The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy

by Joseph McMoneagle

  The first was hurricane Betsy in September 1965. I spent the entire hurricane inside a metal electronics shelter that was anchored to the coral with chains and two-foot iron stakes I helped to drive with a sledgehammer. The shelter was located on top of a hill just north of Governor's Harbor. We were supposed to evacuate the site when the winds reached 80 MPH, but they went from gusts of around 65 up to 110 in a matter of minutes. So we were forced to stay put and ride it out.

  It was a nasty storm, which did a lot of damage to the island. Braving the elements once, I was able to look toward the north end of the island and see huge breakers rolling across the entire island to the north. It was the only time I was outside, as the wind was picking up bits of rock and coral and pounding the side of the shelter with them. At the time it was quite scary, wondering whether or not the stakes and chains would hold, the rising water creeping in through the lower crack in the door, segments of plywood on the connecting shelter popping away into the wind, all in near total darkness, broken only by small candles. I shared the 5x10-foot shelter with one other man, a case of beer, and six tins of tuna.

  We were able to maintain radio contact with the Florida coast through the passing of the eye and halfway through the 'hurricane's departure, but eventually we lost our whip antenna. I think soon after that the 30-kilowatt generators, one of the trucks, and most of the unattached items on the hill disappeared.

  Before it ended, we were forced to lash the metal door shut with one-inch braided metal ground strapping, to keep the door from being sucked completely off the shelter. The wind meter sheared off the building after it jammed at a hundred and fifty knots. The hurricane sat on top of us, completely stalled, for about twelve hours, eventually moving north, dancing all along the coast of our island as it departed.

  The others assigned to the site were ensconced in two locations. Half were socked in at our support base, an auxiliary Air Force base that was host to the downrange tracking facility that supported Cape Canaveral. The others were in a cave-like concrete bunker buried in the side of the hill facing the ocean, just below the trailer. Luckily, the waves didn't quite reach that point.

  By the time the hurricane left, the windward side of the equipment shelter had most of the paint sand-blasted from it. It looked like highly polished stainless steel. It took almost a day for the main base to reach us with a bulldozer, plowing debris off the only road, which was pretty much scrubbed from the island.

  It was kind of scary after we lost power, mostly because you couldn't see your hand in front of your face and the entire shelter was shaking violently. But the other man in the shelter and I did what we could to ensure survival of the very expensive and one-of-a-kind equipment. We were eventually forced to remove most of the electronics from the equipment racks and stack them near the roof of the shelter, where we eventually joined them. For my part in saving the equipment and some of the more sensitive gear, I later received a promotion to buck sergeant and an Army Commendation Medal, something everyone should have gotten.

  The second event occurred sometime around midnight in the early part of 1966. We worked at a separate site, but we actually lived in apartments on an auxiliary Air Force base half way between our installation and Governor's Harbor. The base commander was the only Air Force officer on it. The rest of the inhabitants were employees of William Bendix Corporation, RCA Victor, and other subcontractors who operated the down-range telemetry gear for the Cape Canaveral rocket launches. (Eleuthera was one of a string of such bases that stretched all the way to the tip of South Africa.)

  On that particular night, Steve Roberts—the man I was working with at the time—and I went up the hill to the outdoor movie theater and club bar, where we attended a double-feature film and had a few drinks. It was a great way to spend an evening. The theater was in the open air so you could smoke and drink while watching the movies. If you wanted a drink, you only had to hold your hand in the air and yell, "Nurse!" and a young native girl would bring you what you wanted. While I know this seems to be an impossibly wonderful situation, it was a terribly boring assignment.

  We finished the second feature around midnight and headed back down to our apartments. We left the ocean end of the club and were walking down toward our sleeping quarters, crossing behind the headquarters building on a row of sand dunes. The sky was totally clear with no moon, and the air was clear. It was one of those island nights where you can read a newspaper by starlight. A warm breeze was blowing east to west as normal, and it was absolutely quiet except for the breaking combers down along the shore a quarter mile away—when the whole area lit up like daylight. We found ourselves enveloped within a very bright cone of light, which was coming from the undercarriage of something hovering directly over us. The object appeared to be approximately fourteen hundred feet above the ground. It was making no noise. In fact, it was like standing inside a vacuum bottle: now we couldn't even hear the waves breaking on the beach to our immediate right. The object was elliptical in shape, and appeared to be quite large. The light was bright enough to make me want to protect my eyes from exposure. After a few seconds, the light winked off, and the object accelerated away, quickly disappearing from sight.

  Steve and I were dumbfounded. We walked back to the club and asked if anyone else had seen it. No one else had seen it. At least no one would own up to it. The following morning we both were suffering from what appeared to be a severe sunburn. In fact, Steve's burns were serious enough to put him in a hospital back in Homestead, Florida, for a short period. He still wears the scars on his chest and is quite sensitive to direct sunlight. I was lucky, however. Since I spent a considerable amount of time in the water every day and was already cooked to a nice dark brown, I wasn't so affected by it. I am frequently asked about this event. While I can remember seeing what looked like panel lines and rivets in the underside of the object, as well as opaque ports that seemed to blend into the surrounding material, there isn't much else that I can say about it.

  In the days that followed, I was able to determine from conversations with electrical engineers on base that much of the telemetry equipment had been overwhelmed with noise that washed out the scopes. Also, to this day, Steve has a memory of the light but not the immediate or subsequent actions. After that week, we never discussed it with anyone for fear of being reassigned—to someplace hotter and wetter. The peculiar part is that the military never seemed to show much interest in the event.

  While the assignment was somewhat boring and repetitive, I enjoyed my eighteen months on Eleuthera. I spent at least half the time diving in dozens of coves on the ocean side of the island. On some of my days off, I entered the water at dawn and didn't leave it till early afternoon. Swimming is like walking for me. When I was little my grandfather used to say I had scales on my butt, then he would pretend to search my body looking for fins, tickling me all the while to make me laugh.

  I departed Eleuthera in January 1967, and was reassigned to Homestead AFB, only a few miles south of my home. If I had been trying to stay close to home it probably never would have happened. The extra pay that came with the promotion to buck sergeant came at a time when Congress decided to boost military pay to a point that was reasonable. As a result, I began sending half of it home to my parents. When I joined the Army in 1964, my take-home pay after taxes was $52 a month. Granted, cigarettes were only $1.20 a carton, and a haircut only cost me 75 cents, but it was pretty low pay. After the government correction to military pay scales, my pay jumped to $282 a month. For me, it was an unbelievable sum, more than my father made after more than twenty years at the department store. When I got to Homestead, the colonel arranged for me to draw bachelor housing allowance and subsistence so that I could live at home. He knew I was giving it to my parents. So my pay increased to more than $450 a month.

  The next four months I was assigned to work with the Navy on their "Bullseye" project, something the Navy was not very pleased about. Bullseye is the code name for the Navy's land-based High Frequenc
y Direction Finding surveillance stations, in this case operating in the Caribbean Sea. I worked at the AN/FRD-10 antenna array at Card Sound, Florida, just south of Homestead AFB. The interservice defensiveness about protecting knowledge about their individual collection systems back then was over the edge. Having an Army person behind their doors was like getting a sharp stick in the eye.

  Even though I was being paid to live at home, only about an hour's drive away, I only visited my parents and sisters now and then, not as often as I could have. I had extracted myself from that situation and would not let myself be dragged back into it. Instead, I would park my new car on the point overlooking the bay on the back side of Homestead AFB, and would sleep in the backseat, fishing during my off-duty time. I took showers in the barracks and paid to eat at the military mess facility.

  During this time I met and fell in love with my first wife, Sue. I met her at a party given by a friend. She was attending Notre Dame School for Girls, my old hangout. So, it wasn't long before I was back to meeting her on the same corner I hung out on back in high school, only now I was sometimes wearing a uniform, and either going to or coming from work. Sue was in her final year of high school. After dating for a few months, we became engaged. Things were really looking up, when the Army made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

  If I would take what they called a short discharge and would reenlist for six more years, they would pay me a variable Category IV reenlistment bonus. Actually this equated to just a bit more than $11,000 cash. In 1967, it was too hard to pass up. I "kicked it" for six years and collected the money. I should have known they had something more up their sleeves. We were about to set the date for our wedding when orders came down from on high assigning me to the Republic of South Vietnam. Before I had kicked it for six, I didn't have enough time left in service to serve a full tour in Southeast Asia.

  That's why I had been approached for early reenlistment. That's why they had even waived what time I had to serve on my first enlistment so that I could reenlist. My whole focus had been on the money. See what I mean about being psychic about one's own self? It never works.

  It was bound to happen eventually. I had watched my other friends pack off to that area of the world, so now it was my turn. To say it was difficult leaving home all over again would be an understatement. I was making good money, driving a brand-new Cobra that I had bought with a major part of my reenlistment bonus, and was engaged to a very lovely young woman. Having no choice, we postponed our wedding plans until I returned. And, of course, the unspoken thought was "if I returned." I once again said farewell to my parents and siblings, and to my fiancée and her family, and left for the West Coast. My journey, however, was not direct. The colonel, my battalion commander at the time, sent me via Fort Polk, Louisiana, where I attended jungle warfare school. I stopped off in New Orleans for ten days and took a Creole knife-fighting course as well. I figured, what could it hurt?

  It would take an entire book to cover my experiences in Southeast Asia. Just as for most of the others assigned there, my tour was not pleasant. I came away convinced that all congressmen and senators should have their sons and daughters assigned to combat zones before being able to vote on commitment to war. Wars are evil. There is a lot more that I could say about it, but it will have to await some other manuscript. What is pertinent here is the effect on me as a psychic.

  I was assigned to an Army intelligence company in support of MACV, the 4th Infantry Division, and 1st Armored Calvary, in the central highlands city of Pleiku. My tour included five major offensives, including the Tet offensive and mini Tet offensive of 1968. It cranked up my psychic ability and increased my sensitivity to other forms of information transfer.

  I had a profound experience almost immediately upon arrival. I was disembarking from the ramp of my C-130 aircraft. As my foot hit the pavement, I had a very clear vision of myself climbing aboard a bright yellow plane and waving good-bye to people standing next to the main air terminal building. It was so clear and startling that I made a point of describing it to the man standing next to me. He probably thought I was crazy. It was a recurring vision that I carried all through my tour there.

  As an emitter location and identification specialist, I was expected to search out and locate enemy transmitters. With the equipment we had back then, it was not an easy job. Under wet jungle canopies, you had to be nearly standing on top of a radio to know where it was. For a while I worked out of a heavily fortified fixed site with fifteen other men. We were stuck way off on our own, away from anyone else, as too much wire or equipment would screw all our equipment up. These isolated sites were extremely vulnerable, but so heavily mined that you needed a good memory to walk across the compound to take a leak without blowing yourself up.

  They kept us busy. When we weren't trying to make an antiquated piece of electronic equipment operate under impossible conditions, we were spending time protecting the other guys who were. I then spent time working with portable equipment they called "man packable." That meant it could be broken down and carried in backpacks or mounted on the rear of a Jeep. There were a number of things wrong with these types of equipment. The only human capable of ever packing them had to be the Jolly Green Giant. The other problem was that this equipment dealt with VHF, or line of sight, radio frequencies. This meant that you had to be close enough to see the enemy emitter for the equipment to be even halfway accurate. Obviously, if you were that close, you didn't really need the equipment to find the enemy, because you were more than likely already drawing heavy fire. Since it was a safe bet the enemy were the guys shooting at you, you didn't really need the equipment. But, in the wisdom of the United States Army, we proved that the equipment worked—sometimes.

  After enjoying the glorious Tet holidays in Pleikuiv, I spent some time working with experimental equipment mounted in a helicopter flying out of a place called "LZ Two Bits," in a place called Bong Song, north of Qui Nhon. The aircraft worked fine, but were overweight and unable to carry defensive armor or guns. Before long, the North Vietnamese figured out what our strange boxlike antennas mounted on the front were for. Since we always flew unarmed, we lost all the birds in a couple of months. Toward the end of my tour, while flying back into Pleiku on a Huey, we were suddenly converted from combat aircraft to a falling metal rock and crashed short of the runway. I woke up in the Army hospital with pins in my skull and sandbags hanging from my ankles. They offered to send me to a hospital close to my home, which I immediately refused. Had I accepted, I would have been flown back to the States short of a full tour and on recovery been sent right back again to serve my full twelve months in the green. (They weren't yet doing second tours.) Instead, I asked a medic for some painkillers and limped out of the hospital. I then self-medicated my way to my normal rotation stateside, at the same time discovering that Jack Daniels is great for more than countering the effects of Benzedrine in getting to sleep, forgetting experiences impossible to describe, or just plain getting stinking drunk.

  What is material about my time in Vietnam is how much I came to rely on my gut or intuitive nature. Many times I instinctively knew I wasn't safe, or that I was somehow exposed to danger. The small voice inside my gut became a lot louder and I listened. Inside and outside the base camp, I always listened to my inner voice, did whatever it suggested, and did it without question. If I felt an urge to get into a bunker, I did so immediately. If it was a gut feeling to zig rather than zag, then that's what I did. I once abandoned a Jeep and walked back to the base camp on advice of my internal voices. To the consternation of my first sergeant, the Jeep was never seen again.

  While sitting in a listening post one night near a small unit outside of Tay Ninh, I had a terrible urge to move. The small voice in my gut was telling me to be anywhere but there. Movement was difficult because it was pitch black—the kind of dark where you can't see your hand right up in front of your face. I had to convince the two others who were there it was the right thing to do. It took almost an hour, but
we shifted west of our original position by about sixty yards. Around 4:00 A.M. we heard a series of grenades going off in the area we had previously occupied.

  During a firefight at LZ Two Bits, just north of Qui Nhon, I took up a gun position on top of a bunker facing the village just outside the wire. Within minutes my inner voices were screaming at me, "Be somewhere else!" I shifted to a firing slot inside the bunker. Seconds later the top of the bunker was racked with two direct hits from mortar rounds. My voices started yelling again, "Not enough! Get out!" So I quickly moved through the bunker entry, sliding sideways to a depression in the ground. I just cleared the bunker doorway when an RPG (a high-explosive rocket-propelled grenade) opened the bunker up like a banana hit with a sledgehammer. My voices kept me moving all night long.

  My life was saved more than once by simply doing what my inner voices suggested, even if at the time it seemed foolish or stupid, or that I might embarrass myself. Some began to notice. Others began to do whatever I did, just from watching me. At one of the firebases, I noticed a young private lacing his boots the same way I did. I'm sure it wasn't because it looked cool.

  When I left Vietnam, 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. My vision was correct and the feedback obvious.

  When I left Vietnam, I was a staff sergeant with nearly a year in grade carrying orders for southern Germany—a small place called Bad Aibling in southern Bavaria, south of Munich. I stopped long enough in America to be married, after which Sue and I spent a couple of weeks on our honeymoon, touring the East Coast.

  My next three years were spent in different parts of Europe. I was originally assigned to the field unit at Bad Aibling. The base was unique, in that it was specially designed to give support to the U.S.

  Army in Europe, as well as the National Security Agency and other agencies that must remain unnamed. Inside the secured compound was a more classified or restricted area, and inside that was an even more classified and restricted facility. That was where I worked in support of one of those agencies.