SRI International is an independent nonprofit research and development institute headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Trustees of Stanford University established it in 1946 as the Stanford Research Institute. It formally separated from the university in 1970, amid Vietnam-era criticism of military research funding on campuses, and took its current name in 1977. The institute reports about 1,500 researchers and professional staff, more than 13,000 patents filed and over 50 spin-off companies, and it absorbed Sarnoff Corporation, the former RCA Laboratories, in 1987 and the Palo Alto Research Center in 2023.

Its laboratories produced several landmarks of computing. Douglas Engelbart's group built the first prototype computer mouse in 1964 and hosted one of the first four ARPANET nodes, linked to UCLA on October 29, 1969. SRI's Shakey project, begun in 1966, produced what is described as the first mobile robot able to reason about its own actions, and in 2007 the institute spun off Siri Inc., which Apple bought in 2010 and turned into the iPhone's voice assistant.

SRI is also where the U.S. government's remote-viewing research began. In 1972, the laser physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ started CIA-sponsored experiments with the artist Ingo Swann, and the pair coined the term "remote viewing" for the claimed ability to describe distant or hidden targets by mental impressions. Uri Geller and the Army intelligence officer Joseph McMoneagle were among the other subjects and consultants. Nature published the pair's results in 1974, with an editorial note that publication was not an endorsement, and their reports to sponsors, such as the 1975 Perceptual Augmentation Techniques, set out protocols, statistics and null results. Critics answered sharply: psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann argued in 1978 that judges had access to sensory cues, and a 1980 replication by Ray Hyman and James McClenon found no evidence for the effect.

The research grew into a long-running intelligence program. SRI was the contractor when the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Army set up a remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade, Maryland, in 1977; its work was folded into the Army's Grill Flame program in 1979, and later efforts ran as Center Lane and Sun Streak. Puthoff and Targ had left SRI by the mid-1980s, and in 1991 most of the contracting moved to Science Applications International Corporation. The consolidated effort, known as the Stargate Project, was terminated and declassified in 1995 after a review by the American Institutes for Research concluded that no remote-viewing report had provided actionable information for an intelligence operation.

That chapter keeps SRI's name in UFO and consciousness media decades later. In 2026, McMoneagle recounted his early remote-viewing tests at SRI on That UFO Podcast and elsewhere, and the parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove discussed the SRI research legacy with Jesse Michels on American Alchemy. For the institute, the program was a small part of a history defined mainly by computing, robotics and government contract research; for the study of anomalous phenomena, SRI remains the documented starting point of a government experiment with remote viewing that lasted more than two decades.