FOIAWEAR — GRILL FLAME / Applied Remote Viewing Protocol Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 040 — GRILL FLAME

In 1978 the United States Army wrote a formal, classified protocol for finding things with the human mind.

It was called GRILL FLAME. The sponsoring activity was the Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity (AMSAA); in April 1978 the Commander of DARCOM approved AMSAA’s involvement in principle, in May 1978 the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence accepted lead responsibility, and overall Department of Defense responsibility sat with the Defense Intelligence Agency. The protocol’s project officer was John W. Kramar.

Its subject was remote viewing, defined in the document itself as “an intellectual process by which a person perceives characteristics of a location remote from that person.” The protocol is careful to rule things out: remote viewing “does not involve any electronic sensing devices at or focused at the target site, nor does it involve classical photo interpretation of photographs obtained from overhead or oblique means.” It is equally careful to rule out the obvious crutches — “no drugs, hypnosis, special sensory… or proprioceptive stimuli, liminal or subliminal, electrical or electromagnetic stimulus will be used in this RV protocol.” What the viewer gets instead is an identifier: map coordinates, a specific structure, an aircraft tail number, or a specific individual — “name, place of birth, age, and/or photograph.”

The document then does something remarkable: it writes a military requirement for it. Among the stated applications, remote viewing would be used to target field mobile weapons “which are currently difficult or impossible to detect prior to launch, such as tactical missiles and rockets and attack helicopters”; to target key enemy individuals; to detect changes in the state of military units; to assess bomb damage quickly; to determine the access code to computers and other electronic devices; and to determine the general content of documents. And it worries about reciprocity: “US Army Personnel, units, materiel and operations are vulnerable to RV. Countermeasures must be devised to reduce this vulnerability.”

The sessions are on the record too. In session C-62 the viewer is told the target is designated by geographic coordinates. In session CC8 the monitor says: “You have in your possession a photograph of two individuals. Focus your attention on these individuals.” In CC27: “Focus your attention on the area designated to you as Area H.” After one session the viewer was shown an overhead photograph of an embassy compound and asked whether the area he had described matched it. The programme even had a draft classification guide, marking target selection — “includes coordinates or other identifiers of RV targets” — SECRET.

It did not end in 1979. The work continued under other names, including STAR GATE, administered by the Defense Intelligence Agency, with oversight panels, long-range plans and a participant consent form. When the programme was transferred to the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center in 1992, the review noted that the operation had been “in compliance with the laws concerning human experimentation.” Twenty years, millions of dollars, and a formal chain of custody over the idea that a person could quietly look at a place they had never been.

The artwork is a stylised declassified session document — typewriter typography with parapsychology test-card graphics, the visual language of the programme’s own paperwork rather than a superhero version of it. The whole thing is stranger as filed.

Offered in eleven garment colours: the artwork carries light typography on Black, Graphite, Espresso, Navy and dark typography on White, Ivory, Butter, Chalky Mint, Blossom, Light Green, Chambray.

The QR code on the front opens the declassified document itself — GRILL FLAME Protocol, AMSAA Applied Remote Viewing Protocol, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100080004-9, released 7 August 2000: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001100080004-9

Note: quotations above are taken verbatim from the released document. Spacing and line breaks in the original typewritten pages are not reproduced. This is a tribute to the historical record, not an official publication.

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

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