June 9, 2020 • 53 mins
In yet another testament to how amazingly great the 70s were, in 1975 the US started a program that tried to harness the powers of clairvoyance to remotely spy on the Soviet Union. Since clairvoyance doesn’t seem to exist, it wasn’t super successful.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck your friends, and we
are here to tell you about our upcoming book that's
coming out this fall, the first ever Stuff you Should
Know book, Chuck. That's right. What's the cool, super cool
title we came up with. It's Stuff you Should Know colon,
an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right, and
(00:20):
it's coming along so great. We're super excited, you guys.
The illustrations are amazing, and there's the look of the book.
It's all just it's exactly what we hoped it would be.
And we cannot wait for you to get your hands
on it. Yes, we can't. Um, and you don't have
to wait. Actually, well you do have to wait, but
you don't have to wait to order. You can go
pre order the book right now everywhere you get books,
(00:42):
and you will eventually get a special gift for pre ordering,
which we're working on right now. That's right, So check
it out soon coming this fall. Welcome to Stuff you
Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
(01:02):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles
w Chuck Bryan over there. Jerry's here floating around the
office somewhere, but she's here. Everybody's back. Yes, Jerry is
here in the flesh. She does exist, she's real. She
also has clothed, not just flesh. That's right. And because
the three of us are hanging out even on the
(01:24):
internet's it's it's stuff you should know. Yeah, it's good
to see her. Her hair is long. She's like a
hippie now, I mean long for Jerry is not very long,
but it's swoopier than usual and looks quite nice. That's great, man, show.
She cares. She's staying home. Stay home, save lives, Jerry. Yeah,
(01:45):
that's right. Uh, you know what else may have saved lives? Chuck,
Project Stargate, Project Stargate. Do you know when why I
hedged and said that it may have saved lives? Why? Well,
I mean, you tell your version, but I mean, because
we don't even know if this stuff is real or not. Yeah,
(02:06):
I it's gonna say that I said it may have
saved lives because it totally didn't save any lives as
far as you know, it's a bunch of made up
gobbledy cook um and a CIA boondoggle and u S
military boondoggle from the seventies to the nineties, but some
fun anecdotal stories though it is. It is like it's
(02:28):
one of the more interesting chapters in CIA history, and
CIA history is awfully interesting. It has a lot of
interesting horrific chapters. This one's not horrific. I think that's
one of the big differences of it is it's just interesting.
There's not a lot of horror to it um. I know,
the menusteric goats by our pel John Ronson really kind
of devolves into horror towards the end of it um
(02:51):
when he gets an mk ultra. But this is separate
from NK mk Ultra. It came from the same mindset
for sure, this idea that there are powers to the mind,
I could consumably be unlocked to do ill or good
or neutral stuff. Who knows. But this one, it was
fairly benign as far as CIA projects go, don't you think, Yeah,
(03:12):
and believe it or not, I never saw that movie.
It was okay, That's why I didn't, I think. I
mean it had everything I love in a movie, which
is Jeff Bridges and George Clooney and John Malkovich, but
have some funny spots in it too, for sure. Yeah,
I don't know why that one got past me. I
think I've read tepid reviews and I just kind of
(03:33):
was like, Yeah, if you watched it, you would not
think that you would just you would not want the
two hours of your life back. But you wouldn't just
be like, I'm going to dedicate my life to making
sure everybody sees this movie. It wouldn't be like that.
And I haven't read the book. Sorry, John, if you
even listen to us anymore, But um, like, I'm quite
(03:54):
sure from what I understand, the book is is vastly
superior to the movie. Which when does that ever happened? Sure?
If John Ronson's hands were involved in his brain, then
I'm sure it was better. I love that guy. Yeah,
he's a good guy. Didn't like to wear shoes for
people who might not have seen him. Here's another fun
fact that you probably don't know. He was on one
(04:15):
of the first editions of movie Crush and he sits.
He swears that he sits on the very front row,
far left seat. That's torture. It's torture. I don't it
was so weird. No, I know I heard that episode.
His His movie was Annie Right, No, not true. What
(04:40):
was it? Do you remember? It was let the right
One in? Oh man, that's a great movie. Yeah, sure is.
And if you know, if you ever go to a
movie theater New York and you see some guy front
shoes with no shoes, then go tap him on the
shoulder and ask for his autography. UM. Okay, so we're
talking Projects Stargate, which was the general name for this
(05:00):
secret project that was declassified around two thousand, I think,
which is it's very telling that it was declassified in
two thousand because the project was finally canceled in. Normally,
when the CIA connects the project, especially if that project
yields valuable stuff, they don't declassify it in just five years.
(05:22):
It takes decades before that stuff starts to trickle out.
But with Project Stargate, um, they said, here you go,
here's everything. Yeah, that's great reading. Um. But this this
project ran from officially I believe, nineteen seventy five, and
I had a different couple of different names, and it
(05:42):
got passed along from different um different agencies. But the
whole thing started even back before the CIA got involved.
And from what I saw, there was a woman Soviet
woman named new Nell Coolognia, who was on TV in
the Soviet Union and she was demonstrating her telekinesis, and
(06:03):
apparently some defense intelligence analysts saw this TV show and said, Hey,
I think this the Soviets might have some sort of
mind weapon that we might want to look at. And
it scared the Bejesus out of the United States, and
they got busy trying their own hand, starting with the
USS Nautilus, the first submarine to make it to the
(06:25):
North Pole. Yeah. I think what's so funny about the
early history of this is that, um, the Russians started
doing it because they thought we were doing it, and
we started doing it because we thought they were doing it.
And I don't know if either one of us technically
were officially doing it. No, no, so yeah, they're the
(06:46):
woman on TV. Did not necessarily mean the Soviets had
some sort of program, but it was that whole goofy
Cold War thing where it's like, if if there's even
the slightest possibility the Russians are up to something, we've
got to do that too, and then do it better.
And they had the exact same mentality. So there was
a constant arms race for everything, including E S p
(07:08):
and what we'll we'll find out was called remote viewing. Yeah,
I mean that's kind of the deal. I guess we
should tell everyone what this means. Um, it's sort of
like a uh in an addition of Karnak the Magnificent
from the Johnny Carson Show. At least this is how
they trained. And we'll get into that specifically, but it was, Hey,
you have a gift. Maybe we're gonna test you to see,
(07:33):
but sit in this room and tell us if you
can locate whatever a missile base in the Soviet Union,
or a hostage in the Middle East, or just whatever
they needed to know that they didn't know. They're like,
just sit here quietly and and think it into reality.
And uh. That was sort of the basis of the
(07:53):
program was it was a trying to use SI P
s I, which we've talked about before. You are political
and I guess military advantage. Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean
in that respect, it was really again very benign. They
weren't trying to explode somebody's head, although there were reports
of of programs like that, but with Project Stargate specifically,
(08:16):
it was just people trying to come up with descriptions
of secret places or like you said, the location of
certain people. Just kind of astra Lei projecting is another
way to put it. Clairvoyance is another way to put it,
but just kind of not just reading somebody else's mind,
but actually traveling somewhere else in the world and connecting
(08:38):
into a person or a thing or a place and
getting that information remotely through means other than the normal senses.
And that's why another reason um or that's why reason.
Another name for remote viewing, which is what it came
to be called, is anomalous cognition, which is you've got
this information. You're getting this this info that you normally
(09:00):
get from like your ears or your eyes or your
tongue or something like that, but you're getting it just
into your mind. You're sure, Hey, go lick that thing,
tell me what you think. See if you can figure
out the secret code word, get into that base by
licking the keypad. But the I mean, you know, you're not.
You're getting it from um not just your sensory perception.
(09:20):
It's an extra sensory perception, right, is that what that means?
That's what that means. Right. So that's the whole jam
with this, is that the CIA and then the Soviets
had their own thing going on too. We're saying like,
let's do this. Let's use this potential capability to um
to see if it works, and if it does work,
let's use it to gather intelligence without having to go anywhere,
(09:42):
without having to spend virtually any money on this. Just
like you said, put him in a room maybe with
some saltines and some grape coolation. Let him relax and
and figure it out. Yeah. So in seventy two is
when the d i A, the Defense Intelligence Agency, first
got wind of the Soviets potentially doing this for real,
(10:03):
and the CIA said, all right, you know what, We're
gonna start funding these private research firms to see if
this is possible. And seventy three, uh, this started happening
at the s r I International in California, which stood
originally for Stanford Research Institute, but they weren't a part
of Stanford at the time. And there was a guy
(10:25):
there named Dr Russell targ who was one of the researchers,
and he wrote a book called Mind Race, which is
a great title for something like this, and he had
some like early examples of sessions that he thought sounded
promising at least, right, I was gonna say, I'm not
(10:47):
sure how he got into it though, but he I
don't know if he was already into it and then
the d I A Got into it or started funding
him or something like that. But from yeah, from what
I can tell you's the earliest one. I bet he
was into it. But not for you know, espionage type
purposes or anything like that. No, No, I think it
was just kind of like this early, you know, beginning
(11:08):
of the New Age movement. This guy was like on
the leading edge of that whole thing. So in nineteen
seventy six there was this experiment that he championed, is like, hey,
look this good work. Everyone. There was a remote viewer
someone in the offices in California, their s R. I
and Dr targ was in New York City and no
(11:29):
one knew anything about where he was supposedly, I think
we're gonna say supposedly a lot in this podcast. And
they said, all right, where am I? And he said, well, um,
let me see in my brain. I'm seeing something. Um,
I'm seeing a subment depression. It's almost like a dry fountain. Yes,
(11:51):
there's a submit post in the middle and there are
pigeons flying around? Oh my god, Doctor targ said, Hell,
I'm in Washington Square Park and the fountain is empty. Yeah.
And and Chuck, there's pigeons pooping everywhere because it's in
New York. Yes. And so like with this this apparently
(12:12):
successful remote viewing session, Dr targ Um was able to
get funding from the d i A at first, and
that's where really kind of kicked off this whole study
that one I think came through in seventies six, but
it's certainly kept his funding going. But he had, um,
he had anecdotal data from remote viewing sessions previous to
(12:35):
this that really kind of kick things off. And so
the CIA is like, well, I mean, if this guy
can sit there and and figure out that this guy
is in Washington Square Park just with his mind's i
you know, without right, no licking at all, certainly no
pigeons are being let here. Um that like, like, we
(12:56):
could probably put that to good use, having him think
about Soviet stuff and we can steal their secrets that way,
That's right. And in nineteen seventy six we had a
president elect and Jimmy Carter, who you know, asked a
couple of questions around the the office, and he got
in touch with Uri Geller, the famous Yuri Geller. He's
(13:17):
a great mentalist. If you haven't, we've talked about him
plenty of times. I feel like, yeah, but I really
want to do just enough to show on him. He's
pretty great. Did you know that he ended up getting
very rich by dowsing for oil companies? Really, can you
believe that? I can. I can't do because I think
oil companies will pay anybody anything if they think it
(13:38):
will lead to oil. You give me some oil, So
Carter said, Um. He had a private meeting with him
and he kind of asked about what was going on,
and Geller said, you know, these Russians they school are
They screen school kids and see if anyone has particular talents,
like paranormal power talents, and they send them to special
(14:00):
places to be trained. And Carter said, well, maybe we
should look into this. It's nineteen seventy seven now, and
they didn't find any evidence of that kind of thing.
But by this point the chicken was out of the coope,
I think, and they were going to spend a little
bit of money to kind of pursue this. Yes, I
think the only evidence that that little line that you're
a Geller gave to Jimmy Carter was that Eurie Geller
(14:21):
had seen escape to Witch Mountain the year before. I mean,
that's the problem with all of this is like BS
begets more BS. So Eurie Geller had a meeting with Carter,
started talking out of his a and the next thing,
you know, the United States is funding and study to
find out whether it's true. It's like, come on, yeah,
(14:44):
I like I have to. I'm gonna just fess up here.
I was very bugged the entire time I was researching
this particular one. It was like crop circles all over again. Yeah,
but more fun than crop circles. I think it was
more fun. But you know what kind of stuck the
fun out of it for me? All this ahead and
say it now. I was going to save it for
the end, but I read something somewhere that really kind
(15:04):
of drove at home that the problem with like this
kind of stuff is that if you if you let
it really kind of get a foothold or get started,
it paves the way for the kind of thinking that
just doubts science and that that doubts expertise. And then
it's like, no, no, don't you know, like people can
(15:26):
bend spoons, you don't need to like, you know, you
don't you don't have to believe in science. This stuff happens.
This is really right, exactly, And then all of a
sudden you have people believing anything that they hear. That's
the problem with it, and it really bugged me, especially
on today of all days. You know. Yeah, of course,
so um around and we don't know all this stuff
(15:49):
for sure, because a lot of the stuff is still
I don't know if it's still top secret. But um,
the timelines aren't like you know, we don't know specific dates.
But around seventy the c i A stopped funding this
and the Army said, hey, we'll take over, no problem,
a bunch of money we don't know what to do with. Yeah,
and how about a cool army code name. We'll call
(16:09):
it Project grill Flame one word. I don't know why
that's weird. Well, I think that's the point of a
project name. It's meant to kind of baffle you. I
think some of them are kind of cool and relatable
to the thing now. But to me, it's like, well,
you don't want any outsider, what the project is about
you know, that's true plowshare plow Okay, you're right, that
(16:30):
was a really good one. You're right. So Project Grill
Flame from the Army was based in Maryland at Fort Meade,
and they had remote viewers or people who claimed to
be remote viewers or show talent as remote viewers in
barracks and they would do the car neck routine. They
would hand them an envelope and said what's inside, And
(16:52):
that was kind of the extent of their testing at first. Yeah,
um they would um, well they were allowed to open
the envelope. I'm sure they would just once I was
a joke put into their forehead. Um, but um, they
would give them. They would give them a car like
an envelope with maybe somebody's picture, maybe a note card
(17:13):
that has latitude and longitude typed on it, maybe somebody's
name that was it, and they were told to think
about that latitude and longitude or told to concentrate on
that person's picture or think about their name, and they
wanted all the information that came. And so when it
was latitude and longitude, typically you would know like you
were supposed to be um viewing remotely a like a
(17:37):
site or some sort of secret base or some sort
of weapon or satellite dish or radartist or something like that.
UM and if it was a person you know, who knows,
maybe they were a lost person. And some of these people,
some of these remote viewing UM subjects, would would say
like I need a little more info or something like that,
(17:58):
and then it would kind of get them going, and
then they would write down what their impressions were. They
would maybe dictated, they would draw it, maybe they would
do all three and then after twenty minutes, thirty minutes,
however long they dedicated to it, they would stop and
all of their info would be taken away and then analyzed,
(18:18):
analyzed by a defense intelligence analyst CIA analyst an NSA
analyst who knows somebody whose job was going through intelligence
that was given to them by spies and satellites and
all that would every once in a a while get a
package slip to them between that had somebody had literally
(18:41):
pulled out of thin air and put down in words
and here you go. See if this this holds up
or helps you in any way in figuring out what's
in that mountain in the urals. Yeah, So there was
a guy named Joseph mcmonagle, and he was he worked
as a he was a recruit for for grill Flame,
(19:03):
and he worked into the nineties. And he has some
pretty good stories. And there's a lot of good stories
in here. And is this stuff true? Is the thing?
Like it was frustrating you think this stuff is all
made up? I here's the thing. For every one of
his stories, I went and tried to cross for infant
with with declassified CIA documents. I couldn't find anything. Like
(19:26):
all of the guys stories are anecdotal. Here's the problem.
They get reported not necessarily as fact, but they get
reported in like, you know, an actual profile of the
guy in the Washington Post Newsweight or something on this podcast,
and then all of a sudden, right, and then all
of a sudden, when somebody cross references some weird thing
they read in some fringe e book, it pops up
(19:48):
in a Washington Post article too. That's true, that's true.
It's just bad reporting. That is that is continuing this
to go on. But as far as I know, I
could not find any corroboration from any declassified documents for
any of his stories. So one of his examples in
nineteen seventy nine. He said that he was he could
(20:08):
see where sky Lab, the very famous satellite in the
nineteen seventies and eighties, was going to crash eleven months before.
So this is also precognition, which is another part of PSI.
And in one UH and supposedly that was correct. In in
in nineteen eighty one, he also got another tip, a
(20:28):
mental hot tip that there was a hostage Brigadier General
James Dozier that was being held in UH. I don't
know if it's Padua or Padua, Italy Padua Padua either one.
I think it is Padua. And supposedly the tip arrived
in Italy and the day that he was released in
that very town. UH. What else? What about the the
(20:51):
KGB agent, This one's pretty great. So there's a KGB
agent in South Africa that the CIA had been watching
in the in I guess thineteen eighty and they couldn't
figure out how he was contacting his KGB handlers back
in in Mother Russia. And um, I guess McGonagall or mcmonagle.
Um it was focused on a calculator. He saw that
(21:15):
this guy really was obsessed with his calculator. And it
turns out when the CIA looked at his calculatory, figured
out it was a short wave radio. And also just
check the guy's calculator. Sure, like checking all the electronics
that he has. He has a cigarette lighter and a calculator.
We looked at the cigarette lighter, found nothing. We just
gave up after that. Yeah, we looked at the calculator
(21:35):
and held it upside down and just said, bubblis who.
It was one of those remember the professor ones thinking
the mortar cap and all that. You know, There was
one that had a drawing of like an old wise
man with a graduation cap on. It was a pretty famous,
like seventies calculator for kids. Oh, you mean the calculator itself. Yeah, no,
(22:00):
I think you know what you're talking about. I thought
you meant some weird trick where you type in numbers
and turn it upside down and it says, oh and
it looks like a guy. Oh I see. I was like,
that's pretty impressive, right, You're like, I can just type boobs.
So in eight five, the d i a uh took
control of this program. I guess took it back from
the army. It seems like nobody wanted it, like every
(22:22):
few years they would just be like, who wants to
take this over now? But the thing is, it kept
getting funding and from what I read, either target Edwin
May who comes in later um as the director of
this program. Like they said it was a year to
year funding, but it kept getting funding every year for
twenty years. I would think I would think too that
(22:42):
like once it went from one agency to another, maybe
it would survive once. But it survived all these transitions. Yeah,
so they take it back in five and started funding
s r I again international. They're back on the scene.
And then another contract after a private contractor came on
called Science Applications International Corporation, also in California. And this
(23:07):
is where they name it Stargate in nine. And it
had to be after the movie, right, I don't think so, man.
I think the movie came out a few years after that. Really,
I'm gonna look, that's easy enough to check. The whole
time I was wondering about that. And that was the
name from nine till it's end in nineteen and uh, oh,
(23:30):
I'm sorry, not end in is when the CIA took
it back over, right, um. And then the CIA finally said,
you know why we're just we're not sure about this anymore. Um,
we're just gonna we're just gonna defund this thing and
let it go away. Um again. This was and five
(23:53):
years later they declassified as far as we know, everything
that had anything to do with it. I think some
of the people like mcmonagle who were involved are saying,
now there's still plenty of classified stuff you guys don't
know about that really proves everything, right, They're just not
showing you the good stuff. Yeah, but I read this, Um,
I read a I guess the transcript of a Skeptoid
(24:15):
our buddy Brian Dunning's UM podcasts who we went. Um
we had a flame war with over whether or not
it could rain frogs? Um, yeah we did. He well,
he tried to start one. I just ignored him. But um,
this is when we had the can it rain Frog's episode?
But that was years ago, wasn't it. I have a long,
(24:36):
long memory. I can hold a grudge. But anyway, in Skeptoid,
he was basically saying, like the very fact that like
all these people are allowed who were verifiably in this
program run by the CIA for twenty years, The fact
that they're allowed to walk around and talk about this
and haven't been like, haven't disappeared. It just lends further
credence to the idea that there was nothing that came
(24:58):
of this because they it all just be vanished. Kind of.
I think the CIA is not above that kind of thing. Well,
at any rate, the CIA said, uh, it's not worth
this money that we're spending, so let's just get a
very you know, the typical thing. Let's get a third
party report that will solve it all. In the American
(25:19):
Institutes for Research published an evaluation of remote viewing colon
Research and Applications and said, you know what, this is
pretty compelling stuff, but we can't use it for intelligence
because you note the word intelligence zing and they shut
(25:39):
it down, shut it down in they did twenty years,
twenty million dollars looking for everything from new Soviet submarine
designs to lost GUD missiles to people being held by
foreign kidnappers. Um, all of it just down the down
the toilet. That's right. And in the old days this
would be the end of the episode. But in today's stuff,
(26:01):
you should know it's our first message break that might
(26:30):
be a record chuck a thirty minute first act. Oh yeah, yeah,
that's right, I was slicking. We started a little late
after we started recording. That's that's I don't think that's
the record alright. So should we keep talking about Project
Stargate just because it's fun? Yeah, let's so. Um yeah.
And I don't mean like I'm not trying to pooh
(26:51):
pooh like people's imagination. I've got the same thing. I
love the same stuff. It's just mine eyes have been
opened and they can never be closed again. Need to
say mine eyes? Yes and again? Oh goodness, So with
with Stargate right. Um. The whole basis of this was
that it was allowed to continue on for twenty years
(27:14):
because the people involved were very much impressed with what
they saw, and um, what they saw kind of went
a little bit like this, Like the earliest test I think,
the ones that Russell targ was doing. We're basically like, um, uh,
tell me about some Soviet submarine floating around somewhere in
(27:36):
the world. Let's see what you can do, just really free, loosey,
goosey hippie stuff. Right. And then a guy named um
Dr Edwin May came along and he took over and
I think but he'd been working on the project starting
at the Stanford Research Institute, um beginning and back in
(27:56):
nine and Um. So he was on this project, I
believe for the full twenty years, in one capacity or another.
And when he took over, they weren't even paying him
for the last ten No, he was just hanging around
living off a Celtines in Great Cool with his red stapler.
But he yeah, kinda, but he Um. He instituted way
(28:19):
stricter protocols for conducting these remote viewing experiments and tests too.
Not just you know, remote viewing experiments were connected. He
wanted to kind of show that these things could work too,
so he came up with something called ranked order judging,
which was part of a larger type of test called
forced choice. Yeah. And I'm gonna get you to explain
(28:41):
that in a second, because I didn't fully get the redo.
But May is a pretty interesting guy. He was a doctor,
He was a PhD in nuclear physics. Um. And while
it's easy to sort of cast someone like this as
just sort of a loopy hippie type, he really intelligent guy. Um,
(29:02):
but he was also a loopy hippie type. He got
his post stock in San Francisco in the nineteen sixties,
So you know what that means. Uh, And he literally
used the words. He became a professional hippie, did a
lot of drugs, did a lot of psychedelics, and got
into parapsychology and did what you do if that is
your path. You go to India at some point just
hoping to sort of soak up some cool esoteric knowledge,
(29:25):
bump into rupert. Yeah, perhaps. And he came back and
didn't really get a lot out of in m Sure
he had a great time and everything, but it didn't
come back there. Yeah, I didn't come back with anything
he could use. Came back in seventy five and then
that's where he got a job as a research assistant
at s r I International, working with telekinesis, and he
(29:46):
was like, this is it for me, baby, this is
this is the job. You pay me for this. And
he just kind of took off from there and and
I guess took over as director in right. Yeah, so
he was the one that's are did this different sort
of testing method called forced uh not first choice, but
forced choice. Right. It just wasn't quite it wasn't anywhere
(30:09):
near is like free and easy as the free response ones.
It was basically it kind of went like this. Okay,
so let's say let's say that, um, you're holding one
of these tests. Ideally you have three people involved. You
have the remote viewer, you have the sender who's actually
thinking of the thing that the remote viewer is supposed
(30:30):
to be tapping into and gaining information from, and then
you have a judge. Okay, yeah, And also ideally the
sender and the remote viewer should not be in contact
with one another before or during the experiment. It's another
kind of important one too. And these are things that
like Edwin May was instituting that really kind of scientific fied. Um,
(30:55):
the whole thing definitely gave it a more legitimate glean
for sure. But um, so what happens is the the
sender chooses a photo from a hundred photos in a
national geographic photo set. That's usually what they use. And
I also ideally we could point out that, um, they
would use way more than a hundred photos and not
(31:16):
those same photos over and over. That's a big one too,
as we'll see for sure, that's a big problem if
you use the same photo set and the same remote viewers. Right,
So the person who is the sender would sit there
and they would pick a photo and then they would
think about that photo, and the remote viewer would be
ideally somewhere else thinking about that what the sender was
(31:39):
thinking of, and then they would write down their impressions,
they would draw their impressions, and then they would compile
this little document basically of what they saw during the
remote viewing session. Okay, that's the first step. The second
step is that you take four other maybe five other
pick is from that same National Geographic Photo set, and
(32:02):
you could even physically put them as printed photos into
an envelope, and then you give that to the judge,
who has nothing to do with any of this. To
this point. They've just now been given an envelope of photos,
and then they've also been given the remote viewers um
document that they whipped up from the remote viewing session.
(32:23):
And so the judge is supposed to take the remote
viewers impressions and and basically match them to one of
the photos, and so they rank the photos. If you
have six photos, there's one photo that's your number one
photo that you're saying, like, this is what the remote
viewer was seeing. This one is the second likeliest, the
third likeliest, fourth, fifth, and sixth likeliest, So you rank
(32:44):
the photos. If the remote viewer got it right, then
the photo of the judge chose as chose as the
number one photo should be the photo that the sender
was thinking of when the remote viewer got their impressions. Okay, sure,
it's actually, in a weird way, very scientific because you
can insert statistical analysis into this whole thing. And they did,
(33:07):
and they found that over time, some remote viewers did
do much better than chance, just random chance, where out
of every hundred tries, any photos should be chosen out
of a set of five, um, you know, twice. Yeah,
it was. I think the direct quote was from the
report was far beyond what is expected by chance. Yes,
(33:28):
that supposedly came from a true believer statistician who had
done an analysis of this. But yes, there were there
were this. There was this idea that some of these
people were capable of of drawing impressions of what somebody
else in a different room was thinking based on a
photo they were looking at. And then there are Now
we can talk about all the explanations of how that
(33:49):
probably wasn't any sort of clairvoyance. Yeah, and what bugs me,
just before we even get to that is in the
report it said it was far beyond what is expected
by chance, Like, tell me what percentage chances and what
percentage they got, not your opinion on what is far
beyond and what isn't right? Right? So that bugs me
(34:10):
right off the bat. That's a big one right there.
There's also subjectivity running through this big time, because the
judge is doing a subjective analysis to right. Yeah, and
you know if they're picking another Like I mentioned, another
one of the problems is they use the same set
of one dred nat Geo images. So I imagine after
a couple of times they know it's going to be
(34:33):
something about nature at the very least. And if they say,
let's say, lion attacking elk, they're like, no, but it's
a tiger attacking an antelope. You win, you know, yep.
And then if that is the the only photo with
anything like a lion in an elk or whatever tiger
(34:56):
um in the photos set the rest is like an
oil derrick and a lake and some other stuff, then
of course that's the one that's gonna win. With With that,
the judge is gonna choose and they're going to have
a hit. So there's a lot of like real problems
with us. Even though they tried to add like science
to the whole thing. They they you just can't do
it just right exactly. And then um, so so there
(35:21):
that was just the experiments that they conducted to kind
of show and demonstrate that this worked a lot of
the stuff that they used for intelligence that was much
more along the lines of them the free association one.
It's not called free association what is it called? Oh,
the free response experiments where they're just like, tell us
about you know, the Soviets, any new submarine designs the
(35:46):
Soviets are working on or something. So can we can
we tell some of these uh stories that were supposedly successes. Yes,
all right. The West Virginia site is the first one.
Uh DR targ relayed this story, and these were from
the early days in the early seventies, in which a
remote viewer in California was given the longitude and latitude
(36:08):
coordinates of somewhere in West Virginia said what do you see?
And the remote viewer said, um, described like what was
going on with a terrain above the ground and about
a secret underground government site, and supposedly provided names of
personnel who worked there. Uh code words used for the
(36:28):
top secret projects UM. And apparently the description was really
really accurate, so accurate that the CIA said, Um, I
don't know if it was the CIA, I assume it was,
but they said that we've got a leak and we
need to find out what's going on and investigate this. Right,
that's the kind of thing I think, like you said,
that was an early seventies doctor targ one, Yeah, something
(36:51):
like that. That prompts an investigation into a leak. That's
that will get you more funding for a while. That
like definitely will cement your scare the end of giving funding, Yeah,
for sure, especially Yeah, if people are jumpy about what that.
The Soviets might be onto this kind of thing too
when we got to get on it. Sure. And apparently
that same remote viewers saw or remotely saw um an
(37:13):
underground site that was similar in Russia, and the Ural
Mountains described that that was supposedly verified as quote substantially
correct by the CIA. Yep. So that was one of
the big ones that people kind of tout as evidence
that Project Stargate worked. Right. There's also one called the
Microwave Generator Report. UM. This one was with Dr May
(37:35):
Dr Edwin May and um, the remote viewer was, as
is typical, just given longitude and latitude, maybe given like
a little more evidence. I think they were told that
it was a technical site in the US, and the
remote viewers started describing a microwave generator on site. And
the most astounding thing about it is that the remote
(37:59):
viewers said that this microwave had a beam of divergence
angle of thirty degrees, which is not something that you
should be able to glean from somebody telling you the
latitude and longitude coordinates of a technical site. So that
is pretty impressive. And then later on Dr May took
(38:20):
the whole description um, which is we'll see is is
rare in these cases and and determine that it was
that the specs of the generator itself were accurate, and
that the site as a whole were se accurate, okay,
seventy percent reliable. No idea how you would conclude that
(38:41):
or quantify that kind of thing. But again, this is
the kind of thing like you're starting to build like
a lore around this department, this agency that people who
are already kind of into the existence of this kind
of thing can come and participate in and talk about
with their friends and wow, people at cocktail parties with
(39:02):
the Russian crane. This one came from doctor targ remote
viewer was given again coordinates of a site near a
city in the former Soviet Union, and there was a
um in the in like what do you see? What
the drawing detailed was a large industrial crane called a
gantry clane crane. And they said, you know what, there's
(39:24):
no way that this person could have known how to
draw this gantry crane unless they saw it through remote
viewing or someone told them this. No other explanation, yeah, um,
And that was what the analyst who has handed this
was like, wow, that's really impressive. So the Russian crane
stands on its own too. And then there's also one
(39:45):
called the Lowell Fugitive. There's a woman named Angela Ford
who was a longtime participant in Project stargate Um and
she used kind of medium ship where she had three
different we're at guides who would cause her to carry
out automatic writing. That's how she did her remote viewing right.
(40:07):
And she and this is you know, she would go
down to Fort Meat at the barracks and do this
right under army supervision, which is so bizarre, but that's
what would happen, right. So Angela Ford was given the
name of a guy named Charles Jordan's who was an
interesting cat in and of himself. He was he called
himself the ruler of the Florida Keys. He was at
(40:30):
he was He's the prince of the flooria um. He
was the He was a crooked customs agent who had
turned into a drug smuggler down there. And also it
was very easily bribed so that other drugs smugglers could
smuggle their drugs. And he got caught and went on
the run, and so they were looking for him. So
(40:50):
they asked Angela Ford if she could find him for
him that's right, And she said, I'm seeing or my
friends or my ghost friends are telling me and I'm
automatically writing this city Lowell, Wyoming. And it turned out
that he was apprehended a hundred miles west of Lavelle,
(41:10):
Wyoming with a v but a hundred miles west of
a place that she still didn't name. Some people say, though,
that Charles Jordan's admitted to being in the town on
the day Angela Ford did her remote viewing sension proven right,
(41:30):
So you've got all this stuff, all of these anecdotes
that are just coming together into like get this, check
this out, get a load of this. Were all these
things that you can point to and write books on
and say that like this is for real and that
the Washington Post can report on. And that's what's kept
this legend, this stuff about Project Stargaping for real going
(41:54):
all these years. And if you dig it to it,
it's really really hard to pull up heart because the
people who were there will tell you in an interview like, oh,
this person said this. But then if you interview somebody
else to say, well, now they didn't say that. She
didn't say she didn't say Lowell, she said northern Wyoming.
Somebody else would say no, she just said, you know,
(42:15):
somewhere in the west or something like that. So as
the story of Charles Jordan being captured in Yellowstone Um
comes out later, the story of Angela Ford remotely viewing
him in Wyoming gets piled on and added to over
the years until you have her just missing the letter
of the word or the word by one letter and
(42:38):
then seeing him in that town on the day that
it happened. And that's how like this stuff goes it's
just anecdotal stuff that really did happen, Like she really
did have this remote viewing session. But the accuracy of
it is what's always been in doubt. The problem is, Chuck,
is there are examples of people doing some really spectacularly
(43:01):
amazingly accurate hits over the years that really kind of
lend credence to it in in some way, so much
so that that American Research instau American Institute of Research
paper still said, look, there are some weird, unexplainable stuff
in here. Does it prove that remote viewing is real
(43:22):
and that it exists. No, there's a lot of things
that could explain these spectacular accurate hits, but overall, no,
it's not going to It doesn't show that this is
this is real because these are the hits. There was
so much garbage produced that by the time old around
(43:43):
the CIA was like, this is even if remote viewing
does exist, it's so useless as an intelligence tool that
we're not going to fund it anymore. Should we take
another break? Yeah, all right, let's take a break it.
We'll be right back after this. Alright. So here's the deal,
(44:27):
and this is sort of the big question which you
kind of answered before the break, is it no, that's
sor right, it's a It was a nice tease. Is
it a useful spy tool because we can have fun
all day funding something and doing these fun experiments and
getting them sort of right or not. But the whole
purpose of all of this was can we actually use
(44:48):
this stuff as actionable evidence or intelligence? And you can't. Really. Um,
Like we said, they are anecdotal um. They might be
impressed by a certain part of a thing, and you
mentioned that it is rare that they ever included like
the full drawing or the full discourse on whatever they
supposedly saw it didn't see. They would sort of pick
(45:10):
out something that was right and say, look they got
this one part right. That's amazing. But that's sort of
where it ended. Um, the with the with the gantry crane.
You know, they got that gantry crane right, but there
was there was so much stuff that was wrong that
they said, we we can't use this. And that's sort
of the point of all this is, we can't use
(45:32):
this stuff as intelligence because it's just partial. Uh. People
that defended it would say, and Jordan mcmonagle is one
of them, said, this isn't supposed to be the end
all be all. This is supposed to work alongside real
intelligence and just see if it could help support some
of this stuff or give them a hint in the
(45:53):
right direction to start using real intelligence. And it was
never supposed to be a stand alone that you go
in like raid a Russian village because some remote viewers
said there was a nuclear weapon there or something. Yeah. Yeah,
And I think the CIA always viewed as that too,
and that like it was benign. It was very cheap
and inexpensive. It can be done easily, um. But the
(46:16):
problem is is like if you have somebody who's producing
tons and tons of garbage intelligence, the analysts still has
to sift through that, and in some of that garbage intelligence,
there may be something that leads them down the wrong path,
and while they're doing that, they miss some other intelligence
that that actually is useful and good. And so it's
(46:38):
kind of like a metaphor for what pseudoscience in general
does the society, Like there's garbage on there that kind
of distracts you from the stuff that you could be
doing that would actually be beneficial. That's what it did
to intelligence analysts too, and that's why they ultimately abandoned
the whole program. Right, But for twenty years they thought,
you know, there were three big reasons why it was attractive,
(46:59):
and they all kind of boy down to why not.
Which it's it's a passive operation, so it's it doesn't
require a lot of resources. It's you know, I don't
know how many people they had remote viewing it their max,
but I doubt if it was that many. Um, it
didn't cost a lot. Six million bucks a year isn't
that much money? And a defense budget. And then it's
what's known as no known defense. So even if it's working,
(47:22):
let's say, then the enemy can't really stop this, Um,
I guess except for rooting these people out and tracking
them down and killing them. Sure, But aside from that,
those are the three reasons. For twenty years, they threw
six million bucks a year at it, and I'm sure
that kind of waivered in and out. But you know,
they spent ollion dollars. No, I think they spent twenty
(47:44):
million dollars over twenty years. Oh is that all? Yeah? Man?
That was it for the whole the whole time. Spent
six million a year. No, I think it might have
been up to like six million dollars at the end
of it, but over over the course of it, and
I don't think this is really necessarily adjusted for inflation.
But starting in seventy five and ending in nine, twenty
million dollars, you know, on paper, is what got spent.
(48:08):
So those first years it was like, here's a hundred
thousand dollars in a bucket of weed, kind of I
think so in some grape cool ais and saltines. Alright, well,
twenty million bucks. But um, yeah, that's not a lot
of money for you know, if you're talking overall defense budgets. No,
it's not. And so it's it's so cheap that we're
even vaguely promising or vaguely helpful. The c i A
(48:29):
would have been fools not to keep funding this, or
the Defense Department would have been fools not to keep
funding it. Somebody and I could have kept funding it
if we really put our minds to it. But it
it not only wasn't useful, it it did not It
was actually harmful as far as an intelligence tool is concerned.
(48:51):
That was I think what I gather from them finally
canceling it. Yeah, and this, you know, this last bit
about the representative from North Carolina, Charlie Rose, not the
not the the TV guy who's turned out to be
quite a jerk, but um, he kind of summed it up.
And this is what I think the deal is is
if and this is what started it to begin with.
(49:13):
If you think the Soviets are doing this, you can't
just sit back, or at least that's the rationale. You
can't just sit back and say, well it's it's probably
so silly and not even real, but um, we're certainly
not going to let them be the only ones trying this. Yeah, yeah,
like if the Ruskies have it, we sure as heck
better be on it ourselves. Luckily, Um well I was
(49:37):
gonna say luckily that mentality favor with the Cold War.
But it's back, everybody. Hey, the eighties are back. Yeah
they are big time people wearing Fannie packs. And apparently
there's um, what's that one thing where like you touched
the shirt and like your handprint would be a color.
Oh sure, like the the heat Heat shirts or whatever.
(49:57):
I can't remember what they're called, but anyways, apparently a yeah,
eighties are back. So that's it. That's Project Stargate. There's
a lot to read about it. If you're fascinated by it,
whether you're fascinated by it it's just completely crackpot thing,
or you're like, Nope, I don't believe you, Josh and Chuck.
I think you're covering up for the government, in the Illuminati, whatever.
(50:18):
Go read more about it, and in particular, I want
to I want to direct you to Mars Exploration May
twenty second. It's a declassified transcript from a remote viewing
session of Mars where they asked the I think Joseph
mcmonagle to wander around Mars um At in the year
(50:41):
one million b C. And it's fascinating stuff. But it
also tells you everything you need to know about Project
Star Gake. Uh if you want to know what I
already said that kind of thing, didn't I, Chuck. I
guess it's time now for listener mail. I'm gonna call
this Heroin Podcast and this is from anonymous YO. Thanks
(51:03):
for your Heroin podcast. You spoke fairly about something that
is usually wrought with bias. I grew up in the
Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. It's one of the largest drug
markets in the world, most of which is heroin. We
are ground zero now for the opioid epidemic. Growing up
around so much heroin messes with you. My childhood best
friends UH turned to sex work to pay for it
(51:25):
while we played video games upstairs. People were odean in
middle school the class clowns. Dad was one of the
biggest runners in the city, so when he was arrested,
the kid was never the same. It's very difficult to
explain what being around groups of people on heroin is like.
The link below is an excellent New York Times article
about the Kensington Avenue area. Luckily for me, I suppose
(51:46):
I got out relatively unscathed. A lot of people see
people who are addicted as animals and criminals. I struggle
with where I stand. I know, as a group it's
a public health issue, but it is also hard when
looking at the individual's actions. Kensington was a middle class
haven from the early to mid nineteenth century until the
crack epidemic of the eighties. According to my parents, a
(52:07):
Sunday event was walking to the shops on Kensington Avenue.
Did not happen after that and that Here's the article.
It is called Trapped by the Walmart of Heroin by
Jennifer Percy from New York Times October and that is
from anonymous man alive. Anonymous, I'm glad you made it
out alive because that is very scary stuff. What a man,
(52:32):
It's crazy. It makes you realize what what what a
lottery birth is? You know, not just in like your
socioeconomic class or your race or what country you're born into,
but like where, what neighborhood you're born into too. I've
never heard of it. Yeah, I hadn't either. Read that article.
That looks good. Yeah, well, thanks a lot. And uh,
we appreciate you getting in touch with us, and if
(52:52):
you want to get in touch with us, please do.
You can send us an email to Stuff podcast at
iHeart Radio. Comm Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts. For
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or where ever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck your friends, and we
are here to tell you about our upcoming book that's
coming out this fall, the first ever Stuff you Should
Know book, Chuck. That's right. What's the cool, super cool
title we came up with. It's Stuff you Should Know colon,
an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right, and
(00:20):
it's coming along so great. We're super excited, you guys.
The illustrations are amazing, and there's the look of the book.
It's all just it's exactly what we hoped it would be.
And we cannot wait for you to get your hands
on it. Yes, we can't. Um, and you don't have
to wait. Actually, well you do have to wait, but
you don't have to wait to order. You can go
pre order the book right now everywhere you get books,
(00:42):
and you will eventually get a special gift for pre ordering,
which we're working on right now. That's right, So check
it out soon coming this fall. Welcome to Stuff you
Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
(01:02):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles
w Chuck Bryan over there. Jerry's here floating around the
office somewhere, but she's here. Everybody's back. Yes, Jerry is
here in the flesh. She does exist, she's real. She
also has clothed, not just flesh. That's right. And because
the three of us are hanging out even on the
(01:24):
internet's it's it's stuff you should know. Yeah, it's good
to see her. Her hair is long. She's like a
hippie now, I mean long for Jerry is not very long,
but it's swoopier than usual and looks quite nice. That's great, man, show.
She cares. She's staying home. Stay home, save lives, Jerry. Yeah,
(01:45):
that's right. Uh, you know what else may have saved lives? Chuck,
Project Stargate, Project Stargate. Do you know when why I
hedged and said that it may have saved lives? Why? Well,
I mean, you tell your version, but I mean, because
we don't even know if this stuff is real or not. Yeah,
(02:06):
I it's gonna say that I said it may have
saved lives because it totally didn't save any lives as
far as you know, it's a bunch of made up
gobbledy cook um and a CIA boondoggle and u S
military boondoggle from the seventies to the nineties, but some
fun anecdotal stories though it is. It is like it's
(02:28):
one of the more interesting chapters in CIA history, and
CIA history is awfully interesting. It has a lot of
interesting horrific chapters. This one's not horrific. I think that's
one of the big differences of it is it's just interesting.
There's not a lot of horror to it um. I know,
the menusteric goats by our pel John Ronson really kind
of devolves into horror towards the end of it um
(02:51):
when he gets an mk ultra. But this is separate
from NK mk Ultra. It came from the same mindset
for sure, this idea that there are powers to the mind,
I could consumably be unlocked to do ill or good
or neutral stuff. Who knows. But this one, it was
fairly benign as far as CIA projects go, don't you think, Yeah,
(03:12):
and believe it or not, I never saw that movie.
It was okay, That's why I didn't, I think. I
mean it had everything I love in a movie, which
is Jeff Bridges and George Clooney and John Malkovich, but
have some funny spots in it too, for sure. Yeah,
I don't know why that one got past me. I
think I've read tepid reviews and I just kind of
(03:33):
was like, Yeah, if you watched it, you would not
think that you would just you would not want the
two hours of your life back. But you wouldn't just
be like, I'm going to dedicate my life to making
sure everybody sees this movie. It wouldn't be like that.
And I haven't read the book. Sorry, John, if you
even listen to us anymore, But um, like, I'm quite
(03:54):
sure from what I understand, the book is is vastly
superior to the movie. Which when does that ever happened? Sure?
If John Ronson's hands were involved in his brain, then
I'm sure it was better. I love that guy. Yeah,
he's a good guy. Didn't like to wear shoes for
people who might not have seen him. Here's another fun
fact that you probably don't know. He was on one
(04:15):
of the first editions of movie Crush and he sits.
He swears that he sits on the very front row,
far left seat. That's torture. It's torture. I don't it
was so weird. No, I know I heard that episode.
His His movie was Annie Right, No, not true. What
(04:40):
was it? Do you remember? It was let the right
One in? Oh man, that's a great movie. Yeah, sure is.
And if you know, if you ever go to a
movie theater New York and you see some guy front
shoes with no shoes, then go tap him on the
shoulder and ask for his autography. UM. Okay, so we're
talking Projects Stargate, which was the general name for this
(05:00):
secret project that was declassified around two thousand, I think,
which is it's very telling that it was declassified in
two thousand because the project was finally canceled in. Normally,
when the CIA connects the project, especially if that project
yields valuable stuff, they don't declassify it in just five years.
(05:22):
It takes decades before that stuff starts to trickle out.
But with Project Stargate, um, they said, here you go,
here's everything. Yeah, that's great reading. Um. But this this
project ran from officially I believe, nineteen seventy five, and
I had a different couple of different names, and it
(05:42):
got passed along from different um different agencies. But the
whole thing started even back before the CIA got involved.
And from what I saw, there was a woman Soviet
woman named new Nell Coolognia, who was on TV in
the Soviet Union and she was demonstrating her telekinesis, and
(06:03):
apparently some defense intelligence analysts saw this TV show and said, Hey,
I think this the Soviets might have some sort of
mind weapon that we might want to look at. And
it scared the Bejesus out of the United States, and
they got busy trying their own hand, starting with the
USS Nautilus, the first submarine to make it to the
(06:25):
North Pole. Yeah. I think what's so funny about the
early history of this is that, um, the Russians started
doing it because they thought we were doing it, and
we started doing it because we thought they were doing it.
And I don't know if either one of us technically
were officially doing it. No, no, so yeah, they're the
(06:46):
woman on TV. Did not necessarily mean the Soviets had
some sort of program, but it was that whole goofy
Cold War thing where it's like, if if there's even
the slightest possibility the Russians are up to something, we've
got to do that too, and then do it better.
And they had the exact same mentality. So there was
a constant arms race for everything, including E S p
(07:08):
and what we'll we'll find out was called remote viewing. Yeah,
I mean that's kind of the deal. I guess we
should tell everyone what this means. Um, it's sort of
like a uh in an addition of Karnak the Magnificent
from the Johnny Carson Show. At least this is how
they trained. And we'll get into that specifically, but it was, Hey,
you have a gift. Maybe we're gonna test you to see,
(07:33):
but sit in this room and tell us if you
can locate whatever a missile base in the Soviet Union,
or a hostage in the Middle East, or just whatever
they needed to know that they didn't know. They're like,
just sit here quietly and and think it into reality.
And uh. That was sort of the basis of the
(07:53):
program was it was a trying to use SI P
s I, which we've talked about before. You are political
and I guess military advantage. Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean
in that respect, it was really again very benign. They
weren't trying to explode somebody's head, although there were reports
of of programs like that, but with Project Stargate specifically,
(08:16):
it was just people trying to come up with descriptions
of secret places or like you said, the location of
certain people. Just kind of astra Lei projecting is another
way to put it. Clairvoyance is another way to put it,
but just kind of not just reading somebody else's mind,
but actually traveling somewhere else in the world and connecting
(08:38):
into a person or a thing or a place and
getting that information remotely through means other than the normal senses.
And that's why another reason um or that's why reason.
Another name for remote viewing, which is what it came
to be called, is anomalous cognition, which is you've got
this information. You're getting this this info that you normally
(09:00):
get from like your ears or your eyes or your
tongue or something like that, but you're getting it just
into your mind. You're sure, Hey, go lick that thing,
tell me what you think. See if you can figure
out the secret code word, get into that base by
licking the keypad. But the I mean, you know, you're not.
You're getting it from um not just your sensory perception.
(09:20):
It's an extra sensory perception, right, is that what that means?
That's what that means. Right. So that's the whole jam
with this, is that the CIA and then the Soviets
had their own thing going on too. We're saying like,
let's do this. Let's use this potential capability to um
to see if it works, and if it does work,
let's use it to gather intelligence without having to go anywhere,
(09:42):
without having to spend virtually any money on this. Just
like you said, put him in a room maybe with
some saltines and some grape coolation. Let him relax and
and figure it out. Yeah. So in seventy two is
when the d i A, the Defense Intelligence Agency, first
got wind of the Soviets potentially doing this for real,
(10:03):
and the CIA said, all right, you know what, We're
gonna start funding these private research firms to see if
this is possible. And seventy three, uh, this started happening
at the s r I International in California, which stood
originally for Stanford Research Institute, but they weren't a part
of Stanford at the time. And there was a guy
(10:25):
there named Dr Russell targ who was one of the researchers,
and he wrote a book called Mind Race, which is
a great title for something like this, and he had
some like early examples of sessions that he thought sounded
promising at least, right, I was gonna say, I'm not
(10:47):
sure how he got into it though, but he I
don't know if he was already into it and then
the d I A Got into it or started funding
him or something like that. But from yeah, from what
I can tell you's the earliest one. I bet he
was into it. But not for you know, espionage type
purposes or anything like that. No, No, I think it
was just kind of like this early, you know, beginning
(11:08):
of the New Age movement. This guy was like on
the leading edge of that whole thing. So in nineteen
seventy six there was this experiment that he championed, is like, hey,
look this good work. Everyone. There was a remote viewer
someone in the offices in California, their s R. I
and Dr targ was in New York City and no
(11:29):
one knew anything about where he was supposedly, I think
we're gonna say supposedly a lot in this podcast. And
they said, all right, where am I? And he said, well, um,
let me see in my brain. I'm seeing something. Um,
I'm seeing a subment depression. It's almost like a dry fountain. Yes,
(11:51):
there's a submit post in the middle and there are
pigeons flying around? Oh my god, Doctor targ said, Hell,
I'm in Washington Square Park and the fountain is empty. Yeah.
And and Chuck, there's pigeons pooping everywhere because it's in
New York. Yes. And so like with this this apparently
(12:12):
successful remote viewing session, Dr targ Um was able to
get funding from the d i A at first, and
that's where really kind of kicked off this whole study
that one I think came through in seventies six, but
it's certainly kept his funding going. But he had, um,
he had anecdotal data from remote viewing sessions previous to
(12:35):
this that really kind of kick things off. And so
the CIA is like, well, I mean, if this guy
can sit there and and figure out that this guy
is in Washington Square Park just with his mind's i
you know, without right, no licking at all, certainly no
pigeons are being let here. Um that like, like, we
(12:56):
could probably put that to good use, having him think
about Soviet stuff and we can steal their secrets that way,
That's right. And in nineteen seventy six we had a
president elect and Jimmy Carter, who you know, asked a
couple of questions around the the office, and he got
in touch with Uri Geller, the famous Yuri Geller. He's
(13:17):
a great mentalist. If you haven't, we've talked about him
plenty of times. I feel like, yeah, but I really
want to do just enough to show on him. He's
pretty great. Did you know that he ended up getting
very rich by dowsing for oil companies? Really, can you
believe that? I can. I can't do because I think
oil companies will pay anybody anything if they think it
(13:38):
will lead to oil. You give me some oil, So
Carter said, Um. He had a private meeting with him
and he kind of asked about what was going on,
and Geller said, you know, these Russians they school are
They screen school kids and see if anyone has particular talents,
like paranormal power talents, and they send them to special
(14:00):
places to be trained. And Carter said, well, maybe we
should look into this. It's nineteen seventy seven now, and
they didn't find any evidence of that kind of thing.
But by this point the chicken was out of the coope,
I think, and they were going to spend a little
bit of money to kind of pursue this. Yes, I
think the only evidence that that little line that you're
a Geller gave to Jimmy Carter was that Eurie Geller
(14:21):
had seen escape to Witch Mountain the year before. I mean,
that's the problem with all of this is like BS
begets more BS. So Eurie Geller had a meeting with Carter,
started talking out of his a and the next thing,
you know, the United States is funding and study to
find out whether it's true. It's like, come on, yeah,
(14:44):
I like I have to. I'm gonna just fess up here.
I was very bugged the entire time I was researching
this particular one. It was like crop circles all over again. Yeah,
but more fun than crop circles. I think it was
more fun. But you know what kind of stuck the
fun out of it for me? All this ahead and
say it now. I was going to save it for
the end, but I read something somewhere that really kind
(15:04):
of drove at home that the problem with like this
kind of stuff is that if you if you let
it really kind of get a foothold or get started,
it paves the way for the kind of thinking that
just doubts science and that that doubts expertise. And then
it's like, no, no, don't you know, like people can
(15:26):
bend spoons, you don't need to like, you know, you
don't you don't have to believe in science. This stuff happens.
This is really right, exactly, And then all of a
sudden you have people believing anything that they hear. That's
the problem with it, and it really bugged me, especially
on today of all days. You know. Yeah, of course,
so um around and we don't know all this stuff
(15:49):
for sure, because a lot of the stuff is still
I don't know if it's still top secret. But um,
the timelines aren't like you know, we don't know specific dates.
But around seventy the c i A stopped funding this
and the Army said, hey, we'll take over, no problem,
a bunch of money we don't know what to do with. Yeah,
and how about a cool army code name. We'll call
(16:09):
it Project grill Flame one word. I don't know why
that's weird. Well, I think that's the point of a
project name. It's meant to kind of baffle you. I
think some of them are kind of cool and relatable
to the thing now. But to me, it's like, well,
you don't want any outsider, what the project is about
you know, that's true plowshare plow Okay, you're right, that
(16:30):
was a really good one. You're right. So Project Grill
Flame from the Army was based in Maryland at Fort Meade,
and they had remote viewers or people who claimed to
be remote viewers or show talent as remote viewers in
barracks and they would do the car neck routine. They
would hand them an envelope and said what's inside, And
(16:52):
that was kind of the extent of their testing at first. Yeah,
um they would um, well they were allowed to open
the envelope. I'm sure they would just once I was
a joke put into their forehead. Um, but um, they
would give them. They would give them a car like
an envelope with maybe somebody's picture, maybe a note card
(17:13):
that has latitude and longitude typed on it, maybe somebody's
name that was it, and they were told to think
about that latitude and longitude or told to concentrate on
that person's picture or think about their name, and they
wanted all the information that came. And so when it
was latitude and longitude, typically you would know like you
were supposed to be um viewing remotely a like a
(17:37):
site or some sort of secret base or some sort
of weapon or satellite dish or radartist or something like that.
UM and if it was a person you know, who knows,
maybe they were a lost person. And some of these people,
some of these remote viewing UM subjects, would would say
like I need a little more info or something like that,
(17:58):
and then it would kind of get them going, and
then they would write down what their impressions were. They
would maybe dictated, they would draw it, maybe they would
do all three and then after twenty minutes, thirty minutes,
however long they dedicated to it, they would stop and
all of their info would be taken away and then analyzed,
(18:18):
analyzed by a defense intelligence analyst CIA analyst an NSA
analyst who knows somebody whose job was going through intelligence
that was given to them by spies and satellites and
all that would every once in a a while get a
package slip to them between that had somebody had literally
(18:41):
pulled out of thin air and put down in words
and here you go. See if this this holds up
or helps you in any way in figuring out what's
in that mountain in the urals. Yeah, So there was
a guy named Joseph mcmonagle, and he was he worked
as a he was a recruit for for grill Flame,
(19:03):
and he worked into the nineties. And he has some
pretty good stories. And there's a lot of good stories
in here. And is this stuff true? Is the thing?
Like it was frustrating you think this stuff is all
made up? I here's the thing. For every one of
his stories, I went and tried to cross for infant
with with declassified CIA documents. I couldn't find anything. Like
(19:26):
all of the guys stories are anecdotal. Here's the problem.
They get reported not necessarily as fact, but they get
reported in like, you know, an actual profile of the
guy in the Washington Post Newsweight or something on this podcast,
and then all of a sudden, right, and then all
of a sudden, when somebody cross references some weird thing
they read in some fringe e book, it pops up
(19:48):
in a Washington Post article too. That's true, that's true.
It's just bad reporting. That is that is continuing this
to go on. But as far as I know, I
could not find any corroboration from any declassified documents for
any of his stories. So one of his examples in
nineteen seventy nine. He said that he was he could
(20:08):
see where sky Lab, the very famous satellite in the
nineteen seventies and eighties, was going to crash eleven months before.
So this is also precognition, which is another part of PSI.
And in one UH and supposedly that was correct. In in
in nineteen eighty one, he also got another tip, a
(20:28):
mental hot tip that there was a hostage Brigadier General
James Dozier that was being held in UH. I don't
know if it's Padua or Padua, Italy Padua Padua either one.
I think it is Padua. And supposedly the tip arrived
in Italy and the day that he was released in
that very town. UH. What else? What about the the
(20:51):
KGB agent, This one's pretty great. So there's a KGB
agent in South Africa that the CIA had been watching
in the in I guess thineteen eighty and they couldn't
figure out how he was contacting his KGB handlers back
in in Mother Russia. And um, I guess McGonagall or mcmonagle.
Um it was focused on a calculator. He saw that
(21:15):
this guy really was obsessed with his calculator. And it
turns out when the CIA looked at his calculatory, figured
out it was a short wave radio. And also just
check the guy's calculator. Sure, like checking all the electronics
that he has. He has a cigarette lighter and a calculator.
We looked at the cigarette lighter, found nothing. We just
gave up after that. Yeah, we looked at the calculator
(21:35):
and held it upside down and just said, bubblis who.
It was one of those remember the professor ones thinking
the mortar cap and all that. You know, There was
one that had a drawing of like an old wise
man with a graduation cap on. It was a pretty famous,
like seventies calculator for kids. Oh, you mean the calculator itself. Yeah, no,
(22:00):
I think you know what you're talking about. I thought
you meant some weird trick where you type in numbers
and turn it upside down and it says, oh and
it looks like a guy. Oh I see. I was like,
that's pretty impressive, right, You're like, I can just type boobs.
So in eight five, the d i a uh took
control of this program. I guess took it back from
the army. It seems like nobody wanted it, like every
(22:22):
few years they would just be like, who wants to
take this over now? But the thing is, it kept
getting funding and from what I read, either target Edwin
May who comes in later um as the director of
this program. Like they said it was a year to
year funding, but it kept getting funding every year for
twenty years. I would think I would think too that
(22:42):
like once it went from one agency to another, maybe
it would survive once. But it survived all these transitions. Yeah,
so they take it back in five and started funding
s r I again international. They're back on the scene.
And then another contract after a private contractor came on
called Science Applications International Corporation, also in California. And this
(23:07):
is where they name it Stargate in nine. And it
had to be after the movie, right, I don't think so, man.
I think the movie came out a few years after that. Really,
I'm gonna look, that's easy enough to check. The whole
time I was wondering about that. And that was the
name from nine till it's end in nineteen and uh, oh,
(23:30):
I'm sorry, not end in is when the CIA took
it back over, right, um. And then the CIA finally said,
you know why we're just we're not sure about this anymore. Um,
we're just gonna we're just gonna defund this thing and
let it go away. Um again. This was and five
(23:53):
years later they declassified as far as we know, everything
that had anything to do with it. I think some
of the people like mcmonagle who were involved are saying,
now there's still plenty of classified stuff you guys don't
know about that really proves everything, right, They're just not
showing you the good stuff. Yeah, but I read this, Um,
I read a I guess the transcript of a Skeptoid
(24:15):
our buddy Brian Dunning's UM podcasts who we went. Um
we had a flame war with over whether or not
it could rain frogs? Um, yeah we did. He well,
he tried to start one. I just ignored him. But um,
this is when we had the can it rain Frog's episode?
But that was years ago, wasn't it. I have a long,
(24:36):
long memory. I can hold a grudge. But anyway, in Skeptoid,
he was basically saying, like the very fact that like
all these people are allowed who were verifiably in this
program run by the CIA for twenty years, The fact
that they're allowed to walk around and talk about this
and haven't been like, haven't disappeared. It just lends further
credence to the idea that there was nothing that came
(24:58):
of this because they it all just be vanished. Kind of.
I think the CIA is not above that kind of thing. Well,
at any rate, the CIA said, uh, it's not worth
this money that we're spending, so let's just get a
very you know, the typical thing. Let's get a third
party report that will solve it all. In the American
(25:19):
Institutes for Research published an evaluation of remote viewing colon
Research and Applications and said, you know what, this is
pretty compelling stuff, but we can't use it for intelligence
because you note the word intelligence zing and they shut
(25:39):
it down, shut it down in they did twenty years,
twenty million dollars looking for everything from new Soviet submarine
designs to lost GUD missiles to people being held by
foreign kidnappers. Um, all of it just down the down
the toilet. That's right. And in the old days this
would be the end of the episode. But in today's stuff,
(26:01):
you should know it's our first message break that might
(26:30):
be a record chuck a thirty minute first act. Oh yeah, yeah,
that's right, I was slicking. We started a little late
after we started recording. That's that's I don't think that's
the record alright. So should we keep talking about Project
Stargate just because it's fun? Yeah, let's so. Um yeah.
And I don't mean like I'm not trying to pooh
(26:51):
pooh like people's imagination. I've got the same thing. I
love the same stuff. It's just mine eyes have been
opened and they can never be closed again. Need to
say mine eyes? Yes and again? Oh goodness, So with
with Stargate right. Um. The whole basis of this was
that it was allowed to continue on for twenty years
(27:14):
because the people involved were very much impressed with what
they saw, and um, what they saw kind of went
a little bit like this, Like the earliest test I think,
the ones that Russell targ was doing. We're basically like, um, uh,
tell me about some Soviet submarine floating around somewhere in
(27:36):
the world. Let's see what you can do, just really free, loosey,
goosey hippie stuff. Right. And then a guy named um
Dr Edwin May came along and he took over and
I think but he'd been working on the project starting
at the Stanford Research Institute, um beginning and back in
(27:56):
nine and Um. So he was on this project, I
believe for the full twenty years, in one capacity or another.
And when he took over, they weren't even paying him
for the last ten No, he was just hanging around
living off a Celtines in Great Cool with his red stapler.
But he yeah, kinda, but he Um. He instituted way
(28:19):
stricter protocols for conducting these remote viewing experiments and tests too.
Not just you know, remote viewing experiments were connected. He
wanted to kind of show that these things could work too,
so he came up with something called ranked order judging,
which was part of a larger type of test called
forced choice. Yeah. And I'm gonna get you to explain
(28:41):
that in a second, because I didn't fully get the redo.
But May is a pretty interesting guy. He was a doctor,
He was a PhD in nuclear physics. Um. And while
it's easy to sort of cast someone like this as
just sort of a loopy hippie type, he really intelligent guy. Um,
(29:02):
but he was also a loopy hippie type. He got
his post stock in San Francisco in the nineteen sixties,
So you know what that means. Uh, And he literally
used the words. He became a professional hippie, did a
lot of drugs, did a lot of psychedelics, and got
into parapsychology and did what you do if that is
your path. You go to India at some point just
hoping to sort of soak up some cool esoteric knowledge,
(29:25):
bump into rupert. Yeah, perhaps. And he came back and
didn't really get a lot out of in m Sure
he had a great time and everything, but it didn't
come back there. Yeah, I didn't come back with anything
he could use. Came back in seventy five and then
that's where he got a job as a research assistant
at s r I International, working with telekinesis, and he
(29:46):
was like, this is it for me, baby, this is
this is the job. You pay me for this. And
he just kind of took off from there and and
I guess took over as director in right. Yeah, so
he was the one that's are did this different sort
of testing method called forced uh not first choice, but
forced choice. Right. It just wasn't quite it wasn't anywhere
(30:09):
near is like free and easy as the free response ones.
It was basically it kind of went like this. Okay,
so let's say let's say that, um, you're holding one
of these tests. Ideally you have three people involved. You
have the remote viewer, you have the sender who's actually
thinking of the thing that the remote viewer is supposed
(30:30):
to be tapping into and gaining information from, and then
you have a judge. Okay, yeah, And also ideally the
sender and the remote viewer should not be in contact
with one another before or during the experiment. It's another
kind of important one too. And these are things that
like Edwin May was instituting that really kind of scientific fied. Um,
(30:55):
the whole thing definitely gave it a more legitimate glean
for sure. But um, so what happens is the the
sender chooses a photo from a hundred photos in a
national geographic photo set. That's usually what they use. And
I also ideally we could point out that, um, they
would use way more than a hundred photos and not
(31:16):
those same photos over and over. That's a big one too,
as we'll see for sure, that's a big problem if
you use the same photo set and the same remote viewers. Right,
So the person who is the sender would sit there
and they would pick a photo and then they would
think about that photo, and the remote viewer would be
ideally somewhere else thinking about that what the sender was
(31:39):
thinking of, and then they would write down their impressions,
they would draw their impressions, and then they would compile
this little document basically of what they saw during the
remote viewing session. Okay, that's the first step. The second
step is that you take four other maybe five other
pick is from that same National Geographic Photo set, and
(32:02):
you could even physically put them as printed photos into
an envelope, and then you give that to the judge,
who has nothing to do with any of this. To
this point. They've just now been given an envelope of photos,
and then they've also been given the remote viewers um
document that they whipped up from the remote viewing session.
(32:23):
And so the judge is supposed to take the remote
viewers impressions and and basically match them to one of
the photos, and so they rank the photos. If you
have six photos, there's one photo that's your number one
photo that you're saying, like, this is what the remote
viewer was seeing. This one is the second likeliest, the
third likeliest, fourth, fifth, and sixth likeliest, So you rank
(32:44):
the photos. If the remote viewer got it right, then
the photo of the judge chose as chose as the
number one photo should be the photo that the sender
was thinking of when the remote viewer got their impressions. Okay, sure,
it's actually, in a weird way, very scientific because you
can insert statistical analysis into this whole thing. And they did,
(33:07):
and they found that over time, some remote viewers did
do much better than chance, just random chance, where out
of every hundred tries, any photos should be chosen out
of a set of five, um, you know, twice. Yeah,
it was. I think the direct quote was from the
report was far beyond what is expected by chance. Yes,
(33:28):
that supposedly came from a true believer statistician who had
done an analysis of this. But yes, there were there
were this. There was this idea that some of these
people were capable of of drawing impressions of what somebody
else in a different room was thinking based on a
photo they were looking at. And then there are Now
we can talk about all the explanations of how that
(33:49):
probably wasn't any sort of clairvoyance. Yeah, and what bugs me,
just before we even get to that is in the
report it said it was far beyond what is expected
by chance, Like, tell me what percentage chances and what
percentage they got, not your opinion on what is far
beyond and what isn't right? Right? So that bugs me
(34:10):
right off the bat. That's a big one right there.
There's also subjectivity running through this big time, because the
judge is doing a subjective analysis to right. Yeah, and
you know if they're picking another Like I mentioned, another
one of the problems is they use the same set
of one dred nat Geo images. So I imagine after
a couple of times they know it's going to be
(34:33):
something about nature at the very least. And if they say,
let's say, lion attacking elk, they're like, no, but it's
a tiger attacking an antelope. You win, you know, yep.
And then if that is the the only photo with
anything like a lion in an elk or whatever tiger
(34:56):
um in the photos set the rest is like an
oil derrick and a lake and some other stuff, then
of course that's the one that's gonna win. With With that,
the judge is gonna choose and they're going to have
a hit. So there's a lot of like real problems
with us. Even though they tried to add like science
to the whole thing. They they you just can't do
it just right exactly. And then um, so so there
(35:21):
that was just the experiments that they conducted to kind
of show and demonstrate that this worked a lot of
the stuff that they used for intelligence that was much
more along the lines of them the free association one.
It's not called free association what is it called? Oh,
the free response experiments where they're just like, tell us
about you know, the Soviets, any new submarine designs the
(35:46):
Soviets are working on or something. So can we can
we tell some of these uh stories that were supposedly successes. Yes,
all right. The West Virginia site is the first one.
Uh DR targ relayed this story, and these were from
the early days in the early seventies, in which a
remote viewer in California was given the longitude and latitude
(36:08):
coordinates of somewhere in West Virginia said what do you see?
And the remote viewer said, um, described like what was
going on with a terrain above the ground and about
a secret underground government site, and supposedly provided names of
personnel who worked there. Uh code words used for the
(36:28):
top secret projects UM. And apparently the description was really
really accurate, so accurate that the CIA said, Um, I
don't know if it was the CIA, I assume it was,
but they said that we've got a leak and we
need to find out what's going on and investigate this. Right,
that's the kind of thing I think, like you said,
that was an early seventies doctor targ one, Yeah, something
(36:51):
like that. That prompts an investigation into a leak. That's
that will get you more funding for a while. That
like definitely will cement your scare the end of giving funding, Yeah,
for sure, especially Yeah, if people are jumpy about what that.
The Soviets might be onto this kind of thing too
when we got to get on it. Sure. And apparently
that same remote viewers saw or remotely saw um an
(37:13):
underground site that was similar in Russia, and the Ural
Mountains described that that was supposedly verified as quote substantially
correct by the CIA. Yep. So that was one of
the big ones that people kind of tout as evidence
that Project Stargate worked. Right. There's also one called the
Microwave Generator Report. UM. This one was with Dr May
(37:35):
Dr Edwin May and um, the remote viewer was, as
is typical, just given longitude and latitude, maybe given like
a little more evidence. I think they were told that
it was a technical site in the US, and the
remote viewers started describing a microwave generator on site. And
the most astounding thing about it is that the remote
(37:59):
viewers said that this microwave had a beam of divergence
angle of thirty degrees, which is not something that you
should be able to glean from somebody telling you the
latitude and longitude coordinates of a technical site. So that
is pretty impressive. And then later on Dr May took
(38:20):
the whole description um, which is we'll see is is
rare in these cases and and determine that it was
that the specs of the generator itself were accurate, and
that the site as a whole were se accurate, okay,
seventy percent reliable. No idea how you would conclude that
(38:41):
or quantify that kind of thing. But again, this is
the kind of thing like you're starting to build like
a lore around this department, this agency that people who
are already kind of into the existence of this kind
of thing can come and participate in and talk about
with their friends and wow, people at cocktail parties with
(39:02):
the Russian crane. This one came from doctor targ remote
viewer was given again coordinates of a site near a
city in the former Soviet Union, and there was a
um in the in like what do you see? What
the drawing detailed was a large industrial crane called a
gantry clane crane. And they said, you know what, there's
(39:24):
no way that this person could have known how to
draw this gantry crane unless they saw it through remote
viewing or someone told them this. No other explanation, yeah, um,
And that was what the analyst who has handed this
was like, wow, that's really impressive. So the Russian crane
stands on its own too. And then there's also one
(39:45):
called the Lowell Fugitive. There's a woman named Angela Ford
who was a longtime participant in Project stargate Um and
she used kind of medium ship where she had three
different we're at guides who would cause her to carry
out automatic writing. That's how she did her remote viewing right.
(40:07):
And she and this is you know, she would go
down to Fort Meat at the barracks and do this
right under army supervision, which is so bizarre, but that's
what would happen, right. So Angela Ford was given the
name of a guy named Charles Jordan's who was an
interesting cat in and of himself. He was he called
himself the ruler of the Florida Keys. He was at
(40:30):
he was He's the prince of the flooria um. He
was the He was a crooked customs agent who had
turned into a drug smuggler down there. And also it
was very easily bribed so that other drugs smugglers could
smuggle their drugs. And he got caught and went on
the run, and so they were looking for him. So
(40:50):
they asked Angela Ford if she could find him for
him that's right, And she said, I'm seeing or my
friends or my ghost friends are telling me and I'm
automatically writing this city Lowell, Wyoming. And it turned out
that he was apprehended a hundred miles west of Lavelle,
(41:10):
Wyoming with a v but a hundred miles west of
a place that she still didn't name. Some people say, though,
that Charles Jordan's admitted to being in the town on
the day Angela Ford did her remote viewing sension proven right,
(41:30):
So you've got all this stuff, all of these anecdotes
that are just coming together into like get this, check
this out, get a load of this. Were all these
things that you can point to and write books on
and say that like this is for real and that
the Washington Post can report on. And that's what's kept
this legend, this stuff about Project Stargaping for real going
(41:54):
all these years. And if you dig it to it,
it's really really hard to pull up heart because the
people who were there will tell you in an interview like, oh,
this person said this. But then if you interview somebody
else to say, well, now they didn't say that. She
didn't say she didn't say Lowell, she said northern Wyoming.
Somebody else would say no, she just said, you know,
(42:15):
somewhere in the west or something like that. So as
the story of Charles Jordan being captured in Yellowstone Um
comes out later, the story of Angela Ford remotely viewing
him in Wyoming gets piled on and added to over
the years until you have her just missing the letter
of the word or the word by one letter and
(42:38):
then seeing him in that town on the day that
it happened. And that's how like this stuff goes it's
just anecdotal stuff that really did happen, Like she really
did have this remote viewing session. But the accuracy of
it is what's always been in doubt. The problem is, Chuck,
is there are examples of people doing some really spectacularly
(43:01):
amazingly accurate hits over the years that really kind of
lend credence to it in in some way, so much
so that that American Research instau American Institute of Research
paper still said, look, there are some weird, unexplainable stuff
in here. Does it prove that remote viewing is real
(43:22):
and that it exists. No, there's a lot of things
that could explain these spectacular accurate hits, but overall, no,
it's not going to It doesn't show that this is
this is real because these are the hits. There was
so much garbage produced that by the time old around
(43:43):
the CIA was like, this is even if remote viewing
does exist, it's so useless as an intelligence tool that
we're not going to fund it anymore. Should we take
another break? Yeah, all right, let's take a break it.
We'll be right back after this. Alright. So here's the deal,
(44:27):
and this is sort of the big question which you
kind of answered before the break, is it no, that's
sor right, it's a It was a nice tease. Is
it a useful spy tool because we can have fun
all day funding something and doing these fun experiments and
getting them sort of right or not. But the whole
purpose of all of this was can we actually use
(44:48):
this stuff as actionable evidence or intelligence? And you can't. Really. Um,
Like we said, they are anecdotal um. They might be
impressed by a certain part of a thing, and you
mentioned that it is rare that they ever included like
the full drawing or the full discourse on whatever they
supposedly saw it didn't see. They would sort of pick
(45:10):
out something that was right and say, look they got
this one part right. That's amazing. But that's sort of
where it ended. Um, the with the with the gantry crane.
You know, they got that gantry crane right, but there
was there was so much stuff that was wrong that
they said, we we can't use this. And that's sort
of the point of all this is, we can't use
(45:32):
this stuff as intelligence because it's just partial. Uh. People
that defended it would say, and Jordan mcmonagle is one
of them, said, this isn't supposed to be the end
all be all. This is supposed to work alongside real
intelligence and just see if it could help support some
of this stuff or give them a hint in the
(45:53):
right direction to start using real intelligence. And it was
never supposed to be a stand alone that you go
in like raid a Russian village because some remote viewers
said there was a nuclear weapon there or something. Yeah. Yeah,
And I think the CIA always viewed as that too,
and that like it was benign. It was very cheap
and inexpensive. It can be done easily, um. But the
(46:16):
problem is is like if you have somebody who's producing
tons and tons of garbage intelligence, the analysts still has
to sift through that, and in some of that garbage intelligence,
there may be something that leads them down the wrong path,
and while they're doing that, they miss some other intelligence
that that actually is useful and good. And so it's
(46:38):
kind of like a metaphor for what pseudoscience in general
does the society, Like there's garbage on there that kind
of distracts you from the stuff that you could be
doing that would actually be beneficial. That's what it did
to intelligence analysts too, and that's why they ultimately abandoned
the whole program. Right, But for twenty years they thought,
you know, there were three big reasons why it was attractive,
(46:59):
and they all kind of boy down to why not.
Which it's it's a passive operation, so it's it doesn't
require a lot of resources. It's you know, I don't
know how many people they had remote viewing it their max,
but I doubt if it was that many. Um, it
didn't cost a lot. Six million bucks a year isn't
that much money? And a defense budget. And then it's
what's known as no known defense. So even if it's working,
(47:22):
let's say, then the enemy can't really stop this, Um,
I guess except for rooting these people out and tracking
them down and killing them. Sure, But aside from that,
those are the three reasons. For twenty years, they threw
six million bucks a year at it, and I'm sure
that kind of waivered in and out. But you know,
they spent ollion dollars. No, I think they spent twenty
(47:44):
million dollars over twenty years. Oh is that all? Yeah? Man?
That was it for the whole the whole time. Spent
six million a year. No, I think it might have
been up to like six million dollars at the end
of it, but over over the course of it, and
I don't think this is really necessarily adjusted for inflation.
But starting in seventy five and ending in nine, twenty
million dollars, you know, on paper, is what got spent.
(48:08):
So those first years it was like, here's a hundred
thousand dollars in a bucket of weed, kind of I
think so in some grape cool ais and saltines. Alright, well,
twenty million bucks. But um, yeah, that's not a lot
of money for you know, if you're talking overall defense budgets. No,
it's not. And so it's it's so cheap that we're
even vaguely promising or vaguely helpful. The c i A
(48:29):
would have been fools not to keep funding this, or
the Defense Department would have been fools not to keep
funding it. Somebody and I could have kept funding it
if we really put our minds to it. But it
it not only wasn't useful, it it did not It
was actually harmful as far as an intelligence tool is concerned.
(48:51):
That was I think what I gather from them finally
canceling it. Yeah, and this, you know, this last bit
about the representative from North Carolina, Charlie Rose, not the
not the the TV guy who's turned out to be
quite a jerk, but um, he kind of summed it up.
And this is what I think the deal is is
if and this is what started it to begin with.
(49:13):
If you think the Soviets are doing this, you can't
just sit back, or at least that's the rationale. You
can't just sit back and say, well it's it's probably
so silly and not even real, but um, we're certainly
not going to let them be the only ones trying this. Yeah, yeah,
like if the Ruskies have it, we sure as heck
better be on it ourselves. Luckily, Um well I was
(49:37):
gonna say luckily that mentality favor with the Cold War.
But it's back, everybody. Hey, the eighties are back. Yeah
they are big time people wearing Fannie packs. And apparently
there's um, what's that one thing where like you touched
the shirt and like your handprint would be a color.
Oh sure, like the the heat Heat shirts or whatever.
(49:57):
I can't remember what they're called, but anyways, apparently a yeah,
eighties are back. So that's it. That's Project Stargate. There's
a lot to read about it. If you're fascinated by it,
whether you're fascinated by it it's just completely crackpot thing,
or you're like, Nope, I don't believe you, Josh and Chuck.
I think you're covering up for the government, in the Illuminati, whatever.
(50:18):
Go read more about it, and in particular, I want
to I want to direct you to Mars Exploration May
twenty second. It's a declassified transcript from a remote viewing
session of Mars where they asked the I think Joseph
mcmonagle to wander around Mars um At in the year
(50:41):
one million b C. And it's fascinating stuff. But it
also tells you everything you need to know about Project
Star Gake. Uh if you want to know what I
already said that kind of thing, didn't I, Chuck. I
guess it's time now for listener mail. I'm gonna call
this Heroin Podcast and this is from anonymous YO. Thanks
(51:03):
for your Heroin podcast. You spoke fairly about something that
is usually wrought with bias. I grew up in the
Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. It's one of the largest drug
markets in the world, most of which is heroin. We
are ground zero now for the opioid epidemic. Growing up
around so much heroin messes with you. My childhood best
friends UH turned to sex work to pay for it
(51:25):
while we played video games upstairs. People were odean in
middle school the class clowns. Dad was one of the
biggest runners in the city, so when he was arrested,
the kid was never the same. It's very difficult to
explain what being around groups of people on heroin is like.
The link below is an excellent New York Times article
about the Kensington Avenue area. Luckily for me, I suppose
(51:46):
I got out relatively unscathed. A lot of people see
people who are addicted as animals and criminals. I struggle
with where I stand. I know, as a group it's
a public health issue, but it is also hard when
looking at the individual's actions. Kensington was a middle class
haven from the early to mid nineteenth century until the
crack epidemic of the eighties. According to my parents, a
(52:07):
Sunday event was walking to the shops on Kensington Avenue.
Did not happen after that and that Here's the article.
It is called Trapped by the Walmart of Heroin by
Jennifer Percy from New York Times October and that is
from anonymous man alive. Anonymous, I'm glad you made it
out alive because that is very scary stuff. What a man,
(52:32):
It's crazy. It makes you realize what what what a
lottery birth is? You know, not just in like your
socioeconomic class or your race or what country you're born into,
but like where, what neighborhood you're born into too. I've
never heard of it. Yeah, I hadn't either. Read that article.
That looks good. Yeah, well, thanks a lot. And uh,
we appreciate you getting in touch with us, and if
(52:52):
you want to get in touch with us, please do.
You can send us an email to Stuff podcast at
iHeart Radio. Comm Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts. For
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