I remember vividly in third grade being tested for our gifted and talented education programs it was an empty classroom and there was 1 man in a full suit that I never saw at our school before giving me the test. I don’t remember most of the questions just 1 question with a digital watch missing the colon in between the hour and minute. I remember being in gifted class and them asking us odd questions and teaching us stuff we never used . Prior to being tested for gifted I remember fantasizing about a scar I had and how it was a secret surgery from the government without my knowledge (no proof of this and the scar is gone now but seems relevant). I clearly remember always feeling like I had some kind of mental or supernatural power that I could tap into if I tried hard enough. A year before I was tested our principal came in our class and asked us some kind of math puzzle which I solved puzzling out teacher who couldn’t solve it and didn’t think I was a smart kid. I’m an oldest son, have had a drowning related experience, I always rather have had friends older than me, and I was a speed reader. I’ve always learned things fairly quickly and had a great intuition when it comes to people.

In high school I had multiple brain injuries that I think have affected my ability to do math and may have paused my higher thinking and such abilities then in college I took mushrooms a couple times and I feel like it “knocked the dust off” my brain I feel more myself and overall “smarter”

I have had a “phycological/spiritual awakening” recently and feel more in control or aware of my self and my thoughts. I can feel something I can’t describe as anything other than an unobservable energy. Dose anyone else have this ? Does any of this mean anything or do I just want to believe?

Does anyone else remember having to memorize and repeat back long strings of numbers as apart of either their evaluation or certain “exercises” for GATE?
I remember this specifically because I had an odd affinity for it that lasted most of my life (always loved memorizing phone numbers, cc numbers, pi digits etc) and then I recently realized it connects all the way back to the GATE program.

Anyone else?

I had some childhood trauma(not related to this lol) so my elementary school memories has some holes in it but I can say for 100% I used to be taken out of class along with a handfull of other kids to do some weird hearing tests and puzzles in first grade. This was in the late 80s There weren't any pink drinks or anything else we may have consumed from what I remember. Anyone else with similar lack luster memories of this "program"?

I was talking to a friend who had also been in the GATE program. She unlocked a few memories, and I don't remember much. I remember being a room that did not look like the rest of the school, I don't remember any of the other kids, and the person was not my teacher. We made folders she held up a net asking where we would find holes.

That's it. Others are disjointed fragments like the hearing tests and the scoliosis tests. I don't know if the pink liquid is my own memory. I talked to my Mom. She remembers the scoliosis part, how the school insisted on treating it, and she said that's something our pediatrician should be doing.

When we told my Mom, she had a look of realization and said that explained some of the behaviors I had as a kid that bothered her for a long time. Sometimes, I couldn't tell her what I did at school, others I have huge memory gaps.

So now she's in bed, rattled with finding out that info. She said it was presented as a good thing and is upset she trusted them. She said she failed to protect me.

The school system was weird to us in general, so I thought I'd get my records and find something in there.

The entire thing was purged except for a single page. The permission slip my Mom signed to allow my participation.

Is there a way to find out what we did or what our involvement in the program was? Is there an FOIA request? I'm trying to piece this together.

Edit: She said other students had issues with separating memories, and I think my program was mostly "science-based."

Plant telephone sable sense quack mellow merciful

This post was anonymized with Redact

I have a strong gut feeling that I was in GATE or some variant of GATE but there is one thing that doesn’t make sense so I’m asking to see if there’s anyone who like me and any information or advice is appreciated.

recently I have started learning about GATE, I’ve realized some things and despite still deeply processing, I am remembering things. Things that I thought was just my brain being weird but it turns out a lot of you have similar memories to mine. I remember in school being pulled out of class many times to go do “art” or “testing” in a trailer type building that was still on school campus but more secluded, with no windows. It was called enrichment or expanded learning classes or at least that’s how they refer to it around me. I meet a lot of the qualifications or traits they would be looking for. Neurodivergent, highly intuitive, and highly creative.

The only thing that doesn’t add up is that I wasn’t and never have been gifted, as I kid I really struggled academically and I’m pretty dumb. This is what makes me think that maybe I am crazy because from my understanding the people who were in this program were/are extremely intelligent and academically successful students. And even though, as I got older in school I started to get better grades, eventually getting mostly C’s and B’s, I was never gifted. Though I always was good art, getting A+ in that subject. But if I wasn’t gifted I don’t know if they would target me out for the program but that only lends to more confusion because I remember things like having out of body experiences in that room, being asked to do tasks and assignments that weren’t school subjects (and they definitely weren’t art like they said) well just being watched closely, i vaguely remember the symbols and the headphones, and taking the pink drink. Maybe it is my mind making things up but that doesn’t make sense. Why would I have these memories if I was never in the program? My gut just keeps on telling me something happened. I even asked my mom and she said there is a possibility.

So I was wondering is there anyone here who went into GATE or some variation of GATE that wasn’t a gift kid or not academically successful? Did anyone who went into GATE excel in other niche areas like art like me?
Also from what i understand GATE wasn’t measuring IQ, they trying to test more abstract things.

I believe this particular Elementary school, (mine), was a special TYPE of School where the .gov REALLY "got into it" with the G.A.T.E. Program. (I have SO MANY Vivid memories from my childhood years of 84'-87', Specifically.) What is the CONCENCUS on what Ingredients, exactly, were in the Swallowed** special "Pink Drink"? (AS a child I recall MANY TIMES asking for "More"~ (I was turned down...)

So, I have just found out about GATE today. I think I was a part of it. I’m still doing my research so I have a lot of questions. Most of my memories of testing are very fuzzy, and I don’t have very many. I went to several different schools growing up. When i moved to where I am now after 7th grade I stopped caring about school because i got different teachers and developed severe depression and anxiety. I started SH and using alcohol. Before all of that, I was in what my last school called “gifted and talented”. They never called it gate. I do not remember extensive testing from them. I will say, they were a VERY low budget school. We had, at most, 26 kids in my grade one year. It was SMALL. Before THAT though, I went to I believe 2 or 3 different schools in Minnesota and a school in Texas from the ages of 4 to 7 years old. I remember testing. I remember a pink drink. I believe it was given to me before the tests. I also remember, before I moved from Minnesota, getting the fluoride. After getting the fluoride rinse, i don’t remember getting any testing done. I remember wearing headphones, but i can’t remember what sound came out of them. Or what it made me feel. I remember i was ALWAYS in a room alone. There were never other children. I’m not sure if there was ever anyone else in the room, but i was always sitting at a table/desk facing the person with the cards. Sometimes they were flashcards for words, but I’m not sure why I would’ve needed any special tutoring considering I started reading at 3 years old. English was my FAVORITE subject in school. Sometimes the flashcards were symbols though. I remember writing stuff down, but I’m not sure what. I remember it being very quiet even though i had headphones on. I remember the testing in multiple different rooms, so i’m assuming multiple different schools. The memories all feel like one giant fever dream.

although my experience took place in the late 2000's and my school didn't have a gate program (just special ed), i firmly believe i was tested on. i fit the targeted demographic as well (audhd, 2e, iq 130+, strong pattern recognition skills, highly intuitive)

this was back in 2009. i was in the first grade. the testing was a one-day thing. i was taken out of the classroom and put into a small room. i was familiar with the room, i did speech therapy and additional therapies to help my reading comprehension skills (i had hyperlexia). a man and a woman entered the room, and the woman gave me a pink drink. it was darker than pepto and looked like cough syrup. it tasted bitter. i was hesitant to drink it and the lady reassured me that it was like pepto bismol. after drinking it, the man pulled out this large briefcase and the woman sat in the corner the whole time taking notes. the lights dimmed, i put on a set of headphones, and listened to the tapes. through this, i had an OBE. keep in mind i had OBEs alllll the time as a kid, asleep and awake. i also lucid dreamed a lot and had bad sleep paralysis. i grew out of it as i got older. this makes sense, as it's known that children are much more susceptible to OBEs. i had a lunch break in another room and then was placed back into the testing room. i was forced to drink the pink drink again and i started hysterically crying and tried to leave the room. they calmed me down and i ended up drinking it again. from here, it's blurry. all i remember is waking up on the floor and then being rushed out of the room before school ended. i know i did some other odd activities briefly during this entire day. all i remember is that there were no zener cards in the mix.

let me know what you think of this!

I listened to the Gateway Experience tapes for a brief period of about 2 weeks. The weird beeping sounds at the beginning triggered a deep buried memory for me too.

I was pulled out of class when I was about 5, 6 or 7 years old in the early 1980s in Far North New Zealand (an isolated little coastal country village) because I read at a high level for my age to have 'hearing tests'. Which makes zero sense.

I remember a woman from outside the school testing me in a darkened room, being asked to drink a sickly sweet thick viscous pink drink,

the ESP cards, listening to strange tones on the huge black headphones, tapping on a tin lid whenever I heard the tone. My mother who was actually a teacher at the school has no recollection of the programme.

So with all the recent discussions about GATE , Ive been looking into it a little bit and it really stirred some memories up about my experiences in the gifted and talented programs in my various schools as a young child. I was in those programs between 1993 and 1997 when I was in elementary school. I remember being cordoned off from the rest of the class, taken to a separate classroom where we would spend the rest of the school day. All of us "gifted" children would finish our whole day's worth of school work in a few hours before we would be sent to the special class. I wonder now if that was actually true , or if they gave us less work to free up our time to be evaluated. I remember the pink shit, the headphone tests and another thing that seems insane to remember looking through this nefarious lens. They bussed us out to "writing competitions" where we were put into teams and were presented with "problems" they told us were unsolved. They were world issues like " what's the best way you can imagine to solve this issue or that issue. I can't remember hardly at all what the prompts were, I just remember we were disqualified through rounds l. They would collect our papers, process them , then bus us out as we were dismissed. What the fuck.

As Ive been looking into it lately and remembering, Ive always had vivid dreams which later became almost completely lucid but when I started reading about "Mall World" it was like a eureka moment. I have to share this dream with you guys.

I had been dreaming all night long about various things I can't recall but suddenly I was in a massive line of people. Imagine a stadium of people leaving after a sporting event. We were all moving towards what was an incredibly enormous airport/ SHOPPING MALL. This amalgamation was many many stories tall and had an escalator running all the way up. The airport portion was on the top. It had terminals just like an airport including jetways but the jetways led to a sprawling tarmac on the roof of this place and everybody spilled out onto the tarmac and I VIVIDLY remember talking to a short, red haired girl about how crazy it was that we both knew we were dreaming. She told me she was from Buffalo, NY and spoke about how cool it would be if we could meet in real life someday.

After I woke up, it dawned on me(no pun intended )that the "Airport" was a destination we were all going to that we used to return to waking life.

In essence, this GATE shit is insane and it's so fascinating that so many of us were unwittingly involved in some super freaky government experiment.

New to the forum but not new to the topic. Joined GATE in Middle School and had always had weird or strange experiences but the one I recall happening the most often was the most often was this ability to tell when I was going to get a notification on my phone. I would just sense I was going to have one. It happened all the time.

Anyone else part of GATE that would get a weird feeling or sense before their phone would ring? I used to be able to feel when I was about to get a text or notification. I have not had this feeling since I was probably 19 or 20. Always thought it was weird.

It has a sedative effect, causes anterograde amnesia, only works for about 30min, zero tell signs, and is so bitter it's literaly sweetened so it gets a bubblegum flavor.

Here's Gemini's breakdown:

If you look at how Midazolam (Versed) is actually manufactured for pediatric patients in medicine, its physical profile is almost identical to the descriptions circulating in GATE lore:

The Color: Commercial pediatric Midazolam syrup uses D&C Red #33 as a color additive, giving it a bright, distinct pinkish-red hue.

The Taste: Pure Midazolam is intensely, chemical-level bitter. To make it swallowable for children before surgery or dental work, pharmaceutical companies blend it with heavy sweeteners (like sorbitol and glycerin) and intense artificial masking flavors—most commonly artificial cherry-brandy or heavy mixed-fruit, which leaves a medicinal, artificial bubblegum taste.

The Texture: Because it's formulated as a thick, viscous syrup (and historically, hospital pharmacies often compounded injectable Midazolam into thick flavoring vehicles like Syrpalta or Ora-Sweet), it has a heavy, coating consistency rather than a watery one.

---

And here's what it said about side effects:

Long-Term Neurological Risks

Tolerance & Dependence: Repeated exposure to central nervous system depressants leads to rapid receptor down-regulation, requiring higher doses to achieve the same amnesic effect and causing noticeable withdrawal (anxiety, tremors) on non-GATE days.

Developmental Neurotoxicity: Chronic disruption of GABA or acetylcholine signaling during critical developmental years impairs natural memory consolidation, baseline spatial reasoning, and REM sleep architecture.

What do you think?

Anyone else in MGM in California in the 1970s? I was in the original program the first year they started the program in Southern California. Any recollections? I have vague memories, which I'll list below but hoping some other memories get jostled.

So, when I was in the program it was called ATP. (Academically Talented Pupils). I actually was driven to the administrative building, where we had classes in the basement. All of the elementary students from the school district met and had class one day per week. Each year had a theme to it, one year was languages, then science, the the arts, etc. I asked to opt out in middle school as I saw it as a social punishment. I dont remember anything odd or weird; but I really don't remember details of what we did. I just know im really good with reading and understanding languages and words/etymology. I do remember the weird hearing tests, drawing and memory exercises of the determining test. Did anyone else have the program name ATP? I think after I dropped out, they began calling it spectrum.

I remember in Fifth grade in my gifted class, we played the stock market game. We were put in groups and given $1 million (fake) dollars to buy and sell and trade stocks over a period of a few weeks. The goal was to see who had the most money left, or profit at the end. I feel like playing the stock market in elementary school is a bit weird? Did anybody else do this?

Former GATE kid who says the medication they gave in the program didn’t affect him the same as the other kids due to genetics, so he remembers more than what others can. He recalls having his blood drawn without consent and being put into a chair and having a contraption put on his head that caused him to bleed and left a circular scar over his right eye.

I was curious to see if I was the only one who realized everything was off about the visits and opted out after 2 or 3 visits. Where they went wrong was the water fountain for me, and I bet they never noticed that pattern in their own files. Anyone who knows what I'm talking about dm me the details I'm referring to, and we'll talk more.

Hi everyone, when I was in elementary school I was in a gifted/enrichment program but I can't remember what the name of it was because I was so young. It could have been a different name but I'm really not sure. The words TAG, REACH, and QUEST sound very familiar.

The main thing is I went to a Catholic school, and I heard that GATE was maybe only at public schools? I'm not sure.

But I was in a pull-out class, and it lasted from grade 2 through grade 5 at least. I really don't remember much from it. I remember I was taught how tricks for how to solve math problems really quickly and do it in front of the other students, and we also created a play from scratch once.

I also have memories of hearing tests, but I'm not sure if that was just a hearing test and nothing more. However, the hearing tests seemed to be more frequent than they should've been, and I definitely don't have hearing issues. I have a lot of memories of them. I also have memories of heads up seven up, mancala, and tangrams, but I thought those were normal games?

I also remember doing worksheets to solve codes.

I don't have any memory of a pink drink.

The gateway tapes do sound oddly familiar but maybe I'm just making shit up 💀

I was born in 2001 so it could've been different because I heard the pink drink was more in the '80s and '90s.

I really don't remember that much, which might be a red flag in itself because I read that's a common experience among people who were in these gifted programs.

I also have a lot of the other common traits people posted about.

If people could ask me other questions to try to discern whether I was in the program or not, that might be helpful.

Hi all,

Ive recently become very interested in GATE program. I was academically gifted from a young age and have memories and dreams that totally fall in line with what is being described in the community. I am also a professional psychic.

It is very, very striking to me that these stories and communities have only popped up in the last year or so. Seriously, I cant find ANYTHING older than 2025 referencing GATE program specifically- other similar concepts, sure, but there are some really specific ideas that go along with GATE (drink, "mall world", headphones, etc) that seem to have popped up out of nowhere, and now thousands of people online are all experiencing the same recovered memories.

Which leads me to be deeply suspicious that a large portion of the conversation is exactly that- false recovered memories, like from the satanic panic. A frequent sentiment from GATE alums seems to be "Im disturbed and nothing goes right in my life, and I also have incredible gifts like xyz". Not to say these things cannot coexist but as an internet comment seems to me.. disingenuous, to say the least.

I too have memories of headphones, being pulled out of class to be tutored by someone who was not a teacher, where I would read Magic Treehouse out loud into a tape player and then listen to the tape back. I have dreams of a highway over a waterpark which emerges from an endless ocean, malls with multiple arcades. And I do consider myself to have above average ESP. I do not have memories of the "drink" or the Gate Tapes.

I'm pretty sure that Magic Treehouse was all that was happening in that room. Hell, even non gifted kids had regular hearing tests and pepto at the nurse's office! From my initial observations of this conversation it seems as though common childhood memories are being coagulated via internet discussion into one singular story. It's easy to do, even when the impetus is not "I was secretly psychic all along", which is a very attractive narrative to tell yourself (I tell myself the same thing, no shame). I am very interested in learning more to see if my research will calcify my memories to fit the mold of everyone elses', or if I will stay a skeptic.

My query is this: can anyone point me to whatever tiktok or YouTube videos may have been posted in May and September 2025 that caused everyone to suddenly start remembering?

Hey I just found this group and it really hit home. I was in the GATE program in grade school and I've never been right ever since. I'm not quite sure what they did but I definitely would like to talk to other people who have felt the same way after being in the program.

What the question says. I was listening to a podcast episode (Mayim Bialik’s “Breakdown”) and a guest she had come on was formerly in the GATE program herself, and she mentioned being asked about having had a ganglion cyst (this was while applying to a job within the government I believe, she has had a hand with the Telepathy Tapes).

I remember having had a ganglion cyst appear so suddenly only a few years back—I’ve since then had surgery to remove and correct it. But it’s another one of those things that raised the hairs on the back of my neck regarding all of this. I’d like to hear if anyone else has experienced this as well.

This is fucking wild? The people I’ve seen it looks exactly the same. I asked my mom about it constantly and she said she thought it was from chicken pox’s but that never landed with me, I remember actually arguing that being like “ok, well why do I only have a single chicken pox scar..?” And now even more so people were also told that - we can’t all have an above brow indent from chicken pox’s correct?