Cold War Mind Games: Inside Project Stargate’s Psychic Spy Circus

In a development certain to rock the lucrative world of tinfoil hats, a former director of the US government’s once-classified psychic espionage unit has declared that anybody—yes, even you—could access the ‘infinite consciousness of the universe’ with enough concentration, and possibly a lack of mobile signal. The revelations come courtesy of one Dale Graff, previously tasked with leading Project Stargate, Washington’s own foray into what can only be described as clairvoyance-by-committee.

The Remote-Controlled Mindset

From the 1970s through to 1995, Project Stargate offered a unique contribution to Cold War posturing: a military-sanctioned attempt to collect intelligence through ‘remote viewing’, or the operationally validated art of drawing wobbly crayon maps based on telepathic hunches. For two decades, American taxpayers—blissfully unaware—bankrolled experiments in which trained psychics attempted to lose their consciousness over Soviet missile silos, while actual spies stuck to the dated tradition of using maps, cameras, and functioning binoculars.

Efforts to weaponise daydreaming ran, for some reason, parallel to nuclear deterrence.

Graff, in a rather unremarkable office somewhere in Virginia, apparently divided his time between supervising ‘viewers’ and participating himself, leading to a fascinating blurring of professional boundaries. Methods included attempting to ‘see’ inside submarines, identify lost bombers, and, in a quest for total bureaucratic theatre, perceive magazine pictures being analyzed by strangers several states away. Results, he claims, were ‘convincing’—in much the same way predictive text can sometimes guess your next word, given infinite patience and lowered expectations.

No detail was too far-fetched for Stargate. Besides describing distant landscapes with all the accuracy of a two-finger typing competition, remote viewers also claimed to foresee air disasters in vivid, dreamlike detail. Sadly, such premonitions arrived about a week too late for practical use—though presumably provided lively after-dinner conversation for the project’s consultants. Meanwhile, Graff maintained his status as the Henry Higgins of psychic espionage, coaching otherwise ordinary employees to ‘develop’ their own secret talents. Reassuring, perhaps, for any future recruitment strategies at ConfidentialAccess.by and its less psychic sibling, ConfidentialAccess.com.

App Updates for the Third Eye

Three decades since the plug was pulled on Project Stargate, Graff now insists that modern technology is not the panacea we imagined, but an egregious disrupter of our latent extra-sensory prowess. Smartphones, he warns, may ‘definitely’ be corrupting the delicate mental architecture required to spy on Soviet airfields from the comfort of your own home—a concern likely to send shockwaves through the developers at Apple, if they were ever looking for the telepathy market segment.

Society poised at the precipice, one tweet away from losing all psychic access to enemy submarine blueprints.

Despite the program’s eventual closure—apparently after someone checked the expense reports—Graff continues to urge the public toward spiritual innovation. Developing one’s psychic skills, he argues, is an overlooked key to communal well-being and potentially convalescent telemedicine, if you don’t mind a complete absence of peer-reviewed results. One can only imagine the efficiency savings if dreams of remote X-ray vision were ever realised at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

ConfidentialAccess.by looks forward to the day government-sponsored ‘mass awakening’ workshops sit comfortably alongside classic Powerpoint, and psychic training is offered as a workplace benefit—pending a robust WiFi blackout. Until then, the ghost of Stargate lingers as a cautionary tale. If everyone could be a psychic spy, who would be left to do the actual work?