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In 1972 the CIA, concerned by reports that the Soviet Union was dedicating substantial resources to what it called psychotronics – research into potential military applications of psychic and fringe science phenomena – began Project STAR GATE, a programme of psychic spying, or remote viewing. The project cost $20 million (£12 million) and lasted 23 years until the US military shut it down in September 1995.

The aim of the programme was to close the Cold War ‘psychic warfare gap’ and discover how serious a threat there was from Soviet psychotronics. Parapsychologists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ of the Stanford Research Institute were asked to look for repeatable psychic phenomena that might be useful to military intelligence. Working with psychic Ingo Swann, the duo developed what they called ‘a perceptual channel across kilometer distances’, in other words, the ability to witness objects, people and events at a distance: remote viewing.

Initially called SCANATE, meaning ‘scan by co-ordinate’, the project required the viewer to describe what they could see at map grid references provided by the CIA. Early signs were encouraging, and the programme expanded. Also known as SUN STREAK, GRILL FLAME and, finally, STAR GATE, the programme was used to help many US military and intelligence-gathering operations over its 23 years. There were a few successes, but more than a few failures.

The team is said to have located Soviet weapons and technologies, such as a nuclear submarine in 1979, identified spies, helped find lost SCUD missiles in the first Gulf War and located plutonium in North Korea in 1994. All in all, more than 20 psychics were employed. With lives at stake, many of them found the work traumatic, some ending up in psychiatric hospitals.

The project was closed down in 1995, probably because the Defense Department lost confidence in it, but even today some psychics continue with police and government work; one assisted the FBI – clearly unsuccessfully – during the hunt for Osama bin Laden in late 2001.