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The Jordan Harbinger Show

1304: Remote Viewing | Skeptical Sunday

The Jordan Harbinger Show

Jordan Harbinger

Science, Business, Education

4.8 • 12.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2026

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The US spent millions trying to create psychic spies, but this remote viewing pseudoscience never came into focus. Nick Pell explains on Skeptical Sunday!

Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by writer and researcher Nick Pell!

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1304

On This Week's Skeptical Sunday:

  • The U.S. government spent millions over two decades on Project Stargate — a real program aimed at training psychic spies to "see" enemy secrets through meditation — and the CIA ultimately concluded that no remote viewing report ever provided actionable intelligence.
  • Early ESP research by J.B. Rhine at Duke produced seemingly positive results, but none of his studies were ever reliably replicated — including a Princeton trial of over 25,000 attempts with 132 subjects that found zero evidence of extrasensory perception.
  • Project Stargate wasn't a fringe side project — it was a sprawling effort across multiple military and intelligence programs that ran from the Cold War era all the way until 1995, partly spurred by reports that the Soviets were spending $125 million annually on similar research.
  • After Stargate shut down, many of its former participants went commercial — selling remote viewing courses ranging from $79 to nearly $3,000 — proving that even debunked pseudoscience can become a profitable cottage industry.
  • The biggest takeaway here is a genuinely useful life skill: knowing even the most basic scientific principles — like demanding replication and questioning methodology — can help you cut through junk science and spot quackery before it costs you time, money, or good judgment.
  • Connect with Jordan on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at jordan@jordanharbinger.com and let him know!

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps!

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical

0:07.9

Sunday co-host writer and researcher Nick Bell. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the

0:12.4

stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turned their wisdom into

0:16.5

practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to

0:21.4

help you become a better informed, more critical thinker, and during the week, we have long-forms

0:25.2

conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers,

0:30.4

performers. On Sundays, though, it's skeptical Sunday, a rotating guest co-host and I will

0:34.5

break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions misconceptions about that topic. Topics like why exploration dates on food are mostly nonsense, acupuncture, recycling, chemtrails, the lottery, reiki, healing, and more. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation,

0:54.8

psychology, disinformation, junk science, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners

0:59.1

get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start

1:04.4

or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. All right guys and girls, strap yourself in

1:09.5

because this is going to be a weird one.

1:11.0

Not that we ever give Nick Pell any skeptical Sunday topic that's not weird, by the way.

1:15.6

This one, though, this is like something out of stranger things or the X-Files, but the United

1:20.3

States government has put tons of money into something called remote viewing.

1:25.3

The idea here is wild.

1:26.7

Through what's basically a kind of meditation,

1:29.3

you can supposedly see in your mind's eyes something that's happening across the state,

1:34.3

across the world, even across the galaxy. Project Stargate, no, not the movie with Kurt Russell

1:40.0

and James Spader, but a real government project sought to develop psychic super spies who could look

1:45.5

into the most secure rooms of the Kremlin, and then, I don't know, draft reports or whatever.

1:51.1

And now, I know what you're thinking.

...

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