Pat Price

Pat Price (December 8, 1918 - July 14, 1975) was a retired law enforcement official from Burbank, California, who joined the Stanford Research Institute remote viewing program in 1973 and produced results that the program's principal investigators, Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, considered the most operationally significant of the SRI period. His remote viewing sessions targeting a classified Soviet research facility at Semipalatinsk and a classified NSA signals intelligence installation at Sugar Grove, West Virginia, were assessed as substantially accurate against independent intelligence sources and contributed substantially to congressional and agency briefings used to justify continued program funding. He died in Las Vegas in July 1975 at age 56 of a reported heart attack, under circumstances that some program participants considered suspicious.

Background and Law Enforcement Career

Price was born December 8, 1918, and spent his career in law enforcement in Burbank, California, where he eventually served as a police commissioner and reached the rank of undersheriff. During his law enforcement career, he claimed to use psychic impressions as an investigative tool, sitting in police dispatch offices attempting to perceive locations of criminals and using spontaneously received information to generate investigative leads. He retired from law enforcement and by the early 1970s was living near Lake Tahoe, operating a small building contractor business. He was a member of the Church of Scientology, as were Ingo Swann and, for a period, Puthoff. The CIA's internal program assessments noted the Scientology affiliations of the program's principal figures.

SRI Experiments and Semipalatinsk (1973-1974)

Price introduced himself to Puthoff after attending a lecture and began informal remote viewing sessions at SRI in 1973. His early results were sufficiently consistent that he rapidly became the program's primary subject. Unlike Swann, who had developed theoretical frameworks for understanding anomalous cognition, Price treated remote viewing tasks with what Puthoff described as the practical matter-of-factness of a detective.

The most operationally significant of his SRI sessions targeted the Soviet research facility designated URDF-3 near Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, assigned by CIA officer Peter Maris. Price described a large gantry crane structure on rails, construction of large spherical metal objects he estimated at approximately 60 feet in diameter, and a novel welding technique being applied to their assembly - a method he termed "flux-welding." The CIA subsequently evaluated these descriptions against classified satellite photography and assessed them as substantially accurate, including dimensional details of the structures that could not have been derived from available open-source information about the facility. The Semipalatinsk session became the program's most-cited operational result in subsequent briefings to congressional oversight and DIA sponsors.

The second major session was a remote viewing of the NSA signals intelligence facility at Sugar Grove, West Virginia, conducted when CIA officer Bill O'Donnell inadvertently provided Price and Swann with the facility's geographic coordinates as a targeting exercise. Price's and Swann's descriptions included internal organizational details and reference to NSA cryptographers working at the site. The accuracy of the descriptions triggered an NSA security investigation into whether remote viewing, if genuine, represented a vulnerability for classified installations.

Price also demonstrated precognitive results during SRI experiments: he described the Redwood City Marina and its boats five minutes before Puthoff and a colleague arrived at the target location, and he described a water-treatment facility with elevated water tanks at Rinconada Park that had existed at the site decades before his session.

CIA Direct Work (1974-1975)

In the autumn of 1974, Price left SRI and began working directly for the CIA outside the SRI institutional framework, including a period attempting to identify coal deposits in Huntington, West Virginia, using psychic methods for a commercial client. He also undertook CIA-tasked remote viewing sessions to attempt to confirm locations of foreign intelligence facilities. He passed initial CIA verification tests, accurately describing embassy layouts and interior details that were confirmed against classified records.

Death and Disputed Circumstances

Price died in Las Vegas, Nevada, on July 14, 1975, at age 56. The official cause of death was a heart attack. He had no known prior history of cardiac disease. Puthoff was contacted and traveled to Las Vegas to manage the program's interests in the aftermath. He found that Price's personal suitcase, which Price habitually carried and which contained his remote viewing notes and CIA-associated materials, had disappeared before Puthoff's arrival.

Within the SRI program, Puthoff and other participants considered Price's death - a healthy 56-year-old with no cardiac history, working for the CIA, suitcase missing - as warranting further inquiry. Price's family disputed the cardiac diagnosis. The CIA conducted an internal review. No evidence of foul play was established and no formal investigation outside the CIA's internal inquiry was conducted. The circumstances have remained unresolved.

Price's death substantially changed the program's operational character. As the most effective subject for intelligence-relevant remote viewing to that point, his loss redirected the program toward developing trained remote viewers from the Army's own personnel rather than relying on a small number of naturally gifted civilians. The structured Coordinate Remote Viewing protocol that Swann subsequently developed for Army training was in part a response to the program's inability to identify another subject with Price's consistency.

Assessment

Within the government's remote viewing program, Price's Semipalatinsk session was the most frequently cited evidence for anomalous information transfer with intelligence value. Ray Hyman, who evaluated the program critically in the 1995 AIR assessment, acknowledged the Semipalatinsk result as the program's strongest single case while arguing that alternative explanations - including access to open-source information about the facility that participants did not recall using - could not be definitively ruled out without complete documentation that had not been preserved.