Twenty-three years. That's how long I worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency. My clearance was TS/SCI with additional compartments I still can't name. I was actually in town for my daughter's graduation when I saw your topic tonight. Figured it was a sign. I retired in '98, but there's one program I worked adjacent to that I can finally discuss because it's been declassified. You can verify everything I'm about to say. The government spent over twenty million dollars on it across two decades. The program had a dozen different code names, but you'd know it by the last one, STAR GATE. I'm calling because people think this was some fringe conspiracy theory. It wasn't. This was real. Funded. Operational. And the documents that prove it are sitting in the CIA Reading Room right now. Eighty-nine thousand pages of them. I'm not here to convince you it worked. I'm here to tell you what it actually was, how it operated, and why it lasted as long as it did. Let me start at the beginning, because the whole thing started with Cold War paranoia. And honestly? That paranoia might've been justified.
Between 1969 and 1971, our intelligence sources started reporting something strange. The Soviets were pouring resources into what they called 'psychotronic research.' I know how that sounds, but hear me out. By 1970, estimates put their spending at sixty million rubles annually. By 1975? Three hundred million rubles. That's serious money, and it got the attention of people at the Agency. The logic was simple. If the Soviets were spending that kind of cash on psychic research, either they knew something we didn't, or they were wasting massive amounts of money. Either way, we needed to know. So in 1970, the CIA started funding a program called SCANATE at Stanford Research Institute. That stands for 'scan by coordinate.' The research was headed by scientists I'll call Robert Jensen and David Whitman. Now here's where it gets interesting. They started working with a New York artist I'll call Peter Morgan. You can find his real identity in the declassified files. This guy claimed he could describe remote locations just by being given geographic coordinates. No photos, no briefings, nothing. Just numbers. And when they tested him in controlled conditions, he kept getting details right that he shouldn't have been able to know. By 1972, SRI was running full-scale remote viewing experiments. The protocol was simple but rigid. Put the viewer in a room. Give them coordinates. Have them describe what they perceive. Keep everything documented. The researchers weren't believers going in. They were scientists trying to figure out if this was real or if there was some other explanation. And that's what made the results so troubling. They couldn't explain what was happening.
In 1977, the Army's Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence decided this needed to move from research into evaluation. They launched GONDOLA WISH to assess whether adversaries could actually use remote viewing for intelligence purposes. The answer came back, maybe. There was enough there that the Army Intelligence and Security Command decided to formalize an operational program. So in mid-1978, they created GRILL FLAME. This wasn't research anymore. This was an operational intelligence unit. They set it up in buildings 2560 and 2561 at Fort Meade, Maryland. INSCOM called it 'Detachment G.' The unit was small, maybe fifteen to twenty people. Soldiers and a few civilians who'd been tested and shown some ability at remote viewing. These weren't mystics or fortune tellers. They were intelligence personnel who'd been put through psychological screening and training. The Stanford research got integrated into GRILL FLAME in early 1979. Hundreds of remote viewing sessions were conducted at SRI through 1986. They developed something called Coordinate Remote Viewing, or CRV. Basically a training protocol where supposedly anyone could learn to do this with enough practice. The claim was that with proper training, accuracy rates could hit sixty-five percent or higher. I want to be clear about what they were actually doing. A viewer would sit in a quiet room, get handed coordinates or a target number, nothing else. No context, no briefing, no hints. They'd go into a meditative state and start describing what they perceived. Sometimes sketching. The monitor would take notes but wouldn't give any feedback until after the session. Everything was documented. Everything was timestamped. This wasn't casual guesswork. It was a structured intelligence collection method. GRILL FLAME protocol details are fascinating - Brooke'
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