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.

The Documents

SRI's SCANATE report introduces him without a surname: "As a backup test, the coordinates were given to a second subject who appears to possess similar ability in casual testing, although with perhaps a lower signal-to-noise ratio. Since the second subject, a businessman, wishes to remain anonymous for the time being, he shall be referred to simply as Pat." Given the West Virginia coordinates by telephone on June 1, 1973, he wrote his answer at Lake Tahoe the next day: a mountain of about 4,996 feet, "a battleground in civil war," a monument to "the battle of Lynchburg," and "large underground storage areas" that "looks like former missile site, bases for launchers still there, but area now houses record storage area, microfilm, file cabinets. Personnel, Army 5th Corps engineers. M/Sgt. Long on desk placard on grey steel desk. Personnel, Army Signal Corps." A later session gave "papers labeled: Flytrap / Minerva," a cabinet "labeled: Operation Pool," folders "Cueball / 14 Ball / 4 Ball / 8 Ball / Rackup," a site name "vaguely seems like Hayfork or Haystack," and three officers' names. He then "volunteered that he scanned the other side of the globe for a Bloc equivalent, and found one in the Urals," at 65°00'57"N, 59°59'59"E: "Elevation, 6200 ft. Scrubby brush, tundra-type ground hummocks," an underground site with "doorways of steel of the roll-up type," "unusually high ratio of women to men, at least at night," helipads, light rail into the mountain, and thirty miles north "a radar installation with one large (165 ft) dish and two small fast-track dishes." The 1975 final report, which codes him S1, states that "the two reports for the West Virginia Site, and the report for the Urals Site were verified by personnel in the sponsor organization as being substantially correct," the coordinates having come from "the OSI group responsible for threat analysis." He was the subject of its magnetometer series, thirteen ten-trial runs at four metres giving p = 0.004, and of its Costa Rica series, in which twelve daily descriptions by him, a second subject, and once an SRI experimenter gave five matches to Puthoff's travels (p = 0.02).¹

The Semipalatinsk experiment ran in three phases "under direct control of the COTR": Phase I with coordinates and the words "R&D test facility" only, Phase II after "the subject being made 'witting' (of the client) by client representatives who introduced themselves to the subject," and Phase III "the generation of unverifiable data concerning the Semipalatinsk site not available to the client, but of operational interest nonetheless," over two weeks. The Los Alamos analyst who reviewed the tapes of July 9 to 15, 1974, found that on the first day he "successfully evaded drawing a perimeter of the area even though he was asked to do this twice" and produced a 500-foot antenna, a swimming pool "for underwater testing," an array of telephone poles, and an airstrip that did not exist; that on the second "Price supplied the most positive evidence yet for the remote-viewing experiment with his sketch of the rail-mounted gantry crane. It seems inconceivable to imagine how he could have drawn such a likeness to the actual crane at URDF-3 unless: 1) he actually saw it through remote viewing, or 2) he was informed of what to draw by someone knowledgeable of URDF-3," adding, "I only mention this second possibility because the experiment was not controlled to discount the possibility that Price could talk to other people, such as the Disinformation Section of the KGB"; that on the third, shown the surface features of the underground Building 1, he said "No, that's a concrete apron, and there's nothing subterranean right in that particular area," which "was his most negative evidence yet"; and on the fourth admitted "he had been trying to force-fit a space-oriented situation to the target location." The conclusion: "I consider Price's remote-viewing experiment of URDF-3 to be unsuccessful. I recommend that the tapes be considered for use with the psychological stress evaluator." An outside reviewer of the SRI progress reports in 1974, under the heading "Remote Viewing by Mr. Price," wrote that "one cannot determine whether he was aware of the nine sites or had visited them prior to the experiment," and closed: "one still has the feeling that the prevailing philosophy is to 'prove' the existence of an information channel." When OTS briefed the House intelligence committee in November 1977 it left with the staff "a brief article on Mr. Pat Price."²

David Marks and Richard Kammann of the University of Otago argued in Nature in August 1978 that the judging of his nine-trial series depended on "multiple extraneous cues which were available in the original unedited transcripts," such as "Nothing like having three successes behind you" in the fourth, and on a target list given to the judge "in the correct order"; Puthoff, Targ and Charles Tart answered with a rejudging of edited transcripts in which "seven of the nine were correctly matched," and Puthoff conceded in 1980 that the list had been "inadvertently (through an error) given in the same order." The Snyders' evaluation of 1979 added: "It is alleged, although unverified by the authors, that Price had once worked for the organization that had control over that particular site" in West Virginia.⁹⁰¹

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.

The Nature paper of October 1974 reported his nine double-blind trials against Bay Area sites, six matched by a plurality of five judges, and gave him, with Hella Hammid, as one of "two of our subjects (H.H. and P.P.)" who "had not considered themselves to have unusual perceptual ability before their participation." Targ's memoir of 1996 quotes his words on July 10, 1974: "I am lying on my back on the roof of a two or three story brick building. It's a sunny day. The sun feels good. There's the most amazing thing. There's a giant gantry crane moving back and forth over my head," and his description of "a giant, 'sixty-foot diameter metal sphere'" assembled from "thick metal gores," which Targ set beside an Aviation Week report of May 2, 1977, of Soviet steel gores for "a large sphere estimated to be about 18 meters (57.8 feet) in diameter." In August 1977 Stansfield Turner told reporters that the agency "had found a man who could 'see' what was going on anywhere in the world," dropped in 1975: "He died, and we haven't heard from him since."³

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.