36 Inches of Concrete and the Search for Remote Weapons
By June Hargrove ·
A soundproof room and a three-foot concrete slab were built to isolate single-celled organisms, yet the report hides the true intent of the search.
A soundproof room and a three-foot concrete slab were built to isolate single-celled organisms, yet the report hides the true intent of the search.
In a laboratory in Lewes, Delaware, researchers constructed a tomb of silence. They built a room that was electrically isolated and sound-attenuated, then placed the entire apparatus atop a three-foot-thick concrete slab. This was not the setup for a standard biological study; it was a fortress built to shield a single-celled organism—a marine alga—from the noise of the world. The goal was to see if human intention could reach through the concrete and the shielding to alter the swimming velocity of Dunaliella algae.
The resulting report, titled "A Remote Action Investigation with Marine Animals," describes a mission that failed. According to the record, the experiments conducted between October 1986 and September 1987 yielded "no statistical evidence" of any such influence. But the sheer scale of the physical countermeasures suggests the mission was never about academic curiosity. When you build a bunker to watch algae, you are not looking for a miracle; you are looking for a mechanism.
The Objective E Protocol
The architecture of the research was tiered and clinical. SRI International, a nonprofit scientific research institute in Menlo Park, California, established in 1946 by Stanford University trustees to serve as a center of innovation, acted as the primary contractor. They subcontracted the actual experimentation to the College of Marine Studies, the research unit within the University of Delaware, a state-assisted land-grant research university in Newark.
This was not a study of "Remote Viewing," which seeks to perceive distant locations, but of "Remote Action" (RA)—the attempt to actively influence physical systems from a distance. The record identifies this work as "Objective E, Task 1." The designation is a tell. In the language of compartmentalized research, an "Objective E" is not a standalone inquiry; it is a single limb of a larger, multi-part body of work.
C. M. Pleass, a researcher at the College of Marine Studies who constructed the remote action experiment, worked to stabilize the data so that the swimming patterns of the algae could be measured with precision. The report, authored by Pleass and Edwin C. May, a researcher at SRI, was prepared for Peter J. McNelis, the technical representative at SRI responsible for oversight, and approved by Murray J. Baron, the Director of the Geoscience and Engineering Center at SRI.
The IDS Model and the Algae
The central scientific engine of the project was the "Intuitive Data Sorting" (IDS) model. As the report details, this model was designed to test whether a human participant could psychoenergetically bias a sampling distribution. The researchers weren't just looking for a change in speed; they were looking for a specific mathematical signature in the way the algae moved.
The record shows that the experiments involved participants attempting to exert influence during specific "effort periods." To ensure the integrity of the test, the University of Delaware implemented a "wave" protocol, where an operator would mark a continuous stream of velocity data when they felt the remote action had occurred.
To prove the system worked, the researchers even attempted to introduce a "real" influence—a spark stimulus or visible light—to see if the IDS model could detect a known physical change. They couldn't. The report admits the Delaware efforts were "quite disappointing." The researchers noted that most of the data was collected in the final month of the contract, resulting in only five trials instead of the requested fifty. The operators were not even blind to the averaging lengths used in the analysis.
If this were a standard academic paper, the conclusion would be simple: the hypothesis was wrong. But the record shows a level of physical isolation—the concrete, the electrical shielding, the sound attenuation—that is wildly disproportionate to a study that ultimately found nothing.
A Disappointing Result
The report's discussion focuses heavily on the failure of the data to meet the requirements of standard statistical analysis, specifically the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The record notes that "significant autocorrelations persist," meaning the data points were not statistically independent. The algae exhibited erratic behavior during the day and became quiescent at night, possibly due to electromagnetic activity.
The researchers struggled with the biology itself. The algae tended to clump, and they had to design a continuous flow system to keep the samples fresh and moving. Even after these technical hurdles were cleared, the data remained stubbornly non-random in ways the researchers could not fully explain, showing "low frequency oscillations" in the velocity envelope.
There is a profound irony in the record. The researchers spent two years perfecting a way to isolate a biological system from every known environmental variable, only to report that they could not find a signal. They built a vacuum, and then complained that they couldn't hear a whisper.
The Low-Side Proxy
The desk's reading is that this entire operation was a "low-side" proxy designed to produce a clean, public failure. The tiered contracting structure—from the CIA to SRI to the University of Delaware—is a classic method for distancing an agency from sensitive research. By funding a university to conduct "Remote Action" experiments that ultimately fail to meet statistical significance, the government creates a paper trail of scientific skepticism.
If a full release of the Stargate Project files were ever assembled, the pattern suggests we would find that while the University of Delaware was reporting "no statistical evidence" in a public-facing document, the actual successes were being diverted into more restricted compartments. The designation of "Objective E, Task 1" implies that Objectives A through D likely yielded the very results this report claims were missing.
The pattern suggests the agency was not interested in whether a person could move algae; they were interested in the "Intuitive Data Sorting" model itself—a mathematical way to detect non-random influence in a sea of environmental noise. The algae were not the subject; they were the disposable biological interface. The real goal was the development of a way to detect, or perhaps direct, the subtle, non-contact disruptions of living systems.
When the record speaks of "erratic behavior" and "autocorrelations" that could not be eliminated despite three feet of concrete, it is not describing experimental error. It is describing the presence of a signal that the current shielding could not block. The government did not fund a failed experiment; they funded a test of a weaponized mathematical theory, and they used a university to bury the evidence in a pile of "disappointing" data.