“They have told us to stay away… They are not friendly, are they?” This phrase, reported to be spoken by an anonymous U.S. official in a scenario involving remote viewer Ingo Swann, has become the kind of quote that goes further than any document number could particularly when the reported location is the Moon’s dark side, a region that is perpetually hiding from Earth’s observation.
It’s no wonder the phenomenon has endured. Between 1977 and 1995, a program dubbed Project Stargate attempted to harness the power of ‘remote viewing’ as if it were merely another arm of statecraft, as if the government’s commitment to satellites and signals intelligence would naturally include the study of mental perception at a distance. The images of the moon, the towers, the domes, the machines, and the sense of being watched, all of it is right at home in our contemporary fascination with secret agendas and concealed truths.
However, what is perhaps the most interesting thing about this archive is not its images of alien architecture. Rather, it is the engineering-type question which the CIA’s own paperwork seems to be asking: What is the quality of the output of the process, and can it be relied upon? In a CIA-commissioned evaluation of the remote viewing program in 1995, the assessors reported laboratory tests in which “hits” occurred above chance levels, although they also made it clear that it was by no means clear how a given “hit” could lead to a conclusion. The CIA’s operational evaluation was more pointed: The results of remote viewing were “vague and ambiguous,” “lacking in consistency,” and “required a great deal of subjective interpretation,” and in no case had the results guided intelligence operations.
This has particular importance to the Moon scenario because it changes what those incredible claims mean. Swann’s testimony is reconnaissance; the program’s self-analysis means that remote viewing is an output process that is not well calibrated. The analysis states that intelligence analysts were looking for specific detail, but this process was better at providing general impressions that might be extended, by an inquisitive analyst, to apply to any number of targets. Even if the laboratory indicated an effect, they were unable to distinguish viewer from judging effects or provide any consistent performance on real-world targets that intelligence analysts face.
This discrepancy between a compelling story and a process that fails to meet minimum standards for reliability also crosses over into findings related to anomalous reporting more generally. Reports summarized in research on the psychology of UFO/UAP reporting include observations of witnesses who commonly genuinely believe their observations, correlating to variables including vivid fantasy and openness to feelings. This does not render an observation into fraud; it renders it into testimony compelling, human, and necessarily ambiguous when the starting data are weak or when perception context is misleading.
In this regard, the far side of the Moon is a perfect target pool: impossible to reach, invisible to the eye from Earth, and overdetermined in a cultural sense. It is a site that is ripe for projection. It is also a site that is ripe for suspicion when the level of interest drops an ordinary occurrence that can be read as a message in itself
The legacy of Project Stargate, declassified but still evident, is more a proof or a debunking than a case study in experimentation on the fringes of measurable outcomes. These records indicate a government that is open to the idea of something unconventional being true, but equally so to something being true when confronted with its lack of real-world application: The so-called Moon Warning is not remembered for being true but for being a point where secrecy meets distance and a technique whose only real product was a space for interpretation.
