Joseph McMoneagle

American remote viewer (born 1946)

Joseph W. McMoneagle (born January 10, 1946) is a retired United States Army Chief Warrant Officer and remote viewer who was among the first operational viewers recruited into the classified U.S. Army psychic intelligence program ultimately designated Project Stargate, where he became known as "Remote Viewer No. 1". He received the National Intelligence Meritorious Award for over 200 remote viewing sessions performed for the CIA, National Security Council, and FBI, and reportedly provided time-sensitive intelligence to the CIA, DIA, NSA, FBI, DEA, National Reconnaissance Office, NASA, U.S. Special Operations Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House. Along with colleague Ingo Swann, McMoneagle is best known for his involvement in the investigation of remote viewing and the use of purported paranormal abilities for military intelligence gathering; his stated interests also include near-death experiences, out-of-body travel, and unidentified flying objects.

Early life and military career

McMoneagle grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood in Miami, Florida, in the 1950s, surrounded by alcoholism, abuse, and family turmoil. He has described having visions at night as a child when scared, and said he believed that psychic abilities protected him when he hitchhiked. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1964 at age 18 to escape the household, initially seeking to become a fixed-wing pilot but being disqualified by a depth-perception deficiency. He was subsequently recruited into Army intelligence via an unconventional process — told only to throw a dart at a board of numbered MOSs — and trained in signals intelligence, Morse code, and multiple radio systems.

McMoneagle's early career was as a non-commissioned officer, and he retired after 20 years as a chief warrant officer. He served in signals intelligence in the Bahamas, then in Vietnam with the 330th Radar Reconnaissance unit in the Central Highlands near Pleiku, where his mission included direction-finding enemy command transmitters and localizing enemy headquarters units. He was severely injured in a helicopter accident in Vietnam when the aircraft was struck by an RPG, suffering spinal compression injuries; after recovery he continued service in Europe and Southeast Asia, including 14 months in Thailand near the CIA's operations hub for Laos and Cambodia.

Near-death experience and recruitment

In the early 1970s, while stationed in Germany, McMoneagle was apparently poisoned with what he was later told was a binary poison — two enzyme compounds administered separately — which when combined in the liver mimicked a natural death. He reportedly experienced a near-death experience (NDE) that he describes as a full out-of-body experience: he watched from outside his body as his friend administered cardiac compressions, was transported by car to a clinic in Bavaria, and in the clinic's emergency room encountered a column of white light he experienced as unconditional perfection. Army Intelligence reportedly held a fake funeral for him while he was sequestered in a rest home in Munich for psychiatric evaluation — initially suspecting brain damage — but the attending psychiatrist concluded the NDE was genuine rather than a symptom of neurological injury.

Following the NDE, McMoneagle began experiencing spontaneous out-of-body experiences and was subsequently recruited into the classified remote viewing program — initially called Gondola Wish, then Grill Flame, and ultimately Project Stargate. From 1978, he was known as "Remote Viewer No. 1" at Project Stargate — the U.S. Army's psychic intelligence unit at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Project Stargate

McMoneagle was one of a cohort of Army intelligence officers recruited for remote viewing training at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ ran the program. Puthoff describes his progression as exceptional: McMoneagle allegedly became one of the program's most productive operational viewers, responsible for intelligence data used across multiple government agencies. Over his seven-year career at Fort Meade, McMoneagle performed sessions tracking Soviet intelligence assets, locating missing persons and hostages, and providing intelligence on classified facilities.

In one documented operation, McMoneagle was tasked with tracking a Soviet spy using only a Social Security number as targeting material. He reportedly identified the spy's location at Altamont Pass and later at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories director's office — results he says were noted by the tasking agency without further explanation. A third tasking asked him to describe the spy's activities; his description of a microwave disruption system being tested in the desert was allegedly later confirmed to match the actual program.

At his retirement McMoneagle earned the Legion of Merit for his last ten years of service, including five years of work in SIGINT and five years in the remote viewing program. He retired from the Army in 1984 but continued work as a consultant at Stargate until 1993.

Jupiter ring prediction

A notable early demonstration of McMoneagle's purported abilities involved remote viewing Jupiter before the NASA flyby. He allegedly described a thin ring around the planet — at the time unknown to science — which the subsequent NASA mission confirmed. Carl Sagan was reportedly skeptical of the result before the mission proved it correct.

Out-of-body intelligence collection

After his NDE, the Department of Defense reportedly hired Robert Monroe — founder of the Monroe Institute and author of Journeys Out of the Body — to train McMoneagle to initiate and control out-of-body states on demand for intelligence collection purposes. McMoneagle trained at the Monroe Institute for many months, working with Monroe on initiating the vibrational separation state and maintaining directional focus while outside the body.

In his final out-of-body intelligence operation, McMoneagle was reportedly given a photograph of an unidentified building and tasked with locating it globally, then penetrating a vault room to examine an object on a table. After two and a half weeks of nightly sessions simply to find the building, and several further sessions to navigate to the vault, he sketched the object from memory in precise detail. The reviewing officials allegedly asked him where he had studied high-energy physics; when he confirmed he had not, they asked him to sign non-disclosure agreements and never tasked him with another out-of-body intelligence operation.

In 2004, in Jon Ronson's Crazy Rulers of the World documentary (Episode 3, "The Psychic Footsoldiers", Channel 4), McMoneagle was interviewed and described his technique for traveling "out of body" to Communist China to remotely view a trigger mechanism in a military nuclear weapons laboratory.

The Mars session

One of the most discussed remote viewing sessions in the Stargate program's history involved McMoneagle being given GPS coordinates corresponding to Mars at approximately one million years BC as the target — with no other information disclosed. During the session, McMoneagle reportedly perceived structures including a fort, pyramids, and an impact crater with a road running through it — a straight road extending 1,200 kilometers across the Martian surface, visibly modified where it passed through the crater walls. He also reportedly perceived a massive pyramid-like construct on the impact crater's upper rim whose shadow in NASA/JPL photographs indicated it was tens of thousands of feet tall.

He allegedly described inhabitants: proportionally human but approximately ten feet tall, survivors of a catastrophe in stasis, waiting — though McMoneagle sensed they were already dead and that he was receiving residual mental impressions left behind rather than live minds. After the session, McMoneagle traveled to JPL in California and requested the photographs for those coordinates. A JPL staff member reportedly immediately identified the location as "the old city on Mars" and produced a packet of negatives from a drawer — suggesting, according to McMoneagle, that JPL personnel were already aware of the anomalous structures at those coordinates.

Views on remote viewing and consciousness

According to McMoneagle, remote viewing is possible and accurate outside the boundaries of time; he claims to have remote-viewed into the past, present, and future and to have predicted events. According to Paul H. Smith, who was himself involved in the Star Gate Program, McMoneagle predicted "several months" into the future, and McMoneagle's own accounts give differing claims of the accuracy of his remote viewing, varying from 5 to 95 percent to between 65 and 75 percent. McMoneagle says that remote viewing is not always accurate but that it was able to locate hostages and downed airplanes. Of other psychics, he has said that "Ninety-eight percent of the people are kooks."

McMoneagle's purported predictions include a teenager's "Right to Work" Bill, a new religion without the emphasis of Christianity, a science of the soul, a vaccine for AIDS, a movement to eliminate television, and a 'temporary tattoo' craze that would replace the wearing of clothing, all of which he said would take place between 2002 and 2006.

McMoneagle has said the military remote viewing program was ended partly due to stigma: "Everybody wanted to use it, but nobody wanted to be caught dead standing next to it. There's an automatic ridicule factor. 'Oh, yeah, psychics.' Anybody associated with it could kiss their career goodbye." Supporters of his claims include parapsychologists such as Charles Tart. He has worked with Dean Radin at the Consciousness Research Laboratory, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to seek patentable ideas via remote viewing for a "future machine" Radin conceived. McMoneagle also says he has worked on missing person cases in Washington, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, as well as employing remote viewing as a time machine to make various observations such as the origin of the human species. According to McMoneagle, humans came from creatures somewhat like sea otters rather than primates and were created in a laboratory by creators who "seeded" the earth and then departed.

McMoneagle has also argued that pre-linguistic human consciousness was more efficient and direct than modern language-based thought, citing remote viewing as evidence that information transfer can occur through a mode of awareness that predates verbal communication. He describes the out-of-body perceptual state as processing multiple locations simultaneously, and states that perception during it is qualitatively different from ordinary sensory experience: "Things of beauty are ten times more beautiful, and things that you would normally not pay any attention to are the most gorgeous things on the planet."

Later career

In 1995, funding for Project Stargate was terminated and the unit was decommissioned after the official finding that "no discernible benefit had been established". McMoneagle became a speaker at the Monroe Institute, where he had previously been sent as part of his RV training. He then ran a remote-viewing consultancy aimed at the corporate world called Intuitive Intelligence Applications, Inc., advertising that "he can help a wildcatter find an oil well or a quarry operator know where to mine". He continued as a remote viewing consultant to U.S. intelligence agencies, reportedly contributing to missing-children investigations and ongoing classified operations. He guest-teaches remote viewing at the Monroe Institute and has performed public remote viewing demonstrations on live television in both Japan and the United States.

Media appearances

McMoneagle was featured on a National Geographic Channel episode of Naked Science along with parapsychologist Edwin C. May, who tested McMoneagle's ability to "remote view" six locations in the San Francisco Bay area, with mixed results.

In 1994, McMoneagle appeared on an ABC network television special Put to the Test. Skeptical researcher Brian Dunning remarked that "The only thing I found impressive about McMoneagle's demonstration was their editing and narration job to make it look like the most amazing and miraculous psychic feat in history", noting the show took a 15-minute test and edited it down to 2 minutes leaving only what the producers felt were the best hits. In 1995, McMoneagle defended the Stargate program in an interview for the Washington Post.

McMoneagle co-wrote an episode of the psychic science fiction show The Dead Zone in which remote viewing was used in the hunt for Osama bin Laden; the USA Network canceled the episode's initially scheduled broadcast because of concern about the subject matter, but aired the program a few months later. In 2002, McMoneagle began receiving regular coverage on Nippon Television's prime-time Chounouryoku Sousakan show (roughly translated, "FBI: Psychic Investigator"), during which he performed remote viewings related to unsolved police cases.

Books

• Mind Trek: Exploring Consciousness, Time, and Space Through Remote Viewing. Hampton Roads Publishing Company. 1993. ISBN 1-878901-72-9. OCLC 29858629. ＋
• The Ultimate Time Machine: A Remote Viewer's Perception of Time and Predictions for the New Millennium. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company. 1998. ISBN 978-1-57174-102-8. OCLC 40308919. ＋
• Remote Viewing Secrets: A Handbook. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company. 2000. ISBN 1-57174-159-3. OCLC 44115863. ＋
• The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company. 2002. ISBN 1-57174-225-5. OCLC 50679067. ＋
• Memoirs of a Psychic Spy: The Remarkable Life of U.S. Government Remote Viewer 001. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company. 2006. ISBN 1-57174-482-7. ＋

See also

• Ingo Swann
• Hal Puthoff
• Russell Targ
• Robert Monroe
• Grill Flame

References

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External links

• Official website of Joseph and Nancy McMoneagle Archived 2019-06-24 at the Wayback Machine
• Burnett, Thom (2005). Conspiracy Encyclopedia. Collins & Brown. ISBN 1-84340-287-4. ＋

This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Joseph McMoneagle", as of 2026-04-26, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.