A bright kid in the early 2000s gets shuttled into a Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program—extra logic puzzles, cryptic exercises, maybe some early exposure to Russian. Standard stuff for the academically inclined, right? Unless, of course, the whole thing was a covert Pentagon operation to prepare young minds for contact with extraterrestrials.
That’s the theory gaining traction among former GATE students, who claim the program was less about fostering future chess champions and more about molding psychic operatives. Some even suspect it was linked to the CIA’s infamous Gateway Program, that 1980s experiment in bending human consciousness with sound waves and meditation. Because nothing says “national security” like weaponized astral projection.
Milli, a former GATE student now dissecting her childhood on TikTok, still has her old worksheets. One sheet from 2004, titled *A Strange Message*, plays out like an alien transmission. It details a “mothership” landing in Peru before making stops in Egypt and the Yucatán. That same year, UFO sightings were reported in all three locations. Just a coincidence? Or a classified thought experiment slipped into a fourth grader’s curriculum?
The worksheet’s instructions are unsettlingly specific. “Close your eyes and breathe deeply.” “Our oneness will direct our way.” “Fear no human intervention.” It even mentions a fifth-dimensional ship invisible to “normal Earth eyes.” On the surface, it reads like a whimsical creative writing prompt. But if that’s the case, why do so many former students feel like they were being *trained* rather than simply entertained?
Other reports from GATE alumni paint an equally bizarre picture. Some recall meditative audio tests that felt suspiciously like hypnosis. Others claim they were taught Morse code before they even learned long division. A few even remember being encouraged to practice remote viewing, a skill the U.S. military once legitimately researched because—why not?
What’s unclear is whether the program was about identifying psychic talent or *creating* it. If the Pentagon wanted to cultivate young minds capable of decoding alien signals, infiltrating foreign thought patterns, or—let’s get wild—communicating telepathically with non-human intelligences, embedding that training in a gifted curriculum would be a subtle way to do it. Train them young, keep it classified, and bury the evidence under a heap of old standardized test scores.
Of course, skeptics dismiss the whole thing as a symptom of overactive imaginations. Standard GATE programs were designed to stretch young minds, not draft them into an intergalactic intelligence agency. But if that’s true, why does so much of the curriculum seem eerily aligned with known government experiments on consciousness expansion and anomalous cognition?
One thing is certain: the kids in these programs weren’t just learning multiplication tables. And if some shadowy branch of the Pentagon *was* planting seeds in the minds of the gifted, we might want to start paying attention to what those kids remember—before they remember too much.
Five Fast Facts
- In the 1980s, the CIA’s Gateway Program investigated whether altered states of consciousness could allow for astral projection and remote viewing.
- The U.S. military ran a real-life “psychic spy” unit called Project Stargate, which attempted to train operatives in extrasensory perception.
- UFO sightings in Peru, Egypt, and Mexico have been documented for decades, with some reports dating back to ancient civilizations.
- Morse code, a skill some GATE students were allegedly taught early, has historically been used for covert military communication.
- Some former GATE students claim they recall dreams or visions of alien contact that predate the current wave of UFO disclosure.