Gifted. Talented. Intellectual Asset.

What really was the G.A.T.E. program? And how deep does it go?

As I sit to write this, I can’t imagine it being a stand alone article. I’m writing this overtired and with babies ready to wake up at any moment. I haven’t proofread so if I sound like an idiot- blame the Fluoride tablets.

My mind has been overwhelmed by all that I have learned in diving in to the G.A.T.E. program. And just a few days ago, that very sentence would have seemed so strange to me.

Being a part of the GATE program was very much cemented in my core memories. Many discussions in my life have been centered around my membership in this school club. But when I came across a video on TikTok speaking to now adult members, asking how much about the program we remembered, I was immediately perturbed.

In all of my years discussing GATE, it never once dawned on me that I remembered so very little about it. While I hold some foggy childhood memories like anyone, there are particular seasons and subjects in my early years that I hold incredibly vivid details of. One of those subjects being school. More specifically, the school staff. I was a bit of a teacher’s pet. I loved school. I loved learning. I loved to receive admiration and approval from authority figures. And I often proclaimed that I wanted to be a teacher in elementary school. I think this great affection for these things allowed me to create rather substantial relationships and carved deep memories for me. I can recall every single teacher in every grade I had. Every secretary, office staff, Principal- even the TA’s. I remember every friend I ever had. Classmates from Kindergarten to senior year, across all 7 schools I went to. Their names, faces, and even some of their parents’ occupations and names, are all etched in my mind. I remember that a girl named Missy ate a Turkey sandwich with just mayonnaise, one piece of Iceburg lettuce, and Muenster cheese on Potato bread every single day. Two, actually. Her mom packed her two and she gave one to me because she played sports and her mom… never mind. You get the point.

So why when it comes to GATE, a program my family and I were so proud for me to be in, do I not remember a single person involved? I couldn’t tell you one teacher, one administrator, one peer. I cannot recall a single face from the time of my testing or time in the program. I don’t remember having one friend in the program with me. I don’t remember an end to the program. Sure, I moved a lot. But I was in the program at several schools. So when did it stop? While that may not be odd for you, and perhaps childhood blackouts feel normal, it is not for me.

To further expand this sinking feeling I began to encounter, when encouraged to spend some time reflecting on the testing and activities that I did remember, it began to occur to me that some of them do seem strange. If not entirely strange on their own, strange in the setting or frequency at the very least.

I began to dig into these questions and probe around online to see how easily debunked they were. When only more questions began to reveal themselves, I asked for help.

I first asked for help from my family and those around me. Several of them had experiences in the GATE program or other types of schools designed for those “gifted” children. I then reached out to my online community to see who might have had similar experiences. Very quickly I realized that many of you had stories to tell. And the more questions are asked of us, the more memories and sense of familiarity begin to appear.

I decided to create a Google form to compile my initial questions. Between the questionnaire and my direct messages, I received more than 2 dozen responses. I was careful to not delve into what I had already learned or what my theories were as I did not want to compromise the validity of the responses. I wanted them to be as unbiased as possible.

And here is the result: I am not alone in many of my life experiences. We are not alone in them. And I believe we have much more to discover. Some of it is a bit uncomfortable.

Let us start from the top.

The Gifted and Talented Education program, often referred to as G.A.T.E or may go by other names depending on the state, is described as an enrichment program designed for students identified as being gifted and talented. The goal is to single out students who exemplify higher than average levels of intelligence and enter them into separate academic groups to further expand their learning.

However, the first thing that struck me in this reflection is that they had to have alternative ways of identifying who these bright students were. The entire academic system is designed around creating worker bees. It caters and rewards children who are best able to fit their mold of intelligence, repetition, and busy work. But I was not a great student. I had seasons of doing well but many more of them were mediocre or even subpar. I was a student who needed to be challenged and if I wasn’t, I would create a challenge for myself. And that usually involved enough procrastination that almost made the completion of a project statistically impossible- then I was interested.

So if I didn’t fit the mold of conventional academic intelligence, how did they spot me? They had to have a means to find intelligence outside of the stereotypical model- and a prerogative to find forms of intelligence outside of system compliance. While about 60% of the survey claimed to be excellent students, 40% claimed to only be average or even a student like myself that underperformed unless challenged. So how were they doing this? What was their criteria? And what were they looking for?

The GATE program’s arguably largest contributor was a man named John Curtis Gowan. Gowan was a psychologist who received his education from Harvard and UCLA and became a founding member of the educational psychology program at CSU Northridge.

His developmental stage theory provided the foundation for the development of gifted youth. Gowan wasn’t just interested in the intelligence of children, he was really interested with the psychic phenomena derived from creativity and mystical states of consciousness. Gowan stated, “A gifted child was defined as one who has the potential for verbal creativity. A talented child was defined as one who had the potential for non-verbal creativity. In both cases, it is the actualization of the potentiality, not the potentiality itself, that is important.”

Some time after Russia launched Sputnik. Russia had also formed the National Association for Gifted Children. Gowan became passionate about the nurturing of the intelligence in our own country. He thought that if we had any chance at going toe to toe with Russia, we needed to sow into the youth of our nation, and that opportunity solely existed with the population of gifted children.

Much of GATE activities were surrounded by exercises in creativity with little to no direction from an instructor. It was almost entirely composed of independently led activity that involved abstract prompts. Much different than the average elementary course work. They did not want to find the worker bees. They wanted to find the creative minds that lead to the psychic phenomena that Gowan described in his work.

Gowan wrote several books about his work. His second book, The Development of the Psychedelic Individual, identified mind expansion as the cognitive step after creativity. Creativity, the very primary characteristic that GATE was looking to identify. The Development of the Psychedelic Individual was primarily written about Gowan's most complete assessment of psychedelic experiences. He explored the potential for psychedelic experiences to help an individual grow and break through mental barriers. He also mentioned how, hypothetically, LSD could coerce this type of access to the phenomena. Hypothetically. And he definitely never tested that on children. Right?

Many members of GATE recall a testing activity that involved flashcards of different shapes and colors. The prompt was for the child to accurately predict what the next card would be without any clue, pattern of repetition, or insight. What does that have to do with conventional measures of intelligence? It doesn’t. That is an exercise in psychic ability.

GATE was not looking for children simply good at math. Or reading comprehension. They were looking for children who were gifted. Gifted as related to special abilities in the physical realm. Those capable of experiencing spiritual, psychic, and paranormal phenomena. Like astral projection. Lucid dreaming. Interdimensional communication and comprehension.

The gray area to this that I have yet to discover documentation to support is where and when Gowan became entangled with the CIA. At some point they became interested in his work with psychic phenomena and how it relates to gifted children.

Imagine GATE to be an umbrella under the MK Ultra program. A tool for national security. GATE was created to manage intelligence assets. And who are the nation’s greatest intelligence assets? The gifted youth. They were looking for students that they considered to be high intellect, high test result, driven children. They considered those to be a matter of national security. And they needed to be identified, analyzed, and potentially programmed before any other foreign entity could do so first.

Now let me ask the reader this- does it seem normal to be taught to brush your teeth multiple times a year? No, not in a dentist office- at school. I’m not asking if it happened, I’m asking if that’s logical. The answer from a state of cognitive dissonance is a bit robotic, “Oh yes, of course! They were just identifying missed plaque so that we would have better dental hygiene!” What? What. That seems a strange setting and frequency to be doing that. And why do GATE kids remember receiving the pink tablets and drinks much more often?

Because that’s not what they were doing. I believe that they were either masking foreign solutions as the typical plaque identifiers so we were none the wiser, or attempting to subdue our brain’s capabilities. Fluoride is known to calcify the Pineal gland. And what does the Pineal gland do? It offers our brains the ability to connect to a higher power, access spirituality, and take part in psychic phenomena like astral projection, remote viewing, and lucid dreaming.

This leads me to the hearing tests. As a mother to two young children, I am familiar with children being tested for their hearing within a few days of being born. Why are they so concerned with whether a newborn baby can hear within a day or two of being born? It really wouldn’t make a significant difference until the child was of speaking age. And by then, you would certainly know whether your child might have an issue or be hard of hearing. So why is it one of the flags for a CPS investigation when refused? And why then do children need to be tested every year? It seems that children who showcase symptoms that suggest a hearing issue would be tested. But why every one else? And why do GATE students remember being tested more frequently? Removed from their peers, only with their GATE cohorts, and in separate trailers, basements, or other windowless rooms?

Sound labs. Sound labs that are testing different frequencies that can only be heard by select participants. Gifted ones. And this leads us to The Gateway Tapes. The Gateway Tapes were a CIA development experimenting with sounds and frequencies that would lead to Astral Projection and other psychic phenomena. Is that what they were playing for us? Was that part of the experiment?

More than 2/3 of the questionnaire participants have experienced some form of psychic or spiritual phenomena. These range from Lucid dreams to astral projection. I do not believe that just anyone can access these pathways. I believe that those inclined to these phenomena experience some piece of this in childhood. And many are told that it is just their imagination. A bad dream. A silly story. The muscles can be strengthened and techniques can be learned. But I don’t believe everyone has this technology. So does that mean that the fluoride or memory blocks did not work on us? Only 9% of our community said they were not separated from their parents during testing. The rest said they were or couldn’t remember. What about our time in the program? How often were we separated with only our cohort who were going under the same testing as us?

And what about reoccurring dreams and deja vu? Are those really figments of our imagination? Or is it a remembering? Or a connection to other dimensions. What about sleep paralysis and shadow people? Could those be affects of the program? Is it all connected?

Did they find what they were looking for? Even if you think this is all a crazy conspiracy- at the very least, it is an intelligence based operation to seek out promising youth for the sake of national defense and recruitment. So in that case, did they find them? Was it us? Were we the left behind? Or were the tests and experiments completed during our time?

An even more sinister theory suggests that the GATE program created sleeper cells. The programming already happened and we went about our lives as if nothing changed. But should the need arise, the weapons have been buried. I don’t have enough intel on that yet to subscribe to that theory but I am exploring more of the pathways that led to that suggestion.

If you’re looking for a Hollywood dramatization to parallel this, Stranger Things. Eleven being entered into secret government experiments so that they could exploit her extreme giftedness with psychic phenomena to combat a foreign enemy. Hmm.. brb to binge Stranger Things.

Another parallel that this brings up for me is in Divergent (It’s on the required Restoring Tradition Reading/Watch List so I know you’ve already done your homework). In Divergent, they conduct annual testing to place children coming of age into a faction that best suits their gifts. Until we get deeper into the series and discover what they’re really looking for- the Divergent. Divergent are those with such giftedness that it breaks them out of the crafted system. They don’t fit anywhere because they fit everywhere. The Divergent break the matrix of their world. Typical tests don’t work on them. The standard injections and serums don’t work on them. They have beat the system and are incapable of extreme mental fortitude and superior intelligence. In fact, the entire system was build in hopes that the Divergent would be created. But as any threat to the system, the Divergent must be snuffed out. So leaders of factions wishing to keep things as they are, unleash on them any means necessary to secure their demise or their allegiance to carrying on the systems in place. They want human drones who march in place and carry out orders. The Divergent do not fall into that category. That feels familiar.

Truthfully, the more stones I turn over, the more questions arise. Every day I am discovering more and more voices that have tuned in to this conversation. I hope to research more and to use my discernment in what resonates with me to share with all of you.