This week, the CIA declassified the entire archive of the agency's activities from its inception to 1992, according to a court order. And among them were reports on a strange project in which they tried to prepare real psychic spies.
Until recently, access to these documents was provided only in one place, the National Archives in Maryland, and with special permission. Now all 25-year-old documents have been digitized and are freely available on the Internet. Other notes and reports include references to the Sun Streak, a secret military unit that investigated human paranormal capabilities in the 1970s and 1980s. Sun Streak existed under various names and was listed in the CIA database as Stargate. The existence of this unit was declassified back in 1995, and it was its activities that served as the basis for the 2009 film, which in the Russian box office was called "Crazy Special Forces", and the 2004 book by John Ronson. But details of the unit's activities were sparse.
The declassified documents released this week include, among other things, reports of Project N-1 X, in which Sun Streak trained people with seemingly psychic abilities to sense the contents of classified documents from a distance. According to the official instructions, the subjects had to fully describe the document, including its name, size, value, author, language in which it was written, principal sources of information, as well as the container in which the document is stored, the room with the container and the building where it was all located.
According to the documents, the task of Project N-1 X was to test whether such remote vision was possible in principle, and during the tests, the observer mainly asked questions to the subject, or "source", trying to get him to accurately describe the control document. The project progressed to stage N-2, after which it stopped, since, apparently, the tests did not bring any tangible results. And a couple of years after the closure of the project, the Sun Streak division itself was disbanded due to lack of results.