Noah’s Notes

Written by Noah.

The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) serves as the catalyst for much of what evolved into broader US remote viewing and other psi-research under characters Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. A collaboration between SRI and government entities turned into the projects we now know as GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, and eventually STARGATE. Major General Albert “Bert” Stubblebine III was a major supporter of Task Force Delta and saw that an extension of the work being conducted in this group be built upon to help the US Army solve complex problems using psychic abilities that exist within all people. I’ve dumped notes I have on these programs into our favorite AI friend to help synthesize these programs and people together in a digestible format.

Hopefully this will be a useful resource for anyone interested in the history of these programs, the people involved, and the connections between them.

AI-Assisted Synthesis

This synthesis was drafted with AI from declassified program records, academic literature, and secondary sources, guided by Noah.

The post-Vietnam US Army was a genuinely broken institution — drug abuse, racial violence, collapsed NCO authority — and that crisis opened a door. A cohort of progressive officers with behavioral science degrees launched the largest organizational development program ever run inside a military institution. At the same time, the same personnel network was funding research into psychic espionage.

This synthesis pulls together eight sections of research: the crisis context, Task Force Delta’s structure and methods, the full program chronology from SCANATE through Stargate, the Stubblebine node in detail, a key figures grid, four competing hypotheses with confidence ratings, an evidence quality assessment, and open investigative questions.

A few things worth flagging:

The H2 hypothesis — that Task Force Delta and the remote viewing programs were a single coherent project, not coincidentally adjacent ones — is where the evidence lands most strongly. The NLP pipeline is the key structural link. The same training cohort that included Maxwell Thurman under TFD’s orbit also ran through Stubblebine’s INSCOM command into the RV programs. That’s not incidental personnel overlap. It’s the same ideology operating through the same command relationships simultaneously.

The attribution problem for Desert Storm is larger than most treatments acknowledge. Every piece of secondary literature asserts the connection between TFD and the Army’s 1991 performance, but none of them establishes mechanism. The same period saw AirLand Battle doctrine development, major NCO Corps revitalization, and the M1/Bradley fielding. The TFD contribution is plausible — small-unit cohesion work is genuinely hard to reverse once embedded — but the evidentiary standard in the literature is asserted, not demonstrated.

On the RV → UAP genealogy: the simple-dismissal position is harder to hold than it looks. Puthoff in particular is not just a name that recurs across programs — he’s an institutional figure who transitioned from SRI’s remote viewing contracts directly to AAWSAP. That’s career continuity, not coincidence. Whether the underlying epistemological claims improved across that span is a separate question from whether the genealogy is real. It is.