Hi, this is Melanne Verveer and this is Kim Mazzarelli and we're co-hosts of Senecas Conversations on Power and Purpose, brought to you by the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio. We're launching a brand new season of this podcast, which brings you fascinating conversations with leaders like two time gold medalist, author and activist Abby Wambach and actor, producer and entrepreneur Justin Baldoni, among many others. Listen to Senecas conversations on power and purpose on the radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Keegan Michael Key. Welcome to Drafted. This podcast series follows eight players as they enter the 2020 NFL draft.

We go behind the scenes before, during and after one of the biggest days of their lives and we relive every detail from the players perspective. Please join me on the first step in their journey to greatness. Welcome to Drafted Lisetta, drafted on the I Heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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. Colen an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things.

That's right. And it's coming along so great. We're super excited, you guys. The illustrations are amazing. And there's the look at 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. 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 preorder the book right now, everywhere you get books and you will eventually get a special gift for preordering, 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 NPR Radio's HowStuffWorks. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Doublecheck, Brian over there. Gerri's here floating around the office somewhere, but she's here. Everybody I saw saw. Yes, Jerry is here in the flesh. She does exist. She's real. She also is clothed, not just flesh. That's right.

And because the three of us are hanging out, even on the Internet, it's it's stuff you should know.

Yeah. It's good to see her. Her hair's long. She's like a hippie now.

I mean, long for Jerry is not very long, but. Right. It's swoopy year than usual and, uh, looks quite nice. That's great.

Man shows she cares. She's staying home. Stay home. Save lives, Jerry.

Yeah, that's right.

You know what else may have saved lives? Chuck Project Stargate. Project Stargate. Do you know why I hedged and said that it may have saved lives?

Sure.

Why? Well, I mean, you tell your version, but I mean, because we don't even know if it's real or not.

Yeah, I was going to say that. I said it may have saved lives because it totally didn't save many lives as far as you know. Yeah.

It's a bunch of made up gobbledygook and a CIA boondoggle and U.S. military boondoggle from the 70s to the 90s.

But some funny anecdotal stories, though. It is. It is like it's one of the more interesting chapters in CIA history. 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. I know the men who stare at goats by our pal John Rensin really kind of devolves into horror toward the end of it when he gets an MK Ultra.

But this is separate from MK Ultra. It came from the same mindset for sure. This idea that there are powers to the mind that could conceivably be unlocked to do Ilar good or neutral stuff, who knows? But this one, it was fairly benign as far as CIA projects go, don't you think? Yeah.

And believe it or not, I never saw that movie. It was OK. 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. Right.

Yeah, but some funny spots in it, too, for sure. Yeah. I don't know why that one got past me.

I think I read tepid reviews and I just kind of 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. OK, and I haven't read the book. Sorry, John, if you even listen to us anymore. But like, I'm quite sure, from what I understand, the book is is vastly superior to the movie.

Which when does that ever happen? Sure.

If John Brunson's hands were involved in his brain, then I'm sure it was better. Yeah. 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 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. It was weird. No, I know.

I heard that episode is his movie was a..

Right. No, not true. What was it? Do you remember? It was let the right one in. Oh, man. That's a great movie. Yeah, sure is.

And you know, if you ever go to a movie theater in New York and you see some guy shoes with no shoes, then go tap him on the shoulder and ask for his autograph.

Yeah. OK, so we're talking Project Stargate, which was the general codename for this secret project that was declassified around 2000, I think, which is it's very telling that it was declassified in 2000 because the project was finally cancelled in 1995.

Normally when the CIA conducts a project, especially if that project yields valuable stuff, yeah, they don't declassify it in just five years. It takes decades before that stuff starts to trickle out. But with Project Stargate, they said, here you go, here's everything.

We throw everyone a bone. This is fun stuff. Yeah, it's great reading.

But this project ran from officially, I believe, 1975 to 1995. And I had a couple of different names and it got passed along from different different agencies. Yeah, but the whole thing started even back before the CIA got involved. And from what I saw, there was a woman, Soviet woman named Ngunnawal, Coolac Nia, who was on TV in the Soviet Union. And she was. Demonstrating her telekinesis and apparently some defense intelligence analyst 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 North Pole.

Yeah, I think what's so funny about the early history of this is that 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, the woman on TV did not necessarily mean the Soviets had some sort of program, but it was that whole a 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.

And what 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. It's sort of like a and an addition of Carnac 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 going to test you to see. 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 think it into reality. And that was sort of the basis of the program, was it was a trying to use sci fi, which we've talked about before to our 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, 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 astrally 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 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 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'd normally get from, like your ears or your eyes or your tongue or something like that. But you're getting it just into your mind, your tongue, if. Sure. Hey, go look that thing. Tell me what you think to me.

See if you can figure out the secret code word. Get into that base by looking the keypad.

But the I mean, you know, you're not you're getting it from not just your sensory perception. It's an extra sensory perception. Right? Is that what that means? That's what that means. Right. So that's the whole Jamm 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 to see if it works. And if it does work, let's use it to gather intelligence without having to go anywhere, 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 Kool-Aid.

Sure. Let him relax and figure it out.

Yeah. So in seventy two is when the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, first got wind of the Soviets potentially doing this for real.

And the CIA said, all right, you know, we're going to start funding these private research firms to see if this is possible.

And 73, this started happening at the Ezri 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 there named Dr. Russell Targ, who was one of the researchers, and he wrote a book called Mein Race, which great title for something like this. Sure.

And he had some, like early examples of sessions that he thought sounded promising at least.

Right. I was going to say I'm not sure how he got into it, though, but he I don't know if he was already into it. And then the DIA got into it or started funding him or something like that. But from yeah, from what I can tell you is 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 of the New Age movement. This guy was like on the leading edge of that whole thing.

So in 1976, there was this experiment that he championed is like, hey, look, this could work. Everyone. There was a remote viewer, someone in the offices in California. They're Ezri. And Dr. Targ was in New York City and no one knew anything about where he was supposedly. I think we're going to say supposedly a lot in this bobcat's. Oh, yeah.

And they said, all right, where am I? And he said, well, let me see to two to do in my brain, I'm seeing something I'm seeing as the depression. Yes. It's almost like a dry fountain. Yes. There's a cement post in the middle and there are pigeons flying around.

Oh, my God. Dr. Targ said, oh, 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 successful remote viewing session, Dr. Targ was able to get funding from the CIA at first. And that's really kind of kicked off pretty amazing. This whole study, that one, I think came through in 76, but it certainly kept his funding going. But he had he had anecdotal data from remote viewing sessions previous to 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 eye, you know, without looking anything right now looking at all, certainly no pigeons are being liked here that look like we 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 1976, 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 Uri Geller. He's a great mentalist, if you haven't. We talked about him plenty of times. I feel like.

Yeah, but I really want to do just enough just to show on him. He's pretty great.

Did you know that he ended up getting very rich by dousing for oil companies? Oh, really?

Can you believe that? I can. I can't, because I think oil companies will pay anybody anything if they think it will lead to oil. You know where the oil is. You got some oil, man.

Give me some oil. So Carter said he had a private meeting with them and he kind of asked about what was going on. And Geller said, you know, these Russians, they school or they screen school kids and see if anyone has particular talents like paranormal power talents, and they send them to special 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 coop 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 Uri Geller gave to Jimmy Carter was that Uri Geller had seen Escape to Witch Mountain the year before.

I mean, that's the problem with all of this, is like B.S. begets more B.S.. So Uri Geller had a meeting with Carter, started talking out of his AI. And next thing you know, the United States is funding a study to find out whether it's true. It's like, come on. Yeah, I like I have to I'm going to just fess up here. I was very bugged the entire time I was researching.

This particular one is 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 sucked the fun out of it for me? I'll just go ahead and say it now.

I was going to save it for the end, but I read something somewhere that really kind of drove it 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 it paves the way for the kind of thinking that just dout science. Yeah. And that that doubt's expertise. And that is like, no, no. Don't you know, like people can bend spoons you don't need to like and you know, you don't you don't have to believe in science.

This stuff happens. This is really what's the right. Exactly. And then all of a sudden you have people believing anything that they hear. Yeah, that's true. That's the problem with it. And it really bugged me, especially on today of all days, you know. Yeah, of course.

OK, so um, around nineteen seventy eight and we don't know all this stuff for sure because a lot of the stuff is still unknown if it's still top secret. But um, the timelines aren't like, you know, we don't know specific dates, but around seventy eight the CIA 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 it Project Grill Flame yet one word.

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 outside. The project is about, you know, unless you plowshare. OK, you're right. That 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 showed talent as remote viewers in barracks. And they would do the Carnac routine. They would hand them an envelope and said, what's inside? And that was kind of the extent of their testing at first. Yeah, they they would. Well, they were allowed to open the envelope. I'm sure they would just want to, as a joke, put it to their forehead.

Right. But they would give them they would give them a like an envelope with maybe a somebodies picture, maybe a note card 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're supposed to be viewing remotely a like a site or some sort of secret base or some sort of weapon or satellite dish or radar dish or something like that.

And if it was a person, you know, who knows, maybe they were a lost person in some of these people, some of these remote viewing subjects would would say, like, I need a little more info or something like that. And then it would kind of get them going. And then they would write down what their impressions were. They would maybe dictate it, they would draw it, maybe they would do all three. And then after 20 minutes, 30 minutes, however long they dedicated to it, they would stop and all of their info would be taken away and then analyzed, 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, whatever you want.

So I'll get a package slip to them between 1975 and 1995 that somebody had literally 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 Four Grill Flame, and he worked into the 90s and he had some pretty good stories.

And there's a lot of good stories in here. And it's this stuff. True is the thing, you know, 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-reference with with declassified CIA documents. I couldn't find anything like all of the guy's 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, Newsweek or somewhere 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 fringy book, it pops up in a Washington Post article to.

Right. That's true. Yeah, it'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 1979, he said that he would he could see where Skylab, that very famous satellite in the 1970s and 80s, was going to crash 11 months before. So this is also precognition. Right, which is another part of SY. And in 1981, and supposedly that was correct in 1981, he also got another tip, a mental hot tip, that there was a hostage, Brigadier General James Dozier, that was being held.

And I don't know if it's Padua or Padua, Italy. It's Padua, Padua, either one.

I think it is Pedro.

And supposedly the tip arrived in Italy and the day that he was released in that very town. Yeah. What else what about the KGB agent?

This one's pretty great. So there is a KGB agent in South Africa that the CIA had been watching in the in, I guess, 1980, and they couldn't figure out how he was contacting his KGB handlers back in modern Russia. And I guess McGonagle or McMonagle, it was focused on a calculator. He saw that this guy really was obsessed with his calculator. And it turns out when the CIA looked at his calculator, they figured out it was a shortwave radio.

Yeah. And also just check the guy's calculator. Sure. Like, check out 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 and held it upside down.

It just said bootless here. It was one of those. Remember the professor ones with the mortar cap and all that.

Now what he you think? Oh, you don't. There was one that had a drawing of like an old wise man with a. A graduation cap on it was a pretty famous, like 70s calculator for kids. Oh, you mean the calculator itself? Yeah, no, I think I know what you're talking about.

I thought you meant some weird trick where you type in numbers and turn it upside down. It says, oh, and it looks like it got. Oh I see. I was like, that's pretty impressive. We got it right. You're like, I can just type boobs.

So in eighty five the DEA took control of this program, I guess took it back from the army.

Hmm. It seems like nobody wanted it. Like every 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 Targ or Edwyn me, who comes in later as the director of this program, like they said, it was a year to year funding, but it kept getting funding every year for 20 years. So I figured I would think to that, 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 eighty five and started funding Ezri again, international. They're back on the scene. And then another contractor, a private contractor, came on called Science Applications International Corporation, also in California, and this is where they name it Stargate in 1991. Right. 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 going to look, that's easy enough to check. Let's find it the whole time. I was wondering about that.

And that was the name from 1991 till its end in nineteen ninety five and.

Oh, I'm sorry, not end in 1995, 1995 is when the CIA took it back over, right. And then the CIA finally said, you know what, we're just we're not sure about this anymore. We're just going to we're going to defund this thing and let it go away again. This is 1995. And five 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, no, 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. I read a, I guess, a transcript of a stepdad, our buddy Brian Dunning's podcast. Yeah. Who we went we had a flame war with over whether or not it could rain frogs.

Did we? Yeah, we did. He well, he tried to start what? I just ignored him. But when was this? This is when we had the. Can it rain frogs up.

I know, but that was years ago, wasn't it. Yeah.

OK, have a long, long memory. I can hold a grudge but anyway, let's get to it. 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 20 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 of this.

Right. Because they would all just be vanished. Kinda.

I think the CIA is not above that kind of thing.

Well, at any rate, the CIA said 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 and that'll solve it all. In a 1995, the American Institutes for Research published an evaluation of remote viewing, cone research and applications and said, you know what, this is pretty compelling stuff, but we can't use it for intelligence because you know the word intelligence zing and they shut it down, shut it down.

In 1995, they did 20 years, 20 million dollars looking for everything from new Soviet submarine designs to lost Scud missiles to people being held by foreign kidnappers, 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, you should know it's our first message break.

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That might be a record, Chuck, a 30 minute first act. Twenty five. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right, I was looking we started a little late after we started recording 25. I don't think that's the record. All right.

So should we keep talking about Project Stargate just because it's fun? Yeah, let's.

So, yeah, and I don't mean like I'm not trying to poo poo, 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 close to getting you to say mine eyes. Yes. In the game. Oh goodness.

So with with Stargate. Right. The whole basis of this was that it was allowed to continue on for 20 years because the people involved were very much impressed with what they saw. Yes. And what they saw kind of went a little bit like this, like the earliest tests. I think the ones that Russell Targ was doing were basically like, tell me about some Soviet submarine floating around somewhere in the world. Let's see what you can do. Just really free Lucy Goosey hippie stuff.

Right.

And then a guy named Dr. Edwin Mae came along and he took over and I think 1985. But he'd been working on the project starting at the Stanford Research Institute beginning in back in 1975. And so he was on this project, I believe, for the full 20 years in one capacity or another.

And when he took over, they weren't even paying him for the last 10 years, just hanging around him, living off of saltines in great schools. Right with his red stapler.

But he yeah, kind of. But he he instituted way stricter protocols for conducting these remote viewing experiments and tests to not just, you know, remote viewing experiments were conducted. He wanted to kind of show that these things could work, too. So he came up with something called Ranked Order Judging, which is part of a larger type of test called forced choice.

Yeah. And I'm going to get you to explain that in a second, because I didn't fully get the the redo.

But May is a pretty interesting guy. He was a doctor. He was a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. And then while it's easy to sort of cast someone like this as just sort of a loopy hippy type, he's really intelligent guy. But he was also a loopy hippy type. He got his postdoc in San Francisco in the 1960s. So you know what that means. 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. Bump into Rupert Sheldrake. Yeah, perhaps. And he came back and didn't really get a lot out of it. I'm sure he had a great time and everything. Sure. But didn't come back there. Yeah. 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 Ezri International working with telekinesis.

And he 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 I guess took over as director in nineteen eighty five, right. Yeah.

So he was the one that started this different sort of testing method called first not first choice but forced choice.

Right. It just wasn't quite it wasn't anywhere near as like free and easy is the free response. Once it was basically it kind of went like this. OK, so let's say let's say that you're holding one of these tests. Ideally, you have three people involved. You have the remote viewer. Yeah. You have the sender who's actually thinking of the thing that the remote viewer is supposed to be tapping into and gaining information from. And then you have a judge.

OK, ideally, you said that the idea was important. Yeah. And also, ideally, the sender and the remote viewer should not be in contact with one another before or during the experiment. Another kind of important one, too. Yes. And these are things that, like Edwin May was instituting that really kind of scientific fied. The whole thing definitely gave it a more legitimate Gleen, for sure. Yeah, but so what happens is the the sender chooses a photo from one hundred photos in a National Geographic photo set.

That's usually what they use.

And I also ideally we could point out that they would use way more than one hundred photos and not those same photos over and over.

That's a big one, too, as we'll see for sure. It's a big problem if you use the same photo set and the same remote viewers, right? Yes. 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. You would be ideally somewhere else thinking about that, what the senator was 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.

OK, that's the first step. Yes.

The second step is that you take four other maybe five other pictures from that same National Geographic photo set and 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 document that they whipped up from their remote viewing session. And so the judge is supposed to take the remote viewers impressions and in 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 likely is the third likeliest fourth, fifth and sixth likely. So you rank the photos. If the remote viewer got it right, then the photo the judge chose and chose is the number one photo. Should be the photo that the sender was thinking of when the remote viewer got their impressions.

Yeah, OK, sure.

It's actually, in a weird way, very scientific because you can insert statistical analysis into this whole thing. And they did. And they found that over time some remote viewers did do much better than chance, just random chance. We're out of every 100 tries. Any photos should be chosen out of a set of five, you know, twice.

Yeah, it was I think the direct quote was from the report was far beyond what is expected by chance. Yes.

That supposedly came from a true believer statistician who 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 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 chance is and what percentage they got. Not your opinion on what is far beyond and what isn't. Right. Right. So that bugs me 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, too, right?

Yeah. And, you know, if they're picking like I mentioned, another one of the problems is they use the same set of 100 nat geo images. So I imagine after a couple of times. They know it's going to be something about nature at the very least. Yeah, and if they say, let's say a lion attacking elk, they're like, no, but it's a tiger attacking an antelope.

You win, right? You know? Yeah.

And then if that is the the only photo with anything like a lion and an elk or whatever tiger in the photos, that the rest is like an oil derrick in a lake and some other stuff, then of course that's the one that's going to win. With that, the judge is going to choose and they're going to have a hit. So there's a lot of like real problems with this. Even though they tried to add, like science to the whole thing, they you just can't do it just as science.

Right, exactly.

And then so so 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 the the free association. One, it's not called free association. What is it called the free response experiments where they're just like, tell us about, you know, the Soviets, any new submarine designs this. Right. Are working on or something.

So it can we can we tell some of these stories that were supposedly successes? Yes.

All right. The West Virginia site is the first one. Dr Targ relayed this story. And these were from the early days in the early 70s in which a remote viewer in California was given the longitude and latitude coordinates of somewhere in West Virginia and said, what do you see?

And the remote viewer said, described like what was going on with the terrain above the ground and about a secret underground government site and supposedly provided names of personnel who work there, code words used for the top secret projects. And apparently the description was really, really accurate. So accurate that the CIA said, 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 in early 70s, Dr. One. Yeah, something 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 them into giving funding.

Yeah, for sure. Especially, yeah. If people are jumpy about what the Soviets might be on to this kind of thing too when we got to get on it. Sure.

And apparently that same remote viewer saw or remotely saw an underground site that was similar in Russia in the Ural Mountains. Describe that that was supposedly verified as, quote, substantially correct by the CIA.

Yeah. So that was one of the big ones that people kind of tout as evidence that Project Stargate worked, right? Sure. There's also one called the microwave generator report is a good one.

This one was with Dr. Mae, Dr. Edwin Mae. And the 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 U.S. and the remote viewers started describing a microwave generator on site. And the most astounding thing about it is that the the the remote 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.

Sure. So that is pretty impressive. And then later on, Dr. May took the whole description, um, which is we'll see is rare in these cases and determined that it was that the specs of the generator itself were 80 percent accurate and that the site as a whole were 70 percent accurate, 70 percent reliable, though, OK, 70 percent reliable.

No idea how you would conclude that or quantify that kind of thing. But exactly, again, this is the kind of thing like you're starting to build like a law around this department, this agency that people who are already kind of into the existence of this kind of thing can come in and participate in and talk about with their friends.

And while people at cocktail parties with the Russian Krein, this one came from Dr. Targ remote viewer was given again coordinates of a site near a city in the former Soviet Union. And there was a in like what do you see? What the drawing detailed was a large industrial crane called a gantry crane. And they said, you know what, there's 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, and that was the analyst who has handed this was like, wow, that's really impressive. So the Russian crane stands on its own two. And then there is also one called the local fugitive. There's a woman named Angela Ford who was a long time participant in Project Stargate, and she used kind of mediumship where she had three different spirit guides who would cause her to carry out automatic writing.

So she did her remote with you. Right. And she this is you know, she would go down to Fort Meade 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, who is an interesting cat in and of himself. He was he called himself the ruler of the Florida Keys. He was I thought that was Jimmy Buffett.

He was. And he's the prince of the floor. He was the he was a crooked customs agent who had turned into a drug smuggler down there and also was very easily bribed so that other drug smugglers could smuggle their drugs. And so it was Jimmy Buffett. He got caught and went on the run. And so they were looking for him. So they asked Angela Ford if she could find them 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 low of Wyoming.

And it turned out that he was apprehended one hundred miles west of Leavelle, Wyoming, with a V.. Yeah, but 100 miles west of a place that she still didn't name.

Some people say, though, that Charles Jordan admitted to being in the town OK on the day Angela Ford did her remote viewing boom proven right.

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 where 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 legen, this stuff about Project Stargate being for real going all these years. Yeah. And if you dig into it, it's really, really hard to pull apart 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, they say, well, no, they didn't say that. She didn't say she didn't say LOL. She said northern Wyoming.

Somebody else would say no. She just said, you know, somewhere in the west or something like that.

So as the story of Charles Jordan being captured in Yellowstone 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 then seeing him in that town on the day that it happened. And that's how this stuff go. So 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, 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 Institute or American Institute of Research paper still said, look, there are some weird, unexplainable stuff in here. Does it prove that remote viewing is real 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 the hits. There was so much garbage produced that by the time 1995 rolled around, 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 find it anymore.

So we take another break. Yeah. All right. Let's take a break. We'll be right back after this.

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All right, so here's the deal, and this is sort of the big question, which you kind of answered before the break, sorry, is it now? That's right. It's how. It was a nice tease. Is it a useful spy tool? Because we can have fun all day finding 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 this stuff as actionable evidence or intelligence?

And you can't really, um, like we said, they are anecdotal. They might be impressed by a certain part of a thing.

And you mentioned that it's rare that they ever included, like the full drawing or the full discourse on whatever they supposedly saw, didn't see. They would sort of pick 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 up with 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 can't use this.

Right. And that's sort of the point of all this, is we can't use this stuff as intelligence because it's just partial. People that defended it would say in 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. Right. And just see if it could help support some of this stuff or give them a hint in the right direction to start using real intelligence. And it was never supposed to be a stand alone that you go and, like, raid a Russian village because some remote viewer said there was a nuclear weapon there or something.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think the CIA always viewed is that, too, and that like it was benign. It was very cheap and inexpensive. It can be done easily. But the problem is, is like if you have somebody who's producing tons and tons of garbage intelligence, the analyst 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 kind of like a metaphor for what Pseudo-Science in general does to society, like throws garbage on there that kind of distract 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 20 years, they thought, you know, there are three big reasons why it was attractive. And they all kind of boil down to why not? Which it's a passive operation. So it doesn't require a lot of resources. It's you know, I don't know how many people they had remote viewing at their max, but I doubt if it was that many it didn't cost a lot, six million bucks a year and that much money in the defense budget.

And then it's what's known as no known defense. So even if it's working, let's say, then the enemy can't really stop this, I guess, except for recruiting these people out and tracking them down and killing them.

Sure. But aside from that, those are the three reasons. For 20 years, they threw six million bucks a year at it. And I'm sure that kind of wavered in and out. But, you know, they spent over twenty million dollars.

Oh, no, I think they spent twenty million dollars over twenty years. Oh, is that all. Yeah, man, that was it for the whole the whole time.

I thought they spent six million a year. No, I think it might have been up to like six million dollars at the end of it 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 ninety five. Twenty million dollars, you know, on paper is what got spent.

Gotcha. So those first years it was like here's one hundred thousand dollars in a bucket of weed. Kind of. I think so in some grape Kool-Aid and saltines. All right. Well 20 million bucks but yeah that's not a lot of money for, you know, if you're talking overall defense budget.

No, it's not. And so it's so cheap that we're we're even vaguely promising or vaguely helpful. The CIA would have been fools not to keep funding this or the the the Defense Department would have been fools not to keep funding it. Somebody. Yeah, I could have kept funding if we really put our minds to it. But it not only wasn't useful, it it did not. It was actually harmful as far as an intelligence tool is concerned. That was, I think, what I gather from them finally cancelling it.

Yeah.

And this you know, this last bit about the representative from North Carolina, Charlie Rose, not the, uh, not the the TV guy who's turned out to be quite a jerk, but he kind of summed it up. And this is why I think the deal is, is if and this is what started it to begin with, 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 we're certainly not going to let them be the only ones trying this.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, if the Russkies have it, we sure as heck better be on it ourselves. Exactly. I think luckily, um. Well, I was going to say, luckily, that mentality faded with the Cold War, but it's back, everybody.

Hey, the 80s are back. Yeah, they are big time people wearing fanny packs. And apparently there's what's that one thing where, like, you touch the shirt and like your handprint would be a color. Oh, sure.

Like the the heat, uh, heat shirts or whatever. I can't remember what they're called, but anyways.

Ah back. Back. Yeah. Very cool. 80S are back. So that's it. That's Project Stargate. There's a lot to read about it if you are 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, go read more about it. And in particular, I want to I want to direct you to Mars Exploration, May 22nd, 1984.

It's a declassified transcript from a remote viewing session of Mars where they asked the, I think, Joseph McMonagle to wander around Mars in the year one million BCE and it's fascinating stuff, but it also tells you everything you need to know about Project Stargate. If you want to know. I already said that kind of thing, didn't I, Chuck? I guess it's time now for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this heroin podcast's, and this is from Anonymous.

Yo, thanks 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 turn to sex work to pay for it. While we played video games upstairs, people were OD'ing 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 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 19th century until the crack epidemic of the eighties.

According to my parents, a 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 Pursey from New York Times, October twenty eighteen.

And that is from Anonymous Man Alive Anonymous.

I'm glad you made it out alive. Totally, because that is very scary stuff. A man, it's crazy. It makes you realize 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. Tuna. I never heard of it. Yeah, I hadn't either read that article. That looks good. Yeah.

Well, thanks a lot and we appreciate you getting in touch with us. And if you want to get in touch with us, please do. You can send us an email to stuff podcast that I heart radio dotcom.

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