Pat Price and URDF-3

The full file

At eleven in the morning on 9 July 1974 at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, the physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff gave Pat Price, whom the CIA sponsor called their best subject, a pair of map coordinates. They showed him its position on maps about sixty miles west-south-west of Semipalatinsk in Soviet Kazakhstan, and described it as a scientific military research and test area. The site was known to American intelligence as URDF-3, the Unidentified Research and Development Facility-3; a June 1974 CIA memorandum preparing the experiment calls it a Soviet nuclear facility.

What was reported

The experiment was sponsored by Kenneth Kress of the CIA, who later wrote that he had studied reconnaissance photographs of the site and chosen two features in advance as the test: a tall crane and four structures resembling oil-well derricks. Describing both would qualify Price for real collection. The sessions ran on 9, 10, 11 and 15 July. On the first day Price described partly buried buildings, an antenna, a pool and a gantry crane. That evening, at 5.25 p.m., Puthoff telephoned him and asked for as exact a drawing as possible of the crane and its relation to the main building. On the second day, much of it conducted by telephone with only the experimenters' side recorded, Price drew a tall rail-mounted gantry crane. He never described the derricks, which the record also calls headframes. Kress wrote that because "the crane was so impressive", he and his branch chief relaxed the requirement and continued.

What evidence exists

Two records made at the time by people other than Price survive. The first is An Analysis of a Remote-Viewing Experiment of URDF-3, dated 4 December 1975, written from two cassette tapes, 79 pages of transcripts and 30 sketches, checked against imagery of the site. Kress attributes it to D. Stillman of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. The second is Kress's own account, Parapsychology in Intelligence: A Personal Review and Conclusions, in the CIA's classified journal Studies in Intelligence for Winter 1977. Both are in the CIA's declassified STARGATE collection, online in its reading room. One copy of the analysis names Price and carries release stamps from 2001; a second, approved in 2003, blanks out his name and the analyst's. The sketches survive only as poor scans in the analysis and Kress's article. The tapes themselves have not been released.

What investigators concluded

The analyst found the crane sketch "remarkably close in detail" to the real crane, and wrote that it was hard to explain unless Price had either seen it by remote viewing or been told what to draw by someone who knew the site. Almost everything else was wrong. Price drew two extra cranes, turned the real one through ninety degrees, and put the main building above ground. In reality it was underground, with the crane running on rails above it. On the third day the experimenters showed him a sketch of the actual site; he said only one of the four headframes was still there, which was untrue, and that the ground under the main building had nothing subterranean in it. The analysis concluded that the experiment "proved to be unsuccessful".

Kress reached a similar view. In his words, "most of Price's data were wrong or could not be evaluated", though a CIA photo interpreter and the Los Alamos analyst both judged the crane accurate. He recorded that agency research officers concluded that, with no control experiments, the data "were nothing but lucky guessing". Puthoff, writing in 1996, gave the opposite reading: the results held signal among the noise, several large structures were correctly described, and the work had been done double-blind.

The leading conventional explanation

The analysis itself supplies it, in two parts. The first is the multiple-guess effect: a subject who names enough objects "would surely hit on one object that is actually present". Price named a pool, a pole grid, an antenna, a dome, silos, a substation and three cranes; one crane was there. The second is leakage. The analyst noted that the experiment "was not controlled to discount the possibility that Price could talk to other people", that the overnight call had pointed him at the crane, and that the questions sometimes seemed to lead him. On the second day an experimenter told him by telephone that something as large as the crane stood west of the main building, which the analyst read as an attempt to get him to see the headframes, though he also judged the experimenters unfamiliar with the target.

The weakness of this explanation is that it does not fit the crane neatly. Price mentioned a gantry crane on the first afternoon, before the evening call, and the multiple-guess effect accounts for naming a crane, not for drawing a likeness that two analysts thought close. Kress wrote that Targ and Puthoff presumably knew nothing about the site when it began.

What remains disputed

Nobody can now settle where the crane came from. The analyst recommended that the tapes be put through a psychological stress evaluator, a voice-based lie-detection aid, and that future experiments record both ends of every phone call; the released record does not show whether either was done. Price died of a heart attack in July 1975, before the analysis was written. The record shows one striking detail in a session its sponsors judged a failure, run under conditions that can neither rule out ordinary explanations nor confirm them.

Sources

• An Analysis of a Remote-Viewing Experiment of URDF-3, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200240001-0 (archived) — CIA STARGATE collection, 4 December 1975. Session dates, the phone calls, the crane, the errors, the conclusion.
• The same analysis, redacted release, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200040002-1 (archived) — CIA, approved for release 2003. Second copy with the viewer's and analyst's names removed.
• Parapsychology in Intelligence: A Personal Review and Conclusions, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200030040-0 (archived) — Kenneth A. Kress, Studies in Intelligence 21(4), Winter 1977. The pre-chosen features, the relaxed requirement, the analysts' views, Price's death.
• Preparation for the SRI Remote Viewing Experiment: Arrangements with NPIC and NED, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200130006-2 (archived) — CIA memorandum for the record, 17 June 1974. The target as a Soviet nuclear facility and the arrangements for scoring.
• CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute (archived) — H. E. Puthoff, Journal of Scientific Exploration 10(1), 1996 (hosted copy). The experimenter's account, claiming double-blind conditions and correct structural detail.