They Identified the "Smart Kids." Then What?

The "Gifted and Talented Education" program was sold as enrichment. Some former participants think they were being used as lab rats.

There was a time when suggesting the CIA was secretly dosing unsuspecting Americans with LSD to study mind control and psychological torture would have gotten you sent straight to the tin-foil hat department for a fitting. Then the MK-Ultra files were released and suddenly the bar for ‘certifiable’ changed zip codes.

If you’d implied that the U.S. government intentionally withheld treatment from hundreds of Black men with syphilis to see how the disease would progress, people would have called you a monster. When a whistleblower exposed the Tuskegee experiment, the only thing more horrifying than the allegations was the realization that they were true.

You’d have been laughed out of the room for believing that America quietly recruited former Nazi scientists after World War II… until the government admitted to recruiting former Nazi scientists and Operation Paperclip became one of history’s worst-kept secrets.

And if you had suggested our own Department of Defense exposed American service members to chemical and biological agents without their knowledge or consent, you'd have been referred for treatment. It would take forty years of official denials before a mainstream news investigation blew the lid off Project SHAD and vindicated you.

The older I get, the more “crazy” just sounds like shorthand for “pending declassification.”

The latest “crazy” government-themed horror story making the internet rounds involves millions of elementary school children, unorthodox testing sessions, mysterious pink drinks, strange audio tones piped through gigantic headsets, and glaring, unexplained memory gaps. It’s tied to an official government program that was marketed and sold as advanced instruction for bright young minds—but more than a few former participants believe it was actually a secret CIA training or indoctrination program.

On a scale of your-phone-is-spying-on-you to Nicolas-Cage-is-a-Civil-War-era-vampire, this one doesn’t even make the podium.

Read the memo here.

At the bottom of this Reddit rabbit hole is the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE or G&T) program—the one where the “smart kids” disappeared for an hour every Tuesday while the rest of the class was diagramming sentences and learning what a swell guy Christopher Columbus was. The seeds of this educational fig leaf were initially planted in the 1958 National Defense Education Act, passed in direct response to Sputnik.

SOVIETS: “We have conquered space.”
WASHINGTON D.C.: “Quick! Find the nerds!”

That’s not wild speculation. That’s the actual origin story.

@elle_poohIf you were a part of the GATE program in school— do you remember it being like this?! 😭😭😭😮🤯 #gate #gateprogram #strange #giftedandtalented #school

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School districts began testing children—sometimes as early as kindergarten or first grade—and those who qualified were periodically pulled from their classrooms for “enrichment.” The stated goal was simple: challenge gifted students, prevent boredom, and help develop the next generation of scientists, engineers, inventors, and leaders. The problem is, the “stated goal” and the “real-life experiences” don’t really track.

There’s no mental gymnastics required to wager that the intelligence community would be interested in identifying whiz kids. The recruitment infrastructure is well documented. The NSA has sourced talent from high-school competitions for decades. DARPA routinely funds gifted education research. The military uses the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) test to screen millions of teenagers and pinpoint candidates for specialized roles. The CIA and NSA run scholarship and internship programs explicitly targeting high-cognitive-ability students. It’s not just public. They advertise it.

The question isn’t whether someone was running a talent acquisition pipeline through the American school system. They were, openly. The question is what else the pipeline was being used for.

This is where the “it’s crazy” crowd loses the argument.

During the exact window that GATE was making its way into classrooms, the same government that brought us MK-Ultra, Paperclip, Tuskegee, and SHAD decided another a terrific use of taxpayer dollars would be to launch something called Stargate Project—a classified psychic espionage program designed to determine whether people could be taught to “remote view.” I promise, I’m not making that up.

From 1977 to 1995, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency spent millions testing and training recruits to “see” distant locations—military installations, hostage sites, enemy movements—using nothing but concentration and a set of coordinates. The premise was simple enough to sound almost reasonable until you say it out loud: put a supposed psychic in a room, give them numbers tied to a target, and have them describe what’s happening hundreds or thousands of miles away. Somewhere in Washington, there was an actual federal employee whose job consisted largely of saying, “Okay, Gary. Sit quietly and think really hard about Soviet missiles until something comes to you.”

Stargate didn’t spring from nowhere. It borrowed heavily from the Monroe Institute, founded by radio executive Robert Monroe, who believed he’d discovered a way to nudge the human brain into altered states of consciousness using carefully engineered audio frequencies. Monroe called his technique “Hemi-Sync”—binaural beats delivered through stereo headphones, designed to synchronize the brain’s hemispheres and guide listeners into deep meditation, sensory expansion, and allegedly, heightened perception. Apparently the line between “hippie meditation tape” and “national security asset” was a lot blurrier than most of us realized.

The CIA was interested enough to produce a formal assessment. In 1983, an Army intelligence officer submitted a declassified document known as the Gateway Report, analyzing Monroe’s “Gateway Process” as a potential tool for intelligence gathering. The report describes audio patterns intentionally concealed beneath ambient sounds—ocean waves, wind—engineered not to be heard, but to rewire how the brain processes reality.

So the idea that the government would never explore ways to develop and exploit psychic abilities falls apart pretty quickly when you realize they already did. Deliberately. For nearly two decades. With a budget.

The name overlap—Gateway and GATE—might just be serendipity. (Don’t even get me started on you-know-who.) Hilariously, or tellingly, the Monroe Institute denies being “directly” involved in GATE programs. Note the adverb. Because their technology, their tapes, their methodology, their terminology, even the structure of the exercises all show up in accounts from former GATE students. At some point, “coincidence” should start collecting overtime.

To recap: you’ve got a government running psychic research programs beginning in the 1980s. You’ve got a pool of the highest-IQ children in the country, gathered in school buildings once a week, with roughly zero parental oversight. You’ve got a documented willingness to experiment on civilians without consent. You’ve got an ex-CIA officer admitting that the agency had a program for tracking alien DNA and openly questioning whether GATE was part of it. And now you’ve got adults in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who were in GATE programs as kids comparing notes online.

And the details are… disturbing.

They’re recalling a pink liquid administered before “testing sessions,” described as chalky and sweet, followed by drowsiness or transient amnesia. Oversized headphones playing tones—not music, not white noise, but strange, pulsing beats—marketed as a “hearing test.” Zener cards: the five-symbol ESP testing cards that have zero legitimate educational application. Activities that included cracking codes, plotting graphs, and learning sign language, Morse code, and Russian. Covered windows. Meditating in the dark. Unfamiliar adults with clipboards who never introduced themselves and were never seen again. Massive memory gaps. An instruction, reported across independent accounts, not to tell their parents.

Let that last one marinate for a minute. An academic enrichment program—supposedly designed to challenge miniature Einsteins and accelerate their learning—told those children to hide what they were doing from their parents. That’s not research integrity. That’s damage control. An educational program with nothing to hide doesn’t issue gag orders to eight-year-olds.

“Why do most of us only ‘faintly’ remember any of it,” someone questioned.

“Completely blocked that out for decades until just now,” another said.

“Why don’t I remember a single thing except the building and entryway?” someone else asked.

One of the most detailed attempts to investigate the GATE program comes from an anonymous researcher writing under a pseudonym. “J. Whitfield” has compiled hundreds of pages of testimony, FOIA responses, procurement records, archived corporate filings, recovered audio recordings, and other documents into what he calls The GATE Investigation. Whitfield argues that between roughly 1983 and 1993, a Virginia contractor called Annex Research Group operated a covert program inside the GATE framework on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education. According to his investigation, select children underwent undisclosed auditory testing using binaural frequencies, received an unidentified chemical compound disguised as a fluoride treatment, and were evaluated for what internal documents allegedly called “perceptual access.” He further alleges that children who demonstrated certain characteristics were funneled into a secondary program—“Protocol Series C”—whose purpose remains unknown because the relevant documents are either redacted, missing, or, according to the investigation, destroyed.

Whitfield’s investigation goes far deeper than a Reddit thread or a viral TikTok. It’s a sprawling body of work built around specific names, dates, procurement records, FOIA requests, corporate registrations, audio analyses, and claims that can, at least in principle, be independently scrutinized rather than simply believed or dismissed.

What can’t be denied is that the nearly-identical accounts from participants have surfaced independently across multiple states, spanning the 1980s into the early 2000s, from people who have never met. Critics argue it’s false memory formation, amplified by social media suggestion. That’s a real phenomenon… but a spectacularly inadequate explanation in this case. Borderline lazy, if we’re being honest. False memory formation requires a cultural source—a news report, a book, a documentary—that implants the narrative. But until recently, there was no GATE-related conspiracy circulating. These people weren’t primed. They were remembering. And false memories don’t explain the physical artifacts: the worksheets, the audio recordings former students preserved, and independent contractor procurement records. You can’t suggest your way into a paper trail.

Who’s LingOL with me right now?

Plus, “maybe a stranger planted the idea in your head” is doing a lot of heavy lifting when you’re talking about a network that only ever cops to its nefarious deeds when documents get declassified or whistleblowers come forward—usually decades later.

Here’s what nobody has a good response to: What educational purpose does binaural audio through headphones serve? What does a Zener card teach? How do you explain the selective amnesia experienced by nearly all of the participants? What’s the purpose of the blackout windows? Why would an academic enrichment program need children to drink anything?

It wouldn’t. Everyone knows it wouldn’t. And the people telling these stories aren’t selling books or running monetized channels. They’re disturbed adults trying to understand fragmented flashbacks from their childhoods. Strip away the headphones and the Morse code and the pink drinks and one fact remains: Behavioral data is the new oil. Today we voluntarily hand Silicon Valley every heartbeat, Google search, grocery purchase, and late-night Amazon impulse buy. Compared to that, longitudinal cognitive profiles of America’s brainiest children would be like discovering the Fountain of Youth inside a Dairy Queen.

The receipts will come. They always do. MK-Ultra took twenty years. Tuskegee took forty. If the pattern holds, Protocol Series C will get declassified right around the time the last GATE kid turns ninety and can’t remember their own name.

When you tell me how you voted and why, please remember that there’s always an “other” option (I wasn’t a GATE kid, so I have no refined or advanced psychic skills). Also if you or your kids were part of GATE, I’m especially interested in your thoughts!

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