Who Was Involved: The People Behind America's Psychic Spy Program
The government program to study telepathy and remote viewing ran for two decades, and it was small enough that a few dozen people account for nearly all of it. Knowing who they were makes the history much easier to follow, because the arguments about this program are largely arguments between these individuals.
The Physicists Who Ran It
Harold E. Puthoff
A laser physicist with a doctorate from Stanford, Puthoff co-founded the SRI program in 1972 and directed it through its formative years. He came to the work already interested in the possibility that consciousness might interact with physical systems, and he was the one who secured the initial CIA interest after arranging demonstrations with Ingo Swann. Puthoff later moved on to theoretical physics, working on zero-point energy and related topics.
Russell Targ
Also a laser physicist, and Puthoff's co-investigator through the 1970s. Targ co-authored the 1974 Nature paper and, with Puthoff, the 1977 book Mind-Reach, which brought the work to a general audience. Of the founders, Targ has remained the most publicly committed to the reality of the phenomenon, writing and speaking about it for decades after leaving SRI.
Edwin C. May
May joined the SRI effort in 1975 as a nuclear physicist and became research director in 1985, carrying the program through its move to Science Applications International Corporation in 1991 and its termination in 1995. He spent longer on the project than anyone else on the research side and has since maintained the largest archive of its data. May is notably more critical than Targ of loose claims made in the field, while still defending the underlying findings.
The Viewers
Ingo Swann
The single most influential figure in the program's methodology. Swann was a New York artist, not a scientist or a soldier, and he arrived with an unusual proposition: that this ability could be trained rather than merely possessed. He is generally credited with the term remote viewing and with developing Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV), the structured protocol later taught to military personnel.
CRV was Swann's real contribution. Instead of asking a gifted person to free-associate, it imposed stages, standard notation, and rules about when to stop. Whatever one concludes about the phenomenon, the protocol was a genuine attempt to make the process repeatable and auditable by someone other than the viewer.
Pat Price
A retired Burbank, California police commissioner who became the program's most celebrated subject. Price produced the Semipalatinsk descriptions that remain the most cited sessions in the entire archive, and he worked with an unusual confidence, naming places and functions outright rather than hedging. He died in 1975, early in the program's life, which is part of why his sessions loom so large: the record of his work is finite and endlessly re-argued.
Joseph McMoneagle
An Army warrant officer who became Remote Viewer No. 1 at the Fort Meade unit, and the most durable operational viewer in the program. McMoneagle received the Legion of Merit for his intelligence work, an award citation that is often presented as institutional validation of the program. He continued working and writing on the subject long after Stargate closed.
Hella Hammid
A professional photographer with no prior claim to psychic ability, recruited partly as a control subject. She became one of the program's more consistent performers in laboratory trials. Her case is used by supporters to argue that the ability was ordinary and trainable rather than confined to rare individuals.
Uri Geller
The most famous name attached to SRI and the most damaging to its reputation. Geller was tested at SRI in 1972 and 1973, primarily on drawing-reproduction tasks, a classic telepathy design in which a sender views an image and the receiver attempts to draw it. Some of those results appeared in the Nature paper.
Geller was also a working stage performer, and the possibility that stage methods rather than psychic ones explained his results became the central line of attack on the program. The magician James Randi made a career of that argument. Even researchers sympathetic to the wider program have often wished the Geller sessions had never been part of it.
The Military Side
F. Holmes "Skip" Atwater
The operations and training officer for the Army unit at Fort Meade, responsible for recruiting and preparing viewers and for managing operational tasking. If Swann designed the protocol, Atwater is the one who ran it as a functioning military unit day to day.
The Sponsoring Agencies
The CIA funded the initial SRI work from 1972. The Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) stood up the operational unit at Fort Meade in the late 1970s. The Defense Intelligence Agency took over in 1986 and ran the program until it was closed in 1995. The shifting sponsorship explains the parade of code names, from GRILL FLAME to CENTER LANE to SUN STREAK to STARGATE.
The Evaluators
Jessica Utts
A statistician at the University of California, brought in for the 1995 American Institutes for Research review. Utts concluded that the statistical effect in the laboratory data was real and had replicated across independent laboratories, and argued that continued research was warranted. She later served as president of the American Statistical Association, which makes her assessment difficult to dismiss as fringe.
Ray Hyman
A psychologist at the University of Oregon and the other half of the 1995 review. Hyman agreed the numbers departed from chance but argued that methodological weaknesses, the lack of any proposed mechanism, and the field's history of flawed protocols meant the departure could not be attributed to psychic functioning. He had been one of parapsychology's most rigorous critics for decades.
The two reviewers examined the same data and disagreed, and their exchange remains the most useful entry point into the entire controversy, because both are careful and neither is a caricature.
Why the Cast Matters
The program's credibility problem is visible in this list. It contains serious physicists and a decorated intelligence officer, and it also contains a stage magician's favorite target. Supporters emphasize the first group, critics emphasize the second, and both are describing the same program accurately.
Try it: Read Jessica Utts's 1995 report and Ray Hyman's response back to back before deciding what you think. They are short, they are public, and they are the rare case where two experts argue over identical evidence in plain language.
- Use our gematria calculator to compare the numerical values of the names above.