Albert Stubblebine

Major General Albert Newton Stubblebine III (February 6, 1930 - February 6, 2017) was a U.S. Army general who served as commanding general of the INSCOM from 1981 to 1984, during which he was the most senior American military officer publicly associated with belief in psychic phenomena and their military applications. His command authority provided the institutional protection that allowed the Grill Flame and Center Lane remote viewing programs to survive bureaucratic resistance and continue operating through the early 1980s. He died on his 87th birthday.

Military Career

Stubblebine graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1952 and pursued a career in Army intelligence and signals work. He advanced through assignments in Army intelligence analysis, signals intelligence, and special operations-adjacent programs, eventually reaching the senior Army intelligence command positions.

He was appointed commanding general of INSCOM in 1981. INSCOM was the Army's primary intelligence collection and counterintelligence organization, responsible for signals intelligence, human intelligence collection, and operational security programs across the Army. The STARGATE remote viewing program, which had been operating at Fort Meade since 1977 under code names Gondola Wish and Grill Flame, fell within INSCOM's organizational umbrella.

Psychic Research Advocacy

Stubblebine was a genuine believer in the potential of unconventional human capabilities for military applications. He believed that with sufficient training and mental discipline, soldiers could develop abilities that conventional science had not fully measured or explained. This conviction encompassed remote viewing - which the Grill Flame program was already investigating - as well as more extreme propositions including the possibility of passing the human body through solid matter by achieving a sufficiently altered mental state.

Reports from officers who served under him described Stubblebine attempting to walk through the wall of his Pentagon office, based on his conviction that this was theoretically achievable through the right mental training. These reports, which circulated within the Army intelligence community and later became part of the broader cultural record of the STARGATE era documented in Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004), illustrated both the sincerity of his beliefs and the distance between those beliefs and mainstream military culture.

He pushed for expanded use of psychics throughout Army intelligence and organized training programs intended to develop soldiers' latent psychic capabilities. These included consciousness training exercises at Fort Bragg for special operations personnel. The cultural environment these programs created - sometimes called the "First Earth Battalion" culture after Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon's influential 1979 concept paper proposing a psychic warrior force - was an institutional artifact of Stubblebine's INSCOM command.

Support for STARGATE

Stubblebine's most consequential contribution to the government remote viewing program was his command-level support. When skeptics within Army intelligence and Pentagon bureaucracies questioned the program's value, Stubblebine's rank and genuine enthusiasm provided protection. He participated in remote viewing demonstrations, received briefings on operational results, and used his position to continue program funding and staffing through his INSCOM tenure.

His advocacy also had limits: the program's credibility within mainstream Army intelligence was not enhanced by its association with a commander known for attempting to walk through walls. Officers who might otherwise have engaged with the remote viewing program's results distanced themselves from it to avoid association with what they considered an embarrassingly unconventional command climate.

Stubblebine was relieved of the INSCOM command in 1984 and retired from the Army. After his departure, the program continued but lost some of its most senior Army champion. The DIA subsequently took over primary program management.

The Record

Stubblebine received his first Grill Flame briefing as incoming commander of INSCOM on June 30, 1981, from the outgoing project manager, Lieutenant Colonel Murray Watt, and his successor, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Jachim. After the Senate intelligence committee's budget subcommittee cut the Army's psychoenergetic operations from the National Foreign Intelligence Program at the end of fiscal 1982, he "decided to continue INSCOM's project and provide funding with Security and Investigative Activities (S&IA) monies" under the provisional special access program Center Lane. The project manager's records of his meetings show him on November 30, 1983, confirming "his decision to hold a 'bonding' ceremony" for the RAPT training, to be led by Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander, and on January 6, 1984, saying of Alexander's unauthorized debriefing of Russell Targ that "he had not instructed LTC Alexander to debrief Targ because Alexander was not a trained intelligence officer."¹

At the briefing of June 30, 1981, attended by Brigadier General Flynn, Colonel Weinstein, Colonel White, and the two project managers, "MG Stubblebine instructed us to ensure that there were no legal problems concerning our joint contractual effort with DIA, especially to be watchful of mixing OM&A and R&D monies," and, reviewing the customer evaluations, "expressed the thought that the evaluations were a clear indication that we were on to something and that work in this area had to continue."²

On September 27, 1982, four days before the cut, he heard the full Grill Flame briefing at building 2561, "well over an hour" of it on the project book and two unevaluated cases; "he was unaware of the problems we had had in getting information from Europe, concerning Dozier." Coming from a visit to Lieutenant General Faurer of the NSA, he dismissed one option for housing the unit as soon as it was clear it had no spaces or money of its own, and "before I could finish, MG Stubblebine selected SSD, 902D as the organization to which the project would go. As I tried to continue with other options, MG Stubblebine then indicated I must not have heard him for he had already made his decision." His guidance included "Get out of the briefing mode!" The assistant chief of staff for intelligence wrote to him in April 1983 that "I applaud your efforts to establish a Special Access Program," and that INSCOM should present itself as engaged in "a similar, cooperative effort of its own initiative" rather than the former joint program. In 1983 he briefed the Army Science Board, the under secretary James Ambrose, and the Secretary of the Army, John Marsh, himself. On August 26, 1983, after Buzby, Atwater, and McMoneagle briefed him on the project and the Monroe Institute, "the CG started to relate some of his experiences and personal thoughts in the field of parapsychology," and "directed me to expand the program with quality people, develop a screening program to identify qualified people for the project; and employ advance techniques for intelligence collection." His chief of staff asked whether the project was receiving information from Lieutenant Colonel John B. Alexander and was told that Alexander's involvement "was entirely overt and that we neither had nor wanted any contact with him." On January 6, 1984, he asked to be kept informed of the "Los Alamos Project," "as it was his initiative," and agreed not to fund a new Monroe Institute proposal. On March 13, 1984, the director of the Army staff cancelled RAPT, the Hemi-Sync screening course, and on July 13 his successor, Harry Soyster, decided to discontinue Center Lane.³

Post-Military Career

After retirement, Stubblebine became involved in alternative health movements and supplement businesses. He married psychiatrist Rima Laibow, and the two became prominent voices in alternative medicine and health freedom advocacy, including campaigns against mandatory vaccination and opposition to pharmaceutical industry regulation. This later career was distant in character from his military intelligence background but reflected a consistent pattern of skepticism toward mainstream institutional authority.

He was prominently featured in Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004) and the 2009 film adaptation, which used him and the Grill Flame culture as the central subjects of its examination of psychic warfare research within the U.S. military.

Stubblebine died February 6, 2017 - his 87th birthday - at his home in New Mexico.