NZ Skeptics Articles

The G.A.T.E. Program: A conspiracy theory for elder millennials

Bronwyn Rideout - 22nd June 2026

Are you too old to be an indigo child, and too human to be a starseed? Did you grow up in the 80s and 90s and have vague memories of being pulled out of class for special tests or activities? If so, then you might have been part of a secret CIA programme. In this edition of “The Strange Gifts That Social Media Algorithms Give Me”, I will provide a primer on the G.A.T.E. conspiracy, and how its current iteration is informed by pop culture and analog horror like The Backrooms.

What is Gifted And Talented Education

G.A.T.E. stands for Gifted And Talented Education, but it may go by other names such as TAG (Talented And Gifted), G&T, or (as in some NZ schools) CWSA (Children With Special Abilities). Programmes of this ilk exist globally, and while there is no universal mandate or curriculum, they share recruitment and education strategies. For the most part, high IQ scores are the way in, with students either placed in full-time accelerated education or left in mainstream education and pulled out intermittently for enrichment opportunities. To appreciate the framework of the GATE conspiracy, it’s valuable to understand its origins in the United States, as the spread of the conspiracy has led ex-gifted children in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to question their own memories as well.

The NZ Skeptics have had a grumble or two about IQ testing and its application in the past, and if you are interested in reading more see our past articles about MENSA and other High IQ Societies. The application of IQ tests sits alongside educational interests in stratifying students from gifted to “subnormal”. Post WWII, the space race did encourage an increase in federal interest and financial support for gifted programming. However, as the Wikipedia page claims, it was a post-Operation Paperclip world which meant that brain gain into the US had slowed down considerably, while many of its homegrown mathematicians were working in industry, creating a drought of math educators. The launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957 provided the impetus to transform their support into a tsunami of investment, with particular interest in students talented in maths, sciences, and technology.

In 1958, the US government passed the National Defense Education Act, or the NDEA. The purpose of the NDEA was to provide funding to all US educational institutions at all levels. For US K-12 schools, that cash was intended to bring schools up to speed, and led to the introduction of lab kits, overhead projectors, and educational films in the classroom, including the Disney short film Donald in Mathmagic Land (produced with NDEA funding).

Title V, in particular, included provisions for implementing testing of gifted students. However, the conceptualisation of the percentage of gifted students has remained unchanged since the 1920s, having stabilised at the very extreme of a bell-shaped curve at 2-10% according to Dr Jennifer L. Jolly.

But the NDEA was not necessarily greeted with universal fanfare. Again, the Wikipedia page notes that the act was introduced near the end of the Second Red Scare. Despite the waning influence of Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism, Title X required all beneficiaries of NDEA funding to swear that they do not support any organisation that supports overthrowing the United States Government:

This disclaimer would be repealed by President JFK in 1962.

From the NDEA, the 1960s would be a period where there was a significant uptick in standardised testing in American schools to identify gifted students, alongside civil rights actions to ensure equal opportunities in education. The next major advance in gifted education would occur in 1972, with the Marland Report - a 3-year investigation into gifted education in the United States for the federal government. The report had a very broad definition of gifted and talented abilities, including leadership, creative or productive thinking, and visual/performing arts, and also held that giftedness was universal; however, the report also found that investment in gifted education was far below what was needed, and contributed to psychological damage to the gifted child. The programs were also a missed opportunity to serve disadvantaged populations that many gifted children were part of. However, the Marland report is seen to have been ultimately ineffective at reengaging the federal government in gifted education, with commentary on gifted education from the 1980s onward occasionally pitting movements for educational equality/equity against calls for renewed investment into gifted education.

The changing story

As with any internet mystery, there is a high likelihood that many are fabricating their story with Reddits, TikTok accounts, and Facebook pages sympathetic to the theory rapidly attracting and spreading a fairly entertaining story, while detractors or more skeptical websites are killing the vibe. The origins of the GATE conspiracy may have begun on 8chan’s Politically Incorrect forum around 2016, and are deceptively more benign than the conspiracy is today (fair warning, 8chan forums are definitely NSFW). Based on their own strawpoll, the following characteristics of GATE alumni were identified by 4chan/8chan users:

  • Blue eyes (hazel seems equally common)
  • Occipital Bun (aka math bump on the back of skull)
  • Birth Complications (like weeks early or not breathing)
  • Near-Death Experiences (particularly drowning)
  • Lack of memory of GATE
  • Classroom windows were covered
  • Tendency to be followed (including abductions and general tracking)
  • Law enforcement being extremely lenient and easy during chance encounters
  • IQs often as high as 130; 100 is the average. Many have IQs in the genius range of 160+

Other similarities, less common but still a few exGATErs agree on these too;

  • Interest in /x/ phenomena
  • Heavy early-twenties drug experimentation period
  • Forehead scars
  • Early speech therapy
  • Firstborn sons
  • Migraines
  • Israeli art student girlfriends (not even joking)
  • Meme Magic
  • Premonitions/prophetic dreams
  • Above-average intuition

So, what is the conspiracy in 2026?

Despite there being no unified or uniform gifted and talented education programme in the United States, fans of the conspiracy posit that children enrolled in GATE programmes from the 1980s through to the 1990s were part of a CIA experiment. Some believe that GATE helped develop ESP abilities, while others think that the program was a funnel to organisations like the FBI and CIA, and a few suspect more nefarious purposes. In reality, the conspiracy is essentially a pastiche of the ghosts of Cold War shenanigans, internet folklore, and social media contagion. But, for all its high strangeness, TikTok and other platforms that have picked up on the controversy over the past year have significantly sanitised the conspiracy and stripped it of its more 4chan/8chan flavour.

The CIA/Military connection

To be fair, suspicions of CIA or military involvement in the training of psychic abilities have a basis in reality, although the subjects of this training were adults rather than children. The Stargate Project and related initiatives from the 1970s to the mid-1990s explored the application of psychic abilities for intelligence purposes. The CIA has even declassified some of its reports on the findings, but nothing I was able to find mentioned testing American children.

Instead, the more skeptical suggest that there is a mix-up between GATE and the CIA’s very real interest in the Gateway Program. This program was the brainchild of American radio personality and producer Robert Monroe. In 1956, his firm established a research division to study “…the effects of various sound patterns on human consciousness, including the feasibility of learning during sleep…” Monroe wasn’t just the owner, he was also a customer and, in 1958, he started to have out-of-body experiences (OBE). In 1974, his institute developed a brain synchronisation technique called Hemi-Sync (for hemispheric synchronisation), which merged binaural beats with complex sound states and guided meditation, to help the average Joe have their own OBE. These were later put on tape, which made it easy for the average Joe to have their own OBE.

Here is an example of a Hemi-Sync session:

So, how did the CIA become aware of Monroe and Gateway? According to a report by Matta Busby, published in Wired, US Army lieutenant Colonel Wayne McDonnell was sent to The Monroe Institute, which Robert founded, to learn more about the Gateway process. McDonnell’s now-declassified 1983 report gave the whole operation a thumbs-up, but contemporary critics question McDonnell’s credulity. According to Busby, service people still attend The Monroe Institute, albeit for personal reasons rather than professional, joining thousands of people for multiday courses on remote viewing, interstellar consciousness, and energy medicine. Costs for these courses ranged from about $1,000 for virtual classes to $3,000+ for in-person getaways.

The connection being made to GATE is that many alleged former students report either being taken out of class to undergo strange hearing tests with large headphones, or lying on the floor and listening to guided meditation tapes. While the guided meditation tapes would be unorthodox in the 80s and 90s, the hearing tests are not. Hearing screens have been implemented in American schools since the 1960s. A majority of states mandate school hearing screens, and the timings of these tests would coincide with the elementary school timeframe some ex-GATErs report. New York state, for example, required schools to provide screening for all students in Pre-K and Kindergarten, as well as in grades 1, 3, 5, 7, and 10, from 1980 to 2009.

Unusual activities

Further connecting GATE to CIA experimentation are claims that students often played with, or were tested with, Zener cards, which are a simple tool to test ESP abilities. Even some skeptics claim to have been tested with a set of Zeners.

Few alternative hypotheses have been offered for this memory, other than that it is false or that it is a form of social contagion due to the theory’s rising popularity. Some educators suggest using Zener cards as an interactive way to teach probability and hypothesis tests, based on the early tests first used to debunk the cards, but I cannot confirm if they were used that way with an audience of 6 to 10 year-olds 30-40 years ago. Given their appearances in popular movies like Ghostbusters and the television show Columbo, the cards may have just been a fun activity to distract children. However, in light of the Telepathy Tapes, I honestly can’t discount the introduction of Zener cards in a classroom setting outright. It likely wasn’t the CIA, but a misguided teacher or paraprofessional who brought the cards into the classroom is feasible.

Suspicions have also been cast on some of the word puzzles and spatial reasoning problems offered as evidence. These are entirely innocuous time-killing activities, and are neither weird nor indicative of any talent or skill.

https://www.tiktok.com/@annamillsxo23/video/7456976565310704927

A third unusual activity has been reports of a pink drink the gifted children had to ingest. Looking through reddit, the connection between GATE and the ‘pink drink’ seems to have appeared within the past three to five years, whereas older threads make no mention of it. No one knows what it was, or what it was for, but it is also the easiest to explain:

Is any good conspiracy theory worth its salt without some fluoride? While some ex-Gate students deny this, the pink drink in question appears to be NaFrinse, a sodium-fluoride mouth rinse given to students weekly in schools or school districts in low-fluoride communities with high rates of cavities.

The children yearn for the malls

Another aspect of the GATE conspiracy is claims of shared dreams or dreamscapes. Both Forbes and The New York Times have written on the phenomenon known as Mall World in 2025. In brief, thousands of people on the internet (namely TikTok and Reddit) have reported visiting a labyrinthine mall in their dreams. The layout is never the same, and the malls do not resemble anywhere that can be visited in real life, but nevertheless visitors to these dream spaces claim a feeling of the uncanny. The NYT piece by Jessica Roy provides the best breakdown of the theories behind this concept of shared dreams: 1) It proves Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconsciousness; 2) It’s the GATE version of The Hill from the Telepathy Tapes; 3) It is a result of MK-Ultra; 4) According to Dr Dylan Selterman, Malls are a common space and it is not unusual to dream about them, but the concept of Mall World is possibly a “…form of social contagion…” in which public discourse is picked-up by the unconscious mind and integrated into one’s dreams.

Personally, I agree with Dr Selterman on the social contagion element of Mall World, and I’ll also point to the possibility that commonalities in the interior design of malls and other common spaces, such as pools, civic buildings, banks, and offices, can contribute to this shared belief that everyone is dreaming of the same space. I also want to acknowledge and build on Dani Di Placido’s suggestion that the popular internet trend of liminal spaces also fuels the collective belief. Liminal spaces are not a new concept, and for decades urban adventurers (and more recently content creators like Dan Bell and Bright Sun Films) have been exploring dead malls, amusement parks, and hotels all while sharing images of busy spaces devoid of activity.

In 2019, a short creepypasta on 4chan about a never-ending building of uncanny rooms, called The Backrooms, took the internet’s imagination by storm, with the most well-known of these being a YouTube Analog horror series of the same name by Kane Pixels, which was recently released as a feature film.

The Mall World Subreddit was created in 2021, but the first mention of the GATE program didn’t appear until 2023, suggesting that shared dreams may be a recent addition to this so-called conspiracy. One post from that year found that 46.8% of 171 respondents to their visitor survey were part of a GATE program, which the admin described as being:

“…previously reported as a common programming access point by people that were within these sorts of environments.This combined with other areas associated with known mind control practices such as organized religious communities or families with connections to military intelligence or medical research initiatives as well as the foster and adoption systems shows a not insignificant portion of respondents to the survey also fell into these similar correlative categories as those known to have been exposed to these sorts of neuro-linguistic techniques. These GATE programs also had a large number of people that reported experiencing chronic migraines or being tested for ESP and related phenomena within the program…”

Another post from the same period contains this description of a GATE classroom, which will sound familiar to anyone familiar with the backrooms:

“…We had class in a modular building outside of the official school building, so it was disconnected from “regular” classes. We had to go into the main school to use the bathroom and eat in cafeteria. What was weird is this other school was basically an exact replica of my main school I attended, except a little bit backwards. Even the bathrooms were the same color (yellow) and had the same floor (yellow and brown). They both seemed to be built in the 1970s.

There was really bad fluorescent lighting in the modular building, and I remember my teachers turning the lights off a lot while we worked. I think there were some lava lamps, if I recall?…”

Mass amnesia or just poor communication

To the surprise of no one, many 30-50-somethings are only now remembering their GATE experiences. Rather than this being an event of recovered memory on a national scale, it is likely a generation of adults who never had reason to think about their grade 2 class decades ago. What is troublesome is that there are kid-friendly ways that could have been used to explain to children why they got to do puzzles instead of math, or why they needed to protect their teeth with the pink drink. But what is occurring now demonstrates the consequence of not communicating appropriately with children and their families. And now these adults must intellectually contend with why no one explained what happened to them (no matter how benign), all while social media has filled in the blanks with both nonsense and the false belief that the program is why they forgot.