LT LT aaa La ASIN Cate eee sent sitar ner ne -—— oo Approved For Release 2002/05/22 : CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5 Appendix D: Stargate Operational User Interviews a cE ARR RELI: mei tS NO A brief summary of the salient points which appeared consistently throughout these interviews follows: - the principal motivation for using Star Gate services was the hope that something useful might result; the problems being addressed were very difficult and the users were justifiably (and admittedly) "grasping at straws” for anything that might be beneficial. - the information provided by the Star Gate program was never specific enough to cause any operational user to task other intelligence assets to specifically corroborate the Star Gate information. - while information that was provided did occasionally contain portions that were accurate, albeit general, it was - without exception - never specific enough to offer substantial intelligence value for the problem at hand. - two of the operational user organizations would be willing to pay for this service if that was required and if it was not too expensive (although one user noted that his organization head would not agree). However, the fact that Star Gate service was free acted as an incentive to obtain "it might be useful - who knows" support for the program from the user organizations. The reader is referred to Appendix B for additional information resulting from these interviews. However, two inconsistencies noted during the discussion of the numerical evaluations in Section 4.0 were supported by information obtained from the interviews. On the average, the Org. C evaluators scored higher that those of Org. B. One cause for this discrepancy may be due to the fact that the Org. B evaluators were, in general, skeptical of the process while the lead person at Org. C claimed to be a believer in parapsychology and, in addition, had the last say in any evaluations that were promulgated back to the Star Gate — PM. This comment is in no way intended to impugn the honesty or motivation of any of these personnel, merely to point out that this difference in the belief-structure of the staff at these two organizations may have resulted in the perceived scoring bias. As noted above, the subjectivity inherent in the entire process is impossible to eliminate or to account for in the results. The higher average scoring, especially Accuracy scores, from the Org. A evaluators appears to be explained by the procedure they used to task and evaluate the experiments they were performing with the Star Gate program. Namely, they used a staff member as a “beacon” to "assist" the RV's in "viewing" the beacon's location. Subsequently, the same Org. A staff member evaluated the RV inputs. However, since he/she had been at the site, he/she could interpret anything the appeared to be related to the actual site as accurate. When asked if the information from the multiple RV's was sufficiently accurate and consistent such that a "blind" evaluator, i.e., one who did not know the characteristics of the site, would have been able to identify information from the RV inputs that they could interpret to be accurate, they American Institutes for Research — D-T2 Approved For Release 2002/05/22 : CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5
nen er er Approved For Release 2002/05/22 : CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5 Appendix D: Stargate Operational User interviews a reppin. AERP HIRED eet all answered in the negative and agreed that the score would have been lower. Again the subjectivity of the process appears - the evaluator could interpret the admittedly general comments from any RV that seemed to relate to the actual site as "accurate", e.g., consider an RV input "there is water nearby", the evaluator knows this it true of almost anyplace especially if one does not or cannot define what kind of water, i.e., is it a lake, a water line, a commode, a puddle? 7.0 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 7.1. CONCLUSIONS The single conclusion that can be drawn from an evaluation of the 40 operational tasks is that the value and utility to the Intelligence Community of the information provided by the process cannot be readily discerned. This conclusion was initially based solely upon the analysis of the numerical evaluations presented in Section 4.0, but strong confirmation was provided by the results of the subsequent interviews with the tasking organizations (Ref. Section 6.0 and Appendix B). While, if one believes the validity of parapsychological phenomena, the potential for value exists in principal, there is, nonetheless, an alternative view of the phenomenology that would disavow any such value and, in fact, could claim that the ambiguous and subjective nature of the process actually creates a need for additional efforts with questionable operational return on the part of the intelligence analyst. Normally, much of the data provided by the RV(s) is either wrong or irrelevant although one cannot always tell which is which without further investigation. Whether this reality reduces or eliminates the overall value of the totality of the information can only be assessed by the intelligence analyst. It clearly complicates his/her problem in two ways: 1) it adds to the overburden of unrelated data which every analyst already receives on a daily basis, i.e., the receipt of information of dubious authenticity and accuracy is not an uncommon occurrence for intelligence analysts, and 2) since the analyst does not n(Jrmally know which information is wrong or irrelevant, some of it is actually "disinformation" and can result in wasted effort as the analyst attempts to verify or discount those data from other sources. The review of the operational tasking and its subsequent evaluation does not provide any succinct conclusions regarding the validity of the process (or the information provided by it). First and foremost, as discussed in Section 5.0, the entire process, from beginning to end, is highly subjective. Further, as noted in Section 3.0, the degree of consistency in applying the scoring measures, any guidance or training provided to the evaluators by any of the tasking organizations and/or the motivation of the evaluators are either unknown or, in the case of the latter, may be highly polarized (see Appendix B) The lack of information regarding these items could account for some of the variability in the scores across organizations noted in Table 4-2, but this cannot be certified and is, at most, a suspicion. American Institutes for Research D-T3 Approved For Release 2002/05/22 : CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5
eS NR TN a a ERA TRI: SDA SLR secrete Approved For Release 2002/05/22 : CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5 Appendix D: Stargate Operational User Interviews RT eR Ae NRA mi: ea RRS SR Whether the information provided by the Star Gate source is of sufficient value to overcome the obvious detriment of accommodating the irrelevant information included therein is an open question? More precisely, whether the Star Gate information is of sufficient value to continue this program - vis-a-vis other sources of information and other uses of resources - is an important question for the Intelligence Community to address, irrespective of one's personal views and/or beliefs regarding this field of endeavor, i.e., does the information provided justify the required resource investment? One method that might assist this evaluation is to develop a means for scoring the complete input from the RV process, i.e., evaluate all information and determine how much is truly relevant, how much is of undeterminable value and how much is completely irrelevant. One could then analyze how much information is being handled to achieve the relevant information (along with some measure of the relevancy) and make judgments on its value vis- a-vis the investment in time and money. Other, less technical methods, for adjudicating this issue also exist. 7.2 RECOMMENDATIONS Considering the statements above, the only sensible recommendation in this author's mind is to bring some “scientific method" into this process (if it is continued). As evidenced by more than 20 years of research into paranormal psychology, much of it done by institutions of higher education or others with excellent credentials in related fields, validation of parapsychological phenomena may never be accredited in the sense that is understood in other scientific and technical fields of endeavor . Control in any rigorous scientific sense of the multitude of human and physical variables which could, and probably do, influence this process is difficult - perhaps impossible - for any except the most mundane types of experiments, e.g., blind "reading" of playing cards. Even these restricted experiments have led to controversy among those schooled in the related arts. One of the foundation precepts of scientific endeavor is the ability to obtain repeatable data from independent researchers. Given the subjective nature of RV activities, it is difficult to believe that this aspect of parapsychology will ever be achieved. As an admitted neophyte in this area of endeavor, I categorize the field as a kind of religion, i.¢., you either have "faith" that it indeed is something real, albeit fleeting and unique, or you "disbelieve" and attribute all positive results to either chicanery or pure chance.! 'Practicioners in the field, including those funded under government contracts, would argue with these observations, perhaps vehemently; some would argue further that the phenomenology has been verified beyond question already. This reviewer disagrees; albeit, these observations are not intended to discard the possibility of such phenomena. American institutes for Research D-14 Approved For Release 2002/05/22 : CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5
NL EE ee ee TO en Approved For Release 2002/05/22 : CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5 ________. Appendix D: Stargate Operational User interviews Thus, one must recognize at the start that any attempt to bring scientific method into the operational tasking aspects of this project may not succeed. Others with serious motives and intentions have attempted to do this with the results noted above. However, as a minimum, one could try to assure that the scoring measures are succinctly defined and promulgated such that different organizations and evaluators would have a better understanding of what is intended and, perhaps could be more consistent in their scoring. The use of independent, multiple evaluators on each task could aid in reducing some of the effects of the subjective nature of the evaluation process and the possible personal biases (intentional or otherwise) of the evaluators. Since, according to some parapsychologists, the time of the remote viewing is not relevant to the attainment of the desired information, controlled "blind tests" could be run by requesting tasking for which the accurate and valuable information is already known to determine statistics on RV performance (clearly one key issue in such tests is what information is given to the RV in the task description to avoid any semblance of compromise, not a casual problem). Controlled laboratory experiments of parapsychology have done this type of testing and the results, usually expressed in terms of probability numbers that claim to validate the parapsychological results, have done little to quell the controversy that surrounds this field. Thus it may be naive and optimistic to believe that such additional testing would help resolve the question of the"value of the process" (or its utility for operational intelligence applications), but it might assist in either developing “faith” in those who use it, or conversely "disbelief". Before additional operational tasks are conceived, some thought could be given to how and what one defines as a “target. Broad generic target descriptions permit unstructured discourse by the RV which - especially if there is a knowledge (or even a hint) of the general area of interest - leads to data-open to very subjective, perhaps illusionary, interpretation regarding both accuracy and value. If some specificity regarding the target could be defined such that the relevance and accuracy of the RVderived data could be evaluated more readily, some of the uncertainties might be eliminated. In this context, note that the cases where targets were more specific, e.g., the North Korean targets , the resulting scores were generally higher. Finally, it was noted in Section 5.0 that some of the RV information obtained from operational tasks regarding North Korea (and others concerning the Middle East) depended upon the precognitive ability of the RV's in predicting events yet to occur. These data provide an opportunity for a post-analysis of the accuracy of these predictions by making a comparison with subsequent information regarding actual events (some data for this comparison might require access to classified information from other sources). Such a post- anaiysis would provide data for evaluating the ability of the RV's to perform precognitive tasks and of the related operational value of the predictions. Performance of this post- analysis lies beyond the scope of this paper, but is a topic for a subsequent study if any sponsor is interested. American Institutes for hesearch | — D-15 Approved For Release 2002/05/22 : CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5