CIA poltergeist case files: the Guarulhos and Powhatan investigations

STARGATE was the umbrella designation for the U.S. intelligence community's formal research program into paranormal phenomena, running from 1972 to 1995. The program operated under multiple code names including SCANATE, GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, and SUN STREAK. It was funded by the CIA and DIA and conducted primarily at Stanford Research Institute. Its primary focus was remote viewing, the claimed ability of trained subjects to perceive and describe distant locations, but the collection contains research across the full range of parapsychology, including out-of-body experiences, psychokinesis, and spontaneous phenomena such as poltergeists.

In 1995 Congress ordered a formal review of the program. The CIA terminated STARGATE on June 30, 1995, the day it took formal control from DIA. The declassified archive was released to the public beginning in 2000. It is available through the CIA FOIA reading room and mirrored on the Internet Archive.

The two poltergeist papers on this page were filed within this collection. Their presence does not establish that CIA officers personally investigated these cases. What it establishes is that the government's formal paranormal research program collected and retained academic analysis of poltergeist cases as part of its research record.

The Guarulhos case is the more extensively documented of the two. The affected family, Marcos, a plumber; his wife Noemia; their infant daughter Ruth; and an extended household including Marcos's father Pedro, lived in Guarulhos, a city outside São Paulo, Brazil. The disturbances began on April 27, 1973 and continued in recurring phases until at least 1984, when researchers conducted their final interview with surviving family members.

The documented phenomena included cuts appearing in furniture upholstery and mattresses with no visible cause, cuts appearing on the skin of family members, apparitions of monstrous animal figures described by multiple witnesses, spontaneous fires, objects moving and levitating, stones falling on the house and inside rooms, disappearances of money, possession-like trances in children, and what witnesses described as a physical struggle between Pedro and an invisible entity.

The family's religious community, a Pentecostal congregation, interpreted the events as demonic infestation. The researcher Hernani Guimarães Andrade, director of the Brazilian Institute of Psychobiophysical Research, attributed the phenomena to sorcery by an unnamed adversary. An academic review published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in 1990, and later filed in the CIA STARGATE collection, analyzed the same case under the alternative framework of recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, the theory that an unconscious human agent generates the disturbances.

The American case documented in the first CIA paper is the Powhatan poltergeist, reported by researcher John Palmer in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1974. The subject was J.E., a ten-and-a-half-year-old boy living with elderly foster parents in a rural Virginia town. Witnesses including J.E.'s great aunt, maternal grandmother, and the family doctor reported stomping noises and objects moving without contact. The case was active from December 1971 through early 1972.

The foster father interpreted the events as divine portents. The foster mother said the boy "had the devil in him." The family doctor leaned toward a psychokinetic explanation. The researcher sided with the psychokinetic framework, noting personality and psychodynamic factors he believed might have patterned the phenomena.

Complete word-for-word transcription of both CIA STARGATE documents. Includes the full academic analysis of the Guarulhos case with witness testimony on apparitions, possession trances, and physical cuts, and the comparative analysis of American vs. Brazilian interpretations of poltergeist phenomena. First full searchable HTML transcription of either document.