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Volume 10: Number 1: Article 5
The American Institutes for Research Review of the Department of Defense's STAR GATE Program: A Commentary
Edwin C. May, Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, 330 Cowper Street,
Suite 200, Palo Alto, CA 94301
As a result of a Congressionally Directed Activity, the Central Intelligence
Agency conducted an evaluation of a 24-year, government-sponsored program
to investigate ESP and its potential use within the Intelligence Community.
The American Institutes for Research was contracted to conduct the review
of both research and operations. Their 29 September 1995 final report
was released to the public 28 November 1995. As a result of AIR's assessment,
the CIA concluded that a statistically significant effect had been demonstrated
in the laboratory, but that there was no case in which ESP had provided
data that had ever been used to guide intelligence operations. This
paper is a critical review of AIR's methodology and conclusions. It
will be shown that there is compelling evidence that the CIA set the
outcome with regard to intelligence usage before the evaluation had
begun. This was accomplished by limiting the research and operations
data sets to exclude positive findings, by purposefully not interviewing
historically significant participants, by ignoring previous DOD extensive
program reviews, and by using the discredited National Research Council's
investigation of parapsychology as the starting point for their review.
While there may have been political and administrative justification
for the CIA not to accept the government's in-house program for the
operational use of anomalous cognition, this appeared to drive the outcome
of the evaluation. As a result, they have come to the wrong conclusion
with regard to the use of anomalous cognition in intelligence operations
and significantly underestimated the robustness of the basic phenomenon.
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