CIA Psychic Experiments

In 1995, the CIA quietly shut down a program that, for over twenty years, had trained American soldiers to be psychic spies — and then did something almost unheard of: it opened the files.The Declassified Files: CIA Psychic Experiments is a documentary-style history of the U.S. intelligence community's search for psychic warfare, built entirely from declassified government records, congressional testimony, and the tens of thousands of pages the CIA released to the public in 2017.Inside two wooden buildings at Fort Meade, Maryland, a secret Army unit ran sessions against real intelligence targets: Soviet weapons facilities, kidnapped diplomats, downed aircraft, hostages in Tehran and Beirut. The program passed through four code names — Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak, and finally Star Gate — and three sponsoring agencies, and cost American taxpayers roughly twenty million dollars over two decades.This book traces the full arc of that story: the Cold War anxiety that started it, the Stanford physicists who built its methodology, the famous "hits" that kept it funded, the scientists who spent twenty years arguing about whether any of it was real, and the 1995 evaluation that finally ended it.Written in a cinematic, evidence-first style and grounded entirely in primary sources, it separates documented fact from disputed interpretation and popular myth at every turn — including the viral Gateway Process document, the true story behind the "goat-staring" legend, and what the CIA's own scientists actually concluded.The Declassified Files: CIA Psychic Experiments is Volume I in an ongoing series exploring the real history behind declassified American intelligence programs.