Project Stargate is arguably one of the best illustrations of how state secrecy can allow extraordinary claims to persist well after the files are packed away. The CIA financed remote viewing research in 1977-95 that was to accomplish something the satellites and informants could not accomplish: convert human perception into intelligence. The afterlife of the program, though, as a public phenomenon has been conditioned not so much by its humble ambitions of operation, as by the narratives which found their way out of its margins, none more long-lived than the story that a remote viewer had both observed artificial constructions on the far side of the moon.
The internal logic of Stargate was realistic. Controlled protocols were used to make the participants describe far locations or obscured targets and evaluators graded the results to the photographs or other references. The program attracted serious money and serious attention, and afterward external auditors disagreed what the statistical account entailed. A CIA-funded survey of the overall research record painted a clear picture: The evidence of psychic functioning has been established beyond any reasonable scientific doubt, according to Jessica Utts in a review of the program, but Ray Hyman responded that the inexplicable statistical exceptions to chance are barely a scream and a shout above the sound of a distant freight locomotive. A practical weakness that not only persists in the topic but was also highlighted in the same evaluation was: In the scientific perspective, the program was disadvantaged by secrecy, Hyman said, since it diminished the checks and balances that are provided by conducting research in an open space.
That is where lunar sessions held by Ingo Swann are frequently retold. Swann, a champion who was said by his adepts to be an excellent remote viewer, said he experienced towering buildings, glowing domes, and non-human presence on the far side – an inaccessible stage that is literally behind our backs. In the best known passage Swann claimed that one of the officials in the United States advised him: “They have told us to keep off… They are not amiable, are they?” The tale then joins itself to a second riddle to which the people were already accustomed: why the Apollo age cadence had died and why the Moon had become over a period of decades, a destination accessible only to cameras.
But it is not that one story that makes the modern fascination go. It is also fed on a constant gap between what individuals believe they have seen and what institutions can confirm.
The contemporary attempt at examining unexplained aerial reports, on the science side, has been skewed towards instrumentation, as opposed to storytelling. The UAP study team, led by Boston University engineer Joshua Semeter, has advocated an approach to studying sightings, using method-first, that is, view them as a data problem: incomplete measurements, biased interpretation, and weak metadata. The cure to the situation proposed by Semiter is not rhetorical, but rather procedural; multiple vantage points, enhanced sensor combination and constrained analysis such that ambiguous observations do not fall prey to the falsehood of a favorable description. This pattern in focusing on measurement is also present in defense work: in its All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, 757 new UAP cases were reported in 2024, the vast majority of which were resolved as ordinary objects and 21 as unexplained.
The Moon, in its turn, provides its variant of the so-called “data gap,” but leaves at a different scale. In a 2016 article in the Journal of Space Exploration, it was stated that two remarkable aspects of the Paracelsus C far-side crater appeared to be walls or towers in the first instance, which were estimated to be bigger by using the imagery of Apollo 15 and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The authors put the site in the context of anomaly discovery instead of evidence of construction and wrote about the terrain that seemed to be excavated by some unidentified process, either natural or artificial. The importance of language: it demonstrates how seemingly effortlessly technical interpretation of images-shape-from-shading, sun angles, fused-frames, etc. can be dragged into a cultural stream that has already been hyped by decades of folklore about alien structures.
Practically these threads support each other. Remote viewing offers a human account with a character in it; contemporary UAP research offers an institutional recognition that not all instances can be immediately explained; lunar picture anomalies offer a pictorial canvas that can be made tangible, even when our information offers no underlying determination of it. This produces a stable self-perpetuating cycle of secrecy breeding distance, distance breeding interpretation and interpretation breeding hardening of distance in its inability to undo the ways it has learnt to move on quotes.
What lives on, however, is not one assertion about the far side of the Moon, but the lesson that engineering creates, under it: extraordinary conclusions demand extraordinary measurements, and the lack of common, testable data is in itself the strongest drive in the tale).
