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.

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.