The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Bill Ray.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	location	relations	created	updated
Bill Ray William G. Ray William Ray Captain Bill Ray CPT Ray MAJ Ray	Military	Person Military ArmyIntelligence Counterintelligence Stargate CenterLane SunStreak CRV	Army counterintelligence officer assigned to INSCOM's Center Lane project in January 1984 as deputy project manager, who trained in CRV under Ingo Swann and led the Fort Meade remote viewing unit under DIA until 1987.	Fort Meade, Maryland	type with start end role fn employed_by United States Army Intelligence and Security Command 1984-01-01 1985 captain, military intelligence, assigned to the Center Lane project office at Fort Meade from the 11th Signal Brigade, Fort Huachuca 2 type with start end role fn reported_to Brian Buzby 1984-01-01 1985-03 deputy project manager of INSCOM Project Center Lane 7 type with start end role fn head_of Sun Streak 1985-12 1987 chief of the Fort Meade unit, Security Systems Planning Division, under the Defense Intelligence Agency; major 15 type with start end role fn reported_to Jack Vorona 1985 1987 branch chief in the Defense Intelligence Agency's Scientific and Technical Intelligence directorate (DT-S) 14 type with start role fn participant_in Monroe Institute 1983 attended the six-day RAPT course (Gateway Voyage) with other INSCOM officers in late 1983 4 type with start role fn participant_in Coordinate Remote Viewing 1984 trained in Stage I onward by Ingo Swann at SRI's New York offices 5	2025-08-05	2026-10-05

William G. Ray was an U.S. Army counterintelligence officer who served as deputy to the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command Center Lane project manager in 1984 and 1985, trained in Coordinate Remote Viewing under Ingo Swann, and was chief of the Fort Meade remote viewing unit when it came under the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The writer Jim Schnabel described him as a captain in his late thirties, originally from Anaheim, California, six feet one, with graying dark hair, a mustache, an athletic build and chronic back problems from an old parachuting accident, a staunch Irish Catholic who liked his beer, sang sentimental Irish songs and was always smoking or chewing on a pipe.¹

Assignment to Center Lane

INSCOM's memorandum "Center Lane Personnel Spaces," dated August 2, 1983 and sent from the human intelligence office, reported that the Command Staff Psychologist had helped identify two volunteers for duty with the special access program that had replaced Grill Flame: Captain Paul H. Smith of the operations group at Fort Meade, available September 1, 1983, and "CPT William G. Ray, presently G-2, 11th Signal Bde, Fort Huachuca, AZ, and currently on orders for assignment to HQ INSCOM, Ft Meade, effective 1 January 1984, per coordination with CWO Kennedy, DCSPER." The memorandum asked that two non-GDIP-funded captain's spaces be identified for the project.²

Schnabel wrote that Ed Dames, Ray, Smith and a civilian analyst, Charlene Cavanaugh Shufelt, were the four trainees whose instruction by Swann the unit's budget for 1984 would pay for, and that Albert Stubblebine signed off on Dames's inclusion.³ They drove to the Monroe Institute in the Blue Ridge Mountains late in 1983 for six days, with a dozen other officers from INSCOM headquarters, in a course the Army called RAPT, "Rapid Advanced Personal Training." None of the four had an out-of-body experience there.⁴ The Army's chronology records that "RAPT Training" was established in October 1983, that a "second group" began CRV training at Stanford Research Institute on January 15 to 27, 1984, and that on March 1, 1984 Lieutenant General Brown, the Director of the Army Staff, directed the cancellation of RAPT as a personnel screening vehicle.⁵ Swann moved much of the training to SRI's New York office from January 1, 1984; a letter of April 24, 1984 from Lieutenant Colonel Brian Buzby to Hal Puthoff notes that four trainees "have recently completed Stage I, Phase I" without any evaluation having been received. Annie Jacobsen wrote that Ray was one of five INSCOM remote viewers who remained when the DIA took over the program and that he was sent to New York City to be trained in the six stages of CRV with Swann.⁶

The Center Lane office, 1984

In an early 1984 briefing script, Buzby told a visitor: "I would like to introduce you to my deputy, Bill Ray, and my operations officer, Frederick Atwater." On April 13, 1984 Stubblebine, the INSCOM commander, visited the project office at Fort Meade; "LTC Buzby, CPT Ray and" one officer whose name is withheld were its principal participants, and Stubblebine toured the buildings and spent ten minutes alone with Captain Tom McNear. Stubblebine was briefed on finances and on a high-level project called Buckley, an effort to find "new ways and technologies in dealing with the 'search problem,'" and on the cancellation of RAPT.⁷

On May 16, 1984, at 1535 hours, "William G. Ray of this office reported that Congressman Rose had called Ingo Swann at SRI-I New York." According to Swann, Representative Charlie Rose had said that Dale Van Atta, "associate of Jack Anderson," had told him "that although they had recently been under the influence of Ron McRae, that this is no longer the case," and that "there would be a series of articles" in "a favorable vain, i.e., 'Why hasn't more been done?'"⁸

The decision of July 13, 1984 by the INSCOM commander, Brigadier General Harry Soyster, to discontinue Center Lane as an INSCOM project is recorded in the Army's chronology, as is the meeting on July 20, 1984 between Marty Hurwitz of the GDIP Staff, Jack Vorona and the Center Lane personnel on transfer to DIA or to the United States Army Medical Research and Development Command.⁹ On August 1, 1984 Ray went with Buzby to Fort Detrick to tell Major General Garrison Rapmund of the decision; Rapmund described a five-year research effort. An information paper of October 10, 1984 for the Director of DIA, with Buzby as the point of contact, counted 106 projects from September 1, 1979 to September 28, 1984, of which sponsors rated 53 as having intelligence value and 26 as having none, with 12 cancelled and 6 ongoing. A memorandum of October 19, 1984 transmitting the milestones for the transfer lists "LTC Buzby/CPT Bill Ray" as points of contact, with the same extension, 2656, that appears on Captain McNear's signed trip reports of 1983.¹⁰

On February 6, 1985 "LTC Brian Buzby and CPT(P) William Ray, INSCOM CENTER LANE Project (ICLP)" accompanied Lieutenant General William Odom, then the Army assistant chief of staff for intelligence, to brief the Under Secretary of the Army, James Ambrose, who asked about the number of spaces the DIA wanted. Buzby answered twelve; there had been twelve in the program when the cancellation was decided and nine were transferring. Odom told Ambrose that if DIA did not obtain the resources by September 30, 1985 the program would be "dead."¹¹ The memorandum of agreement transferring operational control to DIA was signed on March 7, 1985 by the Director, Lieutenant General James A. Williams.¹² Buzby, still heading the project, wrote to Vorona on April 23 and July 1, 1985, under the heading Sun Streak, that the mission of the "SUN STREAK Prototype Operational Group" was operational intelligence applications of remote viewing and the training of personnel; that SRI-International's training of three source personnel by its subcontractor had ended in December 1984 and in-house training modeled on it began in January 1985; and that "I believe that the in-house program is better than the one we purchased from SRI-International" because intelligence techniques could be taught alongside the basic technology. The second report added that lengthening the sessions for Stage Five training had reduced the number of sessions and would be resolved by adding a second interviewer in August or September 1985.¹³

Chief of the unit under the DIA

Schnabel wrote that when Army funding ran out at the end of 1985 and the unit moved into Vorona's Scientific and Technical Intelligence directorate, Buzby left for another post and Ray, "now a major, was appointed as the unit's temporary commander," and that he was the "branch chief" under whom Atwater remained operations officer, with assistant operations officers Dames, Fernand Gauvin and Gene Kincaid. During the period of limbo, Schnabel wrote, the unit had no operations, only training.¹⁴ His rank and title at that point are confirmed by a memorandum of December 10, 1985 signed "WILLIAM G. RAY, MAJ, MI, Ch, SSPD," the Security Systems Planning Division, the office symbol under which the Army had organized Center Lane on March 1, 1983.¹⁵

That memorandum records a telephone conversation of the same day with Puthoff about an inquiry on December 9 to Russell Targ from Carol Murphy of the Washington Post, who was working for an investigative reporter, Babcock, affiliated with the paper for ten years. Murphy knew that Grill Flame had been in effect for fifteen years at SRI and said she was interested in the Fort Meade program that Stubblebine had overseen, which had "taken over after Murray Watt had left and Robert Jachim took over," in cooperation with Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and which trained people at the Monroe Institute; she asked whether the program was classified because "they" were "afraid of the Golden Fleece" and asked about the viewer involved in the "Backfire bomber incident" and a "Peanuts" briefing. Puthoff suspected that the information "could only have been obtained from some East Coast source, as some of the new information was not known by anyone on the West Coast." Murphy said Babcock's article was intended for release around December 15 to 21.¹⁵

Schnabel wrote that Ray and Atwater "effectively restricted remote viewers to two basic styles, ERV and CRV," a restriction lifted when Gauvin took over the unit, and that Dames regarded Ray, like Kincaid, as a devout Irishman afraid of ghosts. In Schnabel's account, Ray, though trained in CRV by Swann, preferred extended remote viewing because he could lie down and spare his back; one morning near the transition to DIA control, during a solo session, he "suddenly felt a hand grab him," saw no one in the room, and afterward tended to stay away from the operations building and, if he remote-viewed, did so at home with his wife nearby.¹⁶ Ray left the unit early in 1987; Lieutenant Colonel William Xenakis succeeded him as branch chief and ran it until Gauvin took over in 1988.¹⁷

Footnotes

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1. Schnabel, Jim, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies, Dell, 1997, chapter introducing the four INSCOM trainees of 1983. ↩︎

2. INSCOM, "Center Lane Personnel Spaces," August 2, 1983, CIA-RDP96-00788R001700300001-1, read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001700300001-1. ↩︎

3. Schnabel, Remote Viewers, Dell, 1997, chapter introducing the four INSCOM trainees of 1983. ↩︎

4. Schnabel, Remote Viewers, Dell, 1997, chapter on the Monroe Institute course. ↩︎

5. "List of Events from September 1977 to January 1986," CIA-RDP96-00788R001100020001-8, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001100020001-8; Swann, Ingo, memorandum to Dr. H. E. Puthoff, "Work report," April 15, 1984, CIA-RDP96-00792R000100140033-6, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00792r000100140033-6; Buzby, Brian, letter to Dr. Harold E. Puthoff, "Contract Requirements," April 24, 1984, CIA-RDP96-00788R001500120028-4, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001500120028-4. ↩︎

6. Jacobsen, Annie, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩︎

7. Buzby, Brian, "I am LTC Buzby, Project Manager for INSCOM Project Center Lane," briefing script, 1984, CIA-RDP96-00788R001700330002-7, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001700330002-7; "Visit by CG, INSCOM 13 Apr 84," memorandum for record, April 16, 1984, CIA-RDP96-00788R001700220008-3, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001700220008-3. ↩︎

8. INSCOM, "Recent Jack Anderson 'Grill Flame' Articles," memorandum for record, May 17, 1984, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200030001-6, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001200030001-6. ↩︎

9. "List of Events from September 1977 to January 1986," CIA-RDP96-00788R001100020001-8. ↩︎

10. Buzby, Brian, "CENTER LANE Meeting with MG Rapmund 1 August 1984," CIA-RDP96-00788R001500100006-0, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001500100006-0; "CENTER LANE Operational Accomplishments," information paper for the Director, DIA, October 10, 1984, enclosed in "Center Lane Information Papers for Director, Defense Intelligence Agency," CIA-RDP96-00788R000400060001-2, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r000400060001-2; Buzby, Brian, "Milestones Document for CENTER LANE Transfer," October 19, 1984, CIA-RDP96-00788R001500090032-3, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001500090032-3; McNear, Thomas M., "Trip Report 27-28 Sep 83," CIA-RDP96-00788R001200220001-5. ↩︎

11. Buzby, Brian, "Briefing to the Under Secretary of the Army, 6 February 1985," February 11, 1985, CIA-RDP96-00788R001500020021-2, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001500020021-2. ↩︎

12. "List of Events from September 1977 to January 1986," CIA-RDP96-00788R001100020001-8. ↩︎

13. Buzby, Brian, "SUN STREAK Training Report," memoranda for Dr. Vorona, April 23, 1985, CIA-RDP96-00789R002100160001-1, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00789r002100160001-1, and July 1, 1985, CIA-RDP96-00788R001000370002-0, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001000370002-0. ↩︎

14. Schnabel, Remote Viewers, Dell, 1997, chapters on the transfer to the DIA and on the Sun Streak unit. ↩︎

15. "Conversation via Telephone with Puthoff," memorandum for record, December 10, 1985, CIA-RDP96-00788R001700030002-0, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001700030002-0; "List of Events from September 1977 to January 1986," CIA-RDP96-00788R001100020001-8, entry for March 1, 1983. ↩︎

16. Schnabel, Remote Viewers, Dell, 1997, chapters on the Gauvin era and on the unit's strange experiences. ↩︎

17. Schnabel, Remote Viewers, Dell, 1997, chapter on the Sun Streak unit's operations of 1987. ↩︎