---
category: Psi Research Program
created: 2025-07-23
date: 1977
description: Project Deep Quest was a unique psychic functioning experiment conducted
  in 1977, involving remote viewing to locate an underwater shipwreck from a submersible.
location: Catalina Island, California
summary: Project Deep Quest was a unique psychic functioning experiment conducted
  in 1977, involving Remote Viewing to locate an underwater shipwreck from a submersible.
tags:
- program
- research
- psi
- military
title: Project Deep Quest
updated: 2026-09-21
---

[Project Deep Quest](/programs/project-deep-quest/) was a unique psychic functioning experiment conducted in 1977, involving [Remote Viewing](/concepts/remote-viewing/) to locate an underwater shipwreck from a submersible. It was a collaborative effort between [Stephan Schwartz](/people/stephan-schwartz/), [Hal Puthoff](/people/hal-puthoff/), [Dale Graff](/people/dale-graff/), and psychics [Ingo Swann](/people/ingo-swann/) and [Hella Hammid](/people/hella-hammid/).[^1]

The project had two main elements: an unclassified one focused on locating a shipwreck, and a classified project for the [U.S. Air Force](/organizations/us-air-force/) to test long-distance remote viewing inside a submersible. For the unclassified part, Swann and Hammid used map dowsing techniques to identify potential shipwreck locations on a nautical chart of Catalina Island. The submersible *Taurus I* was then used to investigate the identified location.[^1]

The project successfully located a previously unidentified shipwreck, marking the first time psychics had located an underwater archaeological site from inside a submersible. The classified portion, designed to test remote viewing for emergency military scenarios, also yielded positive results, suggesting the potential for [PSI-INT](/concepts/psi-int/) in operational contexts.[^1]

The Navy's only recorded funding of the SRI program, 74,000 dollars from the Naval Electronic Systems Command in 1975 and 1976, was "to measure physiological (EEG) correlates to RV," and by 1981 "the Navy expressed no interest in participating in any discussions" of the joint services program. SRI's report to DIA of January 1983 recorded that "SRI researchers cooperated with a private group (Mobius Group, Los Angeles, CA) to conduct a mass RV screening test, with psychological profiling, through a major magazine publication," Schwartz and DeMattei's "Psi-Q Test II" in *Omni* of October 1982; the dive itself is known only from Stephan Schwartz's later accounts.[^2]

[^1]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis*. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.
[^2]: Puthoff, H. E., E. C. May, B. S. Humphrey, and L. A. Lavelle. *Project Grill Flame,* SRI International, Radio Physics Laboratory, for the Defense Intelligence Agency, January 1983, SRI/GF-0225, CIA-RDP96-00788R001800060001-7. US Army Intelligence and Security Command, "The US Army's Interest in Psychoenergetics," undated, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100370005-6. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.