SRI International and the Top Secret Risk of Mental Suffering
By June Hargrove ·
Subjects risked death and cognitive instability in a remote viewing program hidden behind a shifting contract number and a facade of Army research.
People signed away their mental stability for a project that feared their deaths. This was the cost of the government's attempt to weaponize the human mind, a venture that treated cognitive collapse as a line item in a budget modification.
Modification P00002
The paperwork is a sterile exercise in administrative housekeeping. A document titled "Amendment of Solicitation/Modification of Contract," identified as Modification P00002 and dated September 30, 1981, details the shifting requirements for a scientific project. The record shows that the agreement was between the United States—the contracting party—and SRI International, a nonprofit scientific research institute headquartered in Menlo Park, California, which had been established in 1946 by Stanford University trustees to serve as a center of innovation.
The administrative trail for the project is crowded. The record lists the Virginia Contracting Activity, the Washington, DC-based arm of the CIA, as one of the entities administering the contract. It also names DCASMA San Francisco, an administrative entity located in San Bruno, California, which shared oversight of the work. The document was signed by Barry L. McVay, the authorizing official for the contract modifications. Aside from his role as the signer for the Virginia Contracting Activity, the record provides no further biography for McVay.
On the surface, the modification is a series of deletions and additions. The record states in block 12: "Delete any and all references to Contract No. MDA903-81-C-0292 and substitute therefor Contract No. MDA908-81-C-0004." This is not a clerical error; it is a pivot. The project also expanded its scope. The document adds task number 2.1.10 to a "Statement of Work (Classified)" dated March 19, 1981, with the instruction to "Continue development and evaluation of CRV training program."
The CRV Training Program
The record does not define "CRV," but the public record identifies it as Controlled Remote Viewing—the attempt to scientifically validate and train the ability to perceive distant or hidden targets using psychic means. This was not merely a curiosity of the Cold War; it was a disciplined effort to turn a fringe phenomenon into a reliable intelligence tool.
The line between the Army and the CIA in this file is intentionally blurred. The record specifies that the study must "contribute significantly to scientific knowledge and have reasonable prospects of yielding important results essential to an Army research program." However, the presence of this document in the CIA FOIA Reading Room suggests a different master.
This is where the connections reveal the project's true shape. The Virginia Contracting Activity, a CIA entity, is administering a contract for an "Army" program. The desk's reading is that the Army functioned as a budgetary and administrative front for a CIA-directed operation. By layering the contract through a military research program, the agency could utilize Army channels while maintaining the secrecy of a clandestine intelligence project.
Furthermore, the shift from Contract No. MDA903-81-C-0292 to MDA908-81-C-0004 is a red flag. The pattern suggests the funding source was shifted to a different appropriation line or a more opaque "black" budget account. When a contract number is entirely deleted and substituted, it usually means the money is coming from a different pocket—one that is less likely to be audited by Congressional committees.
Death or Disabling Injury
The most chilling portion of the record is not the secret training of psychic spies, but the precautions taken against the cost of that training. Paragraph H.9, "Use of Human Subjects," is a sprawling, five-page legal shield that reads like a warning. The record defines a human subject as anyone, "knowingly or unknowingly," subjected to an act to contribute to knowledge.
The document's definition of "at risk" is explicit: it refers to the "possibility of harm—physical, biological, psychological, or sociological—to the other—as a consequence of an act or omission that goes beyond the application of those established and accepted methods."
For a program dedicated to the "development and evaluation" of a training program for remote viewing, the level of caution is extraordinary. The record mandates that the study "avoid all unnecessary physical or mental suffering or injury" and states flatly: "No study will be conducted if there is any inherent reason to believe that death or disabling injury is likely to occur."
In the world of government contracting, you do not include a clause forbidding death and disabling injury unless you have a reason to believe they are on the table. The record further requires that "a physician will be responsible for the medical care of subjects" and will have the authority to "terminate the study at any time that he believes death, injury or harm is likely to result." It demands "proper preparations" and "adequate facilities" to protect against "all foreseeable possibilities of injury, disability, or death," including hospitalization.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, the training protocols for Controlled Remote Viewing induced significant psychological stress or cognitive instability in the participants. The government was not just worried about the subjects' privacy; they were worried about their sanity. The insistence that the subject be "informed that at any time... he has the right to revoke his consent" suggests a process that was taxing, invasive, and potentially destructive.
The Classified Target
The final layer of the record is the most elusive. The modification adds task numbers 2.3 and 2.4 to a "technical proposal" that remains classified. These tasks were added after the initial evaluation period.
When a project moves from "evaluation" of a training program to the addition of specific, classified tasks, it has moved from the lab to the field. The desk's reading is that the project transitioned from a feasibility study—asking if remote viewing worked—to an operational capability development—asking how it could be used against a target.
The withheld "Classified" Statement of Work almost certainly contains specific intelligence targets. The pattern suggests that by September 1981, the CIA and SRI International had moved beyond the theory of CRV and were applying it to actual assets or locations of interest. The "scientific research" had become an intelligence operation.
This is the trajectory of the file: it begins with a non-profit institute in Menlo Park and ends with a Top Secret mandate. The human subjects, whose "mental suffering" was a quantified risk, were the fuel for this machine. They were promised a contribution to scientific knowledge, but they were actually being tuned as instruments for a clandestine war.
The pattern across this document—the budget shift, the Army cover, the extreme medical precautions—points to a program that viewed the human mind as a piece of hardware to be pushed to its breaking point. A full release of the classified Statement of Work would likely reveal that the "disabling injury" the government feared was not an accident, but a known side effect of trying to force the human brain to see through walls and across oceans. The participants paid for the agency's curiosity with their cognitive health, while the bureaucrats in Washington and San Bruno managed the paperwork of their decline.