The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy

by Joseph McMoneagle

  After the film had ended, we were asked to continue reviewing the materials that had been provided, as each of us would be individually interviewed. I remember sitting down at the conference table across from a Capt. Kenneth Bell, then a counterintelligence officer.

  There was another gentleman I met at the time, whose name I would also later come to know well, Melvin Riley. He was a staff sergeant and photographic interpreter. We talked in very low voices about the apparent possibilities we had just been introduced to. I remember we were all somewhat in disbelief about what we had seen. We were of the same mind, in that while we were willing to be open, we reserved judgment about the subject matter or its veracity based on what other proof might be proffered to us at a later time. Eventually, it became my turn for the interview.

  When I first entered the room, I was surprised to see only Hal present. I thought that both would be doing the interview. As I later found out, they were surprised at the number of people who had been located and who had decided to stay and be interviewed. I think they were not used to finding so many with open minds in one location, or at least not so many potential remote viewers. They had had to split up the group to do the interviews.

  Hal asked me a little bit about my background, which I openly shared. I did not feel that I was any more open about the subject matter than anyone else might be. In fact, I probably would have responded that I felt myself a little bit more in disbelief. When you are faced with the possibility of paranormal functioning, your natural inclination is to "not believe." What I had kept well hidden of course was the fact that I had had a near-death experience seven years earlier in Europe. I had learned very quickly that most within the United States Army had very little openness to such an experience and, for all I knew, these scientists would be even less inclined to believe my experiences.

  Hal had obviously been shown an information sheet about me and began his discussion with some general questions about my background. Where did I grow up? What kind of general background did I have? What were my overall feelings about the possibilities I had been shown within the Price film? I remember my answers were all very cautious. I allowed him to know that I was very curious about what I had seen, and at the same time not quite sure I believed it. I tried to walk the razor's edge, so to speak, never really giving any information that might demonstrate how it had profoundly affected me, nor what I might actually believe about it. I stayed as neutral as I could be.

  After about fifteen minutes of what I would call general banter, Hal looked me directly in the eye and asked, "Have you ever experienced anything that might be equated to a paranormal event?"

  My first inclination was to lie and respond in the negative. But the little voice down deep inside me would not allow me that protection. It was saying,

  Now is not the time to be timid. Answer the man.

  So I did.

  "Well, actually, I've had like experiences in my life. Ever since I had an NDE back in 1970."

  I could actually see the light in Hal's eyes immediately brighten. He did not seem to be shocked by the response at all, but sort of seemed to expect it. I then gave him a very brief summation of my experience, and alluded to the fact that ever since, I sometimes seemed to sense things, or know things, either just before they happened or about events that I could not have access to in a normal sense. He asked me if I would be willing to be tested by them at their lab in California.

  Again, that little voice jumped to the fore and responded in my stead.

  Say yes, damn it!

  "Yes, of course."

  Hal was pleased and said that we would talk again. I returned to the conference room.

  Once everyone in the room had been interviewed, a process that took nearly two hours, Scotty Watt returned and informed us that we had all been very supportive to the process. We were told that some of us might be contacted in the future and some might not be. We should return to our units and our jobs and not discuss anything that had occurred. I bid farewell to those I had met and returned to Arlington Hall Station, where I finished the day heavily distracted by what I had been exposed to. Little did I know at the time that events were going into motion that would forever change my life. I could not know at the time that these changes would ultimately call for the destruction of my career, a divorce from my second wife, and another complete change in my perceptions about reality.

  These changes would bring me a great deal of exposure within nearly all of the major intelligence agencies of our government, would thrust me into the halls of both the Senate and House of our government and eventually result in my appearance on all the national networks, as well as major networks in numerous other countries. Had I actually known at the time the extent to which I would be affected, I am sure that I would have chosen another course of action.

  One of the most troubling aspects of remote viewing is the need people feel to take a position on it. These positions are inevitably extreme. When first exposed to scientifically demonstrated RV, people usually either react with disbelief and automatically resort to ridicule, or the opposite occurs, and their curiosity is sparked.

  In the first case, this results in what are usually vicious and personalized attacks on the remote viewer's integrity, reputation, or history. In the second, the viewer is overwhelmed with requests for personalized proof: "Okay, show me! I want to see it for myself." Even though there is sufficient extant scientific evidence to fill a room, they either want to destroy the possibility (viewer) or demand that it be demonstrated. This puts a huge and unfair burden on the subject or viewer, resulting in a great deal of stress.

  In my own case, because of my reputation within many of the agencies I supported, the history of the project and my contributions to it, and the history of my participating within the research, this has become almost unendurable. The demands that have been made on me have now gone way beyond reasonable.

  I am constantly being placed between a rock and a hard place. If I do not acquiesce to the demands for proof through a live demonstration, I am accused of being a fraud, or worse, accused of having cheated in my previous work. If I do the demonstration and it fails (which it is apt to do a percentage of the time), then I'm also accused of fraud or the skill is put down as "he made a great guess before" or "it must have been luck." If I succeed, in many cases the person walks away and refuses to talk to me again, as I must be doing the work of the devil, or it quite frankly scares the shit out of them and they are unable to cope with it.

  Only a small percentage has taken the healthy, or middle, road, and agreed that quite possibly there is something going on that can't yet be understood and that it requires further study, or care in its use or application.

  When you've dealt with these conditions for 23 years, it begins to wear you down. Add to this the fact that in many cases, my public demonstrations are usurped by others and used as proof for their own capabilities when they could not remote view their way out of a wet paper bag, and you begin to understand why, if I had had a clear view then of where I am now, I might not have even entered the program in the first place. The frustration these experiences present at times is almost overwhelming. It is not my place to make everyone who comes into contact with remote viewing comfortable with it, nor do I have to prove it to anyone but myself.

  When it comes to understanding the kind of differences that lay within the past of someone who believes in the paranormal and someone who doesn't, almost always people point to my NDE as the probable event affecting my belief, perhaps the key reason why I am open to the paranormal, and perhaps the reason why my informational boundaries are somewhat different from the norm.

  But I vehemently disagree with such a perception. It takes a lot more than a single experience to build the philosophic and spiritual structure of an individual. Certainly, an NDE has a great deal of impact, but it is more the straw that breaks the camel's back than a single transformational event. In my own case, I've gone back over my life numerous times to try and pin
down what makes things different for me when it comes to the paranormal. I just can't seem to find any angle that has that specific an impact.

  In any event, a number of weeks went by and the memory of the events of that day faded. The conditions at home were not improving in my relationship with my wife, so I buried myself deeper into my work. She countered this by looking for and finding work with a newspaper publishing company in the Reston area.

  Chapter Six

  A New Remote Viewer

  I received a phone call many weeks later from Scotty Watt. He said, "Well, you've said all the right things." I wasn't sure what he meant by that at the time, but later he told me that people who appeared to be too eager to join the unit were discarded out of fear that their eagerness might hide an underlying instability that would cause trouble later on. Whether this is true or not I've never been sure, and I don't think they were either. He asked me if I could come to the office at the 902nd, and I agreed, not really having any idea why.

  The following Monday when I visited the office, I was told that arrangements were being made to send me out to California to visit with Dr. Puthoff and Russell Targ. My boss, Ralph, would be given an appropriate cover story. The trip would be for a period of two weeks–an exceptionally long time given the amount of work and commitments I had at the time. This worried me considerably, because I wasn't sure they'd be able to actually do what they said.

  One comical aside to the trip was that I was supposed to sign into the lab at SRI-International as Scotty Watt, "to protect my identity." The problem was, SRI had only one receptionist, and she had no difficulty in determining that the five individuals who followed me later on, one of whom was a woman, were surely not all named Scotty Watt. I had been overseas working a live mission for so many years. It bothered me a lot that a more serious attitude was not in place.

  Leaving my boss thinking that I was going out to California to test some equipment at the Electronic Signals Laboratory for the chief of staff, I arrived early on a Monday morning at the receptionist's desk of the radio physics lab, at SRI-International. Signing in as Scotty Watt, I waited for only a few minutes before being greeted by Dr. Puthoff, who then gave me a tour of the lab facilities. Mostly it consisted of offices for research personnel on one floor and an actual windowless remote-viewing room on an upper floor. Their entire area was sealed off from the rest of the building by a security lock. I spent the entire first day becoming acquainted with the facilities and generally talking about remote viewing and ideas about how they felt it might work.

  While it was clear that everyone felt remote viewing worked, there was no clear idea of how or why. This actually increased my curiosity. I had heard many stories about Pat Price and Ingo Swann that were fascinating, but didn't give me any further clues to how I might be able to do my own remote viewing. I spent the rest of the afternoon lounging in a pool at the Mermaid Inn a few blocks from the lab facility. (Everything was within walking distance, which was nice.)

  The following morning I reported at 8:00 A.M. to do my first remote viewing scheduled for 9:30. This was the first fact I actually learned about remote viewing—the importance of what they called "rise-time." As it was explained to me back then, rise-time meant scheduling a specific time for the actual RV so that you had plenty of time to spend clearing your mind and adopting an appropriate attitude focused toward success, or at least an expectation of success.

  In my career, there had never been any latitude for rise-time or an attitude adjustment in preparation for an event. In my world events just happened, usually with very little warning. They could be and usually were serious crises, and you were trained to deal with them in that fashion. If failure followed, you would quickly find yourself doing something less demanding. So, to be honest, I thought the idea of rise-time was quaint, and I didn't buy it outright. It sounded like what we would call "fluff "—extra chrome to make something look pretty . . . but when in Rome—so I arrived at 8:00 A.M. sharp.

  I was taken directly to the third-floor RV room, where I made myself comfortable with Russell Targ. He locked the door, lowered the lights, and asked me what I thought of remote viewing or the paranormal world in general. I sensed that he was sort of setting the scene and attempting to make me comfortable. Unfortunately, I was beginning to feel performance anxiety creep in the back of my mind. So far, no one had told me any of the secrets that were supposed to enable me to do the RV. Surely, you'd get a hint or something? In any event, I played along.

  At precisely 9:30 A.M., Russell said the outbounder was probably at the target site and we could begin. The outbounder was supposed to be a person on whom I would mentally focus, in the hope that accurate information would then be passed. Back then I was led to believe that no one was sure if another human at the site wasn't needed for passing information. In actuality, they already knew that wasn't necessary, but they also knew having an outbounder at the site was more conducive to helping me to believe in what I was about to do. They were attempting to help me convince myself that it was possible to do RV They knew it was possible, but at the time, I didn't. My first target outbounder was Hal Puthoff.

  A detailed description of my first target, which was the Stanford University Art Museum, can be found in Mind Trek (McMoneagle 1997). There is no reason to go into a lot of detail about it, other than to say that what I was able to imagine turned out to be sufficiently accurate to achieve a first-place match (the highest category match).viii

  We skipped a day between each RV, allowing me enough time to process the results and discuss them with whoever happened to be involved in the experiments. Over the two-week period, I was never able to go beyond a belief that I was inventing the information, or simply looking into my imagination and reporting whatever I was finding there. At the end of my stay they did an independent judging of all six sessions combined and told me that I had five first-place matches and a second-place match, one of the best series results they had ever seen. I was now officially a remote viewer. I returned to my job at the headquarters more confused than not.

  A week later, I was asked to report to the RV project office at Fort Meade on Wednesday afternoon of that same week. Ralph was testy about it, but since the directive came from the chief of staff, there really wasn't much he could say. I reported in at Fort Meade and found out that one of the original six individuals was already out at SRI enjoying the swimming pool at the Mermaid Inn.

  Capt. Ken Bell was already there when I arrived. He had not been out to SRI yet, so he said they had asked him to help out with the practice sessions we were going to run. Using the same protocol that had been used at SRI, a sealed envelope held in a safe was chosen by tossing a pair of dice, and an outbounder—in this case Scotty Watt—departed for a secret location. In this case, there was no rise-time, and no special facility. We made do with what was at hand. We locked the door and I stretched out on the old leather couch!

  Fred Atwater acted as the monitor, and Ken Bell observed. I stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes, trying to shut out my surroundings as well as the distractions. This was very difficult to do. I could hear the muffled voices of people through the interior walls, as well as footsteps on the bare floor just outside the door. Birds were chirping in the bushes outside the window and there was almost no air circulation in the tiny room. There was even the sound of commodes being flushed in the bathrooms overhead. But I did the best I could. At the time I didn't feel I should complain; it was either going to work or it wasn't.

  After about twenty minutes, Fred informed me that Scotty was now at whatever location he was supposed to be at, and I should try to describe it. We had a small recorder going and some blank sheets of paper to draw on. I opened my mind to whatever my imagination had to offer and got exactly nothing—my mind was blank, zip, nada, zilch! After about five minutes of silence I made stuff up. It was about as general as I could come up with—large building nearby, grass, sidewalks, streets, telephone poles, etc. After sweating along for fifteen min
utes, I admitted that I didn't have a lot but what I had given was about it.

  Fred never flinched. He thanked me for the information and asked me to draw some of my perceptions. We terminated the session.

  After Scotty returned, we all went out and piled into the government car and drove across post to the front of the Post Exchange facility. It was a relatively new building, stretching out across the face of a very large parking lot. But, there was absolutely nothing relating to it in my session. I was totally bummed out.

  A lot of doubt then entered my mind—had my time in California been rigged? Had they looked at my results and taken me to some place that seemed to match? My memory said no. None of my material had been shown to the outbounder until after I had been taken to the targeted site then returned to the building. Could it be the absence of a rise-time? Maybe. I had an urge to make some very general correlations to my RV information—I said large building, and there it was, wasn't it? Well . . . sort of. I let it go. It was a total failure and nothing like the results I had out on the West Coast. I was very disappointed and confused by the entire experience. I felt like I had wasted everyone's time as well as my own.

  When we returned to the office we talked about it. Scotty was matter of fact about it. I sensed that his attitude was that it probably wasn't really going to work and he had been proven correct. He didn't actually say that, but I could sense he was somewhat unsurprised by it all. Fred, on the other hand, was very supportive. He told me that I gave it a good try and that we could expect failure at times and not to worry about it. I'd nail the next one. We called it a day and everyone went home.