Gateway Series Part 2: The Day We Searched for God's Box

In 1988, a psychic working for the US government described remote-viewing the holiest object in Judeo-Christian lore. And for the last time - I’m just summarizing the CIA’s own damn FOIA docs.

There are things done in silence by governments and men that will never make the news and were never meant to. This is one of them. In 1988 a man sat alone in a windowless room and closed his eyes. He had been told nothing. Only a set of numbers. Coordinates. And he was told to see. What he saw was the Ark of the Covenant. The real one. Gold and wood and wings outstretched. This was not fiction. Not a parable. It was a classified operation, paid for by the American taxpayer, meant to pierce through time and myth alike. And the strangest part is not that it happened – but that it was taken seriously.

Raiders, but Real

On the fifth of December, 1988, somewhere within the nondescript walls of a U.S. military intelligence facility, a man – referred to only as Viewer 032 – sat alone in a dimly lit room, closed his eyes, and tried to locate the Ark of the Covenant.

Again, not metaphorically. Not in some poetic, “what is the ark within us” kind of way. He literally attempted to psychically locate the actual, biblical Ark. The chest. The one said to be gilded in gold and stuffed with the original tablets of Moses. The one said to kill you if you touch it without divine permission. That Ark.

This was not a discarded Indiana Jones subplot. It was a classified U.S. military program known as Sun Streak, the government’s ongoing attempt to weaponize clairvoyance – because nothing says national security like telepathically rummaging through ancient Hebrew mythology.

But here's the part that claws at the edge of comprehension: they took it seriously. Defense-Intelligence-Agency-seriously. There are transcripts. Diagrams. Declassified memos. An entire architecture of belief, or at least bureaucratic allowance, built to support the notion that psychic perception could penetrate not just enemy bunkers but sacred time.

This is even weirder than Part 1.

Because what kind of nation – in the waning years of the Cold War – commissions a psychic to track down a myth? What secret hopes, what epistemological desperation, does that reveal? This isn’t just a curiosity. It’s a cultural artifact in its own right: a moment when the spiritual and the strategic blurred, and America aimed its classified lens at the divine.

A Classified Faith in the Unseen

There are moments in the life of a nation – just as in the life of a person – when the known world begins to feel insufficient, and the search for understanding requires stepping beyond the customary edges of perception. Project Sun Streak was born of such a moment. It was not an outlier but an extension of a long-running inquiry by the U.S. government into whether consciousness, under the right conditions, might reach further than previously imagined.

By the time Sun Streak formally emerged under the Defense Intelligence Agency in the late 1980s, it represented the latest evolution of a series of programs – Grill Flame, Center Lane, Gondola Wish – each asking variations of the same question: Can human awareness operate independently of the senses? And if so, might it be trained, refined, and applied in service of national security?

The impulse behind these programs was neither purely mystical nor casual. It was, in many ways, pragmatic. Intelligence reports from the Cold War period suggested that Soviet scientists were exploring psychotronic research with increasing seriousness. In response, American defense officials sought to investigate whether such abilities could be replicated – or perhaps were already latent – within their own ranks.

According to declassified briefings, Project Sun Streak was created with structure and intention. It was staffed with trained personnel, supported by formal protocols, and tasked with real-world objectives. Viewers were not improvising. They were following precise methods, developed through years of trial and study, including the Coordinate Remote Viewing techniques first pioneered at Stanford Research Institute.

It is notable how seamlessly this work was integrated into the broader machinery of defense. These were not fringe actors working outside the system. They were NCOs, officers, and analysts, operating within it. The documents are written in the language of procedure: session numbers, access levels, cueing methods. What emerges is a portrait not of eccentricity, but of earnest and disciplined exploration.

There is something quietly moving in that. Whatever one makes of the outcomes – and interpretations vary – the effort itself reflects a fundamental human quality: the desire to understand what might lie just beyond the veil of ordinary knowing. Not instead of science, but perhaps alongside it.

Project Sun Streak, then, is not merely a curiosity. It is a record of our willingness to ask large questions in structured ways, even when the answers are elusive. It reminds us that exploration is not always about distance. Sometimes it is about depth.

The Day We Tried to Find God’s Box