The Day the CIA Accidentally Booty-Called the Multiverse

Alright, buckle up, you magnificent degenerates, because we’re diving head-first into the stupidest, most expensive acid trip the U.S. government ever paid for: Project STARGATE. The year is 19-something-or-other—who gives a shit, it was the Cold War, they were all the same. The CIA, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the best way to stick it to the Soviets was to hire a bunch of crystal-huffing burnouts to “remote view” enemy secrets. Essentially, they paid dudes named Skip to sit in a dark room, pop a few government-grade psychedelics, and try to astral project their dicks into the Kremlin. It was, and I cannot stress this enough, profoundly fucking stupid.

Our hero for this particular shit-show is a “psychic warrior” we’ll call Ingo Swann—because that was his actual name, proving reality is dumber than anything I can invent. One Tuesday, while trying to psychically eyeball a new Soviet submarine class, Ingo’s brain—instead of landing in the icy waters of the Barents Sea—slams face-first into the consciousness of one Major Yuri Volkov of the KGB. Standard stuff so far, right? Ingo was *supposed* to be spying on Yuri. Except this Yuri wasn’t from *our* KGB. This one was from the KGB of Earth-2, a universe where the Beatles were a polka band and Brezhnev had a glorious, nipple-length fu manchu. The psychic connection, usually a one-way mirror, suddenly became a two-way glory hole of cosmic proportions.

The initial psychic exchange, according to an apocryphal and probably bullshit transcript I found tucked into a Hustler from 1983, was a goddamn mess. Ingo opens with the CIA-approved telepathic greeting, “I am a traveler on the cosmic winds,” and Yuri-2 just blasts back, “Who the fuck is this? Did Anatoly put you up to this? I swear to the mummified nutsack of Lenin, I will turn your brain into borscht!” It turned out Yuri-2’s psychic unit—the “Department for Psionic Subversion of Decadent Western Alternatives”—was trying to telekinetically steal the formula for New Coke, which in their timeline was a roaring success. The confusion was immediate and spectacular. Each side thought they had a comically misinformed double agent on their hands.

The Director of Central Intelligence, Bill Casey—a man who looked perpetually like he’d just shit his own pants in surprise—was utterly baffled. His spooks were now dealing with a KGB that reported to a Politburo that didn’t exist, fighting a Cold War with different rules. The CIA tried to leverage it, of course. They started feeding Yuri-2 bullshit intel about our universe—like claiming Reagan’s real power was in his magnificent hair—hoping to sow chaos in Earth-2. But it just created a feedback loop of industrial-grade paranoia. The Earth-2 KGB, in turn, fed Ingo their own batshit propaganda, leading to a famous incident where a CIA analyst had a full-blown screaming meltdown in the Langley cafeteria, insisting that the Soviets had trained bears to psychically sabotage American tractors.

This trans-dimensional psychic pissing contest went on for another two years. It resulted in exactly zero actionable intelligence and a massive spike in requisitions for tinfoil and institutional-grade tranquilizers. They finally pulled the plug after a failed attempt at a “psychic summit” where Ingo and Yuri-2 were supposed to negotiate a kind of astral non-proliferation treaty but instead just spent three hours telepathically calling each other “dickhead.” The final report concluded that while contact with a parallel universe was “theoretically established,” the denizens of that universe were, quote, “just as fucked as we are.” So it goes.