The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy

by Joseph McMoneagle

  I took the day off prior to the physical testing day and saw a private doctor who prescribed pain medication. The following day I showed up and took the tests. I can honestly say that the only thing that got me through the day was what I had learned about meditation through remote viewing. I put myself in a mental state that completely disassociated me from where I was and what I was doing. It was the two-mile run that did my lower back in. I actually finished it within the allotted time, but when I sat down in the grass my left leg wouldn't stop running, I was also on the verge of passing out from the pain. Ken saw what was going on and came over and sat on my left leg till it eventually ran out of steam, all the while talking to me like nothing was going on, the whole while my eyes were rolled up in the back of my head and I was barely conscious of what was going on around me. After a short time, Ken carried my card over and turned it in for me, then after most of the people left, helped me work my way over to my car. I called Scotty the next morning, took four days' emergency leave for personal business, and signed myself into a private clinic for pain control. The doctor at Kimbrough gave up, but the folks at Branch reaffirmed their desire to make me disappear from their rolls.

  While at the clinic, someone recommended that I might want to check out the pain clinic at Walter Reed Army Medical Center—which no one in the Army seemed to know existed. I did this in the following weeks and was treated there by a Chinese doctor using acupuncture. He couldn't correct all the problems I was having, but he reduced my back pain to a level that was manageable without drugs. This was important, because it allowed me to continue clearheaded with my RV in the unit.

  Hartleigh fared much worse than I, because the subsequent testing of his leg pain proved to be a result of cancer that had developed in the muscle mass and bones of his hip. When he first started going to Walter Reed Medical Center, they believed he was suffering with essentially what I was dealing with, disc problems. After numerous treatments, they decided to operate to correct the problem. When they opened him up they found no problems with his disc. After the operation he continued running a low-grade fever and they eventually discovered the mass in his upper leg and diagnosed him as having

  Hodgkin's disease. We got to be even closer friends. He went through all the radiation and chemotherapy treatments, but to no avail. His remote viewing quickly petered out to none, but we continued to spend a great deal of time together. He'd come into the office and we'd talk philosophically. Ken would join in on the conversations as well. As Hartleigh got worse, he could no longer sit up for long periods, so Ken and I would entertain him while he would lie on the couch in one of the apartments he owned and we repainted the ceiling and walls. On one Saturday afternoon, Ken and I repainted the same room three times, two different colors—color a, then color b, then back to color a. He never noticed, or did and enjoyed watching us do it. Hartleigh was a good man, a good sailor, a close friend, and one hell of a great remote viewer. When people denigrate remote viewing through ridicule or misrepresentation, I think about Jackie Keith and Hartleigh Trent and it angers me.

  When Hartleigh finally died, I was standing beside his bed with his wife, in the hospital near where he lived in Maryland. He had been delirious, and in and out of consciousness for more than a day.

  When his end was near, his eyes suddenly popped open and he smiled at us. "It's really quite beautiful where I'm going," he said. Then he commented about how full the room was with all of his friends (only his wife and I were standing there. It was clear to me that a lot of people he knew had come to see him off or were there to greet him when he passed over. It seemed a happy day for him. No more pain. For me, there was only a very large hole in my spirit it would take a long time to get used to.)

  One of the facts of military life is loss. The rate of divorce is three times higher than in the civilian world. It comes from being in a job that involves life-and-death decision making–sometimes on a daily basis or sometimes with long periods of mind-numbing boredom and frustration in between. The effects of divorce mean separation from the rest of the family–your children. If you somehow survive the threat of divorce, you will spend years away from those you love, in places no one should have to talk about, never mind endure. And then there is the loss of friends. Twenty to thirty years in the military kills people. If you don't see your friends shredded on a battlefield, many will die along the way from stress, wounds, and complications, usually the result of exposure to rare diseases, chemical agents, biological contaminants, and things like "Agent Orange." In most cases, a soldier has no time for grief. The mission has to be finished, if for no other reason than to honor those who've already died trying to get it done.

  What happens to all this grief? You put it away somewhere in the back of your mind, bury it under layers of callused scarring from years of accumulated experiences. Before being crushed by it, a soldier learns to use his or her grief as a motivator. He or she uses it to produce anger or rage to compensate for the repetitive frustration and bitter feelings that eventually develop from the experience. But, one thing soldiers never do. They never take the time to process the loss. They suck it up and move on, putting one foot in front of the other. Over time, the grief they've accumulated and buried becomes so great it can never be processed. Opening the door to those feelings would be like splitting the face of a dam. Once the water started to flow, there would be no way to stop it.

  I put Hartleigh and the way I felt about him with my other friends and moved on, putting one foot in front of the other. The way to honor him was to keep remote viewing.

  In a very short time, Scotty Watt, who had earned a promotion to lieutenant colonel as a direct result of managing the project, retired. He was replaced by another lieutenant colonel, whom I will call Bob. The rest of us had hit our three-year rotation dates, which meant that everyone in the unit except the civilian secretary and the new boss would soon be receiving orders for a reassignment. This would shut the project down completely. The crap hit the fan.

  It was about this same time that INSCOM Commander Flynn was replaced by Maj. Gen. Burt Stubblebine. We heard that Stubblebine was generally positive about what we were doing, but we weren't sure if he could shield us against the growing resentment being generated by the new ACSI, General Odom. Odom obviously viewed us as a personal liability regardless of how well we might or might not be doing operationally. The phrase "no one wants to be caught dead standing next to a psychic" was beginning to spread. It actually didn't matter at the time, because by then we had major clients throughout the intelligence community. We were providing support to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Secret Service (SS), the Air Force Intelligence Agency (AFIA), the Naval Intelligence Command (NIC), the Naval Investigative Service Command (NISC), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), the National Security Council (NSC), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the United States Coast Guard (USCG) (at least two districts), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), internal elements of the State Department, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), and other more specific agencies or departments that still cannot be mentioned.

  Attempts were made to negotiate with Branch to extend my assignment as excess (99) in the Washington, D.C., area, but they would have none of it. I received alert orders for Korea that were immediately canceled by General Stubblebine. Within a week I received new alert orders for Fort Bragg, N.C. The general canceled these as well and actually sent his chief of staff over to Branch to discuss my situation with them. According to the general, I was "his people" and he could do whatever he wanted with his people.

  Ken was able to manage a one-year extension on his three-year tour at Meade. Actually, by the time he got it approved he was already three months into the year. Fred received orders to attend the advanced intelligence course in Arizona, which he accepted, with the understanding that he would be reassigned back to the unit. As a result, Fred left rather abruptl
y for six months. Fred actually was able to return in five, because he amassed sufficient credits to pass the course and departed before graduation, something most career officers would not have attempted.

  Mel received alert orders sending him back to his old unit in Germany, only this time as a sergeant first class. He was finally promoted in spite of his working in the project, a promotion that was probably way overdue anyway.

  My own situation was eventually settled at the major general level. Evidently, an agreement was struck. They simply made me disappear from the Army system completely. The Army would forget where I was until I decided to retire. The only problem with this agreement was any hope of further promotion in my case ceased to exist. I was a permanent-grade chief warrant officer and since I wore civilian clothes, most weren't even aware of that. I decided to grow a beard to protest and most didn't notice that either.

  Toward the middle of 1982, the only ones doing RV within the unit were Ken and myself. Our new boss, Bob, was learning how to run sessions coming out of the starting gate, and Fred was out in Arizona learning everything he could about what wouldn't be applicable to what we were doing. (Fred returned at the end of 1982.)

  My recollection of the times between the beginning of 1982 and the early part of 1984 are almost completely clouded in a mist of pain, stress, and exhaustion. Because Ken and I were the only two now doing the remote viewing, we were completely buried with work. Much of the tasking that was brought to us from the multitude of agencies involved was related directly or indirectly to terrorist activities, which seemed to be growing exponentially.

  Between Christmas Day of 1981 and February of 1984, I participated in 168 separate intelligence problems addressing terrorism (11 incidents in Africa, 29 in Europe, 36 in South America, 31 in the Middle East, and 61 on United States soil). This total was not the total amount of terrorists' actions by a long shot; it was hardly a percentile of the total. This was in addition to other forms of tasking. By the time I reached my own retirement date in September of 1984, I had participated in addressing well over 1,500 individual intelligence problems. Ken worked at least as hard as I did up until the day before his rotation, at the end of 1982. In my heart, his departure was another mark in my loss column.

  One serious problem with the project was the need for new and talented viewers and sufficient overlap time for them to learn the business. This need was never addressed, or at least not until the very last minute. Nearly all the original selection criteria and methodologies for selecting remote viewer personnel had been abandoned as both too time-consuming and too expensive. Our tasking was increasing approximately ten percent per month, while our funding and personnel were decreasing at four times that rate. The solution was to get someone trained and trained fast. This made me very uncomfortable. I could remember all the time and discomfort I had in learning about RV and convincing myself that it was real. Now they were expecting someone to adjust without any time at all. Not good.

  Fred returned to the unit just as our boss Bob was being replaced by a new boss, whom I will call Lieutenant Colonel Franks. I think Franks recognized the shortage of viewers as his most serious problem and took it more seriously than anyone had. Fred advised him of two people in another class out in Arizona who showed some promise, and he and Franks flew out there to recruit them.

  Robert Cowart and Tom McNear came directly to the unit from the Army's advanced intelligence course at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. I believe their selection and subsequent assignment to the unit happened mostly because it was easier to arrange an assignment for someone coming out of a school. After hearing what we were into, they had volunteered. This was actually a very large plus. By this time, no one in his right mind would risk his career being devoured by our very bizarre unit. But both of these new people knew Fred, and I think he felt that given our dire situation, if they weren't terribly psychic, they could by God learn, or at least make great RV monitors, helping to alleviate the strain on himself. (By this time of course, Fred was fully capable of intuitively selecting someone that he felt was more psychic than not.)

  Also, by then a belief was blossoming (out of the ethers) that remote viewers could be trained simply through repetitive and controlled experiences, and that talent wasn't necessarily that important—something that actually flew in the face of what had thus far been demonstrated both at Fort Meade and SRI.

  Ingo Swann, the top remote viewer at SRI and one of the founding members of remote viewing development there, sensed that RV skills might be trainable, but he was only beginning his look into it and wasn't yet sure. The system he was developing was under construction and was not thoroughly tested. (His method at the time consisted of a planned six stages, of which only the first two or three actually existed in an outline format.) Someone at the project decided that it would have to do, and at the end of 1982 they began sending Robert and Tom out to SRI every two weeks. They would train there for two weeks, then return to the unit and practice on their own until they could complete the new training program.

  A few months prior to 1983, Ken departed for his next assignment. He was rightfully concerned that if he stayed any longer his military career could be damaged. I was pleased to hear many years later that he achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel just before he retired.

  Just prior to his departure, I came very close to dying in an accident on the Beltway. (It was actually the sixth accident that I had been able to avoid.) I was on the inner loop heading North approaching the Cabin John Bridge in heavy traffic, at that time in the morning when the light is just beginning to build, and the rods and cones in your eyes can't make up their mind if it's still dark or light.

  The inner loop lanes narrow by one just as you enter the bridge. A tractor-trailer was clipped by a Mercedes and lost control. The trailer actually separated from the tractor and spun sideways before doing a side-over-side roll. Instantly more than a hundred cars were locking their brakes and changing lanes involuntarily. My whole front view filled with light blue smoke from tires being fried to their rims—then the air was filled with the sounds of tearing metal. I could see hubcaps beginning to bounce high into the air. It suddenly became slow motion in front of me, with all the cars in my lane and the surrounding lanes beginning to slide sideways and bounce one off the other. Since everyone was doing more than 70 MPH, what looked like the gentle brushing of fender to fender was actually the crushing of metal like tinfoil. I had just enough time to mumble "holy shit" and brought both arms up across my face, bracing my body for impact. I knew there was absolutely nothing that I could do to avoid being buried in the landslide of vehicles piling up on the road at the far end of the bridge.

  But after what seemed an eternity, nothing happened. I opened my eyes, and the entire five lanes in front of me were clear of cars or trucks. I quickly looked into the rearview mirror and I could see the small tunnel opening I had passed through squeezing shut behind me. I coasted to a stop and got out of my car and looked back at the destruction behind me. There had to be fifty cars crushed into a parking lot the size of a basketball court. I couldn't stop my hands from shaking.

  When I finally arrived at Fort Meade, I calmly walked into Franks's office and said that unless I was moved to Fort Meade, I quit. I couldn't take it anymore. His only comment was "took you long enough to ask." Within the week, I was in officer's quarters less than half a mile from the office.

  Peggy had a total meltdown. She was now faced with a choice of either commuting the opposite direction to her work with the publisher in Reston or quitting. She chose to continue working, which lasted, only a few weeks. This of course was my fault. The larger problem was the loss of her income. (It was somewhat ameliorated by no longer having to pay rent in Reston. The Army's housing allowance to defray the costs of living in Reston was never enough.) So, it cost us money to move into on-post housing. The greater effect was that she now was cut off from all of her workmates and friends. Making friends in the on-post quarters wasn't easy for her. She cou
ldn't talk about anything I was doing because she didn't know much about what I was doing. Our immediate neighbors on either side were wonderful people, but they had their own schedules to keep. The man to our left was a chief warrant officer in supply, so we had absolutely nothing in common. His wife and family were really nice people, which only made Peggy angrier for some reason. In retrospect, I think she thought his wife was hitting on me. The couple to our right was a newly married second lieutenant. At least they had a dog and their dog really liked our dog. My Dalmatian, Barney, really liked the move, because he got to spend a lot more time with me. Because Peggy's and my relationship was in tatters, I spent an increasingly longer time walking Barney all over the golf course that backed onto our quarters. He and I would spend long hours out there walking and sometimes when no one was looking, I'd release him from his leash on the fourth green and let him run the length of the fairway, a special treat he came to expect.

  At work, things began to get somewhat nasty. Robert started telling me about the training system at SRI. The way he explained it to me, he would sit across the table from his trainer and in a very rigid and specific manner, write down what came into his mind about the target. He had to do this according to a very well-defined framework that identified elements and conditions at the target. When he was right, the monitor told him he was by saying "correct." When he was wrong, he received no feedback at all. He said that through this rote repetition he was learning to open the contact between his subconscious and conscious minds where the information was probably being generated. I could understand this as a method for learning, but was having difficulty understanding how the leap would be made from learning to remote viewing targets for which the monitor had no knowledge. Or, if the monitor did have knowledge, I couldn't understand how they would prevent steering the viewer to whatever they assumed was accurate about the target. Clearly, there was a long-range plan, but that had not been revealed yet.