Declassified SRI · origins
SCANATE — early remote viewing at SRI
SCANATE is the early CIA-sponsored “scan by coordinate” work with physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute. It is the seedbed, not the later operational unit.
Before Grill Flame had a shop floor at Fort Meade, there was a physics lab in Menlo Park. SCANATE — “scan by coordinate” — is the early CIA-sponsored work at Stanford Research Institute under physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, with Ingo Swann the name most often attached to the origin story. The bet was simple and strange: a coordinate (or a sealed target) could stand in for a place, and a mind might return a description worth writing down.
What the method was
The viewer was not shown a photograph of the site. They were given an abstract handle — latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes, and seconds, or another designator — and asked to describe. Early SRI work also used remote geographic sites and objects in containers. Double-blind language appears in later enhancement reports: the monitor as well as the viewer kept blind to the site so the room would not leak the answer. Pat Price belongs to this first-cohort chapter as a frequently cited subject; read him in session headers, not as a comic-book origin.
Where it went next
SCANATE is the hypothesis at the start of the arc, not the finished unit. What follows in the archive is institutionalization: Army INSCOM Grill Flame, Center Lane, DIA Sun Streak, the STAR GATE umbrella, and a 1995 external review. SCANATE does not tell you whether later consumers of intelligence found the product useful. That question lives in close-out and in operational packets, which disagree with training curves in the way live programs do.
How this site sits beside it
A modern forced-choice lab encrypts a target and asks for a call against chance. That is a toy version of “sit with a handle.” It is not SRI, not a proof of SCANATE, and not a coordinate from 1973.
Editorial reading of declassified material. The official PDF is authoritative. Not medical, legal, or intelligence advice. Not a claim that consumer audio recreates historical units. The live lab is observational, not proof.