Discussion Post I submitted for my Atlantic University TP6000 Course – March 10, 2020
I’ve always been interested in international spy and cloak & dagger stories, so when we touched on the Stargate Program earlier in the course, I knew it was something I wanted to delve into further. Included on the bibliography for our two book reports was a memoir by one of the Stargate participants, Joseph McMoneagle.
Memoirs of a Psychic Spy begins with a look at his troubling childhood. Born in 1946, McMoneagle grew up in a rough section of Miami, poor, and in an abusive household. His father, whom he liked more than his mother, was a functioning alcoholic. His mom, who was physically abusive to McMoneagle, the oldest boy of 4 children, later turned to the bottle herself. He points to his painful upbringing as “the birth” of natural psychic abilities. “I believe, as steel is forged in fire, my ability to read humans was forged in pain as a child” (2002, p. 7). Another area he displayed early psychic abilities is with his twin sister Margaret. McMoneagle notes that the two “were twins in every sense of the word. She seemed to always know what was on my mind as I did hers” (2002, p. 8).
After a short-lived attempt to enroll in college following high school, he found himself with a few buddies at a recruiting event where all the major branches of the military were represented. He joined the Army as war with Vietnam looked more and more likely, and two weeks later he found himself at Army basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.
Unbeknownst to McMoneagle, because of his “record and test scores” at Fort Jackson, he became an Army Intelligence recruiting target (2002, p. 33). After what he believed was a “chance meeting” by a stranger who appeared out of the blue in a bar on base, he was invited to the man’s office, where he agreed to up his active service to four years since Advanced Individual Training (AIT) is much more intense than the regular training. After a stint at Fort Devens in Massachusetts, where he excelled at learning Morse Code, he received his first assignment at Eleuthera in the Bahamas, and then in January 1967, he found himself close to his home in Miami when he was transferred to the Homestead AFB. It was during this time he met his first wife Sue at a friend’s party.
As soon as he had set his wedding date with Sue, orders came through shipping him off to Vietnam where he was assigned to an Army intelligence company. McMoneagle doesn’t provide a great deal of information regarding what he faced over there, other than to say “Wars are evil,” and that his tour included “five major offensives including the Tet offensive and mini Tet offensive of 1968” (2002, p. 46). He also notes that he learned to rely on his gut and intuitive nature in Vietnam. “My life was saved more than once by simply doing what my inner voice suggested” (2002, pp. 48-49) He mentions a reoccurring vision of climbing aboard a bright yellow plane waving goodbye to people in the main terminal area (2002, p. 46). “It was no surprise to me when the contracted flight back to America was an aircraft painted a light pastel yellow with the words ‘Freedom Bird’ painted on the side” (2002, p.49).
For the next three years, he had assignments in Europe. The most notable experience was a Near Death Experience (NDE) and Out of Body Experience (OBE) as a result of being poisoned when he was out to dinner with his wife and friends. He says he knows who tried to kill him but chose not to retaliate. In terms of the NDE, he had all the classic experiences including leaving his body, traveling down a long tunnel, a life review, and feelings of love and forgiveness. As a result of the NDE, he notes it was difficult to act “normal” again, and that he lost his “fear of death and began to dig much deeper into the metaphysical world…” (2002, p. 52-54).
McMoneagle left Europe and returned to the States. His wife gave birth to his son Scott while he went off for more training at Fort Devens before he had temporary orders to do a project for the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Virginia. He left the U.S. and found himself in Thailand for 4 years, which was a “hotspot for intelligence operations in support of the war” (2002, p.56). While in Thailand, he learned a great deal regarding the metaphysical from the “mountain people,” whom he lived with on and off (2002, p. 56). He experienced a second NDE while over there when he contracted Hepatitis B. Given the stress placed on Army spouses with a young child, his first wife Sue left him, and he never spent much time with his son from that point forward. He met his second wife a few months later, a clear case of “rebound” he notes.
After returning to the U.S., McMoneagle received a call from the Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), which is headquartered in Arlington, VA. They recruited him to join as a warrant officer for the Signals Intelligence and Electronic Warfare, INSCOM. About a year after he began at INSCOM, his boss asked him to attend a meeting in an unused room on the third floor of headquarters. He had no further information and when he walked into the meeting, he was met by two military intelligence officers, Scotty Watt and Fred Atwater. They dumped a bunch of classified and unclassified material on the table and asked him to look them over. “There were numerous documents addressing psychic programs in other countries and newspaper clippings containing some of the same subject matter” (2002, p. 71). They asked McMoneagle what he thought, and after responding that he wasn’t sure he believed any of it, he said “but if it is only half true, then it should be looked into” (2002, p. 71).
A couple of weeks later, Watt invited him to a larger meeting, saying he had provided all the right answers in the first meeting. “What I didn’t know at the time, but would later find out, was that their original assigned task was to locate and recruit potential remote viewers to tell the degree to which remote viewing could be taught, organized, and utilized for intelligence collection purposes” (200, p. 27). McMoneagle was put through additional meetings and clandestine activities before he was selected to be one of the remote viewers as part of a special intelligence project. “I could not know at the time that [my acceptance] would ultimately call for the destruction of my career, a divorce from my second wife, and another complete change in my perceptions about reality” (2002, p. 86).
The next half of the book is dedicated to McMoneagle’s experience as a remote viewer while still in the Army. He was part of a small special unit initially called “The Grill Flame” project that was housed in an out of the way location on Fort Meade in Maryland. The project office “was staffed with Scotty (the boss), Fred (the operations officer)” as well as two additional recruited remote viewers, Mel and Fred, and a secretary (2002, p. 107). The office worked very closely with the Stanford Institute (SRI), based in California. They housed the researchers and developed the protocols used in the remote viewing assignments. Ingo Swann, one of the most famous of the Stargate remote viewers, worked for SRI in California during this period and later moved to New York, where he continued to be involved in the effort. McMoneagle mentions working tangentially with Swann but does not cover their relationship in great depth.
The effectiveness of remote viewing coming out of the Grill Flame project became known by the intelligence community. The project’s impressive work with cases like accurately predicting the impact area of Skylab’s return to earth within roughly sixty kilometers, pinpointing the location of the Americans held hostage in Iran in late 1979 and 1980 both before and after the aborted desert rescue mission, and successfully locating the site in Italy where Brigadier General Dozier was being held after he was kidnapped from his apartment were getting the attention agencies like the CIA, NSA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Unfortunately, however, in many cases including those mentioned above, the information was not accepted at the time to make a difference, something that Grill Flame and later Stargate fought against during its entire existence. When you’re dealing with a government military bureaucracy, it’s difficult for them to explain the information originated from “psychics” so they often needed corroboration before they would proceed with using it. Another issue was the success of the program. Lifelong intelligence officers relying on information the old fashion way typically from assets on the ground felt threatened. As McMoneagle notes, “Could it be an1` embarrassment that someone sitting in a small room in a condemned building somewhere on Fort Meed could invade what all of modern intelligence technology could not?” (2002, p. 131). Having worked and lived “Inside the Beltway” for more than thirty years, the short answer is yes.1`With his second wife now gone and McMoneagle being overworked in a small office that never grew much larger than the original five in a field that while it had the interest of nearly every U.S. intelligence agency never received any recognition due to the source of the information, he retired in 1984. He adds, “I had participated in addressing well over 1,500 individual intelligence problems” (2002, p. 141). Towards the end of his military career, his office began working with Bob Monroe, founder of the Monroe Institute in Virginia, primarily on ways to improve remote viewing techniques as well as increasing the ability of lucid dreaming. McMoneagle learned how to do RV’s while in a lucid dream state, which proved to be very successful but a bit unsettling since on several occasions he thought he was awake and actually briefing someone regarding the target but was actually still in ta dream state.
It was at the Monroe Institute where he met Nancy Honeycutt, Bob Monroe’s stepdaughter. They worked closely together, and ultimately she became his third and final wife. Following his retirement, he moved to the Shenandoah Mountains, near the institute, and secured a consulting job with SRI to continue working on RV projects as well as working with private companies interested in the work. He enjoyed a quiet and secluded retirement doing what he thoroughly enjoyed and he even appeared on a national television show where he performed a successful RV experiment to the amazement of the host and production crew. All this came to a crashing end, however, with the release of the CIA-commissioned American Institute for Research (AIR) report to Congress.
The AIR report thoroughly trashed the Grill Flame/Stargate program and said right up front that “little or no support was found for the usefulness of many other techniques, such as learning during sleep and remote viewing” (2002, p. 248). McMoneagle provides a spirited and compelling rebuttal of the report, including the political leanings and backgrounds of those involved in the panel which was reminiscent of the types of people tapped for the Warran Commission. He found himself on ABC’s Nightline within a few weeks defending his work and that of the project. His appearance, however, meant the end of his consulting business as most of the private companies he worked quietly severed relationship primarily because of his exposure on the show. It was fine if he was getting them useful information via psychic channels but once he became a hot-potato, no paying client wanted anything to do with him or his abilities.
Health issues including a heart attack and back pains from a helicopter crash in Vietnam kept McMoneagle sidelined for a bit but in his recovery from one surgery, he began writing books. He also lectured at the Monroe Institute and kept busy with various other projects.
McMoneagle packs a lot of information in his nearly 300-page book. It’s fascinating, and therefore, it’s a quick read. He provides a compelling look at the success of the program – despite the intelligence bureaucracy which claims the opposite – and he is clearly vested in the abilities of R.V. and other psychic phenomena. He’s not shy about relaying the heartbreaks he took in his life, many due to his decision to work in the Stargate program, but in the end, he appears happy that he’s doing what he loves with a wife who is “woo-woo” like him. I highly recommend the book.
References
McMoneagle, J. (2002), Memoirs of a psychic spy, Herford, N.C.: Crossroad Press Publishing.