part0022

J oseph W. McMoneagle was officially registered as Agent 001 and became the Star Gate project’s most successful psychic. Like Ed May, he is capable of providing a continuous history of the program, in his case from late 1977 through to its closure in late 1995, part of the time with the military unit, the remainder—after retirement from the Army—as a civilian contractor. Specifically, his perspective is that of the remote viewers. No other viewer associated with either the US government’s in-house psychic spying effort or the contractor’s spying and research activity can make the claim of such longevity. Furthermore, as the most successful agent, McMoneagle’s story covering some of the deep nuances of the psychics’ work, espionage and the experience of ESP phenomena is very telling.

Even though he made the decision to join the project as a remote viewer under the warning that his career and possibly life outside the military would be jeopardized—something that did play out—Joe McMoneagle’s participation was recognized with the highest honor for any intelligence officer for his excellence in providing psychic intelligence. His 1984 Legion of Merit award citation reads in part:

…[McMoneagle] used his talents and expertise in the execution of more than 200 missions, addressing over 150 essential elements of information. These EEI [essential elements of information] contained critical intelligence reported at the highest echelons of our military and government, including such national level agencies as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, DIA, NSA, CIA, DEA, and the Secret Service, producing crucial and vital intelligence unavailable from any other source …”

However, one other thing is very important where Joe McMoneagle is concerned: he didn’t set out to be a “psychic.” He was, however, a career military man. How he discovered his talents and moved into position as the best of the best when it comes to remote viewing is a story worth telling before moving into his experiences within Star Gate and beyond. In fact, in his psychic experiences growing up, Joe shared many commonalities with others around the world, as you’ll see.

Since the beginning of his participation in the Star Gate program, many have asked when he first noticed that he had psychic skills. “This is almost an impossible question to answer,” said McMoneagle, “because it seems like I’ve had them as long as I can remember.” In this chapter, he tells us about how he found out about his abilities, how and why he got involved with remote viewing, and the early days of the project from the viewers’ perspective.

A Viewer’s Childhood

ESP abilities among children are quite common, that is until they are essentially educated out of them while growing up. In the West, the cultural perspective is that ESP is weird (meaning not desirable) and even scary to many. In addition, there is a disbelief in the experiences and abilities overtly displayed by academics. Consequently, children often learn to keep their psychic experiences to themselves for fear of ridicule—something that adults do as well—and may lose any aptitude for ESP as they take on the belief that the abilities may be “bad,” that they are “not possible,” or just plain “different.” Most people don’t want to be seen as “different” or “weird.” In McMoneagle’s case, the experiences persisted.

Joseph W. McMoneagle was born in Miami, Florida in 1946. First to arrive of a pair of twins in a difficult birth, he and his sister Margaret were premature by almost two months. Back in those days, the probability for survival for premature infants was rather bleak given that the use of incubators was a brand new idea, and even then they hadn’t yet learned that too much oxygen could cause permanent blindness to the child.

Surprisingly, he was home in only a few weeks’ time, while his twin spent a much longer period in the hospital, fighting to live. Eventually, she was allowed to join Joe at home. They were inseparable growing up, at least until high school. “It was difficult to separate us. We were at the very least, ultra-sensitive to one another’s needs,” said McMoneagle. “There were times my mother said that it seemed we had an orchestrated plan to drive her crazy. I suppose we were just reading each other’s minds.”

As they grew up, they noticed a shared unique ability that others didn’t seem to possess, or if they did, weren’t using. The twins seemed to know things, and it was so noticeable between them that the teachers always tried to keep them separated in the classrooms. “I’m sure they thought we were cheating. There were many times that we both scored the same on tests—same questions right and same questions wrong.”

Telepathy between twins has been studied the world over, and there are studies and many more examples one can find with some minor research. In general, the telepathy is between identical twins, rather than fraternal twins as in the case of Joe and his sister.

Apparently, telepathy with his sister wasn’t the only type of early psychic experience he had. McMoneagle recalls one of the most common kinds of experiences with apparitions reported by people the world over. In his case, it was an encounter with a newly deceased loved one:

Once when we were very young and still sleeping in the same bedroom together, we had a visitation from one of our favorite aunts in the middle of the night. It was our father’s baby sister, our Aunt Anna whom we dearly loved. She appeared to us one night while we were sleeping. It woke us, because she was fully enveloped in a shimmering light and dressed in white. I had never seen her look so radiant and beautiful. She looked very happy and was smiling as she came over and sat on the edge of my bed. My sister and I huddled together in front of her, while she ran her fingers through our hair and quietly told us that in a short time we would hear some sad news about her, but we shouldn’t worry, that she was okay. People would talk about how she had died and gone to heaven, everyone would be sad, and they would cry. But, we shouldn’t worry, because she was going to be with the angels and she would watch over us from that point on. She made us happy telling us about this, and we were both happy for her. It was obvious that this was something that she wanted to do very much.

The next morning we decided that I should be the one to tell my father, which I did. I simply told him that Aunt Anna had gone to be with the angels.

Anna was his favorite sister. He worried about her all the time and we didn’t know why. But, when I told him this he became very angry and he slapped me hard across the face, knocking me off my feet. He told me to never talk like that again about his sister Anna. I hid under my bed for an hour and cried, but remembered what my Aunt had told me. My sister came and stayed with me under the bed.

That afternoon, my father received a phone call. His youngest sister, Anna, had died from lung cancer during the night. She had just had her twenty-first birthday. She had also never smoked.

There were many times that the siblings knew things before anyone else did. They discussed them together, and for a long time agreed never to tell a grownup. It wasn’t safe. Such a feeling–that talking about the experiences or perhaps even the subject in general–is not “safe” for kids is unfortunately a common one in much of our society. Eventually, Joe’s sister Margaret forgot their agreement and began discussing these things with their mother. “I think it was around our 15th birthday.”

Their mother became concerned, especially when Margaret spoke of the many times they were able to pass information between the two of them in school, or know things before they would happen. But, what disturbed her most of all apparently was Margaret describing how she could talk to those who were no longer with us.

As a result, Joe’s mother started taking his sister to see a psychiatrist. Margaret asked Joe to back her up on some of the issues that she argued with their mother over, “but I was afraid and refused.” Over time, the doctors ordered Margaret to take medications in order to control some of her illusions.

“I know that she fought them for some time, but eventually had to give up,” said Joe. “Over the years, it became more and more difficult to communicate with my twin. Her mind seemed to be too confused, and I couldn’t understand it. Eventually, we could only communicate when she was in great pain, fear, or needed me desperately for something. I probably should have been there for her, but as a small child I was afraid. I hid my abilities and used them in self-defense.”

It would be many years until Joe McMoneagle would feel comfortable talking about the experiences with anyone, and that person turned out to be another favorite aunt. He explained that he continued to use his skills to stay out of the way of his parents when they were drinking, to stay out of trouble in school, and maintain near perfect test scores for all his subjects. “No one ever could figure out why I never carried school books home from school to study. ESP served as my silent partner, and my life was saved several times when I used extrasensory powers in times of danger, especially as a soldier during the Vietnam War.”

An Experience in Vietnam, 1967

In Vietnam in the 1960s, McMoneagle found his abilities as much survival-centered as anything else. In one experience in 1967 he related, his life and the lives of his comrades in arms were saved by his ESP.

Just east of Ahn Khe, a convoy McMoneagle was part of formed up on the main highway, Route 19, for the run through the mountains to Qui Nhon. There had been considerable troop movement in the mountain areas just north of Route 19 between the villages of Tay So’n and Nam Tu’o’ng, and their mission was to move into the area for a number of days with some sensitive sensor equipment to see if they could pinpoint the main body of this North Vietnamese Army (NVA) movement. All of their equipment was supposed to be able to be carried in their packs, but since the batteries were heavy and much of the equipment was delicate in nature, they preferred to carry it by jeep to as close as they could to its area of operation. “We had learned the hard way that the less exposure the equipment had to the jungles of Southeast Asia, the more likely it was to operate effectively and the longer it would last. Under a triple canopy of leaves, with no air movement at all, and a constant temperature of 107-109 F and 100% humidity, the heat and moisture was oppressive to humans and totally destructive to electronics.”

It was necessary to travel in convoy, because a single vehicle, especially a jeep that might be carrying non-commissioned officers and/or officers would be too great a target for an ambush. Convoys travelling with armored vehicles and heavy guns guaranteed protection to lone vehicles such as theirs. There was also a greater possibility that a single vehicle traveling the road alone might trigger a mine and leave the occupants stranded and vulnerable to attack by an overwhelming force, or death from lack of immediate medical support.

The men had been sitting in the sun almost an hour, waiting on the other trucks to assemble. McMoneagle’s stomach had been turning over the entire time. “Every small voice in my mind that morning was screaming at me to just take off, leave, to drive it alone, and not to spend another minute waiting on the convoy that morning. I told the other two men in my team what I was thinking and they knew me well enough not to argue.”

McMoneagle started the jeep, pulled out of the line, and rocketed to the barriers where they were stopped by the Military Police. He showed them their Intelligence orders and ordered the barriers lifted. They headed down Route 19 in a cloud of dust a full twenty minutes ahead of the convoy.

“I’d like to say nothing happened that day and it didn’t to us.” However, approximately 13-14 kilometers just east of An Khe, there were a number of switch-backs in the road which are severe enough that all vehicles, especially large trucks, had to slow to 10 km/hr. or less in order to negotiate the turns. The road also dropped precipitously for a long stretch just before the turns and then climbed a long distance immediately following this stretch of turns.

The North Vietnamese soldiers set up four heavy mortars in the mountain directly overlooking these switchback turns and bracketed the top and bottom of the road with heavy machinegun emplacements. When McMoneagle and company drove through with their single jeep, the enemy apparently did not want to waste their ambush on a single vehicle with only three riders. Instead, they waited for the entire convoy, which came along twenty minutes behind. They allowed the convoy to drive down through the switch back turns and begin its accent up the steep climb. Just before it reached the top of the climb, they hit the lead vehicle with numerous rocket propelled grenades, while simultaneously hitting the rear vehicles, trapping the convoy in the middle, which they then raked heavily with mortar fire.

Needless to say, the electronics they carried were not needed to indicate where the bulk of the NVA was located. “We only had to look over our shoulders to see the columns of black smoke. It was an ugly ambush and one we might have been caught in if it hadn’t been for the voices in my head. This was one example of so many instances of knowing that led to many of my closer friends starting to mimic me in my actions. While in the base camp, if I chose to move into a bunker for a couple of nights, it would soon become extraordinarily crowded inside within just a few hours.”

Just before he arrived in Southeast Asia, McMoneagle had a lucid dream in which he envisioned himself dying. In the dream, “at the very moment of my death, there was a brilliant white flash of light and I knew that I was dead, that I had been killed. But my death was okay. I had died doing my duty and with honor. Somehow, that made it right. I interpreted the dream as meaning a short round from a large American cannon would probably get me, or a large mortar from an enemy tube would come down at my feet and I’d die in the ensuing blast. Also, because of this dream I felt it was only right that I tell those around me that death as a soldier wasn’t so bad and I actually had good feelings about it. I was telling people for almost a month that I wasn’t going to survive.”

McMoneagle shared this dream with his closest friends and colleagues. It wasn’t well received. On numerous occasions—often in the middle of firefights—he’d walk around giving orders standing up, while everyone else was on the ground. Everyone looked at this as either brave or utterly crazy. It was neither since he already knew he wasn’t going die by a bullet.

During the Tet Offensive of 1968, one of his friends was hit trying to cross an open field. McMoneagle stopped to cover him with his flak vest and then pulled him behind an Armored Personnel Carrier (APC). “It sounded like I was working inside a beehive. There is nothing brave about this. I already knew how I was going to die. But if the enemy shelled us with mortars or 122mm rockets and RPGs, you’d usually find me standing alone! No one wanted to be standing next to me.”

The dream clearly did not come true as originally interpreted, as McMoneagle survived the Vietnam War. “I was never hit with an artillery round, and although I got metal fragments from many mortar rounds, I was never seriously injured by one.” However, it turned out to be a premonition of another close call with death, which we’ll discuss shortly.

He did have another rather odd vision that did come to pass. “When I got to Vietnam and left the airplane, as my feet hit the tarmac I had a vision of myself turning around and waving to friends as I climbed the ladder to the plane to leave. Only the plane wasn’t a military plane that I was boarding, it was a civilian aircraft and it was painted all yellow. And on the side it said ‘Canary Bird.’ Of course this was absurd, because no planes were yellow and all planes in and out of Vietnam were military. When I was ordered to report to the repo-depot in Saigon for departure home, I ended up flying home on a brand new airline called Braniff, and all of their planes were pastel colors. My plane was a very pale yellow and on the side of the plane it said ‘Yellow Bird.’ I left Vietnam on the 28th of August, 1968.”

Near-Death Experience

The dream McMoneagle had led him to be arguably a bit reckless on the battlefield when bullets (not mortars) were flying, so perhaps it was luck alone that kept him out of harm. “After coming home from Vietnam, it was obvious that the dream was wrong,” since he was still alive, “so, I figured it must not be important.” He was wrong on that front. As he learned in the following experience, “I had gotten the information exactly correct, but had interpreted it badly.”

As part of his military service in 1970, Joe McMoneagle was sent to Braunau Am Inn, Austria. It was here that he had a heart attack and subsequent out-of-body experience that would eventually alert certain military leaders to his abilities.

On one of his missions in Europe, Joe was meeting with his first wife for a weekend retreat at a guesthouse in Braunau Am Inn. He recalls the time of year as being wet and cold, mostly rainy with lots of fog in the early morning hours. He and his wife were going to be staying at the small guesthouse across the German-Austrian border for a weekend, after which he would continue with his mission. Also present was one of his closest friends at the time, who was going to stay for dinner at the guesthouse and then leave. They had entered the restaurant of the guesthouse, sat down towards the rear of the room and ordered drinks before dinner. McMoneagle had just taken a few sips of his drink once they ordered their meals when he began to feel very ill. Not wanting to become violently sick in front of the other patrons who were eating inside the restaurant, Joe excused himself from the table. He told his wife that he needed some fresh air and that he would return in a moment.

He couldn’t find the men’s room, so he headed directly to the glass door at the front of the guesthouse restaurant. “I remember as I pushed on the glass door with my hand, it swung outward, and as my body passed through it, there was a popping noise, very much like someone snapping their fingers. The next thing I noticed was that I was suddenly standing on the cobblestones of the road outside the building.” He recalled that it was raining and that the rain was warm and felt good to him. “I held out my hands to collect the rain in them to see how hard it was raining and was surprised to see the rain drops were passing right through my palms. This amazed me. I watched this happening for a few seconds, until I noticed a small commotion near the front door of the building in front of me. There was a crowd gathering there, so I moved in that direction. What I saw sent a shock wave through my being.”

Lying on the sidewalk in front of the building was the body of Joe McMoneagle. His wife was standing there with her hands over her mouth and she was crying. His friend sat down on the wet pavement and pulled Joe’s body up into his lap and began striking him in the chest. “Each time he struck me in the chest, I found myself back inside my body staring up at him and feeling intense burning pain all through my body. I wanted to scream out at him to stop doing what he was doing. But, every time I started to yell, I’d find myself back outside of my body looking down at him raising his fist again to strike me in the chest.”

Joe tried to yell at him. “No! Don’t do that!” But with Joe experiencing being out of his physical body, his friend couldn’t hear him. The friend would strike again, and McMoneagle would “suddenly be back inside my body looking up at him again. In my mind I’d be screaming, no, no, you must stop this, it hurts too much. And finally I stopped going in and out of my body. I just stayed out, sort of hovering there and watching.”

After a few moments, a Volkswagen Beetle pulled up and Joe watched as they loaded his body into the back seat and drove away. He panicked and began flying off trying to catch them. “I flew along beside the car, yelling at them to wait. I watched as they never slowed down for the border crossing at the Austrian-German check point, they just drove right through. I flew along beside the car all the way to the hospital in Passau, Germany.”

Once there, the still out-of-body McMoneagle watched as his friend pulled Joe’s body from the car and carried him over the shoulder to the emergency room door and tried to enter. It was locked—German hospitals always locked their doors at 8 PM back then. The friend began kicking the glass doors with his foot, until a nurse came and unlocked the doors. He carried Joe into the emergency room and laid him on a table, where they began to cut off his clothing and insert needles into his arms.

Joe recalled that he became very bored by the process and felt as though he was becoming sleepy. He drifted up towards the ceiling and felt intense heat against the back of his neck, thinking this might be from the bright lights they install in the emergency rooms. He turned to see if that were true and suddenly found himself falling backward through a dark tunnel. Thus began a part of the experience that is fairly stereotypical of the Near Death Experiences (NDE) reported by so many over the last several decades. Said McMoneagle:

The tunnel was filled with the faces of people. Many of these faces were familiar to me. They were people I had known or met during my lifetime. Some were totally unfamiliar, people I didn’t remember. Many reached out to me, grabbed at me. Some were crying, some were moaning, and some were smiling and laughing. It was sometimes terrifying and sometimes comforting, but it constantly changed. I closed my eyes and found that I was reviewing my whole life. It was passing before my eyes instantaneously, every action, every item, from birth to death. It wasn’t judgmental however. It was more of an assessment, a review of “what if?” What if I had only been paying more attention here? What if I had only spent a bit more time on this? What if I had only given this person a little bit more respect? It had to do with being more aware of my actions and how they impacted others—how my actions impacted on myself.

I soon began to see light coming towards me from the end of the tunnel. I instantly recognized it as being identical to my old lucid dream, which up until that point had not happened. Faint at first, the light brought hope. It encouraged me. I moved faster toward it. Suddenly I popped out of the end of the tunnel into a very bright and warm light, which completely enveloped me. At that point, I felt complete. I felt whole. I knew all the answers to all the questions that I had ever carried within my mind. I was totally at peace with myself. I knew that I was at home. I wanted to be nowhere else and I needed nothing else to exist. I thought this must be what God means.

A voice in my head said; “You are too early. You must go back.” And I said “No,” which made no difference whatsoever. There was another pop, like someone snapping their fingers and I was suddenly conscious. I opened my eyes and sat bolt upright. I was naked and lying under a sheet in a bed next to another patient. He was startled by my sudden and unexpected movement .

Up until this point, McMoneagle says he wasn’t really conscious of all that happened. When he exited the restaurant on that fateful evening, he made it to the front and collapsed through the door and onto the sidewalk as he pushed on the glass panel. He went into violent convulsions, which resulted in him swallowing his tongue at some point before he got to the hospital. No one knew that he had done that. When someone swallows their tongue, they can’t breathe. How soon this happened after he collapsed is unknown, but it was likely it was closer to the time he was treated.

In 1970, the knowledge concerning Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) was minimal compared to today. The natural reaction was to just beat on someone’s chest with a fist or the palm of one’s hand. That’s what Joe’s friend did, yelling at him to breathe. But as Joe had swallowed his tongue, he couldn’t really breathe. It took Joe’s wife and friend somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes to drive the approximately 60 plus kilometers distance to the hospital in Passau, Germany. As a result, Joe was delivered to the emergency room Dead on Arrival (DOA). The German Doctor was extremely skilled and was able to restart Joe’s heart and breathing. After that, he was in a coma for more than 24 hours, after which he finally regained consciousness sometime in the early morning hours on the beginning of the third day.

McMoneagle looked at the German patient lying in the bed next to his and began telling him in a mix of broken German and English, “I think I met God, and it’s a white light. You can never die. Your identity lives on, but you don’t care. We needed to understand that we were all part of one another, and what you actually did to others you most assuredly were doing to yourself. “

And as he rambled on, the other patient quickly ran out of the room and soon returned with the doctor and a nurse who injected his IV-line with something that promptly made Joe “feel all warm all over and put me back to sleep. I found out much later that when the doctor came into the room, he said that my eyes were wide open and had an almost blue aura in them. He said they had an appearance as though they were glowing, almost radiating light.” Joe thought that was very strange since his eyes have always been green. He probably did scare that poor German patient out of his mind, suddenly sitting bolt upright after lying there totally comatose for over twenty-four hours!

The next time McMoneagle regained consciousness, it was early morning and he was strapped tightly to a gurney. He had an oxygen mask strapped tightly to his face and the gurney was being loaded into the back end of a limousine. A First Lieutenant was walking beside Joe and whispering in his ear. “He said, ‘We’re taking you to Munich. You’re being replaced as the Detachment Commander at the unit, and we’re going to leave things as they are for the moment. People there will think that you are dead, at least until we can sort all this out. Just relax and enjoy the trip.’” Joe was given another shot in his IV-line and remembers nothing of the long drive to Munich in the back of the limousine—only that the windows were covered with tinfoil.

His next awakening was in “a small but comfortable bed, in a small and comfortable room of what felt like a very nice hospital.” Joe was too weak to climb out of the bed, but he said he had a nice view of an interior garden the wing itself wrapped around. It was actually a room in the empty wing of a rest home on the outskirts of Munich. “My head was spinning and felt as though it had been exploded all over the place. My mind felt as though it was spread, like peanut butter or jam, all over the walls of the entire building. I could sense all the rooms and all the people in them and it felt like everyone was talking to me, all at the same time. My head was filled with voices and I couldn’t shut any of them out. I knew I was probably going crazy.”

In a small percentage of NDEs, on recovery the individual has reported an expanded feeling of consciousness or some other psychic perceptions, and even full blown psychic abilities. It seems McMoneagle was in that small group. His extended perceptions continued. “I envisioned a large man, wearing a US Army medical uniform walking into the room and asking me how I was doing. And I could hear myself telling him that I wasn’t doing well because I had already told him twice that I wasn’t doing well. I had a headache, I felt nausea, and needed sleep, but I couldn’t turn the voices off. The vision then repeated itself a few more times until I dozed off.”

He was awakened from his nap by a knock at the door. Standing in the doorway was a large man wearing a US Army medical uniform. This was the man who had been in Joe’s vision. The man asked if he could come in, and how Joe was feeling. “I didn’t answer as he went through the entire vision of pre-questions I had already rehearsed four or five times before I ever met him. My headache came back with a vengeance. I wished I could be somewhere else, anywhere but in the room, and suddenly I was.”

McMoneagle found himself out of body again, in the garden outside the windows, peering inside and watching this man addressing someone who looked like himself sitting up in a bed wearing a white medical gown. He couldn’t hear their voices through the glass. “I watched as he walked over to the ‘me’ sitting up in the bed, bent over, lifted ‘my’ left eyelid and pointed a small bright light into the eye. The sudden flash of light in ‘my’ left eye had me instantly back inside my body within the room.”

“Ouch!” said Joe as he jerked his head away.

“I knew you were in there somewhere,” the medical doctor responded. “You weren’t responsive for some reason. What do you think is going on?”

Instinctively Joe knew that if he told this man exactly what was going on inside his mind at that point, he would think Joe was totally insane. He had to try and act normal. “The problem was I no longer knew what normal was,” said Joe .

Over the course of the next few weeks, McMoneagle came to understand that their primary concerns centered on the fact that he had been delivered to the hospital in Passau DOA. They estimated from the circumstances that his brain had gone without oxygen for approximately 8-10 minutes (minimum), which meant that he must have suffered irreparable brain damage. Because of his security clearances and accesses, they were very concerned about what that meant. Exactly how much did he still know, how much did he remember about what he knew, and how much of a security risk was he after the experience? Could he be trusted once he walked out of the ward and their control?

They were also concerned about all the “crazy talk” he’d been doing. The statements about God, that you can’t die, and that you can know things without knowing them—what was that all about? None of it made any sense to them. They were absolutely sure that Joe had suffered severe brain damage and they were not going to let him go until they had determined exactly how much and how serious it might threaten the system within which he was assigned.

“My difficulty was that my mind was spread half way across Munich and then some. I couldn’t remember what normal was like. I had trouble deciding what images were real and not real, what conversations I remembered that were things that I imagined and which were recall of actual events.”

He would slip into daydreams and hear exchanges of discussions that wouldn’t happen for two days. Then when they actually happened, he would know the answers before any questions were asked. To Joe, it was like being caught in the middle of a self-made nightmare. Slowly, over time, he began to heal. “The staff psychiatrist was actually very helpful. I think he believed many of the things I told him, since sometimes I observed that he didn’t write anything down. He listened very intently and he asked serious questions about what I was telling him, and then he would close the notebook and discuss them with me. Instinctively, I grew to trust him. If it were not for him I’m not sure I would have been able to piece myself back together again.”

Eventually, Joe started to feel somewhat normal. Many of the tests they did with scanning equipment and the EEG’s came back as negative. There was absolutely no sign of serious damage or effects from the experience. They did find some scarring from his previous tour in Vietnam, but that was considered to be a normal effect from proximity to explosive detonations. After many weeks, they finally released him for duty, though a decision was made at the time of his release not to send him back to his original unit.

They still could not determine the unusual cause for his incident that resulted in his emergency hospitalization. This would always remain a mystery. Instead, he was moved to another installation where he assumed full responsibilities as an Operational Supervisor until his next assignment. Joe quickly gained attention as someone who no longer feared death and who had a somewhat humorous outlook on life – something common with people who have experienced an NDE. “Unfortunately, this was an outlook not shared by the majority who would now no longer work with me. So I quickly became the man no one else would hang out with—the loner, who always seemed to get the job done. I was the guy who always got the stuff no one else wanted to touch. ‘Give it to Joe. He’ll do it. He’ll do anything.’” That kept Joe McMoneagle overseas seven more years.

Grill Flame to Star Gate

As a Chief Warrant Officer Two in the United States Army McMoneagle was assigned to the Headquarters, Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) in Arlington, Virginia, after serving overseas for more than a decade. His various tours took him to Europe, the Far East, and a 27-month tour in Southeast Asia. A decision had been made by the Commanding General of INSCOM to bring him to the HQ where Joe was serving both as a technical consultant to his office as well as assuming responsibility for Joe’s Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) worldwide. This included management of manned and unmanned intelligence collection sites within the Continental United States as well as overseas in Europe and the Far East.

In such a position, McMoneagle was responsible for all tactical and strategic equipment, including aircraft and vehicles, development of new and future technology as well as current technology, planning, support and maintenance, funding, training, and personnel. In addition, he was asked to perform responsibilities as a primary in international and intra-service negotiations and agreements in support of six national-level intelligence agencies, and act as a direct consult to the Army Chief of Staff for Intelligence at the Pentagon. It was an awesome responsibility and one that far exceeded his background experiences—or at least Joe thought so.

Before this assignment, he had been assistant to the Security Office for one of the largest overseas intelligence facilities in the world. He served in counter-terrorist and counter-intelligence operations at home and abroad. He was Detachment Commander at two remote intelligence collection sites, served in Air and Sea Rescue, in Long Range Reconnaissance, as a Quick Reaction Strike Force Team Leader, and as a Rifleman in a war zone. “But I didn’t feel it was enough.”

Then something different occurred.

It was the middle of the Cold War, and McMoneagle had just returned from an overseas inspection tour of a number of his collection sites. He was buried in work when he received a message asking him to report to a private office on the third floor of HQ. It came at a bad time, as he had a budget meeting scheduled four hours later and he wasn’t completely prepared for it .

When he entered the room, he found two men waiting dressed in civilian clothes. They displayed Counter-Intelligence Credentials and asked Joe to take a seat. This usually means trouble, “So, I was instantly on my guard as I took a seat. They were friendly which increased my guard against any possible threat.” They said they were taking a survey and interviewing selected people from the HQ. McMoneagle’s name had been given to them by the Commanding General and his immediate superior as someone who was both open minded as well as someone who was not afraid to speak his mind. “I just nodded in the affirmative. I remember wondering if there might not be a tape machine hidden somewhere in the room.

“One of them asked me how I felt about a subject called ‘the paranormal?’ I remember at the time that I began to sweat. My mind began to flash back to many instances in my life when a number of events had occurred that I had hoped were long forgotten, especially by the military. No one had ever called them paranormal, but clearly, that’s what they were. Was this what this interview was all about?”

Thinking back on his experiences growing up, he recalled that as a very young child, his grandmother told him it was called “bug sense. She would say, “That’s how bugs find water and food. That’s how bugs find you in the dark.”

“My mother, on the other hand, would say, ‘Don’t listen to your Grandmother. That’s silly talk. If people hear you talking about the voices in your head, they’ll think you’re crazy.’ That’s what was making me break out in a huge sweat now sitting in the room with the two men from the Counter-Intelligence Division of INSCOM.”

Joe nodded his head in the affirmative when they asked if he knew what the word paranormal meant. This made one of them smile a little bit, and it made him even more nervous. He wondered just how much they knew about his background and history.

One of the men, Frederick Atwater (a First Lieutenant), opened his briefcase and turned it upside down, dumping a pile of material onto the table and pushing the material around in front of him. Some of it was classified, having originated from many of the satellite communist-bloc countries. Many of the materials were news clippings taken from magazines, newspapers, and machine copies of articles from books. This array of materials covered every conceivable topic of the paranormal from Big Foot reported in the American Northwest to telepathy.

The other man, who called himself Scotty Watt (a Major), acted outwardly derisive toward the subject and seemed openly hostile to McMoneagle. He snickered when he asked, “You can’t possibly believe in this stuff, can you?” Joe gave him an honest response; that he didn’t know because he didn’t know that much about it. So, Watt suggested that Joe take a little bit of time to get to know some of it better while they went and got a cup of coffee.

Once they left the room he looked the material over carefully, noting it was very outdated. The first article he picked up was one on Karl Nikolayev, from an experiment that was run in Russia. The “sender” was located in Moscow when Nikolayev himself was the “receiver” located in Novosibirsk, almost three thousand kilometers away. This started a series of experiments that ranged in distances of a few kilometers up to thousands, and eventually it seems, perpetuated a huge leap in interest in parapsychology within the Soviet Union. Nikolayev claimed to get his powers from very strenuous training, and he was apparently good enough at his talent to receive very special privileges from the Communist Party—a private home, large salary, car, clothing, and other perks not available to the average citizen. Of course, because of that last bit, this document was classified.

He spent quite a bit of time reading many of the shorter articles and poked around at the larger documents. They returned after about 45-minutes, coffee in hand. “I noticed they were not carrying one for me. Atwater, if not directly supportive, at least was not outwardly hostile. He asked if I thought there might be some degree of threat contained within the materials lying on the table in front of me. This took me totally by surprise. I took it as a serious question, and therefore thought about it seriously and didn’t answer right away. Watt pushed me for an answer.” He was clearly hostile and not supportive to any of the ideas contained within the material. Apparently, it was nothing but a load of cow manure to him.

After considerable thought, McMoneagle said, “Yes. I do think there might be a threat there. I’m not sure what it is, or how severe it might be. But, I think someone should study it and try to understand at least the severity of the threat, and maybe how vulnerable we might be to it.”

His sense at the time was that neither of them believed Joe. “My feeling was that they thought I was out of my mind or somewhat crazy. They thanked me for my time and nodded to the door, which was clearly giving me permission to leave.” On the way to the door, Watt cleared his throat and reminded Joe that he had signed a non-disclosure agreement and was not to discuss the interview with anyone outside the room. “As he said it, he had the beginnings of one of those smiles of knowing on his face. Those kinds of smiles you see on someone’s face when they are dealing with someone they believe might be putting them on, or joking with them.” McMoneagle left as mystified as he was when he first entered the room.

Almost three weeks later, he received a call from Major Watt. “Looks like you said all the right words,” said Watt. “You’ll be receiving orders to come over for a second interview from the General. Don’t discuss this with anyone.” An hour later, McMoneagle’s immediate superior informed him that his Commander, Brigadier General Rolya, requested he report to the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, Fort Meade, Maryland, the next day at 0900 hours.

The following morning as McMoneagle entered the small office at Ft. Meade, he was again met by Atwater and Watt, still in civilian clothes. This time they were very cordial and less formal. They smiled, shook his hand, offered him coffee and a comfortable seat. Joe was asked to sign a much more formal non-disclosure agreement regarding the material that he was to be shown. They told him that it was the belief of US Military Intelligence that there was a strong possibility that the Soviet Union and many of the Communist Bloc nations might be using psychics to spy on the United States and its allies. They asked Joe if he believed that was possible. Joe responded that he didn’t know the answer to that question, but if it were at all possible, “We should know about it and counter it. In my own mind, I think I knew that it was probably true, but I was afraid to simply state that. I thought that if I said it outright, no one would actually believe me.” Watt and Atwater looked at each other, smiled, and agreed. They too viewed it as a threat—that’s why they’d brought McMoneagle in.

Watt left the room and Joe spent about an hour talking with Atwater about the paranormal and his personal background and experiences. When Watt returned to the office, he was carrying McMoneagle’s personnel file, which he handed to Atwater. As Atwater paged down through the thick folder, he came to a small brown envelope fastened to the inside edge of the folder. It was sealed with brown paper tape and had a diagonal red stripe across it and a warning that said, “To be opened only by the Commanding General INSCOM.”

Joe found that his earlier nervousness had returned and “all my lightheartedness had drained from my body.” Atwater fingered the brown envelope and then suddenly ripped it from the folder. “Please don’t open that, I asked. Only the Commander is supposed to read the contents.”

Atwater looked at Watt, who nodded, smiling, and he quickly ripped the end from the envelope. It was obvious that they wanted to know everything about Joe McMoneagle and were not going to let a warning note stop them. Inside were papers relating to the Near Death Experience that had happened to Joe many years ago that had almost ended his career when it occurred. For Joe, to suddenly revisit it again at that precise point in time was not something he looked forward to. “Now in retrospect, it sure seems to be key and synchronistic to all that eventually transpired, at least within my life and for all that followed,” said Joe.

For his third interview, which also occurred at Ft. Meade, there were about thirty other men in the room with Joe. They had been sitting around a large room for nearly an hour. There were classified paranormal booklets from all over the world piled all over the table in the center of the room, and the men had been reading them while they waited. A few of the men had been joking about the contents of the booklets, which made some uncomfortable.

Someone once said history is always written by the winners, but this isn’t always true when history is being written by a soldier. Soldiers understand that within the nature of their business, it sometimes isn’t about winning or losing, it’s about doing what is necessary or what is the right thing to do within the circumstance. Soldiers sometimes make a decision, which at the time might not appear to be appropriate within the circumstance, but based on their experience and knowledge garnered from years of being at risk and taking risks, they know it to be the right thing to do. So they just do it. Joe McMoneagle was asked to make that kind of decision back in late 1977.

Watt finally came into the room and made a short speech. He said that in five minutes everyone would be leaving the room and moving to another room where they would be given a briefing on a project that they’d probably be asked to join. Once they got that briefing, they would not be allowed to back out. “So, if any of us were uncomfortable in the least bit with the material we had been reading, or with any of the subject material we had been handling over the past couple of months during our interviews, we should make it known now.” There was silence in the room.

Watt went on by stating that once the men left the room and entered the other room, there would be a good chance—in fact a better than 50 to 50 chance—that they’d never see another promotion during their careers because of the top-secret nature of the work that lay ahead. But, it would be for a good cause—the defense of our nation.

Again, there was silence in the room.

Watt spoke again, saying that what he was exposing the men to would probably end marriages and some would probably stop going to their churches before they were finished with the project.

Again, silence, at which point Watt said to move to the other room.

“I was surprised when only about twelve people got up and actually moved to the other room,” said Joe. “Stunned would be more the word I suppose. I don’t know if it scared or frightened me as much as it bothered me that so many men wouldn’t lay their life on the line for their nation.”

“Initially, I was skeptical of the project but decided to take part it because it seemed ‘the right thing to do’ in the service of my country. In any event, I look back on my decision now and I guess I would still do it again, even if in retrospect I can see that everything he said was absolutely true; that it was going to cost marriages, health, cause death, and the loss of all one’s friends both in and out of the military. Yes, I would still do it again. It was that important.”

When they entered the other room, they signed more papers and received briefing certificates for Project Grill Flame (an earlier name for Project Star Gate). It was the beginning of McMoneagle’s introduction to the US Army’s psychic spy program. Physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ gave a presentation on “something called ‘remote viewing,’” which had been under a CIA sponsored study for about five years at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. They showed a film of Ingo Swann who was able to describe with considerable accuracy a location to which Puthoff had gone without Ingo’s knowledge. The location had been chosen randomly after Ingo had been locked up in a secluded location with Targ. Ingo had drawn the location on paper while being secured in a windowless room. After Puthoff returned to Ingo’s location, another person was able to match Ingo’s drawing immediately to the photograph of where Puthoff had been by choosing the photo from a group of five photos placed in front of him. “It was an impressive demonstration, but still I was skeptical. How many times had this been demonstrated?” McMoneagle wondered.

Following the film, the men were again interviewed, only this time in private by Puthoff and Targ. They were told that they were being interviewed for the selection of three of them for possible exposure to and training in Remote Viewing at SRI, for use within Project Grill Flame. Once trained, they would train the others back at Ft. Meade.

“Unknown to us at the time, there was a well-orchestrated plan, in which we would be spending at least a year to train as remote viewers, after which we would be running a counter-espionage effort against specially selected targets within the US Army.” These targets were to be selected based on a broad spread of type, materials, and depth of security protection. Once the viewers had used their psychic abilities to acquire information on these targets for which they had access to all known information, the information they perceived would be turned over to an independent agency for analysis and evaluation to determine just how effective the collection effort had been. “In other words, we were going to mimic exactly what the Soviet Bloc operationally might be capable of. Only in the end, we’d be able to evaluate exactly how capable they just might be and the degree to which they might constitute a threat.”

During McMoneagle’s evaluation with Puthoff and Targ, Atwater discussed all of the previous items uncovered within Joe’s previous interviews. Atwater talked about Joe’s NDE in Austria, as well as the out-of-body experiences that Joe had as a result. This thoroughly interested both Puthoff and Targ during the interview and as a result, McMoneagle was placed high on their list of possible candidates.

The interviews took most of the day. While they went on, those not in the individual interview spent the afternoon reading the documents brought into the room for them. Eventually it was announced that a change had been made. The long, involved selection process had been so successful that they couldn’t reduce the twelve participants to only three. They chose six, and Joe was to be the first to travel out to the west coast for remote viewing.

SRI, Menlo Park, California: First Remote Viewing.

McMoneagle’s trip to SRI was difficult. “Even though I was traveling on the orders of the Commander of INSCOM, the Brigadier General, my immediate superior was a Civilian-GS14 (roughly equivalent to half way between a Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel) and he wasn’t very happy at all. He had no idea what I was doing, who I was working for, or why I wasn’t in the office. My work was falling farther and farther behind, and most of what was getting done, he was doing. It was one of the first trips I had taken that I wasn’t able to tell my wife anything about as well. Since I couldn’t really explain what the purpose was for this trip, there was no one to talk to, and I was beginning to re-think my commitment. The only good thing about it had been civilian clothing and the extra money for my meal allotments.”

McMoneagle went in expecting to immediately start an aggressive two weeks of training, but to his surprise, that isn’t what happened. He was left to relax by the motel pool, and by the second day was already bored. Fortunately, they rescued him from that relaxation, brought him to the top floor of the laboratory, and walked him into a windowless room that looked more like a lounge with a large soft couch and a pleasant atmosphere.

McMoneagle and Russell Targ made themselves comfortable, sitting directly across from each other. Joe was given a small drawing pad along with some pens and pencils. Puthoff then explained that in one hour another researcher, Beverly Humphrey, would be arriving at a randomly chosen site somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area. It would be Joe’s job to try to describe exactly where she was standing at that site. Humphrey would interact with the site location for exactly fifteen minutes and then return to the lab. She would pick up Russell and McMoneagle and they would all return to the actual site for feedback. Later there would be an independent judging of the results by someone who wasn’t involved in the actual remote viewing problem. Puthoff asked if Joe had any questions.

“Exactly how do I do this kind of thing?”

Puthoff explained that there really was no basic way of “doing it.” It was up to the viewer to just kind of empty his mind and then when he felt ready, open it to whatever information was there for him to “see.” Joe was told not to worry, that there would be stuff there that was pertinent to the site location. The viewer had to trust in the system to work. Then Puthoff left.

Targ unhooked the phone and locked the doors so that they wouldn’t be disturbed. He then suggested Joe might want to try to relax, since they had approximately forty-five minutes until Puthoff reached the random location. He explained that Humphrey would go down to another office and use a random number generator to produce a five-digit number, using the last three digits to select a file from the safe. Taking the file out to the car, she would drive away from the building. After she had been driving around for about ten or fifteen minutes, she would pull over and open the sealed envelope inside the file. Inside the envelope were directions and photos of a target location that she was supposed to drive to. As Puthoff and Targ had previously explained–and perhaps to further reinforce what was happening–Targ said that once the other researcher got to the target location, she would enter the site at precisely the correct target time and then interact with the target for fifteen minutes. During that period, Joe would have to try to draw where Humphrey was. At the completion of that time, Humphrey would drive back to the lab and get Targ and McMoneagle, then drive the three back to the actual location. “I was told this so when we got to the site, I would see if that was indeed what I was seeing earlier with my mind’s eye.” Such positive feedback would reinforce the viewer’s ability, or so it was believed (and confirmed by research over the years after).

Perhaps Joe’s greatest surprise was how fast forty-five minutes goes by when one is trying to relax and empty one’s mind. He also realized how hard it was to consciously stop his mind from thinking. “As hard as I tried, my head filled with more junk mail than the average modern computer gets in a lifetime, not the least of which is all the possible places that Beverly Humphrey could have traveled to within a forty-five minute drive of the laboratory in Menlo Park. I felt this task was going to be impossible.”

He was fighting all the “junk” in his mind when he was suddenly startled by Russell Targ’s voice saying, “Okay, Joe. Tell me where you think Beverly might be standing at this moment in time” at which point McMoneagle’s entire mind went totally blank.

“After wondering what I was supposed to do, I asked Targ if he could give me a hint, to which he responded ‘no.’” How could he? Targ had no idea where Humphrey was! Joe asked him if he could provide an idea how to do it. “He suggested that I just try and relax and let the information just come to me. I tried, but there wasn’t anything there. Every time I relaxed and searched my head for information, my mind just filled up with nonsense, junk, so much stuff that I couldn’t pick one thing important from it.”

Time was passing by and Joe’s pad of paper was as clean as when he’d entered the room. Targ spoke up and said they had about ten minutes until Humphrey would be leaving the target area. Joe closed his eyes in frustration and shook his head. “I was going to fail.”

Just then he caught what he thought might have been just a glimpse of something, a small flash. It was a very short and quick sighting or vision of something coming quickly that it seemed to flicker across the back of his eyelids. “Wait! There it was again. It looked like shadows of something, like darkness or shadows behind large stanchions or poles, like support columns in Greek Temples.” Joe quickly began to sketch. There were flashes of other things as well–a barbell kind of object, statues, bicycles, or at least a bicycle stand made of metal standing off to the side. “There to the front were two round planters with short trees planted inside them. Oh yes, and more…and I quickly began sketching stuff onto the pad.”

By the time Targ called “time,” Joe had filled the entire page with bits and pieces of items he felt were relevant to the target. As soon as Targ took the pad from Joe’s hands, he felt as though a sudden break had been made. “I felt energy suddenly drain from my body. I was suddenly lost, momentarily adrift. I felt as though I had suddenly lost all contact with the target and had failed completely in the effort. I told him that I thought I probably screwed the whole thing up. ”

Targ looked at his drawings and smiled. Based on Joe’s notes and drawings, Targ said he already knew where they were going. Half an hour later, Humphrey returned to the lab and the three piled into the car and drove to the target. On the way, McMoneagle saw a few things that seemed to resemble some of the items that he had drawn, but not many. They entered the Stanford University main drive and made a few turns. Joe had never been on the campus so he had no idea where we were going. “When Beverly made a sharp left turn, I immediately saw a building coming up on the right side of the car and knew it was my target building—the Stanford University Art Museum.” Humphrey pulled up and stopped. The large columns in the front of the building were unmistakable, especially framed by the small trees in the circular pits to the front. There was even an iron bicycle stand exactly where Joe had seen it in his partial vision. “I turned around in the front seat of the car and looked at Russell Targ. He was grinning from ear to ear.”

“Not bad for your first remote viewing, Joe,” Targ said.

After several more such trials, McMoneagle received a first place match in the independent judging for his first remote viewing, and three of the remaining six. His fifth and sixth were a second place match. Hal Puthoff told Joe it was the best series they had ever seen demonstrated at SRI.

When McMoneagle returned to Ft. Meade and the 902nd MI Group with the final results, they were entered into a brand new file under the title REMOTE VIEWER #001. He was taken into the front office and asked to volunteer for the remote viewing program with the full understanding that he would be giving up his career, future promotions, and probably walking into nothing but ridicule for such an action. After what Joe had experienced at SRI, what he’d read in the documents over the past number of weeks, and what he perceived to be a new threat to the nation, he was left with very little choice.

“It was something that needed to be done, and I was the one to do it.”

Project Grill Flame at Ft. Meade

Work on Project Grill Flame in Maryland was extremely difficult, not only from a very basic “how to,” but also from a military and political viewpoint. Fundamentally, in the area of using remote viewing for military purposes, no one had ever attempted to do what they were trying to accomplish. The building that housed the psychic spying unit at Ft. Meade was both SECRET, unpretentious and inconspicuous.

The inflexible hierarchy typical of military systems accommodated the ESP program only with great difficulty. It suffered from automatic ridicule if it was even brought up as a subject and therefore had to be kept hidden even from those who were required to support it within the command. In effect, it was a “Black Project” being run within a Black Project. There were multiple levels of security, and only those with topmost security and the Commanding General’s permission were allowed to know of the project’s existence. Those who had to support McMoneagle and company directly were allowed to know the project existed but not know exactly what was being done. They thought all kinds of things (and were encouraged to think others), but never knew what exactly the folks in the project were up to. Only a handful of people were ever allowed actual entry into the building.

“Because of the natural animosity towards the subject by those with certain religious beliefs, we had to be exceptionally careful in how we vested those who we allowed into our network, including secretarial personnel and others who worked as trainers, analysts, and so on,” said McMoneagle. Support personnel were kept to the absolute minimum. Since initially all of the remote viewing personnel were officers and ranking civilians, except for one man (a senior non-commissioned officer), this necessitated officers having to pull duty cleaning floors, washing windows, scraping walls, painting, procuring furniture (sometimes procuring meant “borrowing” in the looser sense of the word), and even cleaning out the toilets on occasion.

In the beginning, the viewers trained very hard. They started early in the morning at 7:30 AM doing practice remote viewings and switched up their roles of who would travel to the randomly chosen target locations and who would do the remote viewing. They excluded the judging procedures because they didn’t require additional protocol, which was more designed for independent support of remote viewing. They only wanted to improve their capabilities. As the next five remote viewers visited and returned from SRI, the extent of their abilities improved. The original six viewers were eventually assigned full time to the project, and the other six volunteered to come in as viewers and train part-time in order to participate on a part-time basis.

The idea remained to see if psychic functioning was a threat by targeting US Army resources against known US Army targets; however, the project was never supposed to be a fully operational unit. The original function of the project was to ascertain what the Soviets knew about the US through ESP, and then determine the value of this information. The entire effort was never formally authorized, and therefore was being run on very little funds. About six months into the project, this was all to change.

Joe McMoneagle’s First US Army Target

Towards the end of 1978, McMoneagle reached a pivotal point in his practice training. Fred Atwater notified Joe that he would be attempting his first real target at 0900 hours the following morning. He arrived prepared for the challenge, with a good night’s sleep and an attitude of anticipation. “I couldn’t wait to see how well I could do against a real world target.”

Once situated inside the room they had been using for practice remote viewings, Atwater pulled an envelope from his briefcase and extracted a photograph from it. Joe was surprised to see a picture of an aircraft hangar. The photo had been taken from the air at approximately three thousand feet. It was an oblique photograph from the front right side of the hangar and showed the hangar with its doors slid shut. There were a number of small aircraft parked all around the hangar. Most were single and twin engine aircraft, both civilian and military. None were jets. It was clearly a military airfield, however.

McMoneagle knew that this was not protocol. The act of showing a psychic images before the viewing is called “front loading” and often causes the subject to lose focus and lose useful information. It’s difficult enough trying to open to what the target might be when you are totally blind and have no idea what the information might relate to, but now that Atwater had showed him a photograph of an aircraft hangar, his mind had filled with all the possibilities that this entailed. Joe became a bit angry and asked the other man what he was doing. Atwater said he was sorry, but those in charge had directed that it had to be this way. He was ordered to show Joe the photograph before the session, and to tell him that the target was located inside the aircraft hangar. He didn’t know why he was supposed to do that, but those were his orders. He handed Joe the photograph and repeated his orders. All McMoneagle could do was go along with what he was told.

Joe looked at the photograph, but didn’t study it. He felt the less he knew the better. He thanked Atwater and placed it on the small table between the two of them. He chose to lie back on the leather couch and close he eyes and try to forget that he had ever seen it. “I couldn’t do it,” said McMoneagle, “but, I tried. I kept telling myself they were only interested in the target inside the building, not the building, only what was inside, not the building. I kept repeating this over and over to myself.”

Apparently, something did shift inside him, as his focus and mental imagery did indeed make a dramatic shift. Joe continued:

I soon felt as though I had drifted off momentarily into a fine mist or a partial day dream-like state, but then I suddenly felt like I was coming back into reality—remembering that I had a target to focus on. I instantly had a vision of a stovepipe, or a long periscope type of device of some kind that snapped suddenly into my vision. I held onto that view and fought to control it. The periscope slid down into some kind of an optical sighting device, with a soft rubber cup and eyepiece, supported directly over a console.

I opened my eyes, picked up paper and pencil, and began to rapidly sketch what I was fighting to hold onto with my mind’s eye. These things faded quickly into what seemed like two layers of some kind of a vehicle. There was an upper layer and a lower, more forward layer. There were seats in both layers. The upper and lower layers had different functions and different layouts with different armoring and protection. I suddenly saw a very hardened military type computer, with a keyboard and sketched its layout. It was difficult, but I was able to sketch the layout of the keys and where the different pads were.

I began getting images of bullet points, which quickly turned into large gun shells and then rolled over onto their sides, falling into sliding trays that curved back into the rear of the vehicle. This curved area became an automated feed segment and armored holding feed area, with auto feed arrangement. Details really started flowing then as I sketched in the details between all these points and the interior of the vehicle began to fill out even more in a three dimension way. Eventually I ran out of material in my mind’s eye and stopped drawing. I passed the drawings to Fred and told him that it was about all that I was going to be getting on the target inside the aircraft hangar.

Fred Atwater was pleased. The two discussed the target a little bit before they turned in the materials. He said he had no idea what the target was, since even the project manager at Grill Flame had no idea what the target was. It was a test of the entire project to see how they were doing. But he said that almost anyone would have drawn a plane given the front loading. Joe didn’t, which apparently was good. He also didn’t draw the inside of the building which meant that he probably had made actual contact with the target that was inside the building, and that was also good, Atwater said. Joe told Atwater that he knew he was in full contact with the target the entire time. “I knew it was good and I felt that it might not be the best that I could do, but I knew that I hadn’t failed either.”

It turned out they were both right. The target was the Abrams XM-1 Tank, one of the US Army’s newest and still SECRET Tank prototypes, of which there were only three in existence at the time. They had deliberately parked one of them inside the aircraft hangar to test whether or not it could be described as a target. They thought that at best, a viewer would only be able to guess at the existence of an aircraft and totally miss the tank. “However, they were surprised that we not only identified the target as being a tank, but were able to draw the outside of the Abrams in profile and the inside, to include its automated loading system, its new optical targeting system, its computer system to include keyboard setup and pads, and the general layout of the interior.” They were especially impressed that this was done double blind from a very long distance away, and after being front-loaded with false information. It was an impressive start to McMoneagle’s remote viewing effort within Project Grill Flame.

At the same time his career was taking off as a psychic within the newly developing intelligence project at the 902nd MI Group, McMoneagle’s superior at the HQ back in Arlington, Virginia, was pressing the administrators at Branch Division, Department of the Army, for a replacement to fill his position. The General had moved Joe from the very important position he had previously filled. This was a position that occupied an identified requirement and slot number at the Department of the Army in one of the twenty-nine very special Chief Warrant Officer Intelligence requirements in his field of expertise worldwide. Joe was moved to an “excess/non-required” slot on the 902nd MI Group books. This did not set well with Department of the Army, especially since they had only a 79% fill percentage (23 Chief Warrant Officers qualified to fill 29 requirements world-wide), and over half of those requirements were in either hazardous duty areas or hardship tour areas.

In actuality, the average time overseas for anyone of those Warrant Officers was approximately five years. Accumulated time overseas as both a Warrant Officer and Non-Commissioned Officer for any one of those Warrant Officers did not exceed eight years. McMoneagle had already served more than 12 years overseas and more than a year in the number one job for his MOS. He was due at least nine years of stateside tours before any one of them could rightfully complain. But two of those Warrant Officers complained to the Department of the Army about Joe’s assignment to 902nd MI Group as Excess/No Requirement as soon as they received assignment orders for their first hardship tour overseas. “They identified me by name in their complaint, stating that I should fill the hardship tour since I was excess and they were not.”

To understand how this affected him politically as a Warrant Officer, McMoneagle quotes his personnel representative at Department of the Army—the man who is directly responsible for looking out for Joe’s promotions and protecting his interests in the Army: “If you persist in working outside your MOS (Military Occupational Specialty), I will no longer protect your interests. In fact, I will do what I can to remove you as a Chief Warrant Officer from the Roles of the Department of the Army.”

Joe took this comment to his Commanding General. While he remained assigned in excess/no requirement, he never again saw a promotion board or other benefit, exactly as discussed with him during the beginnings of his involvement with the remote viewing project .

In addition, since it was a temporary project, they were not authorized for housing at Ft. Meade, Maryland. Therefore, Joe was required to drive from his quarters in Reston, Virginia, on the other side of the Beltway about as far from Ft. Meade, Maryland as one could get in terms of heavy Washington D.C. rush hour traffic. Since they started work at 7:30 AM, he was required to be on the road by 4:30 AM each morning in order to be at work by 7:30. Fighting almost three hours of murderous traffic was not very supportive to remote viewing, given the stress such a situation creates.

During the winter it was worse, especially if it snowed or the roads were glazed with ice. There were more than one or two nights that it took Joe eight to nine hours of bumper to bumper traffic only to return home, just in time to fall into bed, sleep four hours, rise, and then begin the whole routine again. There were times he missed five or six car pile-ups on the beltway only by the narrowest of circumstances. Only the very best of psychics could have survived the years of combat driving he was required to do! “In fact, I would suggest this as a perfect way to select future psychics for any such a project. Anyone who commutes more than fifty miles on the Washington D.C. Beltway for four years and turns in their lease vehicle without a ding is absolutely psychic!”

The Switch to Operations

With successes in the research phase, it was clear that the time had come for the remote viewing unit to start getting tasks that were of a more applicable to actual intelligence work. Project Grill Flame would take an operational hand with some difficult missions.

In 1979, the US had its first significant connection to terrorism with the Middle East with the hostage crisis, and Project Grill Flame and Joe McMoneagle were once again to see action.

In early November of that year, the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran was invaded by Iranian revolutionaries and hostages were taken. McMoneagle and the rest of the remote viewers were called from their beds in the very early hours of the morning and ordered to report to the Project office. They were asked not to listen to any radio broadcasts en route, or look at any television broadcasts prior to leaving their quarters. This requirement turned out not to be a problem, because no one in America knew of the takeover until much later that morning.

It was still dark when they arrived at the Project along with Fred Atwater and Major Watt. “We were given a very strange request,” said McMoneagle. “We were told that one of our embassies had been taken somewhere in the world and hostages had been taken. ”

Atwater then threw over a hundred photographs onto the conference table and asked the viewers to identify only those photographs that belonged to people who were positively hostages. Thus began a year-long problem involving hundreds of individual remote viewings that drove just about all of them as far as one can go as a remote viewer while remaining sane. “It is impossible to describe how difficult it is to target the same thing over and over again, day in and day out, for months on end, while dealing with the front loading problems in looking at the same people, buildings, rooms, areas, items, schedules, equipment, colors, attitudes, etc., with only the smallest of changes under the most stressful circumstances.” For the viewers, the difference between reality and imagination quickly becomes blurred, time today, versus yesterday or tomorrow all runs together. “Who you’re working for, whether it’s the CIA, National Security Council (NSC), National Security Agency (NSA), or INSCOM, quickly seems to all run together. On top of which we also inadvertently made enemies.”

Because the intelligence community wanted everything, that’s what the group attempted to provide. “Every building, room, person, what everyone was doing, what they were wearing, carrying, eating, their health, what they carried, what the furniture looked like, what kind of paint or pictures were on the walls and rugs were on the floors. Even how long the grass had been growing between the quadrangles, and how many cars were parked, where they were parked, what kind they were, and whether they were parked nose in or out.” As a result, they began to get information on hostages that weren’t hostages, US Military exercises, and other things in and around downtown Tehran that appeared to be somewhat sensitive, mysterious, or out of place that involved people the viewers were sure were Americans, or at least people allied to the American cause.

At one point, they had inadvertently stumbled onto the very tightly controlled and secret operational plan for rescuing the hostages. “As a result there was a sudden and unexplained influx of Operational Security personnel that descended upon some of our people, snatching them up for interrogation, demanding to know who was leaking information to them regarding the Operation that was to take place at ‘Desert One’ and a number of other locations within the city.” This resulted in considerable embarrassment to some of the tasking agencies, especially within Special Operations of the NSC.

Soviet Electronic Reconnaissance Aircraft, African Congo, Zaire

A secret Soviet Electronic Reconnaissance Aircraft went down somewhere in Central Africa during the 1979 time frame and many people were looking for it for obvious reasons. Its intelligence value was inestimable. There was reason to believe that it had probably crashed somewhere over the Central Congo, in Zaire. Because of the vastness of the search area and the density of the terrain, even the use of overhead surveillance had provided no useful intelligence to find the wreckage or any evidence of its location. It was a perfect test for the now operational Grill Flame project. If no one else could find it, it would take some extraordinary means to locate and extract the nuggets of value from such a target.

McMoneagle and two other viewers worked on the problem within the Grill Flame project, as well as a number of people from SRI, and a viewer from another location within a study group associated with SRI. Their effort produced three independent locations within Zaire, all of which overlapped within a circle of approximately 13 kilometers. The locations produced by the viewers at SRI and the additional study group put the crash site within the 13-kilometer circle. Search teams were sent into the area and the plane was located within a kilometer of the location provided by the SRI remote viewer. All the locations that had been provided were within eight kilometers of the actual crash site. When the search teams first arrived on the ground, they said that as soon as they entered the circled area on the map, they began to encounter natives on the trails carrying pieces of the wreckage, which they were taking back to their villages to use to reinforce their village huts and buildings.

President Jimmy Carter formally briefed this incident to newspaper and television reporters while discussing the incident with college students in 1979. He talked about the missing secret Soviet aircraft that was thought to have carried nuclear materials and other technology, which would prove beneficial to anyone who could locate it, not only the intelligence agencies of the US and other countries, but terrorist organizations as well. When asked how the US had been able to find it first, Carter said that it was located “using a female psychic.”

Unfortunately, while he was making these comments, he was also holding a folder in his arms which had “Grill Flame” embossed on the edge. As a result of President Carter’s comments on national television, the code name was quickly changed to Project Center Lane, and the Grill Flame title was retired.

TK208, Typhoon Class Submarine, Severodvinsk Shipyard, Soviet Union

[Authors’ Note: Portions of transcripts of Joe McMoneagle’s remote viewing sessions of this particular target are reprinted in this book’s Appendix B.]

During the month of September of 1979, a Naval Officer working for the NSC brought one of the most important targets ever worked by the project to the office. It was one of the first operational intelligence targets McMoneagle worked on and certainly one of the most significant. But, in the beginning, no one had any idea as to the importance of the target or the impact it would have on the project either politically, or militarily.

The Soviet target in the black and white photograph was a very large industrial building sitting some distance from the water at the Severodvinsk Shipyard facility, on the White Sea, near the Arctic Circle. During the long winter it was a port totally frozen in with a thick and impenetrable sheet of ice. The exterior of the building had industrialized materials stacked beside it, and it also had railroad tracks running in one end and out the other. For many months materials had been delivered into the building, and the cars had been leaving empty from the other side, but nothing had come out. The materials were general in nature and gave no hint as to what they might be used for. The structure itself was huge. It was probably one of the largest, if not the largest building under a single roof in the world at that time. It was labeled ‘Building Number 402’ and otherwise had no other spectacular feature or significance about it. Numerous agencies had been tasked to determine what was going on inside this facility for many months, but up until the remote viewers had been tasked, no one had been able to determine anything specific in nature about the building or what might be happening inside. Joe drew the remote viewing mission to target the structure.

On his first remote viewing effort for this target, Joe was only given a set of geographic coordinates for the location of the facility, “which in my mind was somewhere obviously in the extreme north. I knew that it was at least as far north as Finland, and somewhere to the east. But, in my own mind as I focused on the target, all I could sense was a total wasteland of cold, ice and rock.” Within that wasteland he reported seeing a very large industrial building of some sort, with large smokestacks, and somewhere in the distance a harbor or sea covered with ice caps.

Seeing that McMoneagle was clearly in the right place and on target, Fred Atwater opened the brown envelope and showed him the high altitude photograph of the building itself. It looked to me like a very large shed-like building of gigantic proportions, with an unremarkable and flat roof line. Atwater then asked Joe what he thought might be going on inside the building. According to McMoneagle:

Spending a considerable amount of time relaxing and trying to empty my mind, I imagined myself drifting down and slowly passing through the shed-like roof to the inside of the structure. What suddenly greeted my vision was completely mind blowing. I felt as though I was hovering inside a building that was the size of two and a half to three shopping centers, all under one roof. I had completely misconstrued the size of the building. It really was larger than I could imagine. I could just make out two internal walls that ran the length of the building end to end. They appeared to be structural support walls—primary to the support of the building and roof itself. These were open in segments along their length. I felt as though I was hovering and seeing with my own eyes inside the building. This rarely happens when remote viewing. My vision of the target was so precise that it almost seemed unreal.

In the giant bay areas between the walls there appeared to be what looked like large sections of cut away cigar shapes, or sections of cigar shapes that were being individually constructed. There were thick masses of scaffolding everywhere, all arranged around these shapes. Parts and sections of these shapes were being welded together side-to-side, as though two cigar shapes were being constructed together in a twin-pair. It looked like a colossal submarine of enormous proportions was being constructed unlike any I had ever seen before. It was actually two submarines being brought together side-by-side, and they were longer, higher, and larger than any I’d ever seen before. Together, they were at least the size of a WWII aircraft carrier.

The entire area was filled with nothing but the noise of construction—hammering, grinding, and the sounds of high energy electronics, generating powerful beams of light, welding half meter thick walls of steel. Thick blue and purple smoke filled the air from the bright arcs of light dancing off the beams of light striking the steel. Showers of hot metal were splashing in an arc across the concrete flooring. I was totally overwhelmed by the details. There was so much detail in fact, my brain shut down. I spent hours trying to draw all the detail I collected in the few minutes I spent inside Building 402.

They passed the results of the first remote viewing to the NSC. It created quite a bit of controversy. A number of the agencies had already become wedded to their own theories about what was going on inside Building 402. As a result, McMoneagle’s remote viewing of the interior of the building drove them to defend their positions of belief, even though their analysis had been made on as much thin air as they believed Joe’s was. The almost unanimous decision was the Soviets were building a brand-new type of assault ship—a troop carrier, possibly one with helicopter capability—but a submarine? That was completely out of the question.

“There were many other things I provided at the time, but since it is now nearly two decades after the event I can no longer recall much detail.” What is important to note is that much of this material was validated in subsequent remote viewing by one of the other remote viewers, Hartleigh Trent. All of this material, typed transcripts and sketches, were forwarded to the NSC.

They were told sometime later that the material was summarily rejected out of hand by the others working at the NSC, one of whom was Robert Gates who would later become the Deputy Director of the CIA, and eventually the Secretary of Defense under Presidents Bush and Obama.

Upon hearing that the material was rejected, McMoneagle did another viewing and revisited the site a last time. Based on a personal estimate as to the speed of construction taking place and the differences in the condition of the submarine from one session date to the next, he estimated a probable launch date of four months later, which put the date of launch in the middle of September 1980.

Overhead satellite photographs taken of the facility on September 28, 1980, showed a new canal running alongside the building and out to the sea. Standing at dockside was a huge new submarine, the likes of which had never been seen before in the west. Tied up along beside it rested a somewhat dwarfed Oscar Class attack sub, which had been in for repairs. Very clearly seen in the photograph with their doors open for loading were twenty canted missile tubes. The completely new submarine was appropriately named Typhoon Class, a tribute to the mammoth amount of water it displaced within the harbor—water now exposed by two of the largest Soviet icebreakers in the fleet. A modern picture of the sub is shown above.

It was due to McMoneagle’s predictions that a US Naval Admiral who worked in the NSC—and who admired the Project’s ability to produce such detailed and intriguing drawings—had the foresight to arrange for overhead surveillance of Severodvinsk Shipyard the week of the Typhoon launching. As a result, more intelligence was collected on the Typhoon Class Submarine than on any other submarine in history, at a time when the US otherwise might have not noticed its existence.

T he preceding are just a few examples of the operational use of remote viewing for intelligence gathering that went on within the project that eventually became known as Star Gate. Joseph McMoneagle, Viewer #001, has written his own accounts of many other such missions, and covering all of his years as a remote viewer in his book, The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy (Hampton Roads, 2000).

The intent of this chapter was to give you some idea of the experience of one of the main viewers in the project, especially how an army officer was pulled in to work as a “psychic.” It was also to illustrate how the American program worked, which you, our readers, will be able to compare against that of the Russians as you progress through this book. In our next chapter, we’ll discuss the pros and cons, successes and failures, and an assessment of the project that was renamed Star Gate.