Welcome, curious minds, to the top 10 spookiest roundup of declassified Project Stargate paperwork. Between 1972 and 1995, the CIA and a handful of U.S. agencies recruited a generation of bright‑eyed volunteers to probe the uncharted terrain of the human mind. The resulting files are a bizarre blend of sketches, cryptic notes, and jaw‑dropping visions that still make us shiver. Let’s dive in, one eerie document at a time.

Top 10 Spookiest Project Stargate Files

10. The Navajo Necklace

Remote‑viewing logs in the Stargate archives often consist of handwritten sketches and terse captions. Known in the intelligence world as clairvoyance, remote viewing is the claimed ability to employ extrasensory perception (ESP) to “see” a distant object, person, or locale without any physical contact.

Most of these logs are sparse on typed narrative, yet they serve as a goldmine of oddball details about daily assignments given to Project Stargate viewers. Among the many entries—ranging from the Tunguska explosion to the Rendlesham UFO encounter—one stands out: a cryptic session centered on an aged Navajo necklace.

In this particular experiment, Subject 052 received a set of geographic coordinates and a few simple prompts. The mission: coax Subject 052 into accurately describing a silver Navajo necklace that was stored at a remote location.

Subject 052’s report painted a vivid tableau: unfamiliar architecture framed a left‑handed artisan hard at work, fashioning a chain that appeared either gold or steel—an enigmatic glimpse into a world far beyond the necklace’s physical form.

9. Humans On Titan And Aliens In Alaska

In November 1986, a remote‑viewer was dispatched to Saturn’s moon Titan. The subject described stumbling upon a base on the moon’s surface, stepping inside, and finding an entire crew of humans—two fit young men operating a control panel under the supervision of an attractive female overseer.

The same file later recounts two additional missions, this time back on Earth. When sent to Mount Hayes in Alaska, the viewer reported seeing two mysterious “entities” laboring outside a structure. Inside, a human‑looking technician was busy with a strange machine that seemed aware of the observer’s presence.

8. Parapsychology In The USSR

Since the end of World War II, the CIA kept a relentless watch on Soviet scientific endeavors. Unsurprisingly, among the 12,000‑page CREST archive sits a report titled “Parapsychology in the USSR,” outlining how Russian researchers dabbled in psi long after the 1917 October Revolution.

From 1922 through 1928, a wave of paranormal papers emerged from Russian universities. The turning point arrived after the alleged telepathy attacks on the USS Nautilus, prompting the Soviets to fully mobilize a state‑backed psychic program.

By 1967, more than thirty Russian academic centers were devoted to psi research, collectively drawing an annual budget exceeding 13 million rubles. The Soviet pursuit of the paranormal became both a source of envy and a thorn in the side of their CIA counterparts.

7. The Grill Flame Project Report

Project Grill Flame was one of the earliest initiatives under the Stargate umbrella, tasked with uncovering potential military applications of psi technology. Though officially run by the U.S. Army and INSCOM, declassified files confirm that the CIA was involved from day one.

One of the most celebrated CIA‑affiliated remote viewers, Army officer Joe McMoneagle, participated in dozens of missions. The Grill Flame Report, delivered in October 1983, recommended a broad sweep of psi phenomena for tactical exploitation, hinting at everything from battlefield reconnaissance to covert influence operations.

6. Mars Exploration

By 1984, Joe McMoneagle had risen to the top tier of the CIA’s remote‑viewing cadre. After countless missions aimed at counter‑terrorism and Cold‑War espionage, McMoneagle received a truly out‑of‑this‑world assignment.

While staying at fellow remote‑viewer Robert Monroe’s Virginia estate, Monroe was handed a sealed envelope tucked into his shirt pocket. Inside lay a cryptic set of coordinates pointing not to a terrestrial site, but to the planet Mars—specifically, a point one million years in the distant past.

Here’s what Joe saw:

An enormous, ancient pyramid of sand rose from a deep basin, towering roughly 20 kilometers (12 miles) high. Turbulent storms churned across the Martian sky, suggesting a cataclysmic event. When the scene shifted forward in time, the sand‑covered structure glimmered with metallic sheen, and towering, thin humanoid silhouettes emerged, claiming to be a forgotten race doomed unless its exiles returned.

Although McMoneagle was later given additional coordinate sets to explore, his principal focus landed on the Cydonia region—home to the infamous “Face on Mars” and a massive pyramid‑like formation first photographed by Viking 1 in 1976.

5. An Evaluation Of Remote Viewing: Research And Applications

The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) entered the Stargate arena in 1972 as an external contractor, staying allied with the CIA until the program’s conclusion. Over the years, SRI produced a trove of classified reports that eventually made their way into the public FOIA release.

In a 1995 assessment, SRI concluded that remote viewing was unlikely to prove useful for intelligence gathering. The judgment wasn’t rooted in a debunking of psi itself, but rather in the “suspected characteristics of the phenomenon,” suggesting that the mind’s capabilities resisted conventional analysis.

The institute’s findings echoed a familiar refrain: you can’t bottle, label, or sell the human mind. When funding evaporated, the Stargate program collapsed within months.

4. The Uri Geller Experiments

Uri Geller is a name that instantly ignites fierce debates across YouTube comment sections. Whether you view him as a genuine psychic or a master illusionist, his public feats have sparked endless discussion.

The reality is that most of Geller’s purportedly supernatural tricks can be replicated by seasoned magicians. Nevertheless, Geller claims his abilities stem from an alien consciousness transmitted from deep space, insisting that his mind alone powers the phenomena.

Two factors keep his legend alive. First, Geller amassed a fortune not only through uncanny financial predictions but also by consulting for corporations seeking hidden resources. Second, declassified Stargate files reveal his involvement with the CIA’s SRI program during the 1970s. Some even speculate he may have been a conduit for Mossad’s psychological‑warfare efforts, though the CIA certainly found him intriguing enough to dispatch a remote viewer to study him in September 1990.

3. A Dynamic Psychokinesis Experiment With Ingo Swann

Ingo Swann, another celebrated psi‑sensitive recruited by the CIA, is best known for his remote‑viewing exploits—but his talents didn’t stop there. Swann also displayed a knack for psychokinesis, the alleged ability to move or influence physical objects with the mind alone.

While most Stargate experiments focused on remote viewing for its perceived tactical edge, the agency occasionally dipped its toes into psychokinetic research, probing whether the mind could directly affect matter.

In February 1976, Swann was taken to Maimonides Medical Center, a partner facility, to test whether he could sway the output of a random‑number generator. According to the declassified report, Swann succeeded, offering tantalizing evidence that psychokinetic influence might be more than folklore.

2. An Experimental Psychic Probe Of The Planet Jupiter

Swann enjoyed a special privilege during his tenure with the CIA. In 1973, he and fellow remote viewer Harold Sherman were tasked with probing the gas giant Jupiter. While Swann sat under observation at SRI’s California labs, Sherman relaxed in a custom‑built sensory‑deprivation tank at his home, miles and time zones away.

After their sessions, the duo compared notes over the phone and were stunned to discover strikingly similar details—despite the fact that no close‑up images of Jupiter existed at the time.

Both reported correctly identifying the planet’s iconic Great Red Spot and a massive dark cloud trailing behind it. They also described endless fields of suspended crystals glittering amid the swirling clouds.

The crystals, they noted, reflected both sunlight and the intense electric storms raging on Jupiter’s surface, painting a picture of a planet awash in shimmering, otherworldly light.

Swann estimated the planet’s solid surface lay roughly 193,000 kilometers (120,000 miles) beneath the visible cloud layers, underscoring the depth and complexity of the vision.

1. Oklahoma City Bombing

America’s most infamous domestic terrorist attack— the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing—has long been the subject of intense scrutiny and speculation. On April 3, 1995, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols detonated a massive bomb at the federal building, killing 168 people.

To mark the ten‑year anniversary, author Jayna Davis released The Third Terrorist, positing that Iraqi operatives, possibly with Iranian blessing, may have orchestrated the attack. Her theory gained traction when Congress cited her work during a hearing on the bombing.

Crucially, the declassified Stargate files contain what may be the program’s most unsettling report. On April 20, 1995—just a day after the blast—the CIA received unsolicited intel from psi‑sensitive operative Joe McMoneagle. He claimed that five men, not two, carried out the bombing, and that three of them were Arabic, pointing to Iraq as the most likely origin.

The report’s most puzzling element was McMoneagle’s insistence that a man named “Carl” would be linked to the event. No known perpetrator bore that name, and none of the alleged Arabic conspirators were called Carl.

Yet a man named Carl Spengler, an on‑call physician at a nearby hospital, was indeed the first responder to arrive at the devastated scene—making McMoneagle’s cryptic hint eerily prescient, if not fully explanatory.

The Manhattan Project is famously known as the United States‑led endeavor which successfully created the first atomic bomb. The success of the Manhattan Project led to the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 and the total surrender of Japan, ending World War II.

The project was extremely complex and dangerous, even causing the deaths of some of its own scientists. Nevertheless, its story is fascinating, and it is one of the most significant human achievements in history. Below are 10 fascinating facts about the Manhattan Project that shed light on the people, the science, and the legacy of this secretive wartime effort.

10 Einstein Was Integral To The Project Happening

The history of the Manhattan Project is often told as beginning with the Einstein‑Szilard letter. This famed missive, signed by Albert Einstein in 1939, was mailed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Leo Szilard, together with Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, drafted the letter after realizing that a new, terrifying power was emerging from nuclear research—one that could unleash destruction unlike anything the world had ever seen and that Nazi Germany might harness.

Szilard arranged for Einstein to co‑sign the letter, which warned: “This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs,” and that such bombs “could be achieved in the immediate future.” The letter noted that Germany was already stockpiling uranium from Czechoslovakia, indicating a potential nuclear weapons program. Roosevelt received the warning and acted, creating the Advisory Committee on Uranium—effectively the first governmental step toward what would become the Manhattan Project in 1942.

9 The Project Was Infiltrated By Russia

The Manhattan Project was, for obvious reasons, top secret, and intelligence officials and the FBI did everything they could to keep Nazi Germany or Japan from learning about what was happening. Although the USSR were allies of the US, the US still wanted to keep them away from the project and avoid them benefiting from the research and testing being conducted. Despite this, the USSR managed to successfully infiltrate the Manhattan Project. Soviet intelligence had picked up on the fact that British and American publications into nuclear fission had recently dipped—a red flag.

Reportedly, Soviet spies were foiled at many attempts, but some managed to infiltrate the project and send back critical information—one of the most notable being Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs, a physicist, had secretly sworn allegiance to the USSR, offering his services to them. He had been assigned to the Los Alamos laboratory working on bomb research and design. He would pass on information to the USSR while working in Los Alamos and would be eventually caught after the war, confessing to everything. Other spies remain unknown to this day, and their identities were never uncovered by US counterintelligence.

8 The Project Cost Almost $2 Billion

The Manhattan Project was a complex effort, spread out over multiple sites across the US and Canada. The most important sites to the project were Oak Ridge in Tennessee and Los Alamos in New Mexico. Oak Ridge served as the main production plant, which produced the enriched uranium needed to create an atomic bomb. The Los Alamos site was a remotely located laboratory which was tasked with designing and building the bombs.

Many other sites fed into the project, and because of this, the costs added up. Much of the expense came from the Oak Ridge site. It was estimated that the total project costs were $1.9 billion, which would be well over $20 billion in today’s dollars.

7 The Project Was Deemed A Success

Despite the costs of the project being more than originally budgeted, despite the fatalities during the work, and despite all of the scientific challenges that occurred, the Manhattan Project was deemed a success. The overall objective of the project was to arm the US with an atomic bomb against the Nazi or Japanese threat of doing the same. However, whether the project really was a success is more of an ethical question than a factual one. The project delivered the only two atomic bombs ever detonated in warfare, with the total estimated deaths from those detonations being somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 people.

The bombs ushered in a new nuclear era in which Russia and the US would emerge as superpowers, both armed with nuclear bombs, ready to destroy entire cities instantly. The bombings in Japan in 1945 brought about an abrupt end to the war and potentially saved many US lives, but the bombings today still pose a problematic question as to whether they were truly necessary and if they were morally correct. Some would argue they were a war crime; others would say they were justified and necessary. Without the “success” of the Manhattan Project, who knows who would have been the first country to use a nuclear bomb in World War II?

6 The Demon Core

According to reports, there were 24 fatalities during the Manhattan Project’s lifespan. Many of these were deaths caused by things like construction accidents. However, for scientists Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin, it was a different case completely. Daghlian was a scientist who was working on experiments using the third nuclear core (with the first and second having been used in Japan). On August 21, 1945, Daghlian accidentally dropped a tungsten carbide brick onto the plutonium core assembly, which made the core go supercritical. He quickly got the brick off the core, but he would receive a lethal dose of radiation because of his accident and died in agony around a month later.

Despite this incident, nine months later, Slotin would die from the same core in another fatal accident. On May 21, 1946, Slotin was holding the top part of a beryllium neutron reflector in place above the core assembly with a screwdriver. (A recreation of the procedure is pictured above.) Then, his screwdriver slipped, and the half‑sphere fell totally onto the core. This slip caused a lethal amount of radiation to be released in a flash of blue light. Slotin quickly flipped the top part of the reflector off the core and onto the floor, neutralizing the threat. Nevertheless, he would die from acute radiation poisoning nine days later.

The plutonium core was later nicknamed the “Demon Core” because of its involvement in the two scientists’ deaths. It was later melted down, and its material was used in other cores.

5 Thin Man

In the early stages of the Manhattan Project, considerable research and attention was placed on designing a plutonium‑based “gun‑type” bomb. The work was code‑named “Thin Man,” in contrast to the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Fat Man worked by plutonium implosion, whereas Thin Man bombs would have worked by having two plutonium masses coming into contact with each other at high speed inside the bomb.

Thin Man was ultimately abandoned due to a number of difficulties experienced during research. Firstly, the bombs would have been 5.2 meters (17 ft) long, and this posed a challenge, as finding a suitable aircraft to carry them was difficult. Bombers could be modified to fit the longer casings, but it was later learned that the design of the two plutonium masses made the bombs likely to pre‑detonate. Because of this, the casings would have had to be extended, and this put the design outside the realms of what was possible to carry on an airplane of the time. This effectively spelled the end of the project. “Little Boy,” the bomb ultimately dropped on Hiroshima, was a gun‑type bomb, but it utilized uranium‑235 instead of plutonium‑239, as Thin Man bombs would have.

4 The Trinity Test Had Provisions In Case Of Disaster

One of the key milestones of the Manhattan Project was the Trinity test—the first‑ever detonation of a nuclear bomb. The test occurred on July 16, 1945, and was conducted by exploding “Gadget,” a device similar to Fat Man. The test was successful and quite literally started the atomic era.

Prior to the test, which was top secret, officials were forced to come up with ways to hide it from the public and press, which would prove difficult, considering the enormity of the predicted explosion. A writer for The New York Times, William Laurence, had been drafted into the Manhattan Project for this very reason. Laurence would help put together press releases that would cover up the events. Laurence wrote four press releases for the public attention the test would garner, with the most severe including a blank list of those people killed by the explosion and instructions for evacuation situations.

There was considerable worry that this press release would be needed. However, the press release ultimately used hid the event by attributing the noise and heat wave to a “remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics” that had exploded.

3 The Project Was Not Based In Manhattan

Despite the name of the Manhattan Project, the bulk of the work conducted during its existence didn’t take place in Manhattan. In fact, as mentioned, the two most prominent sites were in New Mexico and Tennessee. During the project’s beginning, its official name was “Development of Substitute Materials,” but this never really stuck. President Roosevelt had assigned the project to the Army, and General Leslie R. Groves took up residence in Manhattan initially to draw on the nearby Corps of Engineers division.

Later, it was agreed that “Development of Substitute Materials” may have been too obvious, so they settled for “Manhattan District.” As the project expanded, and the need for multiple sites and laboratories became evident, the Army began to move away from Manhattan. However, the name followed them. Later on, the “District” part was used less and less until the project was known simply as the “Manhattan Project.”

2 The Doomsday Clock Was Born Out Of The Manhattan Project

After the closure of the Manhattan Project, many scientists were left ruminating about the overall impact the nuclear bomb would have in the future of the Earth. After the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, it’s not hard to see why. Therefore, in 1945, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was created, and it began to publish monthly informational pieces about the developments and dangers of the newly dubbed “Atomic era.” One of the founders of the Bulletin was a biophysicist named Eugene Rabinowitch, who had worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Rabinowitch said that the aim of the Bulletin was to “awaken the public to the full understanding of the horrendous reality of nuclear weapons and of their far‑reaching implications for the future of mankind.”

In 1947, the Bulletin started to produce the Doomsday Clock, a way of measuring how close humanity was to destroying the world with man‑made nuclear weapons. When the first Doomsday Clock was released, the time was 11:53 PM (seven minutes to midnight). The furthest away the clock has been from midnight was in 1991, at the end of the Cold War between Russia and the US. The clock is presently at two minutes to midnight, the worst it has ever been, due to current concerning international stances of countries.

1 The Project Is Still Referenced In Popular Culture Today

The Manhattan Project has certainly not been forgotten more than 70 years after its completion. It is still referenced in many popular‑culture genres, essentially paving the way for an entirely new subgenre of nuclear destruction. The Manhattan Project has been featured in many television shows, movies, documentaries, pieces of fiction, music, art, and other forms of pop culture such as video gaming and board games.

Quickly following the close of the project, the film The Beginning or the End was released in 1947, which depicted an inaccurate and villainous story of how the atomic bombs were made. Many years later, the TV movie Day One provided a much more accurate portrayal of the project, going on to win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama. More recently, the Manhattan Project has been referenced in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Iron Man, where the central character Tony Stark makes reference to his father helping the Manhattan Project.

Other portrayals include books such as Los Alamos by Joseph Kanon and The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit. In 2014, a television series simply named Manhattan was produced for two seasons to critical acclaim before its cancellation in 2016. There have been and will continue to be many depictions of the project, as over 70 years later, we still find ourselves fascinated by the work conducted during the Manhattan Project.