During the tense period of the Cold War, the U.S. government sought to deploy a potent new weapon against the Soviet Union: mind-reading.

In a highly classified project conducted first in a California research lab in the 1970s, and later at an Army base in Maryland, the CIA, Army and Defense Intelligence Agency recruited men and women claiming to have powers of extrasensory perception (ESP) to help uncover military and domestic intelligence secrets.

In 2017, the CIA declassified some 12 million pages of records revealing previously unknown details about the program, which would eventually become known as Project Star Gate. By the time the program was shut down in 1995, psychics known as “remote viewers” had taken part in a wide array of operations, from locating hostages kidnapped by Islamic terrorist groups to tracing the paths of fugitive criminals within the United States.