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40 - EVENTS/INTELLIGENCE_SCANDALS/1995 AIR evaluation of Star Gate.md

@@ -41,6 +41,14 @@ The end users said the information was "stated in broad, vague terms," accurate
 
 The report found "a statistically significant 'anomaly'" in the laboratory, no "convincing demonstration that a paranormal ability is involved," no identification of "the nature and source of the effect," and "no evidence that the phenomenon would prove useful in intelligence gathering." Its history of the program stated that "CIA's program began in 1972, but was discontinued in 1977," and that "DIA's direct involvement began about 1985." It observed of "some well-publicized cases of dramatic hits" that "there is reason to suspect that substantially more background information was available than one might at first assume." The last line of the body read: "Continued support for the operational component of the current program is not justified." Hyman wrote in 1996 that "because of some controversies within the program, a Senate committee decided to transfer the program from the DIA back to the CIA," that the operations program "involved six, and later three, psychics on the government payroll who were available to any government agency that wanted to use their services," and that the panel "all agreed that any scientifically meaningful evaluation of these operational psychic intelligence uses was impossible." [[Hal Puthoff]] quoted the report's count of "more than 200 tasks from operational military organizations" between 1986 and the first quarter of fiscal 1995, and cited a CIA public affairs statement on remote viewing of September 6, 1995. May's commentary of 1996 gave the report's public release as November 28, 1995.[^6]
 
+### Release
+
+The agency's public affairs office had said on September 6, 1995: "As mandated by Congress, CIA is reviewing available information and past research programs concerning parapsychological phenomena, mainly 'Remote Viewing' to determine whether they might have any utility for intelligence collection. CIA sponsored research on this subject in the 1970s. At that time, the program, always considered speculative and controversial, was determined to be unpromising." The report was released on November 28, 1995, the day ABC's *Nightline* broadcast "Psychic Spies: Cold War Whimsy or Secret Weapon?" [[Ted Koppel]] opened: "For 20 years, U.S. intelligence agencies have been experimenting with ESP." ABC said it "has obtained a copy of that report which is critical of psychic spying," and that psychic spying "has been used in about 500 cases. Of those, fewer than a dozen were claimed to be right on target." May described the Semipalatinsk crane and "underground spheres"; [[Joe McMoneagle]] said of the Iran hostages, "there were 2 or 3 others that were held away from the Embassy, and no one seemed to know exactly where that was. But we were instrumental in helping identify that location"; [[Dale Graff]] said of Dozier, "we had one viewer come up with the name of the city, Padua. We had another one come up with the name of the building he was in"; the customs official William Green described the Jordan search, "next to an Indian gravesite," and Graff added, "we like to count it as a success." Hyman: "If someone pushed me hard right now, I'd have to say the odds are 99 to 1 that there's nothing to remote viewing." Utts: "There's some mystery out there that we need to solve." In the studio [[Robert Gates]] said that after the mid-1970s "CIA really during that period had a very limited role and essentially was just watching what was going on elsewhere," formalized by [[John McMahon]] in the mid-1980s; "I don't know of a single instance where it is documented that this kind of activity contributed in any significant way to a policy decision"; "we got into it, I think, mainly because we heard the Soviets were involved and also because the Congress, individual members of the Congress and some staff pushed us into it"; and "this is a tool best developed in the academic community or in the public arena, not by the intelligence community." A former CIA technical adviser identified only as "Norm," who had monitored the programs under McMahon until 1984, said "there's never been a case to my knowledge that produced any significant intelligence product," and explained the "8-martini" sessions: "The photograph you gave me, you developed that film in a house a mile down the road in the basement. That's grounds for an 8-martini evening, because the guy that took the picture had forgotten that fact. So, the knowledge was in the room, but not in any conscious way."[^7]
+
+### May's Reply
+
+May's commentary of March 1996 charged that the CIA "set the outcome with regard to intelligence usage before the evaluation had begun," that only one of seventeen members of the program's own oversight bodies was contacted, and that David Goslin of AIR had also administered the NRC's 1988 report; Utts wrote to him on December 19, 1995, that "I was explicitly asked by AIR staff NOT to mention the NRC report in my review!" and that "we were shown very little of the 'operational' remote-viewing work," and that after she asked to contact operational participants she "was contacted by the AIR staff and told that I was NOT to contact any of those individuals." May's conclusion: the evaluators "wanted to demonstrate that AC lacked usefulness for intelligence operations. They did so by construction rather than by careful analysis."[^8]
+
 ### Footnotes
 
 [^1]: Mumford, Michael D., Andrew M. Rose, and David A. Goslin. *An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications.* American Institutes for Research, September 29, 1995, pp. E-1 to E-5, 1-4 to 1-5, 2-1 to 2-8 and note 2, 3-80 to 3-84. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB438/docs/doc_57.pdf
@@ -49,3 +57,5 @@ The report found "a statistically significant 'anomaly'" in the laboratory, no "
 [^4]: Hyman, Ray. "Evaluation of Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena," September 11, 1995, reproduced in the AIR report, pp. 3-41 to 3-75, and published in *Journal of Scientific Exploration,* vol. 10, no. 1, 1996, pp. 31-58. Pages 3-41 to 3-44, 3-67, 3-72 to 3-79 of the report, including Utts's "Response to Ray Hyman's Report of September 11, 1995."
 [^5]: Mumford, Michael D., Andrew M. Rose, and David A. Goslin. *An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications.* American Institutes for Research, September 29, 1995, pp. 4-7 to 4-15 and appendix D, pp. D-12 to D-16.
 [^6]: Mumford, Michael D., Andrew M. Rose, and David A. Goslin. *An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications.* American Institutes for Research, September 29, 1995, pp. 1-4, 3-84, 5-1 to 5-5; Hyman, Ray. "Evaluation of the Military's Twenty-Year Program on Psychic Spying," *Skeptical Inquirer,* March-April 1996, pp. 21-23.; Puthoff, H. E. "CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing Program at Stanford Research Institute," *Journal of Scientific Exploration,* vol. 10, no. 1, 1996, pp. 63-76., note 10 and reference 1; May, Edwin C. "The American Institutes for Research Review of the Department of Defense's STAR GATE Program: A Commentary," *Journal of Parapsychology,* vol. 60, no. 1, 1996, pp. 3-23, abstract only.
+[^7]: Central Intelligence Agency, Public Affairs, statement on remote viewing, September 6, 1995, as reproduced in Victorian, Armen, "Remote Viewing and the US Intelligence Community," *Lobster,* c. 1996; the original release was not seen. "Psychic Spies: Cold War Whimsy or Secret Weapon?," ABC News *Nightline,* November 28, 1995, Radio TV Reports transcript for the CIA Public Affairs Staff, CIA-RDP99-01448R000402140001-7, read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room.
+[^8]: May, Edwin C. "The American Institutes for Research Review of the Department of Defense's STAR GATE Program: A Commentary," *Journal of Parapsychology,* vol. 60, no. 1, March 1996, pp. 3-23. The letter of December 19, 1995, is printed at pp. 15-17 as Utts's reply to May's e-mail of December 17, checked against the page images.

40 - EVENTS/INTELLIGENCE_SCANDALS/Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee.md

@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
+---
+category: "Intelligence Scandal"
+tags:
+  - Event
+  - GaleCommittee
+  - GrillFlame
+  - RemoteViewing
+  - ScientificReview
+  - Army
+alias:
+  - Gale Committee
+  - Gale Report
+summary: "An eight-member Army review under Manfred Gale, reporting in December 1979, which found remote viewing unproved and its programs poorly documented, while a majority of five allowed INSCOM's operational work to continue under oversight."
+start: 1979
+end: 1980-01
+location: "Washington, D.C."
+created: 2026-09-21
+updated: 2026-09-21
+---
+
+The Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee, chaired by Manfred Gale and known in the program as the Gale Committee, reported in December 1979 on the Army's parapsychology work: the [[Stanford Research Institute|SRI]] remote-viewing research, the psychokinesis contract of the Missile Intelligence Command, the replication trials of the Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity, and the [[United States Army Intelligence and Security Command|INSCOM]] unit at [[Fort Meade]] ([[STARGATE PROJECT|Grill Flame]]). Its chapters covered a chronology, "Parapsychology in Perspective," an assessment of Warsaw Pact activity, "suggested parapsychological mechanisms," and the SRI experiments, with annexes on each Army activity.[^1]
+
+### Findings
+
+"RV research and investigations thus far have not proved the existence of the phenomena and have not conclusively established any parametric dependencies. Many of the anecdotal events reported to this Committee as potential evidence of the existence of RV do not adequately sustain their claim under careful scrutiny. A few of the examples are subjectively spectacular, but lack of scientific procedures precludes their consideration as scientific evidence of the phenomena. On balance, the Committee has indeed been persuaded that there is some probability that effects attributed to the RV phenomena exist under unexplained circumstances and in conjunction with particular individuals. However, to date, the experimental techniques have not been adequate to document such effects." Of the programs: "Inadequate documentation and failure to apply adequate controls are the most frequent causes which limit the credibility that can be given to reports of 'success' attributed to RV applications. In the judgment of the Committee, sole dependence on SRI-like protocols to resolve the RV issue will not be fruitful," and "operational programs, that by their very existence assume the reality of RV as given, may inadvertently establish the assumption in other communities that RV is real."[^1]
+
+### Recommendations
+
+Work to demonstrate the existence of remote viewing and psychokinesis "should be supported if a credible approach were to emerge; however, it may be preferable to do this in some other agency other than DOD in order to more readily conduct the work in an open forum." Research to characterize the phenomena "should not be sponsored until existence is established." On operations "the Committee was divided," and "the majority (5 out of 8) believed that operationally-oriented RV activities aimed at determining the empirical value of RV to intelligence (like those at INSCOM) should continue," provided the work "be monitored by an oversight committee that can review the work for its adequacy and guard against self-fulfilling prophecy" and that "dependence on SRI approach should be phased out."[^1]
+
+### The Reply
+
+The Defense Department's Grill Flame working group, under [[Jack Vorona]] of DIA, had asked in November 1979 to see the report "prior to it being given to any other party or group." Vorona's reply supported the finding that "unexplained observations of human capabilities to generate data of potential utility to intelligence have been documented" and "strongly" disagreed with the recommendation to end the Missile Intelligence Command and AMSAA work, "based on a misinterpretation of these programs"; the "condemnation" of the SRI approach "is not understood or acceptable without further explanation"; and "many of the difficulties in the report, especially those of fact and incompleteness, could have been avoided if the report had been collectively reviewed in draft, rather than allowing only individual inputs." On February 6, 1980, the under secretary of defense, [[William Perry]], restricted the use of Program 6 funds, since it was "not appropriate for Army to fund technology programs aimed at scientific demonstration of parapsychology."[^1][^2]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: *Report by the Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee,* December 1979, Manfred Gale, chairman, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120001-5; Vorona, J., "Comments on 'Report By: The GRILLFLAME Scientific Evaluation Committee,'" memorandum of the Grill Flame Working Group, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300060001-2. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. Chapters 1 and 4 to 9 and the annexes were not read.
+[^2]: Defense Intelligence Agency, minutes of the DoD Grill Flame Committee, November 27, 1979 (CIA-RDP96-00788R002000130015-1) and January 10, 1980 (CIA-RDP96-00788R002000100009-1); US Army Intelligence and Security Command, "List of Events from September 1977 to January 1986," CIA-RDP96-00788R001100020001-8; the scan's table columns are reflowed by OCR and some dates are uncertain. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.