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began talking about a “special” Soviet military plane that went down in Zaire during his presidency. After U.S. satellites scanned the area and found nothing, the CIA conferred with a clairvoyant who, Carter told the Emory students, “went into a trance and gave some latitude and longitude figures. We focused our satellite cameras on that point, and the plane was there.”
Hello? Here was a former president of the United States openly discussing government-sponsored paranormal operations. Now,
this
had potential.
Sure enough, intelligence agencies had been utilizing psychic espionage for years. “There are legitimate laboratory projects that may eventually unlock the mysteries of the human mind,” Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Jack Anderson reported in the
Washington Post
on April 23, 1984. “One of the most promising is the testing of ‘remote viewing’—the claimed ability of some psychics to describe scenes thousands of miles away.”
Anderson went on to describe a remote-viewing operation, code-named Project Grill Flame, that was producing “astonishing results.” In one test, a psychic was given latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates and, based solely on those numbers, stated that the site was a Soviet nuclear-testing area, a fact that U.S. satellites verified. Grill Flame and its variously named offshoots, including Sun Streak, Center Lane, and Star Gate (also Stargate), focused not only on espionage but also on predicting terrorist attacks and locating hostages, POWs, and kidnapped government officials.
In a follow-up piece on remote viewing, Jack Anderson claimed that former CIA director Stansfield Turner and General William Odom, the Army’s intelligence chief, were concerned that the Soviets might surpass the United States in psychic research. “Inside the Pentagon, [Odom] has raised the question of whether the Soviets could use psychics to penetrate our secret vaults,” Anderson stated in a sober tone. “This has led to talk in the backrooms about raising a ‘psychic shield’ to block this sort of remote viewing.” Anderson recognized how crack-pottythis all seemed but still defended it: “At the risk of being ridiculed over a ‘voodoo gap,’ advocates like Rep. Charlie Rose (D-N.C.), support continued research into the more promising areas of this mysterious field. After all, the atomic bomb was once thought to be a harebrained idea.”
And Grill Flame was an idea with consequences. Whether the program led to actionable intelligence (and there’s debate about this) or was really just a major disinformation campaign to spook the Soviets, it consumed tens of millions of federal tax dollars and thousands of manpower hours that critics argue could have been used more productively.
By the mid-1990s remote-viewing operations were shut down and declassified. After reading through hundreds of pages of documents and autobiographical material by former “viewers,” I learned that Fort Meade was where Grill Flame was hatched. Buildings 2650 and 2651, to be exact. I contacted Meade’s public affairs office several times to ask where the buildings were and if I could come by to photograph them. The staff members were always courteous but never gave me a definitive reply. Running short on time, I decided to drive there and, without doing anything illegal or unethical, explore the base myself.
Located twenty-five miles northeast of Washington, D.C., Fort George G. Meade is named after the U.S. general who was wounded five times during the Civil War and unexpectedly given command of Union forces at Gettysburg right before the battle. Meade prevailed, and the victory was a turning point in the war. (His post-Gettysburg record was spottier. Lincoln rebuked him for not aggressively pursuing and destroying Lee’s army, and Meade’s luster dimmed as Ulysses S. Grant’s star began to rise.) Access to Fort Meade is generally restricted, but the public is allowed inside under certain
Hello? Here was a former president of the United States openly discussing government-sponsored paranormal operations. Now,
this
had potential.
Sure enough, intelligence agencies had been utilizing psychic espionage for years. “There are legitimate laboratory projects that may eventually unlock the mysteries of the human mind,” Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Jack Anderson reported in the
Washington Post
on April 23, 1984. “One of the most promising is the testing of ‘remote viewing’—the claimed ability of some psychics to describe scenes thousands of miles away.”
Anderson went on to describe a remote-viewing operation, code-named Project Grill Flame, that was producing “astonishing results.” In one test, a psychic was given latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates and, based solely on those numbers, stated that the site was a Soviet nuclear-testing area, a fact that U.S. satellites verified. Grill Flame and its variously named offshoots, including Sun Streak, Center Lane, and Star Gate (also Stargate), focused not only on espionage but also on predicting terrorist attacks and locating hostages, POWs, and kidnapped government officials.
In a follow-up piece on remote viewing, Jack Anderson claimed that former CIA director Stansfield Turner and General William Odom, the Army’s intelligence chief, were concerned that the Soviets might surpass the United States in psychic research. “Inside the Pentagon, [Odom] has raised the question of whether the Soviets could use psychics to penetrate our secret vaults,” Anderson stated in a sober tone. “This has led to talk in the backrooms about raising a ‘psychic shield’ to block this sort of remote viewing.” Anderson recognized how crack-pottythis all seemed but still defended it: “At the risk of being ridiculed over a ‘voodoo gap,’ advocates like Rep. Charlie Rose (D-N.C.), support continued research into the more promising areas of this mysterious field. After all, the atomic bomb was once thought to be a harebrained idea.”
And Grill Flame was an idea with consequences. Whether the program led to actionable intelligence (and there’s debate about this) or was really just a major disinformation campaign to spook the Soviets, it consumed tens of millions of federal tax dollars and thousands of manpower hours that critics argue could have been used more productively.
By the mid-1990s remote-viewing operations were shut down and declassified. After reading through hundreds of pages of documents and autobiographical material by former “viewers,” I learned that Fort Meade was where Grill Flame was hatched. Buildings 2650 and 2651, to be exact. I contacted Meade’s public affairs office several times to ask where the buildings were and if I could come by to photograph them. The staff members were always courteous but never gave me a definitive reply. Running short on time, I decided to drive there and, without doing anything illegal or unethical, explore the base myself.
Located twenty-five miles northeast of Washington, D.C., Fort George G. Meade is named after the U.S. general who was wounded five times during the Civil War and unexpectedly given command of Union forces at Gettysburg right before the battle. Meade prevailed, and the victory was a turning point in the war. (His post-Gettysburg record was spottier. Lincoln rebuked him for not aggressively pursuing and destroying Lee’s army, and Meade’s luster dimmed as Ulysses S. Grant’s star began to rise.) Access to Fort Meade is generally restricted, but the public is allowed inside under certain
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