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Joseph McMoneagle

Remote Viewer #001 in the U.S. Army's Project Stargate program, retired Chief Warrant Officer, and the most documented military psychic in American intelligence history. McMoneagle's 23-year involvement in classified remote viewing operations — and the government's willingness to fund the program for that long — stands as the strongest evidence that the deep state took consciousness research seriously as an intelligence tool.

FieldDetails
Full NameJoseph W. McMoneagle
BornJanuary 10, 1946
StatusACTIVE
Current LocationNellysford, Virginia (near The Monroe Institute)
Current AffiliationThe Monroe Institute (researcher, instructor); independent consultant
RoleMilitary Remote Viewer / Intelligence Operative / Author / Consciousness Researcher / Instructor
CategoryIntelligence Insider / Consciousness Researcher
Military RankChief Warrant Officer 2 (CW2), U.S. Army (Retired)
Military Service1964-1984 (20 years active duty)
Stargate Service1978-1995 (active duty 1978-1984; consultant 1984-1995)
DesignationRemote Viewer #001
AwardsLegion of Merit (for intelligence contributions including remote viewing)
Notable WorksMind Trek: Exploring Consciousness, Time, and Space Through Remote Viewing (1993, revised 1997); The Ultimate Time Machine (1998); Remote Viewing Secrets: A Handbook (2000); The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy (2002, revised 2018)
SpouseNancy Lea "Scooter" McMoneagle (stepdaughter of Robert Monroe, founder of The Monroe Institute)

Assessment: WELL-DOCUMENTED​

Joseph McMoneagle is the single most credentialed living witness to the U.S. government's decades-long classified investment in consciousness as an intelligence tool. His participation in Project Stargate is confirmed by declassified DIA and CIA documents, congressional records, and his Legion of Merit citation — which explicitly references his intelligence contributions during the period he served as a remote viewer. McMoneagle completed approximately 450 intelligence missions using remote viewing over 17 years, producing actionable intelligence on Soviet weapons systems, hostage locations, and missing military assets. His case is not speculative — it is confirmed by the U.S. government's own records, awards, and declassified program documentation.

Background​

Early Life​

Joseph McMoneagle was born on January 10, 1946, and grew up in difficult circumstances marked by poverty, alcoholism, and abuse. As a child, he experienced spontaneous visions at night, particularly when frightened — experiences he would later understand as early indicators of psychic sensitivity. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1964 at age 18, partly to escape his troubled home environment.

Military Career​

McMoneagle served 20 years of active duty in the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of Chief Warrant Officer 2. His military career included:

  • Service in Vietnam, where he was severely injured in a helicopter accident
  • 15 years in intelligence work, including assignments with the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM)
  • Five years in Signals Intelligence (SIGINT)
  • Five years as an active-duty remote viewer in Project Stargate (1978-1984)

The 1970 Near-Death Experience​

In July 1970, while stationed in Germany, McMoneagle had a near-death experience that he considers the turning point in his psychic development. He collapsed in the doorway of a restaurant after taking a sip of a drink, went into convulsions, swallowed his tongue, and stopped breathing. At the hospital, no heartbeat was detected.

During the episode, McMoneagle experienced a classic NDE: he was out of body watching the medical response, then drifted backward through a tunnel and experienced a complete life review in the presence of what he described as an all-loving being. The experience profoundly altered his perception of consciousness and reality, and he began noticing heightened psychic sensitivity in the years that followed.

This NDE set in motion the chain of events that drew him into the classified remote viewing program at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) International, where his abilities could be tested under controlled conditions.

Recruitment into Project Stargate​

In 1978, McMoneagle was recruited as the first operational remote viewer — designated Remote Viewer #001 — for the classified program then operating under the code name GONDOLA WISH at Fort Meade, Maryland. The program, which operated under numerous code names over its lifetime (GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK, and finally STARGATE), was jointly run by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Stanford Research Institute International (SRI-International).

McMoneagle was selected based on his demonstrated psychic aptitude and his existing intelligence credentials. He worked as an active-duty remote viewer from 1978 until his retirement from the Army in 1984, then continued as a civilian consultant to the program until 1995, when it was officially terminated.

Key Contributions​

Operational Intelligence Missions​

Over 17 years, McMoneagle participated in approximately 450 remote viewing missions for U.S. intelligence agencies. Among the most notable:

  • Soviet Typhoon-class submarine — McMoneagle described the interior of a top-secret Soviet manufacturing plant and accurately predicted a new class of submarine under construction there. The intelligence was later confirmed by satellite imagery.
  • Brigadier General James Dozier rescue — McMoneagle sketched the location and described the thoughts of U.S. Army Brigadier General James Dozier, who had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades in Italy in 1981.
  • Skylab reentry — Nearly a year in advance, McMoneagle accurately predicted when the Skylab space station would leave orbit and where it would impact the Earth's surface.
  • Downed Soviet bomber — After conventional reconnaissance failed, McMoneagle and other remote viewers located a downed Soviet bomber that had been carrying nuclear materials.
  • Iran hostage crisis — McMoneagle was given photographs of hostages and asked for their locations, contributing intelligence during the Iran hostage situation.
  • Mars Exploration Session (May 22, 1984) — In a now-declassified CIA session conducted at The Monroe Institute, McMoneagle was given a sealed envelope containing coordinates on Mars (40.89 degrees north, 9.55 degrees west — the Cydonia region) and a time frame of approximately one million years ago. Without knowing the target was on Mars, he described pyramidal structures, massive dust storms, and very tall, thin humanoid beings. The declassified document (CIA-RDP96-00788R001900760001-9) was released in 2017.

Legion of Merit​

At his retirement in 1984, McMoneagle was awarded the Legion of Merit — one of the highest non-combat military awards — for his intelligence contributions during his final ten years of service. The citation covered both his SIGINT work and his five years as a remote viewer. This is significant because the U.S. Army does not award the Legion of Merit for work it considers fraudulent or valueless. The award itself is a form of official acknowledgment that remote viewing produced useful intelligence.

Remote Viewing Methodology​

McMoneagle developed and documented systematic approaches to remote viewing that emphasized:

  • Quieting the conscious (ego) mind — reducing analytical overlay that interferes with psychic perception
  • Maintaining absolute neutrality toward the target — avoiding expectations or assumptions
  • Establishing a fertile ground for conscious/subconscious exchange — creating the conditions for non-local information to surface
  • Developing a common language between physical and non-physical realities — translating psychic impressions into usable intelligence

His methodology, detailed in Remote Viewing Secrets: A Handbook (2000), remains one of the most comprehensive publicly available guides to remote viewing technique.

Consciousness Non-Locality​

McMoneagle's central thesis, developed through decades of operational and experimental remote viewing, is that consciousness is non-local — it is not confined to the brain or to the present moment. Key elements of his framework:

  • Consciousness extends beyond physical time and space. Remote viewing demonstrates that awareness can access information from any location, any time period (past or future), and any scale — from microscopic to planetary.
  • Everything possesses consciousness at some level. McMoneagle has stated that consciousness extends "all the way down to the subprimal level," suggesting a universal information field rather than consciousness as an emergent property of brains.
  • Remote viewing is a natural human ability. It is not a special gift limited to psychics but an innate capacity that can be trained and developed through systematic practice.
  • The implications are profound. As McMoneagle has stated, remote viewing "says that there's a lot more to reality than what we see, hear, smell, touch or taste."

Afterlife and Reincarnation Research​

McMoneagle's exploration of consciousness extends beyond intelligence applications. Through out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and remote viewing sessions, he has explored questions about the afterlife and reincarnation. His NDE in 1970 provided direct experiential evidence — to him — that consciousness survives physical death. His book The Ultimate Time Machine (1998) explores consciousness's relationship with time, including the possibility of accessing future events and past lives.

The Monroe Institute Connection​

McMoneagle's relationship with The Monroe Institute (TMI) is both professional and personal:

  • Training ground — McMoneagle was sent to TMI as part of his military remote viewing training, where he worked with Robert Monroe's Hemi-Sync binaural beat technology in the institute's sensory isolation chambers ("black boxes")
  • Research collaboration — Beginning around 1982, McMoneagle worked extended weekends with Robert Monroe in the lab, refining remote viewing techniques using Monroe's consciousness technology
  • Family connection — McMoneagle married Nancy Lea "Scooter" Honeycutt, Robert Monroe's stepdaughter, on November 22, 1984. Nancy had helped pioneer and build TMI in the 1970s after the publication of Monroe's first book, Journeys Out of the Body, and served as TMI's executive director from 1983 to 1991
  • Mars session — The famous 1984 Mars remote viewing session was conducted at TMI, with Robert Monroe personally waking McMoneagle from a nap in the black box and guiding him through the session
  • Ongoing role — McMoneagle continues to serve as a researcher and instructor at TMI, training new generations of remote viewers and consciousness explorers

Training Jordan Crowder​

McMoneagle serves as remote viewing trainer to Jordan Crowder, a consciousness explorer, podcaster, and Monroe Institute affiliate instructor. Crowder represents the direct transmission of classified government remote viewing methodology into the public domain — McMoneagle trained under the Stargate program, and now passes those techniques to Crowder and others through TMI. This lineage connects the declassified intelligence program directly to contemporary consciousness research and public education.

Japanese Television Demonstrations​

McMoneagle's remote viewing abilities were tested publicly on Japanese television in some of the most well-documented demonstrations of psychic functioning:

  • NHK "Battle TV" — McMoneagle performed two televised remote viewing demonstrations for NHK, Japan's national broadcaster. A highly respected and skeptical professor of physics from the University of Tokyo participated, boasting he would describe the "trick" used or resign his position. McMoneagle's demonstrations succeeded.
  • Nippon Television (2002-2004) — McMoneagle became a regular on Nippon Television's prime-time show Chounouryoku Sousakan ("FBI: Psychic Investigator"), performing remote viewings related to unsolved police cases. In a series spanning two years, five out of seven missing persons — cases that had stumped police and private detective agencies for five to seven years — were located using McMoneagle's remote viewing material alone. All portions of the search were documented on film.

Key Quotes​

"Consciousness is truly a powerful sense in that it extends beyond the very nature of physical time/space." — Joseph McMoneagle, Mind Trek: Exploring Consciousness, Time, and Space Through Remote Viewing

"Everything has a consciousness, all the way down to the subprimal level." — Joseph McMoneagle, Mind Trek

"The valuable tools of a remote viewer or any psychic are being able to quiet the conscious (ego) mind, learning never to demand a conclusion, intensely focusing on nothing specific, being absolutely neutral towards a target, being able to establish a fertile ground for conscious/subconscious exchange, and developing a common language between the physical and non-physical realities." — Joseph McMoneagle, Remote Viewing Secrets: A Handbook

"It says that there's a lot more to reality than what we see, hear, smell, touch or taste." — Joseph McMoneagle, on what remote viewing reveals about the nature of reality

Connection to Deep State / Consciousness Control​

McMoneagle's career sits at the intersection of the deep state and consciousness research in several critical ways:

  1. Proof of institutional seriousness — The U.S. government funded remote viewing research for 23 years (1972-1995) and awarded McMoneagle the Legion of Merit for his contributions. This is not a fringe claim — it is a documented fact that the intelligence community invested decades and millions of dollars into consciousness as an intelligence tool.

  2. Classification as concealment — The Stargate program was classified for its entire operational life. When it was finally declassified in 1995, the CIA commissioned a review (the AIR evaluation) that recommended termination — but the program had already been producing intelligence for 23 years. The question of why a program that "didn't work" was funded for over two decades by multiple intelligence agencies remains unresolved.

  3. Weaponization of consciousness — McMoneagle's work demonstrates that consciousness research was not pursued for humanitarian or scientific purposes — it was weaponized for intelligence collection. Remote viewing was used to locate Soviet submarines, find kidnapped generals, and track nuclear materials. The deep state treated expanded consciousness as a military asset.

  4. Controlled disclosure — McMoneagle's public career as an author and speaker represents a form of controlled disclosure. He is allowed to discuss the program's existence and general methods, but operational details remain classified. This selective transparency suggests an institutional calculation about how much consciousness research the public should know about.

  5. Suppression of implications — While McMoneagle's operational intelligence work has been partially acknowledged, the broader implications of his findings — that consciousness is non-local, that it can access any point in space-time, that it survives physical death — have been largely ignored by mainstream science and media. The government was willing to use these capabilities but not to publicly validate the worldview they imply.

  6. What came after Stargate — McMoneagle and other remote viewers have raised the question of whether the 1995 termination was genuine or whether the program simply moved to a deeper classification level. A 23-year program that produced actionable intelligence does not typically disappear — it gets restructured and reclassified.

The Counterargument​

The 1995 AIR Evaluation​

In 1995, the CIA commissioned the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to evaluate the Stargate program. The two principal reviewers reached dramatically different conclusions:

  • Jessica Utts (statistician, University of California, Davis) concluded that "psychic functioning has been well established" and that "the statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance." She found that the effect sizes were consistent across laboratories and researchers.

  • Ray Hyman (psychologist, University of Oregon) argued that Utts's conclusion was "premature," that the findings had not been independently replicated with sufficient rigor, and that "the overwhelming amount of data generated by the viewers is vague, general, and way off target." He attributed apparent hits to "reasonable guessing and subjective validation."

Both reviewers agreed that the newer experiments had eliminated obvious methodological defects and were producing hit rates above chance, but Hyman maintained this was insufficient to establish psychic functioning as real.

The AIR report ultimately concluded that "no usable intelligence data was produced in the program," with David Goslin of AIR stating there was "no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community." This contradicts McMoneagle's Legion of Merit citation and the program's 23-year funding history.

Skeptical Criticisms​

  • Confirmation bias — Skeptics argue that remote viewing sessions produce large volumes of vague information, and that "hits" are selected after the fact while misses are ignored.
  • Subjective validation — Critics contend that human beings are skilled at finding meaningful patterns in ambiguous data, and that remote viewing transcripts are sufficiently vague to match a wide range of targets.
  • Cold reading and sensory leakage — Some skeptics allege that remote viewers may have had access to contextual clues or that protocols were insufficiently controlled, though later experiments addressed these concerns.
  • Replication issues — While McMoneagle's individual track record is strong, critics note that remote viewing effects have proven difficult to replicate consistently across different viewers and laboratories.

McMoneagle's Response to Skeptics​

McMoneagle has addressed these criticisms directly in his books and interviews, noting that:

  • The program would not have been funded for 23 years across multiple agencies if it produced no results
  • The Legion of Merit is not awarded for work the Army considers valueless
  • The Japanese television demonstrations were conducted under conditions that eliminated cold reading and sensory leakage
  • Many operational successes were confirmed by subsequent conventional intelligence collection

Where He Has Said It​

  • Books — Mind Trek (1993, 1997), The Ultimate Time Machine (1998), Remote Viewing Secrets (2000), The Stargate Chronicles (2002, 2018)
  • Monroe Institute presentations and archived conversations — including a 1993 interview archived by TMI
  • Skeptiko podcast — Interview on how his near-death experience led to remote viewing (Episode 166)
  • Japanese television — NHK "Battle TV" and Nippon Television's Chounouryoku Sousakan (2002-2004)
  • National Geographic — "Who is Joe McMoneagle?" documentary segment
  • Newsweek — Featured in 2015 article "Meet the Former Pentagon Scientist Who Says Psychics Can Help American Spies"
  • Numerous podcasts (2020s) — Including "That UFO Podcast," "Behind Greatness by Inspire North" (four-part series), and others discussing Stargate, the Mars session, and consciousness
  • Jordan Crowder — McMoneagle's remote viewing student and Monroe Institute affiliate instructor; represents the direct lineage from classified government consciousness research to public education
  • Robert Monroe — Founder of The Monroe Institute, developer of Hemi-Sync technology, McMoneagle's father-in-law; his OBE research and the Gateway Process were investigated by the CIA (Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process, 1983)
  • Project Stargate — The 23-year classified DIA/CIA remote viewing program (1972-1995) in which McMoneagle served as Remote Viewer #001
  • Gateway Process — The Monroe Institute's consciousness exploration program investigated by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command; McMoneagle trained using Gateway technology
  • Ingo Swann — Fellow Stargate remote viewer who developed the Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) methodology at SRI; McMoneagle used a different, more intuitive approach
  • Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ — Physicists at SRI International who ran the laboratory side of the remote viewing research and tested McMoneagle's abilities under controlled conditions
  • Edwin May — Physicist who directed the later phases of the Stargate program at SRI and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)

Other Coverage Worth Reading​

  • Courtney Brown: Tenured political science professor at Emory University, founder of the Farsight Institute, and one of the most controversial...
  • Belief Territories (Belief System Territories / BSTs): Non-physical regions where deceased consciousness becomes "stuck" in self-created reality loops shaped by the beliefs held at death...
  • Jordan Crowder: Consciousness explorer, experiencer, podcaster, author, and teacher whose work centers on practical access to expanded states of awareness...
  • Book: Controlling the Human Mind: The Technologies of Political Control or Tools for Peak Performance

Sources​

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