Section I -- The Programme

Between 1972 and 1995, the United States government operated a programme to determine whether human consciousness could function as an intelligence-gathering instrument. The programme changed its name five times -- SCANATE, Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak, Star Gate -- passed through the CIA, Army Intelligence and Security Command, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, contracted work to the Stanford Research Institute and later to Science Applications International Corporation, and cost the American taxpayer in excess of $20 million.

The programme was not speculative. It was operational. Remote viewers were tasked against live intelligence targets. In 1974, a viewer named Pat Price was given nothing but a set of geographical coordinates and asked to describe what was there. The coordinates pointed to a suspected Soviet facility at Semipalatinsk, designated URDF-3. Price described a mobile gantry crane 150 feet tall, running on tracks 50 feet apart, positioned over an underground structure. He described workers assembling a 60-foot-diameter metal sphere from thick metal sections. Several of these structural details were later corroborated by other intelligence sources.

In 1973, another viewer -- Ingo Swann -- conducted a session at SRI targeting the planet Jupiter, approximately 365 million miles from the room in which he was sitting. He described bands of crystals in the atmosphere and a ring system around the planet. Six years later, Voyager 1 confirmed the existence of Jupiter's rings.

The programme survived five presidential administrations. It outlasted the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was still running when the Cold War ended.