"GQ: One of the promises you made in 1976 was that if you were elected, you would look into the reports from Roswell and see if there had been any cover-ups. Did you look into that?

Carter: Well, in a way. I became more aware of what our intelligence services were doing. There was only one instance that I’ll talk about now. We had a plane go down in the Central African Republic—a twin-engine plane, small plane. And we couldn’t find it. And so we oriented satellites that were going around the earth every ninety minutes to fly over that spot where we thought it might be and take photographs. We couldn’t find it. So the director of the CIA came and told me that he had contacted a woman in California that claimed to have supernatural capabilities. And she went in a trance, and she wrote down latitudes and longitudes, and we sent our satellite over that latitude and longitude, and there was the plane.

GQ: That must have been surreal for you. You’re the president of the United States, and you’re getting intelligence information from a woman in a trance in California.

Carter: That’s exactly right.

GQ: How did your scientific mind process that?

Carter: With skepticism. Whether it was just a gross coincidence or…I don’t know. But that’s one thing that I couldn’t explain."

The CIA's remote viewing was known by various cover names, including Stargate. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) also maintained a remote viewing program code named Sun Streak. The prototype CIA remote viewing program, run by Stanford Research Institute (SRI), was code named Project Scanate. Other CIA cover names for remote viewing included Centre Lane, Gondola Wish, and Grill Flame.

A former high-ranking official of Carter's National Security Council and officer in Naval Intelligence confirmed the existence of the CIA's remote viewing program and the use of para-psychics to locate secret Soviet missile bases and ballistic missile submarines. However, he conceded that both the U.S. and Soviet remote viewing programs were plagued with problems, including constant interference from "third parties."

After Stargate's exposure by ABC's Nightline in 1995, it was reportedly defunded. However, according to NSA sources, remote viewing remains an ultra secret project at the signals intelligence agency. According to those familiar with the program, the protocols followed have actually complied with U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18), which implements the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). U.S. persons have been protected by the use of mandatory "two person control" (a viewer and a special handler) during remote viewing sessions, carried out in a super secure chamber at NSA Headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. With recent disclosures about NSA's violations of FISA by order of the Bush White House, there are concerns that NSA's remote viewing program no longer complies with FISA or USSID 18.