Seeing a distant place by psychic means. Just as the U.S. Air Force was attracted to the possibility of using telepathy to transmit messages, the idea of being able to survey locations, installations, possible bombing targets, and much else by some form of ESP was very attractive to the military and to intelligence agencies. To be able to garner the information about some target site thousands of miles away without the expense, the labor, and the risks of satellite surveillance, spy planes, spies the whole gamut of the intelligence-gathering world is indeed very attractive, so the U.S. intelligence agencies and the military had to examine the possibility.
In the early 1970s, the CIA funded a program of experiments into remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute. The two principals were Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, both physicists and both convinced of the existence of this form of ESP. They tested many possible subjects, some drawn from military personnel, and selected a handful who showed promise. Although the CIA withdrew support at the end of the 1970s, apparently then convinced that the program could not yield useful intelligence information, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) took the program under its wing and financed it until finally the agency abandoned it early in 1995. The program, in this second phase, was called Stargate and monitored foreign governments’ psychic intelligence activities, supplied psychic viewers to other U.S. government agencies from its small gifted group, and continued the laboratory experiments that were started at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and then transferred to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). All this was done in secret as befits intelligence activities.