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Psi Research Program | SCANATE was the CIA's initial code name for its remote viewing research program at Stanford Research Institute, launched in 1972 following Hal Puthoff's contact with CIA officer Kit Green and running until the program transitioned to Army management as Gondola Wish in 1977. | 1972-10-01 | 1977-01-01 | Menlo Park, California |
SCANATE (Scan by Coordinate) was the Central Intelligence Agency's code name for its remote viewing research program at Stanford Research Institute International in Menlo Park, California, from 1972 until the program transitioned to Army management under the code name Gondola Wish in 1977. The SCANATE program was the direct institutional precursor to the entire series of government remote viewing programs that culminated in the STARGATE PROJECT program declassified in 1995.
Origins and Initiation
The SCANATE program grew from Hal Puthoff's contact with the CIA following his initial experiments with Ingo Swann at Stanford University's Varian Hall in 1972. On June 27, 1972, Puthoff wrote formally to Kit Green at the CIA's Life Sciences Division, proposing government-funded research at SRI to investigate whether anomalous cognition could be produced and measured under controlled conditions. This letter, subsequently declassified and available in the CIA FOIA Reading Room (document CIA-RDP96-00791R000200030006-8), established the institutional relationship between SRI and the CIA.
The CIA provided initial funding by October 1972, designating the program SCANATE - reflecting Swann's method of using geographic coordinates (scanning by coordinate) as target specification for remote viewing sessions. The program was housed within the CIA's Office of Technical Services and managed through Green's Life Sciences Division liaison function.
Experimental Protocol
The SCANATE protocol that Puthoff and Russell Targ developed at SRI required a subject to remain at the SRI facility while a second experimenter traveled to a randomly selected target location. The subject attempted to describe the target through verbal narration and drawings. An independent panel of judges then blindly matched the transcripts and drawings to the set of possible target locations, with statistical assessment of the matching accuracy.
Swann's proposal to use geographic coordinates alone as targeting information - without an outbound experimenter - was tested under SCANATE and proved to generate results the SRI team assessed as anomalous. This Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) approach became the program's core methodology.
Key Results and Pat Price
Pat Price, a retired Burbank police commissioner, produced the most operationally significant SCANATE results. His remote viewing session targeting the Soviet URDF-3 facility near Semipalatinsk, tasked by CIA officer Peter Maris, generated descriptions of a large crane structure, spherical metal objects under construction, and unusual welding techniques that CIA analysis subsequently assessed as substantially accurate against classified satellite photography. His remote viewing of the National Security Agency signals intelligence facility at Sugar Grove, West Virginia, was sufficiently accurate to trigger an NSA security investigation into whether classified facilities were vulnerable to psychic penetration.
Puthoff and Targ published SCANATE-era results in two peer-reviewed venues: "Information Transmission Under Conditions of Sensory Shielding" in Nature (October 1974) and "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances" in Proceedings of the IEEE (March 1976).
Transition to Army Management
In 1977, the Army established its own remote viewing unit at Fort Meade, Maryland, under the initiative of Frederick Atwater and the command sponsorship of Major General Edmund Thompson. The Army program, designated Gondola Wish, contracted SRI for training and protocol guidance but operated as a separate military intelligence program with its own personnel and operational structure. The CIA's direct management of the SCANATE research at SRI ended as the Army unit became operational, though CIA continued as a consumer and occasional sponsor of the broader program through subsequent code name cycles.