The Central Intelligence Agency’s long secret experiments with psychic spying have become a magnet for some of the strangest stories in modern conspiracy culture, especially when the Moon enters the frame. Tales of “red moons,” alien bases and classified warnings now circulate freely online, often presented as if they were confirmed intelligence. Yet when I follow those claims back into the declassified record, the files point to a much colder reality: a program that struggled to work on Earth, let alone on a distant lunar surface.
The newly accessible archive of remote-viewing material does not erase the weirdness that surrounded Project Stargate, but it does set a hard boundary on what the evidence can support. The documents show how the CIA and the U.S. Army tried to turn psychic impressions into usable data, how evaluators judged the results, and how a few dramatic anecdotes about the Moon escaped that context and took on a life of their own.
How remote viewing actually worked inside the program
Before the Moon myths, there was a very specific idea of what “remote viewing” meant inside the national security world. A remote viewer was expected to describe an object, event, person or location that was hidden from normal sight and separated from the viewer by distance, shielding or time, with the hope that those impressions could be checked against reality later. In practice, that meant controlled sessions in which a subject tried to sketch or verbalize details about targets such as buildings, military sites or simple geometric shapes, a process that early advocates framed as a disciplined form of extrasensory perception rather than a séance, as outlined in standard descriptions of remote viewing.
Inside the government, this work eventually coalesced into what became known as Project Stargate, a U.S. Army unit that tried to operationalize psychic data for intelligence customers. The CIA later commissioned the American Institutes for Research, referred to in the record as The CIA working with the group also called AIR, to evaluate whether the program had actually produced useful results. That outside review, combined with internal skepticism, set the stage for a sober assessment of what remote viewing could and could not do, long before anyone in Langley was worrying about psychic warnings from the Moon.
What the CIA’s own evaluation really says
The most important check on the wilder claims about psychic intelligence is the CIA’s own formal review of the program. In an Executive Summary labeled as Page 5 and marked “Approved For Release” by the CIA, evaluators reported what the “end users” of remote viewing actually experienced. Those users indicated that, although some individual sessions produced intriguing hits, the information was too inconsistent and too hard to verify in real time to guide operations. In other words, the people who were supposed to act on the data did not see a reliable tool, they saw an occasional curiosity.
That conclusion matters for any discussion of lunar visions or cosmic warnings, because it shows the ceiling the program hit even under ideal conditions. If trained viewers working under controlled protocols could not consistently describe a warehouse in another country well enough to satisfy their own clients, the idea that the same methods yielded precise, actionable intelligence about structures on the Moon runs into the limits documented in the CIA’s evaluation. The file does not read like a cover story for a hidden success, it reads like a bureaucracy closing down a project that never quite delivered.
The “red moon” warning and how it was framed
Into that gap between ambition and performance stepped a different kind of lunar story, one that blended Cold War anxiety with celestial symbolism. A declassified clipping in the CIA’s reading room, cataloged under the Document Type code CIA-RDP75-00001R000200430028-9, carries the striking line “DISCLOSE U.S. HAD WARNING OF RED MOON.” The fragmentary text, which highlights the words DISCLOSE, HAD, WARNING, RED and MOON, has been widely recirculated online as proof that Washington received some kind of paranormal alert about a lunar event, sometimes folded into remote-viewing lore as if it were a missing chapter of Project Stargate.
Read in context, however, the clipping looks more like a period news item about intelligence warnings than a transcript of a psychic session. The language is the language of headlines, not of laboratory notes, and nothing in the available text ties it directly to the structured remote-viewing work that the CIA and the Army later evaluated. The fact that the same archive that preserves this “RED MOON” reference also preserves the skeptical Project Stargate assessments is a reminder that not every dramatic phrase in a declassified file points to a hidden psychic breakthrough.
Ingo Swann, alien bases and the leap to lunar horror
The most vivid Moon narratives in remote-viewing circles center on Ingo Swann, a psychic who later said he had been tasked with describing the far side of the lunar surface. In one widely shared account, Swann is described as having worked with the CIA to “remote-view the dark side of the moon” in search of an alien presence, with the claim that he found structures and entities that “aren’t friendly,” a story that has circulated in forums devoted to Ingo Swann. More recently, enthusiasts have pointed to mainstream coverage that mentions a resurfaced CIA file said to describe “life” on the Moon, with one discussion framed around the line “As the US prepares to send astronauts back to the moon, a CIA file has resurfaced that claims to have found life there more than” a generation ago, a formulation that appears in a thread titled As the US.
These stories are powerful because they supply what the official record lacks: a clear narrative, a named seer and a concrete image of alien “bases” on the lunar far side. Yet when I set them against the CIA’s own evaluation of remote viewing and the AIR review commissioned by The CIA and American Institutes for, the tension is obvious. The same bureaucracy that concluded remote viewing had not been proved to produce actionable intelligence information on terrestrial targets would have had to accept, in secret, that it had mapped hostile nonhuman installations on the Moon. That contradiction is not resolved in the documents we can see, which is why the Swann material remains, by any strict evidentiary standard, “Unverified based on available sources.”
From classified program to public archive and YouTube lore
Part of the reason these lunar tales have flourished is that the raw material for them is now so easy to access. Approximately 930,000 documents, described as 12 million pages, are available in the CIA’s Electronic Reading Room, a searchable trove that includes everything from mundane cables to exotic psychic experiment files. Anyone with an Internet connection can now dig through CREST, a CIA reading room of roughly 930,000 documents, a collection that also covers investigations into UFOs, psychics and invisible ink. That scale makes it easy to cherry pick the strangest phrases, like “RED MOON,” and circulate them stripped of context.
At the same time, former insiders and commentators have helped keep the psychic program in the public eye. In one video, a figure associated with the Stargate effort talks about using the human mind to gain impressions of distant targets and refers to working with colleagues on the so-called Star program, while also suggesting that a psychic was “murdered,” a claim that appears in a clip labeled Mar. That kind of dramatic framing, combined with the sheer volume of raw files and the evocative language of documents like DISCLOSE U.S. HAD WARNING OF RED MOON, feeds a feedback loop in which the most chilling interpretations rise to the top, even when the underlying evidence is fragmentary or ambiguous.
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