Dale E. Graff

Career Overview

Dale E. Graff is a retired aerospace engineer and physicist who served in senior positions within U.S. military intelligence, most notably as the director of the Stargate remote viewing program at the Defense Intelligence Agency. A credentialed government insider with decades of experience in classified programs, Graff represents a crucial figure bridging consciousness research, psi phenomena, and military intelligence operations during the Cold War era.

Military Intelligence Background

Graff began his government career in the aerospace industry, applying his degrees in Aeronautical Engineering and Physics to technical intelligence assignments at the Air Force Foreign Technology Division (FTD) at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. He rose to become Chief of an Advanced Technology group at FTD, where he oversaw complex intelligence assessments related to foreign aviation and aerospace capabilities. His technical credibility and security clearance led to his recruitment into emerging research on parapsychological phenomena during the mid-1970s.

Stargate Program Leadership

In 1976, Graff became the contract manager for remote viewing research at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a position that would define his career. He managed Department of Defense funding for what would become one of the military's longest-running classified programs investigating extrasensory perception and remote viewing as intelligence-gathering tools. In 1980, he transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he became Director of the Advanced Concepts Office and, most significantly, Chief/Director of the Stargate remote viewing unit at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Graff coined the term "Star Gate" to represent the program's mission of expanding human potential through consciousness research. Under his directorship, the program employed trained remote viewers to attempt psychic intelligence gathering on targets of national security interest. One of the program's documented successes occurred in 1976, when remote viewer Rosemary Smith, a young administrative assistant recruited by Graff, successfully located a lost Soviet spy plane—a result that demonstrated to program stakeholders the potential viability of psi-based intelligence methods.

Research Philosophy

Graff distinguished between two categories of ESP phenomena: conscious psi (deliberately accessed through techniques like remote viewing) and unconscious psi (naturally occurring in dream states and through synchronistic events). His work emphasized that psi represents a natural human capacity rather than a supernatural anomaly, something that could be trained, refined, and applied operationally. This framework informed both his government work and his later academic contributions.

Published Works and Continuing Research

Following the declassification of Stargate in 1995, Graff became one of the few senior Stargate officials to publish detailed accounts of the program. His book Tracks in the Psychic Wilderness: An Exploration of Remote Viewing, ESP, Precognitive Dreaming, and Synchronicity (2001) provides rare insider documentation of actual Stargate operations, including accounts of how remote viewing was used to locate hostages and identify missile targets. The book's foreword was written by Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 astronaut who became a prominent proponent of consciousness research.

River Dreams, published by Element Books, further explores Graff's research into dreamstate ESP and the mechanics of unconscious psi phenomena, positioning psi as a holistic aspect of human consciousness rather than an aberration.

Institute of Noetic Sciences Connection

Post-retirement, Graff joined the Advisory Board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), an organization founded by Edgar Mitchell that investigates consciousness, parapsychology, and human potential. This position reflected his intellectual alignment with researchers exploring the intersection of consciousness studies and physics—a field that increasingly overlaps with unidentified phenomena research and non-human intelligence frameworks.

Relevance to UAP Discourse

While not primarily known as a UFO researcher, Graff's work is significant to UAP studies through several connections: (1) his decades-long government investigation of psi phenomena and consciousness anomalies parallel the study of UAP anomalies; (2) remote viewing programs were sometimes tasked with UAP-related intelligence; (3) his theories about consciousness transcending conventional physics align with emerging frameworks for understanding non-human intelligence; (4) his government credentials and willingness to publish about classified programs lend credibility to the broader disclosure narrative.

Graff represents the serious scientific exploration of consciousness anomalies within government intelligence structures—work that remained classified for two decades and has informed contemporary discussions about the nature of anomalous phenomena, whether aerial or psychological.