13 years after the V2. I'd say nuclear fission developed a lot faster than ICBMs.
I'd peg the beginning of the research that jostmey mentioned at the discovery of radioactivity. The science was already well-underway when research reactors were being built.
Ok. In that case, it took 49 years from the discovery of radioactivity to the production of the atomic bomb. It took 60 years from the development of the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation to the production of the ICBM. Nuclear science still advanced significantly faster than rocket science.
If intelligence gathering, and the reports produced by such were analyzed and critiqued with the same rigor as the 'known-to-be-flawed peer-review system', you'd be horrified at what your tax dollars are being spent on.
I doubt it. My tax dollars are already spent on lots of things that are known to be actively harmful, not just "low probability of ROI". For example, any 'critical theory' university program.
To be clear, I didn't claim anything wrong with critical theory, but rather the university programs that focus on it. I'm not sure if it's causation or correlation, but the programs that focus on critical theory tend to promote an ideology that is racist and sexist (literally; they advocate openly for discrimination on the bases of race and sex). At public universities (and even private universities, to a lesser extent), these programs are funded by tax dollars.
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.
There was also an economic strategy at play. Both sides were willing to start programs to counter each other, even if those programs seemed silly. Neither side wanted to be caught out if silly suddenly became practical. But the americans knew they had more money. If you could trick the other side into researching a dead end, that's a win. That's dollars/rubles wasted. So you might maintain research programs that you know are ridiculous because you know the other side will continue theirs too. It is one of the few cold war games that one side might actually win.
The pinnacles of this were probably the Buran and F-15 programs. US builds a Space Shuttle so the USSR needs one too... just in case the US decides to activate Shuttle's military features. Buran flies a couple times and is shelved as impractical. Net result: Billions on rubles not spent on other missiles/rocket programs. Conversely, the Americans convinced themselves that the Mig-25 was an epic superfighter. It wasn't. Billions were poured into F-15 development to counter a threat that didn't exist, billions that might have been spent on anything else. Net result: while the F-15 went on to be a great fighter, the USSR remained ahead in high-speed interceptors for two decades.
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).
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]
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.
Probably most of the investigations were conducted by shell companies owned by sisters-in-law etc. Just another way for TLA assholes to line their own pockets.
The CIA are an old hand at using "you can't prove a negative" against laypeople in order to manipulate them. After years of cooperation with international inspectors, Iran saw this first hand when the CIA produced a report thousands of pages long which ended with "We found no evidence suggesting any continuation of a weapons program... but that doesn't guarantee there isn't a super secret one hidden 500 miles underground somewhere." and the media reported it as "CIA confirms underground Iranian nuke program."
There are more practical and down-to-earth reasons why they would want to monitor witches. Another gate, the heavens gate UFO cult, caught the FBI's attention when they all killed themselves in 1997. That caused the FBI to start monitoring some scifi and UFO groups. I don't knock the FBI for wanting to maintain broad institutional knowledge. If that means paying for people to be experts on witchcraft ... if they had experts on UFO cults in the 1980s maybe they could have prevented heavens gate.
>I find it somewhat mind-boggling that the US still searched for witches in the 1980s.
Our military commander in chief at the time was literally an Alzheimers riddled septuagenarian, guided on policy decisions by a personal astrologer. Nothing from the '80 surprises me.
A society that never invests in research into anything that in hindsight was obviously silly, is also going to miss out on a bunch of things that looked unpromising but actually paid off in a big way. I'm glad NASA investigated the reactionless drive recently, even though I was pretty sure it would come to nothing. We need more willingness to finance far-out research projects, not less.
This seems overly dismissive. I think if you had intelligence that the soviets were researching this, and they were, you would more or less have to also. Its also philosophically suspicious to assume we understand everything about human consciousness today and that we can dismiss what may be a way to access non-local information.
Worse, the uber-skeptic position has been hurt in recent years, not the least of which with the military releasing incredible footage of the very same UFO experiences that have been dismissed by skeptics:
Also, small nitpick, but a witch hunt was a political move against women, not an honest attempt to find real witches. Societies with witch burnings were overly patriarchal and witch threats existed to keep women in line.
I think if you had intelligence that the soviets were researching this, and they were [...]
I know essentially nothing about this topic but from what I read due to this post the Soviets were not actually researching this, it was just a translation error.
[...] you would more or less have to also.
If your enemy wastes resources on something that is hopeless you don't counter by also wasting your resources on the same thing.
Its also philosophically suspicious to assume we understand everything about human consciousness today [...]
We may not have a good understanding of human consciousness but we have a pretty good understanding of fundamental physics and human consciousness can not sidestep the laws of physics.
Worse, the uber-skeptic position has been hurt in recent years, not the least of which with the military releasing incredible footage of the very same UFO experiences that have been dismissed by skeptics:
I don't know how such footage changed anything, there have been alleged alien space ship sightings for a long time, some easily explained, some remaining unexplained. What do a couple more examples change? There are no alien space ships roaming Earth's sky.
Also, small nitpick, but a witch hunt was a political move against women, not an honest attempt to find real witches. Societies with witch burnings were overly patriarchal and witch threats existed to keep women in line.
According to Wikipedia that was at best one motivation among several and neither a particularly early nor leading one. Anyway, I only used the term witches to make the comment more catchy, I did not want to imply that what they were looking for was the same or similar to witchcraft witches allegedly made use of.
> We may not have a good understanding of human consciousness but we have a pretty good understanding of fundamental physics and human consciousness can not sidestep the laws of physics.
The laws of physics havn't been completely decided. The arrogance of this post is enraging.
I never claimed that we figured out all the laws of nature but we certainly know a lot about them. And among the things we know are limits on things we may not have discovered. If there was, for example, a yet undiscovered fifth force, then it would have to have tiny effects because otherwise we would have noticed it in past experiments. There is no chance we would have missed anything that could enable remote viewing or something along that line.
Are you worrying what you will do if the sun does not rise again tomorrow? I guess technically it is not certain that the sun will rise tomorrow, but for all practical purposes the sun will without [any relevant amount of] doubt rise again tomorrow.
No. The whole secret stargate agency, the one in all those bunkers, was a creation for the series. The original movie didn't involve a giant secret operation. It was a basic take on the whole 'ancient aliens' concept. They expanded everything to make room for the series long after the name. I think gate was more to do with star trek and wars, but by that same logic the government program could be named after trek and wars. The people picking names for secret government programs like to play jokes. They are all scifi geeks too. See Skynet and Reagans Starwars.
I'd be 100% behind calling the new 'space force' the Starfleet. There is no harm in making a name fun.
"Stargate" was also the name of a 1981 arcade game. [1] It was the sequel to "Defender." On that basis, I wouldn't be shocked if it were named for the game.
There’s also the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), and many other similar names. The US government has perfected creating such pop-culture references in names of laws and projects.
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:
These sketches in a way reveal a quite a bit about the "medium" (or however they call the person doing the remote sensing). Psychologists often do this with children "draw whatever you like" and then they can tell a quite a bit by what they draw and how and maybe see some patterns or issues which could not be verbalized easily.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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 :)
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.
>because obviously you wouldn't find evidence of psychic phenomena
If they had found proof of said phenomena, wouldn't it make sense for them to convince the public they had not? To prevent others from looking into the subject while researching it farther and weaponizing it?
After all, one of the agency's prime purposes (as stated by a former director) is to control the narrative of society - to shape commonly held views:
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" [1].
The American public is pretty well convinced that 'psychic phenomena' isn't real. While this belief is potentially organic, is it that far out of line to question it, considering the striking similarities between mystical belief systems of ancient societies who had no contact with each other (Egypt & Tibet, for example) and the CIA's stated campaign to shape public opinions?
Not directly opposing your statement, just playing devil's advocate around the word 'obviously'.
[1] Former CIA Directory William Casey [via Barbara Honegger]
>> 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.
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?
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.
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/ - 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.
This is sort of how the Buran "Soviet Space Shuttle" got built. Soviet leaders saw the American space shuttle and basically told their engineers "we need one too", despite the engineers knowing there was no point (much of the Shuttle's design stemmed from an Air Force requirement that it be able to launch on a polar orbit, go around the planet once and land back on American territory, which required the wings for that much cross-range capability. The USSR didn't have that problem due to how much longitude Russia spans; but the leaders only saw the finished product, not the politics that went into it.)
The Soviet Union did espionage on the space shuttle even though the plans were public through foia because they are a civilian agency. They literally could have just asked.
> 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.
"Even though a statistically significant effect has been observed in the laboratory, it remains unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, has been demonstrated. The laboratory studies do not provide evidence regarding the origins or nature of the phenomenon, assuming it exists, nor do they address an important methodological issue of inter-judge reliability.
Further, even if it could be demonstrated unequivocally that a paranormal phenomenon occurs under the conditions present in the laboratory paradigm, these conditions have limited applicability and utility for intelligence gathering operations. For example, the nature of the remote viewing targets are vastly dissimilar, as are the specific tasks required of the remote viewers. Most importantly, the information provided by remote viewing is vague and ambiguous, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the technique to yield information of sufficient quality and accuracy of information for actionable intelligence. Thus, we conclude that continued use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering operations is not warranted."
quoting: Executive summary, "An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications", American Institutes for Research, Sept. 29, 1995[19]
I wanted just to stress they didn't stop the research because at the time they were sure it was all false, but because they thought the information was not good enough to use in intel operations
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I consider myself 'intellectually adventurous'. I don't know how else to describe it. I will very willingly read total bunk and extend to it every hypothetical and grant it the widest margin of "OK, just maybe..." But, when it comes down to discussing it, I like using strong language where called for and absolutes when they can be defended. Reason can get you far. But I've run across the same folks you have, not willing to actually explore ideas at all and clearly looking only to find one excuse to throw something out.
The most annoying are the many who claim to be approaching thins with reason who immediately flee to the worst flaws in thinking there are, ad hominem and arguments from authority. Rather than focus on substantive issues, they point out that those putting forward the ideas don't have the right credentials or similar. Which, if you're just dealing with "am I personally going to accept this idea", that's fine. But it's a pragmatic dodge that is guaranteed to fail quite often. Identity of the speaker can't influence truth of what is spoken, it's that simple.
Then you've got things like the issues you mention, like the expense. So tackle the expense problem! WHY is it expensive? Things are only expensive for a few reasons. Either they require rare materials, extremely precise engineering, or they're being produced for an extremely small destination market. It's not magic. If the things can be made at scale, and they can be made with commodity components, they can be made cheap, end of story. That's just a matter of scale. Whether that scale could ever be achieved is one of those "you have to grant the hypothetical" situations. The slipperiness might be a bigger sticking point. What physical properties lead to stickiness and how do they affect light transmission through a medium? That might be the killer right there, but you have to actually pursue it before you can write something off.
Being intellectually adventurous isn't for everybody. Many people can't take an idea like "maybe it would be best if we ate people" and then just take it apart and determine what the consequences would be and whether they accomplish a desired goal. They just can't bring themselves to do it. Or once they hear about prion diseases, they bail instantly without looking for workarounds. You have to WANT an idea to work to ever have a chance of proving whether its possible. Then you can define the conditions under which it WOULD be possible. And if it's not possible, then you actually know why. Which means you probably know far more about the original problem you were trying to solve and that might generate some great ideas going forward.
Like virtually everything else in biology and learning theory the optimum is not at either "edge" of the parameter space but somewhere in between. Willingness to entertain model-breaking ideas and data is a compromise between the need to avoid falsehood and error and the need to learn and update models when needed.
They disclosed their stealth bombers after a time - and those were also seen before disclosure.
There’s being capable of a thing and the fear that instills in people it’s used against. There’s also displaying a large sword deliberately. Governments in general love having moments where they wow their adversaries.
I feel this is an unfair characterizion - the US government isn't a singular entity. In fact, as we've seen these last two years, it is an entity fully capable of warring with itself (the current executive branch is in bitter battle with the justice department and intelligence agencies, for the previous 8 years around half of the legislative branch had a mission statement of preventing the executive branch from doing anything).
Given the nature of the US government I think it is unreasonable to anthropomorphisize it as something that can "enjoy displaying a large sword," for example.
I don't think that was, or even was meant to be, specific to the US. That's a universal thing. And it's one which is really very well supported in military history and strategy. Hell, it even goes down to the animal kingdom. Displays of strength are almost always preferred to actual USE of strength. Use of strength brings with it real dangers of injury to those displaying it, the negative consequences of revenge and the like from the victim, etc.
This is one of the reasons that many military historians remain confused to this day why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. Everyone involved in the decision had to have known that dropping the bombs in unpopulated woodland near the cities would have actually been MORE effective at accomplishing the goals (mostly intimidating the USSR, as it was known from decrypted military communications of the Japanese that they were already defeated and ready to surrender on terms amenable to the Allies).
Parts of the government aren't that great at secrets, sure.
But like someone else wrote, the government isn't a single entity, but a collection of entities. Moreover, a substantial (if not the vast majority) of classified work is performed by contractors (SRI, Lockheed etc) which have their own procedures in place.
We know through OSINT that the government has kept plenty of secrets and they have done so very very well for decades, before leakage or disclosure. Finally, with such a poor SnR these days due to information overload and psyops, even if the government isn't that great at secrets, you still have the herculean task of sorting through the information haystack looking for the needles.
The smaller the project the easier it is to keep secret. The B2 project had literally thousands of people working for it, and even then they kept the lid on it for several years.
Do you really mean this? Are you saying that the government is incapable of keeping a certain fact secret, if exposing it will compromise national security?
MKUltra was wide in scope but no earth-shattering new information was revealed, and I suspect most of those involved didn’t really know the big picture (and the ones that did were likely either too ashamed or too patriotic to talk about it).
That’s a very different type of “big” than, e.g., “we found an alien spaceship in the desert”.
>MKUltra was wide in scope but no earth-shattering new information was revealed...
Again, our little argument was asking if such information would ever be revealed to the public if it was found. So including this particular argument is no possible..
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".