Actual Document Contents Regarding Psychic (Clairvoyance) Research (CIA)

「Did the CIA really study psychic powers?」
The questioner asks whether the CIA has actually researched psychic powers in the past.
According to the CIA, after investigating the records of agency historians, they explained that from the early days of the CIA's founding, there was interest in whether Extrasensory Perception (ESP) or other supernatural phenomena—generally referred to as "parapsychology"—actually existed, and if so, whether they could be utilized for intelligence gathering activities.
The oldest related record found by the CIA is a memo from 1948. This included a review of the possibility of using people in a hypnotic state for long-distance communication. However, the CIA was not directly conducting psychic research at that time.
Direct CIA Research Started in 1972
The CIA began participating directly in research starting in the summer of 1972.
Together with scientists and researchers, they investigated whether certain individuals could see locations or objects somewhere in the world without actually traveling to those physical locations.
The CIA describes this as **Remote Viewing.**
CIA Research → Transferred to DIA
After conducting this research for about five years, the CIA terminated its own research in 1977 and transferred it to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Subsequently, the related programs became known by names such as STARGATE and GRILL FLAME.
Back to the CIA in the 1990s
In the mid-1990s, the DIA transferred this program back to the CIA.
Rather than simply continuing the program, the CIA re-evaluated it on the condition that independent researchers assess whether it had actual effectiveness.
Four researchers from the American Institutes for Research conducted the evaluation and published a **183-page report titled "An evaluation of Remote Viewing" on September 18, 1995.**
This is where the most interesting part appears.
The CIA page explains the evaluation results with the following intent:
> “There were sufficient instances of accurate remote viewing that were difficult to explain by randomness alone.”
In other words, the CIA page itself introduces that there were successful results in remote viewing experiments that were difficult to explain as mere coincidence.
However, there was a problem at the same time.
The issue was that remote viewing results were **too unreliable, inconsistent, and sporadic** to have the stability required for actual intelligence agency operations. Therefore, the CIA decided not to restart the program.
Subsequent Disclosure of Related Materials
At the request of the U.S. Congress, the CIA decided to re-examine the entire program and declassify related materials.
The CIA collected relevant documents in cooperation with the DIA and the U.S. Army, and released the declassified materials from all three agencies to the CIA's FOIA Electronic Reading Room.
For those who want to know more, the CIA also recommends reading Kenneth Kress's declassified paper, **「Parapsychology in Intelligence」**. This document provides a relatively detailed summary of the CIA's parapsychology research at that time.
The Most Important Part of This Article
The conclusion of this official CIA text is not simply **“psychic powers were fake.”**
More accurately:
① The CIA did indeed research ESP and Remote Viewing.
② Some experimental results showed a level of accuracy that was difficult to view as pure coincidence.
③ However, the results were not reproducible every time and lacked consistency.
④ Therefore, it was judged to be unreliable enough to be used in actual intelligence operations.
⑤ A significant amount of related research material is currently declassified and available to the public.
In other words, it is slightly different from saying they "stopped because nothing came of it." The core point, even in the expressions publicly written by the CIA, is that while there were statistically interesting results, there was not enough stability to trust and use them in the field.
[View Original CIA Text](https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/ask-molly-did-cia-really-study-psychic-powers/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)