For 18 years (from 1975 to 1993), Dale Graff was active in various capacities in what became known as the military’s Star Gate remote viewing program. This made him the longest-serving person directly affiliated with the program.
Dale Graff was working as a Department of the Air Force civilian intelligence analyst in the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio when he first heard mention of remote viewing. In early 1976 he was asked to attend a classified briefing by Dr. Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ about the research they were doing at Stanford Research Institute (later to become SRI-International) into parapsychological phenomena, especially remote viewing.
A year earlier, the CIA, which had been funding Targ’s and Puthoff’s research was ordered to sever its connection with the remote viewing research program. This threatened an abrupt end to the government’s exploration into psychic phenomena.
Fortunately, Graff learned of the problem and managed to convince his superiors in Air Force intelligence that it would be worth the effort to pick up the funding and allow the research at SRI to continue. An assessment paper that he wrote in 1975 on Soviet ESP research provided justification for the Commander’s decision. Dale was appointed as the government’s contract manager for the SRI’s remote viewing research. With funding in place and the Stanford Research Institute remote viewing effort saved,1 Graff went further and created his own small exploratory remote viewing cell right there at Wright-Patterson AFB. His viewers consisted of Air Force airmen, Air Force officers, and civilians who had top-secret clearances.
Dale’s efforts there resulted in two major successes: The first was when Air Force enlisted woman Rosemary Smith was able to locate in Africa a crashed Soviet Tu-22 bomber outfitted as a reconnaissance aircraft; the other was demonstrating that remote viewers, when tasked properly, could defeat the supposedly fool-proof basing scheme for the newly-developed MX nuclear ballistic missile (eventually to be named the LGM-118 “Peacekeeper”). The latter success put Dale at odds with the then-Air Force Chief of Staff, General Lew Allen, who was heavily invested in the MX missile deployment scheme that the remote viewing research effort had just scuttled. Allen also threatened to demote the Intelligence Division’s commander. Graff had to cancel the remaining portion of the RV research contract with SRI.
At the time, Dale had been selected by the CIA to receive a highly-prestigious award for excellence in intelligence analysis—an honor for both him and the Air Force. But Gen. Allen directed that the award be rejected, and threatened Dale that he would lose his job if he went to Washington, DC to receive it.
Seeing the hand-writing on the wall, in 1981 Graff transferred from the Air Force to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), where he worked for Jack Vorona, the Assistant Deputy Director for Scientific and Technical Intelligence at DIA. Part of Vorona’s duties included overseeing DIA’s portion of what was then known as the Grill Flame remote viewing program. Along with other intelligence-related duties, Dale was placed in charge of much of the day-to-day management of the project. In this role he had frequent contact with the Army portion of Grill Flame at Fort Meade, Maryland.
Throughout the 1980s Dale functioned as the liaison between the Fort Meade office, where operational remote viewing was done, the scientific research effort at SRI-International, various prospective remote viewing consumers in the intelligence community, Congress, and DIA headquarters. He also managed much of the remote viewing tasking from high-level agencies that wanted to request the Fort Meade remote viewers to perform operational projects on targets that were inaccessible to conventional intelligence collection means.
In late 1990, Graff was assigned full time to the Fort Mead unit, and became overall director of what was by then known as Sun Streak. Shortly after arriving, Dale created the name Star Gate as the new unclassified nickname for replacing the previous Sun Streak name, and it was accepted by the Ft. Meade unit’s staff. The Star Gate name required approval from the Secretary of Defense’s office since it was not in the computer-generatied lists for nick names mandated by DOD’s Special Access Program (SAP) Security Division. Dale also facilitated the use of LIMDIS (“limited dissemination”) classification for some of the Ft. Meade activities that did not require the Special Access highly classified deep cover classifications. SRI’s RV research was never itself included within the Special Access Control system.
In 1993, Dale retired from civil service, and ultimately settled in rural Pennsylvania where, even in his 80s, he is still a vigorous hiker of challenging trails. He often speaks at conferences and in other venues, and conducts research and workshops on his favorite subject, dream ESP. One of his hobbies is growing crook-necked squash, also known as Pennsylvania Dutch pumpkins. As an avid canoeist, his travels have included thousands of miles of Canadian rivers that flow into Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean. Dale is an advocate of maintaining physical and psychological well-being through holistic health practices. And Dale has an amazing sense of humor!
