The Men Who Walk Through Walls

by Brian Dunning
June 2, 2026

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Today we have a story from the immortal annals of “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” As a science writer who spends a lot of my time correcting false histories, there is one particular false history that seems to come up more often than most. It concerns the days of MKULTRA and Project Stargate, when at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, American intelligence agencies went all-in on investigating psychic powers to make sure American spies would have the psychic edge over their Soviet counterparts. In some tellings, it seems that virtually the entire weight of the national security agencies was behind it. This is raised to me all time by true believers in these phenomena, who hope that the example of the US government heavily investing countless millions of dollars into it proves beyond any doubt that these powers are real. And the “more things stay the same” part of this is what we see today with government attention on UFOs; at times it appears the entire government is thinking about nothing but flying saucers, therefore they must know something we don’t. Well, it’s a fine argument; or at least, it would be, if it didn’t fall completely apart under even the lightest scrutiny.

In the case of today’s apparent government attention on UFOs, if you follow Skeptoid or any other science communicators who cover the UFO culture wave, you already know that this is really just a tiny core group of well-connected UFO believers who have managed to catechize a small number of non-scientific Congresspeople into acolytes. And today, the Congressional UFO caucus holds televised public hearings every so often: each hearing is publicized as a “whistleblower” coming forward to give testimony about what he has learned through his government or military employ about how the US is in possession of crashed flying saucer wreckage, or “non-biologic” alien bodies, or “non-human intelligence” derived technologies. But those of us whose jobs require that we follow these storylines know that these Congresspeople and their “whistleblower” testifiers and the UFOlogists behind the scenes have typically all known one another for a long time, and the hearings are essentially planned PR events to promote to the world press their shared belief that aliens actively visit the Earth. The theatrical touch of having some of them play the role of “whistleblower” who used to work in some unspecified national security or intelligence role is a master stroke of PR genius.

If you look in the front row of the audience at these hearings, you’ll usually see the UFO believers who are pulling the committee’s strings: it’s usually guys like Jeremy Corbell, George Knapp, Lue Elizondo, Ross Coulthart, Jay Stratton, Chris Mellon, Tim Gaulladet, Avi Loeb, Eric Davis, and a half dozen others (sometimes called the SMURFs, for SMall group of UFO Religious Fanatics). Why do they do it? Popularizing their viewpoint is only the first step; the next step (and most revealing) they made in April 2025 with a Congressional briefing in which they asked Congress for a billion dollars to study UFOs.

Yup, it’s all this one same core group of people, chasing the big money, and making so much noise since 2017 that many in the general public have gotten the impression that the whole government shares their consuming obsession with alien visitation. Nope. It’s not “the government” — it’s one small, loud, influential group.

And as things have changed — what is UFOs today, was psychic powers back in the Cold War — the more they’ve stayed the same. It was never “the government,” or even any significant number of people in it, who wanted to invest in psychic powers to defeat the Soviets. It was a single small group of individuals. And, as do the UFO people today, the psychic believers back then made enough noise and had enough influence that 50 years later, a lot of people believe it was, in fact, the whole military/intelligence machine that invested everything in the development of psychic warfare.

All of this brings us to “the men who walk through walls.” If you saw the 2009 George Clooney movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, you might recognize this from the first seconds of the film, when actor Stephen Lang gets a running start and tries to break through his office wall to get into the next room, and ends up flat on his back.

The movie was changed and fictionalized, but it was based on a nonfiction book by Jon Ronson, also titled The Men Who Stare at Goats. The real person that Stephen Lang’s character was mostly based on was General Albert Stubblebine (1930-2017). Stubblebine did indeed believe that humans have the power to (literally) phase through a wall, to pass through it like a ghost; and he did attempt it on many occasions — though in private. He believed that one simply needed to attain the right mental state by visualizing the molecules in their bodies and the wall.

Stubblebine was probably the single most influential person driving the military/intelligence interest and research in psychics and psychic powers, and he held a whole raft of other strange beliefs as well. He also believed people could levitate or do almost anything with the right mental state, and attempted levitation many times himself. He believed in psychic healing and in psychic killing: that soldiers could be trained to kill their enemies with their thoughts, and that their injured comrades could be similarly healed. He also held a broad general belief that telekinesis, telepathy, and clairvoyance were all real.

Stubblebine, however, came into all of this rather late in the game. The real origin is even weirder.

In the early 1970s, Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ were engineers working at SRI, a contract testing and research lab in California. They also happened to be paranormalists, and happened to have met through the Church of Scientology — in fact, a lot of the personal connections in this story came about through Scientology, and it’s also how they met their third: a self-described psychic named Ingo Swann. Swann was also very good at many of the same magic tricks used by Uri Geller, things like spoon bending and using concealed magnets to do apparently supernatural things. Again through Puthoff’s Scientology network, someone at the CIA heard about how Swann was amazing Puthoff and Targ with some of his tricks (they all thought the tricks were real) — and, long story short, that’s how the CIA came to pay millions of dollars to have these powers researched, through what later became known as the Stargate Project.

Knowledge of these experiments filtered through whatever parapsychology believers happened to work at CIA, including Christopher Green, who championed it at CIA and kept it funded. Jack Vorona at the Defense Intelligence Agency was also a believer and he championed it at DIA. A few Congresspeople were also believers, such as Charlie Rose and Claiborne Pell (who kept a parapsychologist on staff at his offices). Eventually INSCOM (the Army's Intelligence and Security Command) was tasked to develop a program for clairvoyance, and they found a commander who was willing. An office was set up in a disused building at Fort Meade and a few soldiers and local civilians who claimed psychic powers were trained and tested in remote viewing. The program was called Grill Flame.

But since none of this had ever produced any useful results, interest and funding waned. By 1981 it was virtually all dried up. And 1981 was, fortuitously, when INSCOM received a new commanding officer: Stubblebine.

Stubblebine was freshly invigorated from what he always described as his greatest influence: a book by a certain Jim Channon (1939-2017). Returning from Vietnam depressed and traumatized, Channon had petitioned for, and received, a two-year journey of personal discovery, all expenses paid by the Army. He visited some 150 New Age institutions including Esalen and the Gentle Wind World Healing Organization. The report he wrote upon his return in 1979 was, well, unconventional. It was a handwritten and illustrated manual for what he called the First Earth Battalion, the US military reimagined as “Warrior Monks.” Pretty much every aspect of military life and combat would be remade as metaphysical and psychic. It was to be a modern battle force of henna-tattooed energy warriors, yoga instructors, mystics, and New Age shamans carrying healing chimes instead of machine guns. It’s actually a pretty fun (and wild) book, and you can probably find a PDF online.

Channon’s return to active duty created something of a buzz among his friends and the Army’s own little New Age subculture, and he held a private event for all of them at the officers’ club at Fort Knox in 1979, during which he famously presented his First Earth Battalion book. Copies were distributed from there to all who were interested, and through a mutual acquaintance, one found its way to General Albert Stubblebine. (It should be noted that most accounts of this meeting cast it as a skeptical audience of regular Army officers who were won over by Channon’s brilliant ideas, but it most assuredly was not; it was mostly Channon’s fellow New Agers. Channon’s document was submitted officially through normal channels; the informal officers’ club event was entirely unofficial — but ultimately far more effective in spreading the word.)

If you’re not seeing the connection between New Agers doing yoga in Big Sur and psychic spies chasing Soviet submarines from a disused building in Kentucky, these skills are all branches of the Human Potential Movement. That’s the whole mind-over-matter idea that the brain can be unlocked through spiritual practices to unleash unlimited abilities, which was where Stubblebine got the idea he could walk through walls, and why it was so easy for him to be fooled by the guys like Ingo Swann who were using magicians’ tricks to read the contents of sealed envelopes — the very foundation of remote viewing.

INSCOM’s few years under Stubblebine’s command in the early 1980s, with his constant attention to the flow of money, were the glory days for the Army’s psychic spy programs. Stubblebine opened it up from just a few psychics to more than a dozen, and he funded it out of INSCOM’s own budget when the Army lost interest. His officers all had to learn to bend spoons like Uri Geller, and they were all required to have out-of-body experiences at the Monroe Institute. One of Stubblebine’s officers, Skip Atwater, became the Monroe Institute’s Research Director after his retirement from the Army.

Stubblebine’s own retirement, alas, came all too quickly. Once the increased activity in his little program caught the notice of the National Academy of Sciences in 1984, the National Research Council lost no time in finding that the whole program was a worthless waste of taxpayer money that was intended for scientific research on the planet Earth. Stubblebine was given early retirement, and without a cheerleader, what little remained of the psychic spies programs quickly dried up.

So the next time you see some big government UFO news and wonder if maybe there’s something in the water in the Washington, DC metropolitan area that causes sharp drops in IQ, take comfort in the fact that what you’re hearing and seeing are much, much bigger than whatever thin thread of actual activity might exist. We’ve seen it all before: A loud minority can sound like a majority — especially when the majority has something better to do than make noise.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning