Project Center Lane

Project Center Lane was a U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command special access program that developed and used remote-viewing methods, then called psychoenergetics, for intelligence collection and counterintelligence support in the early 1980s.¹² It followed INSCOM's role in the joint-services Project Grill Flame effort and became the Army-managed bridge into later Defense Intelligence Agency activity associated with SUN STREAK and the broader Project Stargate record.³⁴⁵⁶

The program's surviving records are unusually explicit about mission, training, funding, human-use review, and transfer mechanics.¹⁷⁸³ They are less decisive on the central evidentiary question: whether remote viewing produced reliable, actionable intelligence. Later independent review concluded that some laboratory results were statistically interesting, but that operational remote-viewing reporting was too vague, inconsistent, and interpretive to justify intelligence use.⁹

  Origin and Army Context

Center Lane grew out of INSCOM activity that began before the name existed. A 1985 historical overview traced the line through GONDOLA WISH, Grill Flame, and a Fort Meade operational unit that tried to determine whether selected Army intelligence personnel could learn remote viewing well enough to support real collection requirements.³ In INSCOM's own retrospective wording, the earlier mission was to establish training, collection techniques, and a mechanism for quickly using remote-viewing data against intelligence needs.³

The immediate trigger was congressional funding pressure on Army psychoenergetics work. INSCOM records state that Army Grill Flame collection operations lost National Foreign Intelligence Program funding at the end of fiscal year 1982, while DIA was allowed to complete its third year of research.³⁵ INSCOM then continued the capability with Security and Investigative Activities funds outside the NFIP, changed the project name to CENTER LANE, and treated the new effort as a compartmented Army program.⁸³

The effective implementation date appears in the Center Lane information papers as 3 December 1982, while Secretary of the Army approval for continued Army participation was granted on 1 September 1983.³ A 3 May 1984 mission statement by Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III then gave written authority to formalize earlier verbal directives and operate the INSCOM Center Lane Project inside the command.¹

  Mission and Operational Goals

Center Lane's mission statement described it as an INSCOM special access program that developed and applied psychoenergetics in intelligence collection and counterintelligence operations.¹ The stated tasks were to conduct collection and counterintelligence operations using psychoenergetic processes, train selected personnel in those techniques, and expand operational capability beyond information collection into areas such as psychoenergetic communications and psychokinesis.¹

The program's training and applications procedures narrowed that mission into military support categories. They listed collection, target acquisition, deception, monitoring of hostile military movements or technologies, assessment of hostile intelligence efforts against friendly units, and countermeasure support for Army vulnerabilities.² This language places Center Lane in the Cold War intelligence toolkit, not in a UAP investigation portfolio, even though both topics later entered adjacent disclosure debates.²⁶

Center Lane also presented itself as an operational service for intelligence customers. A February 1984 INSCOM briefing said project personnel had conducted 726 operational remote-viewing interviews in support of 96 intelligence collection projects since the first operational interview in September 1979.¹⁰ Those numbers are program-reported activity counts rather than independent measures of accuracy, but they show that Center Lane inherited a working tasking-and-reporting process from Grill Flame rather than beginning as a paper study.¹⁰

  SRI and Training Links

SRI International remained central to Center Lane's training architecture. The program's Training and Applications Procedures defined remote viewing as a term coined by SRI and described Coordinate Remote Viewing as a technique using coordinates as target information.² CRV training was a contracted SRI service, conducted at SRI locations including Menlo Park, New York, Washington, D.C., and other agreed sites, with a normal training duration of 12 to 18 months.²

The training pipeline combined several layers. New personnel received orientation testing and training at Fort Meade and other locations, using practical exercises, lectures, literature review, and observation.²³ CRV training was handled by contractor and subcontractor personnel, while applications training used actual targets of military interest under Center Lane control at Fort Meade.² Advanced training also drew on the Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences in Virginia, including Hemi-Sync-related work, although some advanced activity was suspended when resources were limited.³

The procedures show the program's attempt to make an anomalous claim operationally repeatable. Sessions used a viewer, a monitor, target cues, verbal descriptions, sketches, recordings, transcripts, reports, and requester evaluations.²¹⁰ Training rooms were described as plain, quiet, controlled environments, and applications sessions followed a sequence of tasking, collection planning, session conduct, reporting, and evaluation.²

  Oversight and Human-Use Controls

Center Lane was not administratively casual. A June 1984 cover memorandum to the INSCOM Human Technology Review Board stated that the Center Lane procedures revised and amplified the earlier Grill Flame protocol submitted to the Army human-use review system in 1981.⁷ The same record says the Army General Counsel, Army Surgeon General, DIA General Counsel, and DoD General Counsel had treated Grill Flame and Center Lane activity as human-subject experimentation under DoD intelligence oversight rules, requiring regular approval from the Under Secretary or Secretary of the Army.⁷

The full procedures document included consent, confidentiality, psychological screening, environmental controls, support from the INSCOM staff psychologist, limits on weekly training and applications sessions, and an explicit statement that Center Lane procedures did not involve drugs, harmful substances, or harmful circumstances.² Those controls do not validate the claimed phenomenon, but they are important evidence that the Army regarded the program as a regulated human-performance activity rather than an informal paranormal side project.²⁷

  Funding and Scale

A November 1984 funding summary described Center Lane as a Secretary of the Army approved special access program that enhanced intelligence collection and operational security operations with psychoenergetics.⁸ It reported that Center Lane had conducted collection operations for INSCOM, DIA, NSA, and CIA requirements and used both internal resources and external contractors, primarily SRI International, for training.⁸

The same summary gives a compact view of scale. INSCOM spent $148,000 in fiscal year 1983 on remote-viewing training contracts and operating costs, then used fiscal year 1984 funds from the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and INSCOM support accounts for SRI work, screening and selection studies, ELF countermeasure research, search-problem methodology, and remote-viewing applications training.⁸ By late 1984, however, the Army had already approved discontinuing Center Lane inside INSCOM and shifting operations and research to other DoD agencies.⁸

  Transfer to DIA

Center Lane did not end in a clean technical judgment. It was moved. The 1984 funding summary says INSCOM collection operations ceased on 28 September 1984 and that resources were redirected toward training while transfer planning proceeded.⁸ A memorandum of agreement framed the next step as a transfer of the INSCOM Center Lane project to DIA so a prototype operational group could be established with less disruption to ongoing training and operations.⁴

That transfer agreement gives the strategic rationale. It says formal Grill Flame recommendations submitted in October 1983 supported continued applied remote-viewing research, new basic research in remote viewing and psychokinesis, and central management by DIA.⁴ The agreement called for personnel, documents, equipment, and related responsibilities to move from HQDA/INSCOM to DIA, with the group remaining at Fort Meade under DIA operational control during the transition.⁴

The DIA successor activity became SUN STREAK. A 1986 SUN STREAK annual report stated that the operational activities of INSCOM's remote-viewing unit were made more responsive to strategic and national-level tasking by transferring the unit to DIA, and that the DoD/DIA collection effort was then called SUN STREAK.⁵ In that sense, Center Lane is best understood as the Army's post-Grill Flame, pre-SUN STREAK interval in the longer Stargate lineage.⁵⁶

  Declassification Record

Center Lane became visible through the STAR GATE declassification record. A 2006 CIA final response explained that, after a 1995 congressional mandate, CIA collected CIA and DoD records concerning parapsychological phenomena, mainly remote viewing, and reviewed them for declassification.⁶ CIA described STAR GATE as a later umbrella term for a series of CIA and military remote-viewing research projects, including STAR GATE, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK, STUNT PILOT, PHOENIX, and SCANATE.⁶

The same response said the public STAR GATE Collection comprised 11,985 documents totaling 89,901 pages and was made available through the National Archives CREST system and compact discs.⁶ That record set is valuable but uneven: it includes program memoranda, tasking paperwork, training materials, sponsor briefings, and self-evaluations, but many records are redacted, OCR quality varies, and operational claims often lack the independent verification needed to judge performance.¹⁰⁹⁶

  Evidentiary Limits

The strongest evidence for Center Lane is documentary rather than paranormal. Declassified records establish that INSCOM ran the program, funded it, trained personnel, used SRI and other contractors, routed the activity through Army and DoD review channels, and transferred the capability to DIA.¹²⁷⁸⁴ They do not, by themselves, establish that remote viewing worked as a reliable intelligence discipline.⁹

The 1995 American Institutes for Research evaluation is the main near-contemporaneous independent review available in the declassified record. It found disagreement between reviewers over how to interpret laboratory remote-viewing results, acknowledged that statistically significant effects had been reported in some controlled settings, and still concluded that the operational information was generally broad, ambiguous, inconsistent, and insufficient for actionable intelligence.⁹ For Center Lane, the balanced conclusion is therefore narrow: it was a real Army intelligence program in the Stargate lineage, but the public record does not demonstrate reliable operational intelligence utility.⁹⁶

  Timeline

  References

  References

1. CIA Reading Room, "CENTER LANE Mission Statement," CIA-RDP96-00788R001500150001-0. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001500150001-0 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. CIA Reading Room, "INSCOM CENTER LANE Project," CIA-RDP96-00788R001500090010-7. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001500090010-7 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

3. CIA Reading Room, "CENTER LANE Information Papers for Director, Defense Intelligence Agency," CIA-RDP96-00788R001500180001-7. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001500180001-7 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶

4. CIA Reading Room, "Memorandum of Agreement," CIA-RDP96-00788R001500090016-1. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001500090016-1 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

5. CIA Reading Room, "SUN STREAK - Annual Report 1986 (U)," CIA-RDP96-00788R001000010001-0. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001000010001-0 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

6. CIA Reading Room, "(Sanitized) Final Response," 0001299750. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/0001299750 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

7. CIA Reading Room, "INSCOM CENTER LANE Project Training and Applications Procedures," CIA-RDP96-00788R001500160006-4. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001500160006-4 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

8. CIA Reading Room, "CENTER LANE Funding and Project Summary," CIA-RDP96-00788R001700140001-9. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001700140001-9 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

9. CIA Reading Room, "An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications," CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180006-4. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00791r000200180006-4 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

10. CIA Reading Room, "(Untitled) INSCOM's Activities on the CENTER LANE Program," CIA-RDP96-00788R001500070002-8. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001500070002-8 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴