Did the CIA Find the Ark of the Covenant? Inside the Declassified Psychic Spy Files

Buried deep within the vaults of America’s intelligence archives is a document that reads more like a passage from a Dan Brown novel than something you’d expect from the CIA. And yet, it’s real—declassified, signed, and stamped with government insignia. Its content? A chilling account of a psychic claiming to have remotely viewed the lost Ark of the Covenant.

The sacred, gold-covered chest is said to contain the original Ten Commandments, built under the direction of Moses around the 13th or 15th century BCE. A relic steeped in biblical reverence and mystery, vanishing from the known world sometime around 586 BCE during the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem. Its disappearance sparked centuries of speculation, spawning legends from Jerusalem to Ethiopia—and apparently, Langley, Virginia.

The report in question originates from a project known as Sun Streak, an offshoot of a broader initiative that sought to explore the limits of human consciousness for intelligence gathering. Known as remote viewing, the technique involved psychics—or “viewers”—attempting to perceive locations or objects using only geographical coordinates, with no prior knowledge of what they were looking for.

It was a product of the Cold War—born out of fear that the Soviets were doing the same. The CIA and U.S. Army invested heavily in programs with codenames like Stargate, Grill Flame, and Center Lane. The goal? Find hostages. Track criminals. Uncover enemy secrets. Or, apparently, locate long-lost biblical artefacts.

On December 5th, 1988, one of these viewers—identified only as No. 032—was handed a set of coordinates. The target was unknown to him. What followed was a stream-of-consciousness account, scrawled in rough handwriting and accompanied by crude sketches, claiming to describe a coffin-shaped container made of gold and wood, decorated with a six-winged angel. The description closely matches the biblical accounts of the Ark.

According to the session transcript, the viewer perceived the Ark as being underground, somewhere in the Middle East. The surrounding environment included buildings with domed rooftops—possibly mosques—and people speaking Arabic, dressed in white. The atmosphere was damp, dark, and heavy with spiritual energy.

More disturbingly, the viewer claimed the artefact was “protected by entities” who would “destroy” any who tried to access it. He described these beings not as metaphors, but as real presences. Attempts to force the container open, he warned, would trigger a kind of destructive retaliation using “a power unknown to us.”

Among his drawings were eight stick-figure-like forms labelled as “mummies,” a winged creature with a beak and claws marked “seradin” (possibly a misinterpretation of “seraphim”), and a dome resembling a mosque. A list of words jotted down during the session included “death,” “forbidden,” “anguish,” and “resurrection.”

The document was quietly declassified in the early 2000s but only resurfaced publicly after being featured on the Ninjas are Butterflies podcast. Host Josh Hooper claimed he believed the project was fiction—until he found the document himself on the CIA’s official reading room site.

Critics of the remote viewing program were quick to cast doubt. Joe McMoneagle, one of the most experienced government-sanctioned remote viewers, dismissed the 1988 session outright. According to him, using remote viewing to find historical objects with no known present-day location is a waste of time—there’s no way to validate the results.

And yet, despite the criticism, the document exists. The drawings exist. The eerie specificity—the gold-covered container, the guardians, the ceremony, the danger—all remain inked on official paper. So where does this leave us?

Ethiopia still claims to be the resting place of the Ark, and it is said to reside in a small chapel watched over by a single guardian priest. British scholar Edward Ullendorff, who saw it during WWII, later admitted it was a replica—just one of many such arks found across Ethiopia. Yet, the legend persists.

Meanwhile, the CIA’s viewer insists the real Ark is still hidden, waiting to be discovered. Waiting for the right time, and the right hands

Maybe it’s nothing more than Cold War-era psychic theatre. Maybe it’s a cautionary tale about how far intelligence agencies were willing to go to explore the unknown. Or maybe—just maybe—something sacred lies buried beneath our feet, watching, waiting, and protected by forces we don’t understand.