Movie Spotlight: Psychic Agent: The Gate Program

Millions of American children went through the Gifted and Talented Education program. Most came out the other side with fragmented memories of tests, small rooms, and an unclear sense of what exactly they were being measured for. The government called it GATE. The question this film asks is what GATE was actually for.

Ryder Lee spent three years following that question. He started with the CIA’s MK Ultra records, moved into Project Stargate (the government’s declassified psychic spy program), and found a thread connecting both to children being screened in public schools across the country. Psychic Agent: The Gate Program puts former remote viewers, Air Force intelligence officers, and GATE alumni in the same frame and asks whether any of it was ever a coincidence.

The Program Has a Name

Project Stargate was the government’s psychic spy unit, running from the 1970s through the mid-90s across more than a dozen name changes and three intelligence agencies. Lee describes the institutional history as “very convoluted” and spent significant time making the timeline hold. The declassified record exists. The connections are documented. What Lee did was trace them into a coherent shape without filling in the gaps with guesswork. “There is very little speculation in the film,” he says. For things that aren’t yet provable: “In time that evidence will come to light.”

Children as Assets

The GATE angle was built into the research from the beginning. Lee’s argument, developed through interviews and declassified documentation, is that a program already invested in identifying psychic talent wouldn’t overlook school-age children. “Children have always been said to be more psychic than adults,” he says. “They wouldn’t waste the chance of identifying potential assets. That’s why the GATE programs were set up in the first place.” Many of the adults who appear in the film as former GATE subjects have partial or no memory of what happened during those screenings. Lee’s read on that: “I believe that’s the point.”

The People in the Room

The film’s credibility rests on who agreed to sit for it. Dale Graff and Lyn Buchanan were operationally involved in the government’s Stargate program. Walter Bosley and Angela Ford bring research and intelligence backgrounds. Lee didn’t reconstruct anything or rely on anonymous sources. He found the people who were inside the program and let them speak. Each one, he says, is “key and integral in making the film flow and come to life to tell the story adequately.”

How Many People

The number that still surprises Lee when he sits with it is scale. We are talking millions of children who moved through these programs over decades. A large majority of them, as adults, have gaps where those memories should be. That detail does more work than any single piece of documentation in the film. The sheer volume of people affected turns a story about government programs into something that touches an enormous number of ordinary lives.

What to Know Before You Press Play

Lee is direct: “It’s a lot of information. Lock in, get ready to take notes, watch it, and then you’re going to want to watch it again and pick up on the things you missed.” This is a film that asks you to sit with uncomfortable questions about what the government knew, what it was doing with that knowledge, and how many people it quietly involved along the way. Lee’s hope is to “spark very deep and real conversations about childhood, public schools, remote viewing, capabilities, and what the human mind is actually capable of.”

Documentary

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Streaming now on Relay.