alt.hn

12/29/2025 at 3:16:32 AM

CIA Star Gate Project: An Overview (1993) [pdf]

 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00789R002800180001-2.pdf

by dvrp

12/29/2025 at 2:41:27 PM

For those who want to consider the mundane explanation about remote viewing: remember that humans can still be surprised by the birthday paradox and other synchronicities that occur when sampling data at large scale. So across thousands of sessions, the weak coincidences documented by the Stargate project are expected.

For those who want a skeptical & cynical view: if remote viewing works, it would be part of the standard strategy of every hedge fund. Remember that theses are groups who pay millions for millisecond advantages in information. And you only need an ~51-55% success rate to make a killing in HFT (vs a 50% success rate from a coinflip). The fact that hedge funds don't have remote viewers on staff is evidence against RV providing utility greater than an RNG.

And for curious people who want to try a scientific approach, I suggest joining https://www.social-rv.com/ which is collecting data about RV and trying to make the experiment ironclad via blockchain authentication of predictions.

by sxp

12/29/2025 at 2:54:00 PM

Or certain knowledge is just not available for anyone. No matter how much power and money you have. There are a lot of areas that are buried underneath technology, while it is an innate ability to certain individuals. Most people do not really understand how their gadgets work or what they are capable of beyond what is advertised....

by lofaszvanitt

12/29/2025 at 11:53:40 PM

That, and psyops to saturate the channel, because it's considered a 'born secret', falling under the 'invention secrecy act' or equivalents elsewhere for reasons.

And lastly simple inability by most to perceive that, and other ESP/Psi stuff, maybe akin to so called aphantasia for people who can't visually imagine things.

Edit: Also Weapons of Class Disruption. Can't have that, ever.

by LargoLasskhyfv

12/30/2025 at 1:59:43 AM

That social-rv is really interesting, apparently the target is randomly assigned _after_ submission, so it's not just remote viewing but also precognition?

The popular ones on the "explore sessions" are a very close match, but if you look at other predictions by those accounts, they're less sure. It's very easy to form a connection between any two images if you allow abstracted forms of similarity, and fundamentally there are very limited themes when it comes to images (natural things, man-made things. Smooth vs sharp.).

A good control test might be to have LLMs produce output instead, and score that.

by krackers

12/30/2025 at 5:05:22 AM

Hm I did notice this bit "list of up to the last 50 targets you've done (so you don't get duplicate targets too frequently)" which seems to invalidate some of the methodology. If the target is never among the last 50 you've done that skews sample space a bit. The fact that this needs to be done also seems to imply the set of images is not that large...

And this is worsened by the fact that the LLM-based auto scoring explicitly uses the last 10 as decoy targets

>When you submit a session, the system collects your last 10 targets (including the current target) to create a pool of possible matches. A multimodal AI agent is presented with your complete session (including all drawings, text, and data) along with all 10 targets from the pool. The agent is instructed to analyze and rank the targets based on how well they match the session content.

The protocol otherwise seems good, but the specific carveouts here would seem to bias results.

The source for the judging is at https://github.com/Social-RV/comparative-judging which is the part which would need to be studied carefully. At first glance, it exposes raw filenames to the LLM which might bias things. The ranking logic also seems a bit sketchy, it does some tournament-style elimination thing which I haven't analyzed thoroughly but if decoys are eliminated in an earlier round it could bias things compared to just asking the LLM to order the 10 images based on similarity in a single-pass which is obviously unbiased.

by krackers

12/30/2025 at 9:23:59 PM

I guess another thing, is that the null hypothesis is that an incorrect image is equally likely to be matched to any of the 10 decoy targets. But this isn't the case, the LLM has its own implicit bias. For instance, if you modeled things as a "bag of words" then longer target descriptions are more likely to match with images that contain bunch of text. So some decoy targets are more likely to be hit than others.

I think to counter this, you'd need to model your null hypothesis as the distribution that results when you have the LLM score a deliberately incorrect image against your target + dummies.

by krackers

1/1/2026 at 4:59:14 PM

Hey, creator of Social RV here! Awesome to hear you're enjoying what we're doing.

Some answers to your questions: - the target pool has 275 targets in it - we USED to use the last 9 targets as decoys, but changed to randomly sampling 9 targets from the pool instead several months ago. I've updated the FAQ to reflect that - the unique identifiers we show the LLM for the decoy targets is not the file name but rather the DB primary key for that target. There should be no information in it the AI could use to bias a decision - in regards to the tournament-style elimination, we have a new judge coming out soon that does a single pass. When this was originally built, the single-pass wasn't reliable enough on available models

Thanks very much for your thoughtful feedback and questions about what we're doing!

by chasemc67

12/29/2025 at 3:03:34 PM

Hedge funds? Yes but before than that, armies would use RV to get targets, secrets, etc. There are plenty of wars around the world and a lot of money involved.

by pmontra

12/29/2025 at 3:44:54 PM

[flagged]

by gtdhvy

12/29/2025 at 4:15:59 PM

What would be the price of revealing this information advantage?

by bfuller

12/29/2025 at 4:41:41 PM

There have been hedge funds and other investment groups that claim to use RV. (At least according to Google and pro-RV books.) They also claim to be able to beat the market. Based on those anecdotes, I think any hedge fund that thinks they can use RV will publicly brag about it to get more investors.

None of these groups can replicate their results beyond the initial claims. This is strong evidence that positive results in RV are just due to selection bias, specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias. If those investment groups could actually replicate their results, they would still be major names and others would be actively trying to copy them since it should only take a couple of millions of dollars to find capable RV candidates.

The non-skeptical view is that if people try to predict the stock market via RV, they will interfere with the future and their prediction ability will decrease. But when weighing this hypothesis against the hypothesis that RV is just selection bias, the latter wins due to Occam's Razor.

by sxp

12/29/2025 at 8:38:54 PM

Just go to wikipedia for the mundane explanation: data leakage to the judges of poorly designed experiments. Absolutely zero reproducibility.

by fumeux_fume

1/1/2026 at 5:00:51 PM

There have been many reproductions.

social-rv is our attempt to do yet another reproduction, as publicly as possibly. And we got the same result

by chasemc67

12/30/2025 at 4:19:43 AM

You are wrong. There has been many reproductions. People don't study it because there is no known mechanism of action and so it's fringe.

Jessica Utts, a well respected statistician

> Despite Professor Hyman's continued protests about parapsychology lacking repeatability, I have never seen a skeptic attempt to perform an experiment with enough trials to even come close to insuring success. The parapsychologists who have recently been willing to take on this challenge have indeed found success in their experiments, as described in my original report.

https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/response.html

by stevenhuang

12/30/2025 at 2:19:02 PM

> Jessica Utts, a well respected statistician

No, she isn't. She's a statistician, but mostly known for being in the panel review of Star Gate, and for close associations with parapsychology organizations.

She was already involved in parapsychology, having coauthored papers with the director of Star Gate (a parapsychologist himself) before becoming part of the review panel! You cannot have vested interests in the phenomenon being real if you're going to judge it impartially. You cannot have a relationship with one of the key personnel in the project you're reviewing, and especially not a relationship specifically about the same kind of things you're supposed to review! This is a serious flaw, she shouldn't have been part of the panel.

> There has been many reproductions

Like which ones? A reproduction must be done independently, by scientists without the same sponsors and vested interested. Can you point to these reproductions?

By the way, Star Gate was canceled with the conclusion that the experiments were inconclusive. Had there been reproductions, surely the conclusions would have been different?

by the_af

12/30/2025 at 4:38:40 AM

Before you can define statistical significance, you have to clearly define the success criteria. From what I see, remote viewing produces vague results, so some amount of human interpretation is necessarily. What counts as a "hit"? If you look at "verified" examples from the social-rv site GP mentioned, some of them match only in an abstract sense, but are still counted as a success. The more reliable thing would be to remote view a coin flip and have the person say heads or tails, but that's not how the stargate experiments were defined and I haven't been able to find any trials like this.

Edit: Actually I did find at least one experiment-ish, which is more precognition rather than remote viewing to determine crypto coin price trends [1]. Seems 53 correct predictions, 50 incorrect predictions which is well within statistical chance.

Also seems the social-rv GP linked will eventually have a remote-viewing for real-world events prediction-market type thing. Now that's interesting, and they cleverly avoid it devolving into a traditional prediction market by introducing indirection where two images are arbitrarily assigned to the outcome (true/false) and the person RVs the image, without knowledge of which outcome that image represents.

[1] https://reddit.com/r/remoteviewing/comments/lg6sf2/precognit...

by krackers

12/29/2025 at 10:21:44 PM

> For those who want a skeptical & cynical view: if remote viewing works, it would be part of the standard strategy of every hedge fund.

Please don't use the efficient capitalism argument. By that logic, if polio vaccines worked then why didn't 1940s pharma companies sell polio vaccines back when people were getting polio?

Remote viewing is bunk, but not because hedge funds in their omniscience have determined it to be unprofitable.

by jjk166

12/30/2025 at 12:13:17 AM

> Please don't use the efficient capitalism argument. By that logic, if polio vaccines worked then why didn't 1940s pharma companies sell polio vaccines back when people were getting polio?

Because they didn't know about such a vaccine. We know that remote viewing "exists"

I think that GP's point - that, if such things exist, they would actually be utilized - is a good one. The framing might not be great but it's also not entirely relevant. You could just as easily make a non-capitalism example - like why don't fire departments use them

by squigz

12/30/2025 at 9:30:51 AM

The concept of vaccines had been known for centuries during the 1940s. No one had ever gotten a polio vaccine to work. Imagine if they had concluded since it had never been done that it therefore could not work.

We are aware of remote viewing as a concept but it does not currently exist - no one has ever gotten it to work. There are very good reasons to think it can't work, but the lack of a practical implementation alone is not such a reason.

The issue is not capitalism specifically, it just frequently takes that form. Firefighters not doing something is equally fallacious proof of impossibility.

by jjk166

12/29/2025 at 4:32:52 PM

The issue with remote viewing as the CIA understood it was not that it didn’t work. By all means there are documents that indicated it did work. The difficulty however was that the training program was unreliable and insufficient to establish a reliable pipeline to competency like other military skills.

by kjkjadksj

12/29/2025 at 4:54:46 PM

The "difficulty" with remote viewing is nonsense pseudoscience and crackpottery.

It absolutely does not work. Not "unreliably", but not work at all.

This reminds me of that one time on HN when someone tried to convince me that ritual witchcraft (I think they called it blood magic) on servers was a real thing, necessary to make them work, and my dismissal was typical of narrow minded people.

by the_af

12/29/2025 at 9:05:58 PM

I would be supportive of blood magic if it made things work lol

by mnky9800n

12/31/2025 at 4:46:21 AM

Don’t knock it till you try it:

I call upon thе blood-moon goddess for I have but one request.

I've laid the altar, charged the crystals, the circle, I have blessed.

Then make clean && make all, BOOM compiles with no errors or warnings every time.

Witchcraft.

by buildsjets

12/30/2025 at 12:00:34 AM

Dude claims “there are documents that indicated it did work”. You didn’t enquire about them, just completely dismissed it. That is indeed typical of narrow minded people.

by lijok

12/30/2025 at 1:02:10 AM

Dudes claim all kinds of crap online. He already posted a PDF that indicated nothing of the sort.

If you will believe anything that seems true to you, because someone online said so, without any weight of evidence, and which is widely considered pseudoscience (go check)... I have a bridge to sell you.

What's with the wave of anti-intellectualism on HN of all places? Are we really trying to debate whether debunked crap like witchcraft and ESP is real? What's next, that Nigerian prince truly wants to gift you his money if only you can help him with a few dollars?

Carl Sagan must be spinning in his grave.

by the_af

12/30/2025 at 10:22:57 AM

You're one of the dudes online - never forget that.

Examining something != believing it, it's step 2 in the scientific method, with which I advise you get familiar with before invoking it as much as you have in this thread.

If all you have to contribute to the discussion is thrashing around, maybe stay out of it?

by lijok

12/30/2025 at 12:03:34 PM

> You're one of the dudes online - never forget that.

I never made any outlandish claims and therefore the onus isn't on me to prove anything.

> Examining something != believing it

But parapschyology has been examined and tested by scientists, and none of it has been verified in independent and controlled conditions. Unlike what the other commenter claimed, there are zero documents indicating RV works. Many of its practitioners have been shown to be frauds, pranksters or cranks (Puthoff thought Uri Geller was a psychic and was fooled by sleight of hand). What new evidence is there? RV isn't a new claim; it's an old debunked claim. Have they won the Amazing Randi prize yet? They could have, if RV was real!

> If all you have to contribute to the discussion is thrashing around, maybe stay out of it?

I'm reminding participants about how the scientific method works, which is important when discussing outlandish claims.

> Maybe stay out of it

???

by the_af

12/29/2025 at 1:05:10 PM

I always thought this was interesting.

May 15, 1987: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00789R0017000...

May 17, 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Stark_incident

by noworld

12/29/2025 at 2:52:43 PM

There just as much completely unrelated to the incident in that as there is related.

Also, what guarantee is there that whomever created that document didn't just date it two days prior to acquire more funding for doing spooky things?

by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7

12/29/2025 at 3:50:49 PM

I don't think there's a "guarantee" that it wasn't backdated, but there isn't any evidence of that either.

by noworld

12/29/2025 at 8:27:56 PM

Since backdating would be one of the ways to fake this, the onus lies in those that claim the prediction was legit.

That's how evidence works for extraordinary claims. Alas, scientific rigor is a harsh master.

by the_af

12/30/2025 at 12:10:06 AM

"extraordinary claims/extraordinary evidence" isn't scientific rigor, it's adding qualifiers to make the evaluation of the claim and evidence more subjective.

by noworld

12/30/2025 at 1:00:35 AM

It's literally how the scientific method works.

There's a reason RV is considered pseudoscience.

It speaks volumes you don't see any problem with the lack of proof that the documents weren't backdated, and get defensive when people tell you this must absolutely be ruled out if we're ever to even start considering your alleged evidence.

by the_af

12/29/2025 at 1:36:14 PM

This is so shocking, considering the similarities.

Reality is indeed stranger than fiction.

by FuturisticLover

12/29/2025 at 1:32:09 PM

Interesting indeed. Thanks for sharing.

by perfmode

12/29/2025 at 1:10:45 PM

What does the first pdf mean?

(And does it remind anyone else of an ee cummings poem or is it just me)

by namanyayg

12/29/2025 at 1:22:06 PM

The first PDF is the record of a remote viewing session from 2 days before the USS Stark incident, and it is eerily similar to the incident. The feelings and "atmosphere" (can't think of a better word for it) sound like what you might expect on a ship being attacked by a random missile.

For example:

1. The drawing on p. 7 looks like the superstructure of a warship.

2. The next few pages might describe what it feels like to wonder if your ship is actually under missile attack.

3. On page 10 it records "aircraft--large, multiengined; distant; orbiting; distraction controlled, directed. 'Under orders.'" This USNI article has a little more detail on the AWACS plane detecting the incoming attack: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2017/j...

There are other similarities, but the CIA report predates the attack, which is especially strange.

by noworld

12/29/2025 at 1:48:26 PM

How many of these 'remote viewing' sessions didn't bear any similarities to anything?

If you throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, some of it is going to stick. Especially when it appears to be random words that can be applicable to millions of situations.

by squigz

12/29/2025 at 2:22:29 PM

> Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is ex- pected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of a magnitude similar to those found in government sponsored research at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories around the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.

From Jessica Utts, who was the president of the American Statistical Association and asked to review the Stanford Research Institute psychic programs (including Star Gate).

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333228024_An_Assess...

by an0malous

12/29/2025 at 6:29:26 PM

> Using the standards applied to any other area of science

Assuming this is true, I have to wonder why it would be that the science community apparently places a higher burden of proof on this sort of research, and whether that higher standard has been earned or not.

by squigz

12/30/2025 at 1:18:29 AM

Ray Hyman, the other member of the review panel with Jessica Utts, disagreed with her conclusions ("the overwhelming amount of data generated by the viewers is vague, general, and way off target. The few apparent hits are just what we would expect if nothing other than reasonable guessing and subjective validation are operating."). Utts also seems to be involved in parapsychology organizations, which is pseudoscience -- I hope you won't dispute this much -- so I'd rule out her opinion as fringe, and not in any way the mainstream scientific opinion on RV.

RV is pseudoscience, you won't find scientific support for it, or anyone able to reproduce its purported results under controlled conditions.

The Amazing Randi probably had a challenge about RV that no con artist was able to win.

Edit: wait, it's even worse. Utts was completely biased and compromised:

> The psychologist David Marks noted that because Utts had published papers with [Edwin] May [a parapsychologist who took over Project Stargate in '85] "she was not independent of the research team. Her appointment to the review panel is puzzling; an evaluation is likely to be less than partial when an evaluator is not independent of the program under investigation."

So she was completely biased and wasn't independent of the leadership of Stargate! She had vested interests in it being "real", she was invested on RV and parapsychology!

by the_af

12/29/2025 at 5:02:03 PM

> If you throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, some of it is going to stick. Especially when it appears to be random words that can be applicable to millions of situations.

Indeed. I'm amazed so many HN regulars are surprised by this. It's how horoscopes work, we've known this for centuries now.

Have people forgotten the scientific method, the standards of proof, etc?

by the_af

12/29/2025 at 1:38:24 PM

Yeah, Remote Viewing should be a real-time event. This is Precognition.

by FuturisticLover

12/29/2025 at 5:19:39 PM

Why does it need to be real- time? If rv is possible then it’s naive to assume that time is somehow “special” vs 3D. It’s possible that time is not unfolding linearly, that is only an illusion. “Remote” could involve accessing information from along the time dimension.

by therobots927

12/29/2025 at 7:51:45 PM

I guess that makes sense. My tiny brain is still processing all the information. Thinking beyond 3D or space/time is impossible for me.

by FuturisticLover

12/29/2025 at 8:17:49 PM

Long ago I was told of looking at a timeline so that time "travels" from left to right is the normal view, but now rotate that timeline so that it appears as a dot to you. You now see all events of the timeline, but without reference to "when" they happened. Lots of scifi plots are also described as such

by dylan604

12/29/2025 at 8:20:28 PM

Think about a maze drawn on a piece of paper. Because we’re in 3D you can see all of the maze at once but if you were a 2D entity inside the maze you would only see the walls / entrances / exits directly in front or behind you. Now imagine drawing a line from the entrance to the exit - that’s 2D + a time dimension. Now make it a 3D maze and an entity existing outside of spacetime would be able to see all events happening at once in 3D.

by therobots927

12/29/2025 at 2:30:58 PM

> the CIA report predates the attack, which is especially strange

It's only strange if you believe the CIA released notes from their super-secret psychic program rather than the more plausible explanation that this is disinformation that was backdated for a boost of prestige.

by akatechis

12/29/2025 at 3:15:46 PM

Can you give me some evidence that this document was backdated? I'm not saying the government isn't shady AF, but I just wonder what's behind the immediate jump to "this has to be BS" rather than keeping an open mind.

by noworld

12/29/2025 at 4:59:11 PM

Extraordinary claims (that RV is a real phenomenon) require extraordinary evidence. The null hypothesis is the default position, it requires no extraordinary evidence; the opposite does.

This is scientific method 101. Let's not pretend we're not familiar with it just because some dodgy CIA document surfaced.

by the_af

12/29/2025 at 8:17:08 PM

Ah, since the claim contradicts materialism, you get to make up a scenario, present no evidence, then put the burden on the other side. Got it.

There's literally extraordinary evidence in the PDF, you just don't like it.

by noworld

12/29/2025 at 8:24:32 PM

I didn't make up any scenario. RV is the made up scenario.

If you want to reject the scientific method go ahead, but you won't find much sympathy here.

by the_af

12/30/2025 at 1:29:34 AM

You call that extraordinary evidence? Looks pretty vague to me.

"Ship. Round thing. Structure. Water. Propeller."

Give me a break. Reads like the typical psychic scammers.

by olyjohn

12/30/2025 at 2:52:25 AM

A spicily prepared `false flag' operation dead drop will do the time travel trick especially given the CIA is being outgamed on all the dimensions.

by __patchbit__

12/31/2025 at 4:57:39 AM

Always nice to stumble across your posts. Any progress on the jailbreak?

by buildsjets

12/29/2025 at 1:17:44 PM

The first PDF is the results/notes of someone attempting remote viewing. Given the dates, I agree with the above poster that the similarities are impressive.

by finalarbiter

12/30/2025 at 2:05:16 PM

The PDF mentions a ship and some sort of unexpected catastrophe (in vague surrounding, horoscope-like terms) but it also mentions "high-powered lasers", Bikini atoll, H-bombs, and the drawings of the alleged ship superstructure look nothing like those of the USS Stark (some of the notes mention a "flight deck" like an aircraft carrier's; while the USS Stark does have a flight deck this is a mostly irrelevant detail about this class of ships). Plus this was done for the CIA, so unsurprisingly any "viewing" would be primed to refer to military hardware and events; imagine if they mentioned McDonald's, ice-cream, and an upcoming football match.

If you exclude H-Bomb, high powered laser, disregard the shapes don't match the USS Stark, and fixate on the coincidences -- pattern-matching, something the human brain has evolved for survival -- of course the similarities will seem impressive. This is "cold reading 101", a known trick. The average tarot reader knows how to do this.

Interestingly, we don't know of any other predictions that widely missed the mark. So if predictions 1 to 10 were made, most wildly inaccurate, but one of them vaguely/partially resembles something that happened some days after, that's not convincing to demonstrate anything but a random result. Let's say another prediction stated "calm waters, US dominance, safe passage, successful mission, happy sailors". How would we assess the accuracy of the predictive method?

by the_af

12/29/2025 at 1:42:53 PM

I am amazed that people take Hal Puthoff at his word that he has worked on all these secret projects for decades even though he cannot describe in definitive terms what the actual outcomes of those programs were. But he is able to talk about them for hours in the vaguest terms possible. How is that even possible. I mean I worked for an aerospace company for 5 years and could go into great and boring detail about what I did while I was there. But all these people supposedly worked on things much more exotic and can’t remember anything. This is the greatest psyop of all time.

by mberning

12/29/2025 at 10:05:08 PM

> I am amazed that people take Hal Puthoff at his word that he has worked on all these secret projects for decades even though he cannot describe in definitive terms what the actual outcomes of those programs were.

This is one hundred perfect my view on this, and things are more than suspicious when suddenly being asked to get into the weeds on some technical aspect these guys start citing national security to keep things vague.

by Simon_O_Rourke

12/30/2025 at 12:07:01 AM

Why is it surprising that they can’t talk about it in concrete terms given “ all these people supposedly worked on things much more exotic”?

by lijok

12/30/2025 at 3:11:56 AM

Because talk is cheap, but when pressed, a crackpot like Puthoff cannot provide a single relevant detail. Had he been involved in actual top secret projects, he would shut up about them; instead he fantasizes.

He also has a history of quackery, belief in the paranormal, and being duped by Uri Geller.

I mean, he's the worst kind of crackpot: a sucker who believes magic tricks are real and will evangelize about it.

by the_af

12/30/2025 at 10:18:50 AM

You didn't answer the question, you just went on another one of your rants. Why is it surprising that he can’t talk about it in concrete terms given “ all these people supposedly worked on things much more exotic”?

by lijok

12/30/2025 at 11:59:33 AM

I did answer, but I realize arguing with parapsychology believers is a fool's errand.

Puthoff is a crank. Of course he won't provide evidence of participating in top secret projects that produced any results: he doesn't have it. He can only speak in the vaguest terms typical of pseudoscience cranks.

by the_af

12/29/2025 at 2:34:42 PM

Also it would be very easy to proof that it really works. Instead they remain vague. They remind me of the dropship sales boys, that mainly sell courses on how to dropship instead of dropshipping themselves.

If you find a believer they will worship you with no hard questions.

by tiku

12/29/2025 at 2:17:51 PM

It's only dumb if it doesn't work.

If it works... well, congratulations. You now have an edge that no one else knows about.

by cushychicken

12/29/2025 at 2:03:17 PM

No surprise here. The geniuses at the CIA failed to anticipate the fall of the Soviet Union, ignored the warning signs about 9/11, and falsely claimed there were "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq during the American invasion in 2003. Apparently the so-called intelligence agency was busy with important research on "telepathy," "psychokinesis" and other "para-psychological phenomena."

by diogenes_atx

12/29/2025 at 4:40:29 PM

I thought the story was the CIA and other intelligence said there are not wmds, but the bush whitehouse said there were anyhow and invaded all the same.

by kjkjadksj

12/30/2025 at 3:31:35 AM

It was more complicated, from what I've seen:

I think CIA analysts said no WMDs, but the CIA head personally told the President that the case for WMDs was a "slam dunk" - maybe just a kiss-ass moment, but something to learn from: those moments have consequences.

But generally not getting the answers they wanted, VP Cheney and/or SecDef Rumsfeld setup their own mini-intelligence agency in the Department of Defense which produced their desired results, including WMD and also Iraq somehow being involved in 9/11. They relied heavily on an informant that they code-named "Curveball". Seriously.

by mmooss

12/29/2025 at 4:50:22 PM

A Google search using the terms "did the CIA claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003?" yields the following information:

The CIA and the Bush administration claimed Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in 2003, building the case for invasion on assertions that Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs and failed to comply with UN resolutions, though these claims proved to be incorrect after the invasion found no stockpiles, leading to later acknowledgments of intelligence failures...

CIA's Role: The CIA provided assessments, including classified estimates, stating high confidence in Iraq's possession of biological and chemical weapons, which formed the basis for public statements by officials...

Intelligence Failures: Investigations later confirmed that the intelligence community was "simply wrong" in its assessments, highlighting failures in analysis and sourcing, despite intelligence professionals believing their information at the time...

In summary, the CIA and U.S. government did assert the presence of WMDs, but these claims were later disproven, revealing significant flaws in the intelligence used to justify the war.

by diogenes_atx

12/30/2025 at 1:49:09 AM

Recommend "The Mission" by Tim Weiner for this one. Not as simple as this.

Often the intel community is dead right, but get thrown under the bus by the admin. The intel community can't really come out and say "actually what our pres is saying is false, we told him this would happen".

by tevon

12/29/2025 at 2:34:31 PM

>falsely claimed there were "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq during the American invasion in 2003

This was due to malice not ignorance/incompetence.

by logicchains

12/30/2025 at 1:47:01 AM

They did tell the admin that there was no WMDs. But Rumsfeld didn't want to hear it, and forced them to "find" it.

Almost killed the agency

by tevon

12/29/2025 at 2:39:36 PM

Well in that case, the CIA is not merely stupid and incompetent, it's deliberately evil. How many innocent civilians were slaughtered in Iraq during the American occupation?

by diogenes_atx

12/29/2025 at 5:35:00 PM

Evil and apparently experimenting with magic. Sounds like a recipe for a good time.

by therobots927

12/29/2025 at 2:58:03 PM

I mean yeah, that's the Americas in general since Europeans first put eyes on it. ~500 years of brutality and slaughter in pursuit of profit. We're gonna do it again in Venezuela and probably Denmark/Greenland. C'est la vie

by m4ck_

12/29/2025 at 6:24:34 PM

Ah yes, the quintessential noble savage fallacy.

Before the evil Europeans set their greedy eyes on the new world there was peace, love, and ecstasy every single day. Once the evil Europeans did evil European things the Americas were corrupted for profit and greed. Now the Venezuelans who live in peace and love will be colonized by European descendents, just like natives before.

by stuffn

12/29/2025 at 8:36:05 PM

> Before the evil Europeans set their greedy eyes on the new world there was peace, love, and ecstasy every single day.

That's reading a lot into the other post.

by freejazz

12/30/2025 at 12:09:56 AM

“since Europeans first put eyes on it” seems to justify it pretty well.

by NetMageSCW

12/30/2025 at 3:27:48 PM

"500 years of brutality and slaughter in pursuit of profit" no one said it was peaceful before

by freejazz

12/29/2025 at 6:00:28 PM

https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads...

by someothherguyy

12/30/2025 at 4:06:33 AM

His analysis is flawed.

> Despite Professor Hyman's continued protests about parapsychology lacking repeatability, I have never seen a skeptic attempt to perform an experiment with enough trials to even come close to insuring success. The parapsychologists who have recently been willing to take on this challenge have indeed found success in their experiments, as described in my original report.

If the phenomenon we are trying to study is somehow intelligent, then the observer effect will see to it that skeptics will never progress towards understanding until they're somehow "ready", whatever that means.

https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/response.html

by stevenhuang

12/30/2025 at 5:05:27 AM

She also says

" There is little benefit in continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data. "

Which is an insane thing to say and reveals her motivated reasoning.

by someothherguyy

12/30/2025 at 5:18:53 AM

The results have been collected using experimental rigour stricter than medical trials.

The one's engaged in motivated reasoning are skeptics like you and Randy who refuse to engage with the data because of, ironically, motivated reasoning. The data is clear. Either point out the flaws in the experimental protocols or consider you have some metaphysical priors to update.

by stevenhuang

12/29/2025 at 12:58:45 PM

Disappointing they didn't have their research facility in Cheyenne Mountain.

by franky47

12/29/2025 at 10:29:40 PM

Probably for the best, that place is dealing with weird alien phenomena like every week.

by jjk166

12/30/2025 at 11:59:45 AM

2 million for this bullshit but we can't feed everyone got it

by westmeal

12/29/2025 at 12:30:16 PM

TLDR? Goat-staring is real?

by meindnoch

12/29/2025 at 1:21:54 PM

"real" in that the program existed and research was done? Yes.

"real" in that remote viewing and psychic powers actually exist? No.

The CIA researched a ton of "mind-control" techniques under MKULTRA too but that doesn't mean they can control your mind.

The government has programs to research UFOs but that doesn't mean aliens are buzzing our skies and kidnapping our cattle.

I think what we're really seeing here is just money laundering and confirmation bias.

by krapp

12/29/2025 at 9:04:41 PM

> that doesn't mean they can control your mind.

If the attacker has physical access, assume your system is not safe.

by DANmode

12/29/2025 at 1:34:20 PM

> TLDR? Goat-staring is real?

The movie was based on the work of a journalist investigating the topic and wrote a non-fiction book on the subject.

by hosh

12/29/2025 at 12:49:52 PM

It’s hard to believe that so recently, “serious” people would fund research of literal mumbo jumbo. By all means, the 90s was a different time epistemologically.

We aren’t immune to this today, far from it, though the hoaxes have become way more believable in my assessment.

by kubb

12/29/2025 at 1:10:32 PM

The CIA has been this way since basically its inception. It's where a bunch of lead-lined brains are given unreasonable budgets and discretion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_of_Science_and_Tec...

by willis936

12/29/2025 at 1:23:19 PM

It appears this was actually authorized by Congress.

“ In the FY 1991 Defense Authorization Act, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was identified as executive agent for initiating a new program to investigate parapsychological/ anomalous phenomena. A funding level of $2 million was authorized for DIA to undertake specific research and other activities relative to this activity. Objectives of this authorization were to enable a systematic and scientifically sound approach to the R&D effort, to permit wider and more systematic review of potential intelligence applications, and to assess foreign developments in this area.”

It was taken serious enough to be funded for two decades starting in the 70s. Eventually it was terminated when the strategic pressure eased.

AIR was commissioned to look at the research and says in this [1]

“A three-component program involving basic research, operations, and foreign assessment has been in place for some time… beginning in the 1970s, it has conducted a program intended to investigate the application of one paranormal phenomenon — remote viewing, or the ability to describe locations one has not visited.”

“The AIR review found that remote viewing produced occasional hits that were statistically better than chance, but it remains unclear whether the observed effects can unambiguously be attributed to paranormal phenomena, and the laboratory conditions under which effects were seen do not generalize to real intelligence problems. The information provided by remote viewing was judged vague and ambiguous, making it difficult or impossible for the technique to yield information of sufficient quality and accuracy for actionable intelligence.”

1. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00791R0002001...

by firesteelrain

12/29/2025 at 1:41:20 PM

> A funding level of $2 million was authorized

In government terms that's pretty small. I guess even if there's a low chance of working, the payoff if it did would be huge.

by RobotToaster

12/29/2025 at 1:45:44 PM

I agree. $2million is small. Where I work, I am regularly given budgets well over that to buy software or hardware.

by firesteelrain

12/29/2025 at 2:33:36 PM

At the time, 2 million was an appreciable sum. Maybe not to a government, but that wasn't chump change back then the way it is now.

by lagniappe

12/29/2025 at 2:06:58 PM

Yeah pretty much this unfortunately. Imagine some person tasked and genuinely interested in helping the united states but they do it all with subterfuge which backfires more than it helps anything. Such a person must experience a lot of cognitive dissonance and would generally be susceptible to conspiracy theories such as this which only reinforces the cycle of meddling.

by drpepper42

12/29/2025 at 1:12:51 PM

How do we know if something is "mumbo jumbo" until we actually check and verify it?

by namanyayg

12/29/2025 at 1:33:44 PM

I see you’re interested in epistemology yourself. You should study it.

by kubb

12/29/2025 at 3:00:00 PM

Another element that is ignored in all of this is: How much of this is really intended to be genuine research? The CIA is an intelligence agency, and misdirection is part of counter-intelligence.

Putting legitimate resources into a phony cause could be an effective way of leading an enemy astray, if you know they are intercepting or replicating the same research you're doing (or if you happen to " leak " details to them).

by dwroberts

12/29/2025 at 1:23:22 PM

The benefits of hindsight. I'm sure in 30 odd years someone will be making the same comments about our current hoaxes.

by ifh-hn

12/29/2025 at 1:36:43 PM

And we will have new hoaxes by then.

The embarrassing part is that we can identify many of them already, before the historical consensus catches on.

by kubb

12/29/2025 at 2:13:16 PM

That's the whole thing about consensus tho, it's hardly embarrassing

by MangoToupe

12/29/2025 at 2:18:14 PM

Do you have any examples of these easily identifiable contemporary hoaxes?

by Teever

12/29/2025 at 2:58:34 PM

Are there any areas in which you'd feel attacked if I poined out a hoax?

by kubb

12/29/2025 at 1:18:00 PM

I'm not sure it's changed that much. Look at the work around the em drive. Or fusion power for that matter. I'm not saying we shouldn't be researching fusion, but all the fusion "startups" are essentially jokes, or more charitably, monuments to the unwarranted hubris of investment capital.

by antonvs

12/29/2025 at 2:37:50 PM

Congratulations, you're the new head of the Department of War. It's Day 1 in your new role.

An admiral walks in and sits down and tells you that he'd like some money to research some unidentified aircraft that are buzzing US Navy pilots. Shaped like "tic tacs", that seem to defy physical laws - they accelerate incredibly fast and seem to be able to move between air and water without damaging their structure, even at high-speed. They've been caught on camera multiple times, and pilots don't know what to make of them.

You ask what is this "mumbo jumbo", and whether he is "serious". He points out to you that if these aircraft are Russian or Chinese in origin, given there is no defence against them, they pose a major threat to national security and your refusal to take them seriously will not bode well for you in the annals of time if they do turn out to be a threat.

You agree to funding a small program to research further.

Then an Army General walks in. He wants $2m for a program to research "remote viewing" and "psychokinesis". You sit in awe as he explains: multiple independent laboratories have been able to conduct experiments that show Extra-Sensory Perception, Remote Viewing and Psychokinesis may be real despite not being explained by any current physical model. There is intelligence to suggest that Chinese and Russian militaries are investing in these techniques and the US military is not able to defend against them if they're real and exploited by adversaries, or for the USA to exploit them either, because they have no understanding of them.

You hand wave it away as "mumbo jumbo" and state this is not the work of "serious people". You demand a physical model to explain it before you invest.

You are reminded that there is no single physical model that explains the entirety of how an aircraft wing works, or how anaesthetics work, and that the only way such models are created is through scientific investigation. If after spending the $2m they're able to show such claims are baseless, that is a null result that has value in that it shows the Russians and Chinese are also not a threat to US National Security.

You are reminded that such techniques may pose a major threat to national security and your refusal to take them seriously will not bode well for you in the annals of time if they do turn out to be a threat.

You agree to funding a small program to research further.

And on it goes. It's Occam's razor - if you commit to the scientific method, you have to commit to it. If you are concerned there is a science and technology that others have and you don't, you need to figure out if there is value in you being able to obtain that science or technology, even if it sounds like "mumbo jumbo" today.

These weren't idiots, they weren't corrupt, they were asking for tiny slithers of money to figure out if Western Civilisation was about to collapse into the hands of a few people who asked more questions.

by PaulRobinson

12/29/2025 at 1:03:43 PM

[dead]

by AniseAbyss

12/29/2025 at 12:52:50 PM

> By all means, the 90s was a different time epistemologically

We're in an age when vaccines are treated as the enemy and the us health secretary believes paracetamol causes autism.

by exe34

12/29/2025 at 1:13:01 PM

The Tylenol thing is one of the least crazy things he has believed in, at least it had some initial studies suggesting it. There’s no science at all in most of his beliefs.

by Mistletoe

12/29/2025 at 1:26:52 PM

It's perfectly rational to allocate a bit of money towards investigating unlikely phenomenon. In this case, it started around the 70s and it was believed that the Soviet Union was also doing research into paranormal effects, so even if people were skeptical it seems prudent to allocate funds and research if there's anything there.

by TheAceOfHearts

12/29/2025 at 7:04:15 PM

I am from Spain and know some agents. Those are also known events under the freemasonry term umbrella.

I have seen, after writing through Tor to a known intelligence agency, a ministry of a cabinet through my inner eye, or whatever you may call it.

Black and white video so to speak. I was even threatened by a twice loaded gun so I could go away to my own businesses in that affair.

I can talk without being in the same room with a lot of cni agents, and interestingly, this is not a known fact of the intelligence community outside it.

I can even receive and transmit figures using my mind alone. Tested with a CIA agent. Greets to the spy museum series.

I would predict in the past, a year ago or so, a future event seen as it was filmed. Also diverted pathways in the past: if I could have went into the foreign legion I could be dead at the time and my mother could had defenestrated herself after being noticed by two officers: movie style too.

Sometimes I have listened to people thoughts, small phrases without them noticing.

Disclaimer: I am not on any agency payroll at this time.

by escanda

12/29/2025 at 7:56:22 PM

Given that you yourself have admitted you have schizophrenia in a recent comment, I find it hard to give much weight to your “paranormal” experiences. Confirmation bias affects all, those that can hear voices and those that can’t. I hope you understand.

by sph

12/29/2025 at 8:28:38 PM

I understand you might be 19 years old and you might not yet understand fully what surrounds you. Better you don't.

by escanda