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ABSTRACT: As a result of a Congressionally Directed Activity, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 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 (AIR) was contracted to conduct the review of both research and operations. Their September 29, 1995 final report was released to the public November 28, 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 extensive Department of Defense program reviews, and by using the questionable National Research Council's investigation of parapsychology as the starting point for their review. Although 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, these external considerations 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 have significantly underestimated the robustness of the basic phenomenon.
As part of the fiscal year 1995 defense appropriations bill, responsibility for the government-sponsored investigation and use of ESP was transferred to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In a Congressionally Directed Action, the CIA was instructed to conduct a retrospective review of the 24-year program, now known as Star Gate, that resided primarily within the intelligence community. The analysis was to include the research that was conducted since 1972 at SRI International and later at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). In addition, the CIA was to include an assessment of the intelligence-gathering utility of anomalous cognition (AC), and the program history was to be declassified. Initiated in June 1995, the evaluation was to be completed by...