The Research & Making sense of the CIA FOIA Documents

Background on the Birth of the Star Gate Interactive Archive

In 1995, the formerly classified research into anomalous cognition, energetics, and remote viewing was declassified (at least in part). According to Paul Smith, obtaining the research documents through the FOIA took many years. In 2004, he wrote the full length article linked to at the right. The following excerpt from that outlines the good news (the documents were finally made available) and the bad news (it was nearly impossible to find anything). That bad news was made good news when this blogger meticulously opened each and every file, one by one, and created a hyperlinked annotated index. According to Paul's 2004 article:

The good news is that now, after nine years of waiting, a major portion of the archives of the US Government’s seminal remote viewing program have not only been declassified, but made generally accessible to the public. For well over a year these same documents had been available on a limited basis, but you had to go bodily to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, sit at a CD-Rom carrel, wait while the CDs were loaded for you, then page through the [15,200] documents one at a time, printing off copies of those you wanted to take with you. It was laborious and maddening...and a crap shoot. The documents were numbered, not titled, there was no comprehensive index, no subject-matter nor chronological organization to help you know where to look or what you might find there. Soon after the Star Gate corpus was installed in the National Archives, CIA remote viewing program founder Dr. Hal Puthoff tried it out, spending the better part of a day and coming away with relatively little (though he did have lunch with Joe McMoneagle). A U.S. News & World Report journalist went to the Archives and ended up with a hodge-podge of documents of which she couldn’t make heads nor tales. In January, 2003 she faxed me a one-inch stack of them and we had to go through them together over the phone while I explained what each was and where it fit into the overall picture.

But now all that has changed. Ninety thousand pages of the Star Gate Archives, making up nearly[15,500] documents can be owned by anyone. As I said before, that’s the good news. But now for the bad news: It is still hard to sort out a very confusing mis-mash of correspondence, research reports, remote viewing sessions, tasking documents, memos, and so on. I just spent four exhausting weeks going through all fourteen disks the CIA provided, which is what it took to even begin to make sense of it all.

What I did was not much more than a skim-job – though I actually laid eyes on perhaps around 8,000 of the total, relatively few of the documents (though still amounting to hundreds) was I able to exam in any great depth. But it was fascinating. ...

It is one thing to hear about this (or, as in my case, remember them in one’s past). It is an altogether different experience to actually see these fascinating documents with one’s own eyes or, printing them out, actually hold hard copies of them in one’s hand to be leafed through and carefully examined. There was a lot to learn that was new even for me. (Paul Smith)

P.J. Gaenir was also cognizant of the work that went into producing the Interactive Archive. In her words (blog.dojopsi.com):

When the CIA released around five percent of the records from the collected projects now known as the STAR GATE program, I bought a program that ripped the multi-page TIF files into web-viewable GIFs, did this in detail, then I resized them all, and uploaded them to the web (at dojopsi.info).

Unfortunately, the index was a disaster. The filename in the index, if you went to that filename, it wasn’t that record. The file itself, the image, would have a different file number stamped on it. I really wracked my brain about it for awhile, but finally had to conclude there was no way to automate a scripting (such as if all the filenames were offset in the same way).

Depressed, given how much time I spent on it, I left the files just sitting there but without a clickable index.

Meanwhile, it turns out Tamra Temple spent about a bazillion hours (we’re talking months. This is an INSANE amount of work!) going through EVERY SINGLE FILE and renumbering them simply and making a detailed index with notes on content. She put it all in excel so it could be searched, sorted, and you can edit the notes and stuff for your own references.

After that much work on it, she well deserves a little compensation for the effort, and it’s not a bad price for this kind of thing. There’s more info and detail at the new website for it: http://stargate-interactive.com/, check it out!

Thank you, PJ :)

And to you the reader, I'd like to add a personal note. The indexing of these documents was a labor of love performed while being displaced by the hurricanes in Louisiana. At the time I began working on them, I believed I would return to my repaired home and the CD logo was "For Humanity." But governments and insurance companies are not as quick to do what needs to be done as one might hope. For example, it's now 2008 and I JUST received a letter from FEMA stating that funds are available for expenses incurred while being displaced. Two years later??? We need a word for an emotion that is a pure mix of laughter and grief. Perhaps it's irony.

So if you are inclined toward research into healing, consciousness, anomalous cognition, or remote viewing, you will find enormous value in the massive content of the Star Gate Interactive Archive. You will also be compensating me for the work I've done in the way that means most to me -- helping me to be "placed" rather than displaced. It's time.

Thanks go to Paul Smith, PJ Gaenir, Hal Puthoff, and Daz Smith whose encouragement, enthusiasm, and support made it possible for the Interactive Archives to be available for purchase online.