A Magician Investigated the CIA’s Psychic Spies - Chris Ramsay (Video)

In this 28 October 2026 published video, host Georges St-Pierre talks with Chris Ramsey who has spent 20 years fooling people for a living, and he knows every trick in the book. So when a magician says remote viewing is the one thing he can’t explain away, it’s worth asking why. Chris explains how a year of training in remote viewing turned a hardened skeptic curious.

The conversation focused on the CIA’s historical venture into psychic phenomena—such as the Stargate Project and Cold War-era remote viewing experiments where intelligence agencies tried to use psychic perception for espionage.

Remote viewing is the practice of seeking sensory impressions or information about a distant, hidden, or unseen target using the mind, distinct from ordinary physical senses. A typical session involves a viewer (who records data), a monitor (who guides the process), and a target (an object, person, event, or location). The viewer is usually “blind” to the target—given only a set of random coordinates or a code number—to prevent analytical guessing, bias, or “mental noise”. Instead of a clear movie-like picture, practitioners generally note basic sensory details such as shapes, colors, textures, temperatures, or general movement.

During the Cold War, the U.S. and Soviet militaries explored psychic phenomena to gather intelligence on foreign installations and activities. 
Coordinated largely through agencies like the CIA and SRI International, the U.S. government funded research into remote viewing under initiatives like the Stargate Project. The military program was officially shut down in 1995 following evaluations concluding it was not reliable or practical for operational intelligence. 

The scientific community widely regards remote viewing as a pseudoscience, noting a lack of reproducible, peer-reviewed evidence and pointing to flaws in experimental controls or subjective matching. Supporters—including some former military participants and parapsychology researchers—argue that structured methods (such as Coordinate Remote Viewing) yield statistically significant anomalies under strict laboratory conditions. Consensus on online communities like Reddit generally views it as a trainable mental skill or discipline, though opinions remain deeply divided outside of dedicated circles. 

https://youtu.be/18PDUlPDtqE

00:00 Intro
02:07 Visiting Chris Ramsay
02:58 Georges’ UFO sighting on a flight
05:02 Can a crowd be hypnotized to see UFOs?
07:43 Why an explanation isn’t proof
09:00 The Ace of Hearts card trick
10:07 The Queen of Diamonds
12:02 The time travel trick
13:12 Why slow motion doesn’t scare him
15:37 The magician as an “honest liar”
15:49 Faith healers and Peter Popoff
16:46 Placebo, prayer and consciousness
18:29 Visualization and the nocebo effect
20:35 Chris Ramsay’s background
22:04 How he got into magic
24:42 Practice, nerves and failure
26:40 Street magic vs stage vs TV
27:53 What is mentalism?
29:49 Reading Georges’ passcode
32:02 The magician’s ethical line
32:46 Magicians and the CIA
36:19 The secret magicians’ retreat in Spain
40:42 What magicians really think about ESP
44:18 A 1907 mentalist’s hidden radio
46:25 Princeton’s random number experiments
48:14 9/11 and the Entangled app
50:16 Did Dr. Penfield think memory lives outside the brain?
51:23 Remote viewing for a hedge fund
54:07 Chris’s year of remote viewing
56:27 Is psychic ability a survival instinct?
1:01:02 How the psychic spy program began
1:02:59 Ingo Swann
1:04:07 600 people tested, 6 stood out
1:05:26 Joseph McMoneagle’s results
1:07:02 Why every top viewer had synesthesia
1:07:44 How Stargate was actually used
1:09:54 Why agencies kept coming back
1:12:07 Is remote viewing still being used?
1:14:07 Jimmy Carter and the missing plane
1:15:30 “Billionaires believe in astrology”
1:16:00 Haim Eshed and the Galactic Federation
1:19:29 James Forrestal and MJ-12
1:20:34 Why UFOs and consciousness are linked
1:23:14 The Area52 live tour