The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) once tried to go to very extreme measures to try and gather information from other countries.
One of America's biggest threats - and long has been - is Russia, with their feud dating back to the Cold War (which began in 1947).
What was then known as the Soviet Union and the US butted heads over a series of different things; from ideologies and politics to the two countries' race to space.
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Amid the tension between the two powerhouses, the CIA hatched a somewhat unconventional plan to find out other countries' plans.
This was called Project Stargate and saw the CIA begin to investigate the idea of using paranormal phenomena in the military.
Basically, they wanted to train people to be able to do 'remote viewing' in a bid to gather information.
"Remote viewing refers to a type of extra-sensorial perception that involves using the mind to 'see' or manipulate distant objects, people, events, or other information that are hidden from physical view," Popular Mechanics explains.
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Stargate was taken over by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the 1980s, which is when an unusual experiment involving Mars took place.
As per a report titled 'Mars Exploration May 22, 1984', the DIA psychologically 'transported' someone to Mars.
They did this using astral projection - the concept that a person's spirit can travel through the astral plane.
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The time the subject was supposedly visiting was one million years B.C., and they were verbally given different geographical coordinates supposedly on the Red Planet.
The report, which is said to have been declassified in 2017, recorded what was said when the person in question supposedly mentally went to Mars, while their physical being remained on Earth.
The transcript shows that the individual reported seeing a 'pyramid or pyramid form', 'severe clouds', and 'a perception of a shadow of people'.
The subject also was quoted saying: "I just keep seeing very large people. They appear thin and tall, but they're very large. Ah... wearing some kind of strange clothes."
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Does this mean we actually discovered life on Mars 40 years ago? Who knows.
Project Stargate went on to run until 1995, when it was eventually concluded that 'remove viewing' wasn't particularly useful or successful in gathering information.
Both the DIA and CIA started to declassify documents that were attributed to the project in the run-up to it being shut down so that the scientific credibility of the program could be externally reviewed.
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While the findings were 'compelling', reviewer Ray Hyman wasn't convinced that remote viewing was real.
Hyman may have had his reservations, but he did admit that 'the contemporary findings along with the output of the [Stargate] program do seem to indicate that something beyond odd statistical hiccups is taking place'.
Topics: Russia, Mars, US News, Psychology, Military
Niamh Shackleton