Page 181 of The Secret of Secrets

Feeling like they’d been caught flat-footed, the CIA immediately launched the nation’s first remote-viewing program with the goal of matching the Soviets’ success. Founded beneath the innocuous umbrella of an academic think tank associated with Stanford University, the classified project went through various early iterations and code names, including Grill Flame and Center Lane, before it was formally established in 1977 as Stargate.

To the surprise of the scientists involved, Stargate’s first stable of remote viewers—Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Joseph McMoneagle, and others—achieved startling success. While consistently entering the out-of-body state proved challenging, they were able to achieve “projection” and provide mind-boggling intelligence.

Including some “eight-martini results,” Judd recalled—the project’s official lingo for a success so mind-boggling that everyone required multiple cocktails to recover. Those results included spying on a Soviet double-hulled Typhoon submarine in the Arctic; finding a crashed Soviet Tu-95 bomber in Africa; locating kidnapped Brigadier General James L. Dozier in Italy; identifying a KGB colonel spying in South Africa; and more than a dozen other seemingly impossible results.

In 1979, the House Select Committee on Intelligence presented a closed-door, live demonstration of remote viewing, and many lawmakers in the room were left reeling. Democratic Congressman Charlie Rose had gone on record to say: “If the Russians have it and we don’t, we’re in serious trouble.”

The Stargate program grew in secrecy until 1995, when a series of serious security leaks went public and ignited public indignation. It appeared the CIA was either training an army of psychic spies…or was wasting taxpayer money on an absurd endeavor.

Rather than trying to deny the secret program was real, the agency made a sheepish public admission that Stargate had indeed existed, but that it was now defunct, having been shut down as a total failure and waste of U.S. tax dollars. It was not true, but the agency hoped their red-faced mea culpa would silence the public’s curiosity about the program and also persuade many of America’s global adversaries not to pursue psi-based intelligence.

The ploy worked fairly well, although it ruffled the feathers of some of Stargate’s retired remote viewers, who took offense at having their groundbreaking successes declared “bunk.” Several of them decided to write unauthorized biographies whose titles included:

Psychic Warrior: The True Story of America’s Foremost Psychic Spy and the Cover-Up of the CIA’s Top-Secret Stargate Program

PSI Spies: The True Story of America’s Psychic Warfare Program

A Sorcerer’s Apprentice: A Skeptic’s Journey into the CIA’s Project Stargate

Project Stargate and Remote Viewing Technology: The CIA’s Files on Psychic Spying

Conveniently for the agency, the accounts shared in these books, while mostly true, sounded so far-fetched that almost nobody believed them to be accurate. Rather than pursuing legal action against the authors and calling attention to what they’d written, the agency simply shrugged off the books as misguided, fictionalized money grabs by unstable former employees.

But there was more serious trouble to come.

In 2015, Newsweek magazine ran another unexpected exposé of Stargate. Judd would never forget reading the quote from retired Stargate project manager Lieutenant Colonel Brian Buzby, who broke two decades of silence and said: “I believed in it then, and I believe in it now. It was a real thing, and it worked.”

Troublingly, the article also described a remote-viewed sketch by Stargate’s legendary Agent 001—Joseph McMoneagle—depicting an enormous submarine with twin hulls, in a secret shipyard in Russia. According to Newsweek, U.S. satellite photographs later confirmed the existence, at the Soviets’ secret Severodvinsk shipyard, of a massive double-hulled Typhoon submarine, which constituted a new threat to American national security.

U.S. Senator and future Secretary of Defense William Cohen, when asked his thoughts on the defunct Stargate program, had replied:

I was impressed with the concept of remote viewing…. The exploration of the power of the mind was, and remains, an important endeavor…. I did support the Stargate program, as did Senator Robert Byrd and other members of the committee. There seemed to be a small segment of people who were able to key into a different level of consciousness.

Following that article, Director Judd found himself facing a deluge of Stargate conspiracy documentaries on television. One particularly alarming film was called Third Eye Spies, and although the agency gave it the standard brush-off response, Judd recalled being surprised how many of the film’s conspiratorial claims were accurate…including the suspicion that Stargate’s public failure had been a carefully stage-managed illusion.

They have no proof…but they’re not wrong.

In fact, remote viewing had quietly continued within the walls of Langley, SRI International, and Fort Meade. The smoke screen of Stargate’s failure enabled the agency to quietly plan the future of the program—a better-funded, far more secure, and infinitely more technologically advanced version of itself…deep underground, a world away from its tainted past, and with a brand-new code name.

Project Threshold was born.

“Director?” a voice crackled in the comm. “She’s on.”

Judd emerged from his daydream, raising his eyes to the video screen before him. “Thanks,” he said. “Please connect me.”

A moment later, the CIA seal on the screen dissolved, replaced by the defiant face of Ambassador Heide Nagel…flanked by two U.S. Marines.

Chapter 114

Katherine stared into the barrel of Finch’s gun, feeling like she had just been jolted back to reality. The CIA’s “death lab” was no consciousness research facility…it was a mission control for an astonishing new kind of weaponized remote viewing.

In Katherine’s world of noetics, Threshold would be the ultimate triumph. The key to understanding nonlocal consciousness had always been understanding out-of-body experiences; but that understanding had always faced two massive hurdles.

And Threshold solved them both.

The first hurdle was that out-of-body states were rare, fleeting, and often unpredictable. Only a few uniquely skilled individuals were capable of “projecting at will,” and even they struggled to maintain the out-of-body state for a full minute. At Threshold, however, using Gessner’s pods, anyone could be forced into an out-of-body state and suspended there for an hour or more.

Terrifying but true.