People & places · 12 MIN READ · 8 SOURCE QUOTES
Joe McMoneagle
Joe McMoneagle is the retired Army intelligence officer known as Remote Viewer 001, the first person recruited into the Army's remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade, Maryland, the program the public now calls Stargate. He worked in the unit for about six and a half years, retired from the Army in 1984 as a special projects officer, and went on to consult for the cognitive sciences laboratories at SRI International and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) through his company, Intuitive Intelligence Applications. He has written four books, beginning with Mind Trek in 1993.
His connection to the Monroe Institute is long and personal. After a near-death experience left him with spontaneous out-of-body experiences, the Army, through his training officer Skip Atwater, brought him to Bob Monroe's laboratory for about fourteen months of long weekends. Monroe made him a Hemi-Sync tape that shortened the time he needed to clear his mind between targets, and the two worked on controlling the out-of-body experiences. The best-known session of that period is the 1984 Mars target. He also met his wife, Nancy 'Scooter' McMoneagle, at the Institute, and she later became its executive director and president.
Today McMoneagle teaches the Institute's remote viewing seminar and speaks to Gateway Voyage groups. His view is consistent: remote viewing is a talent that varies between people, it needs blind protocols, and its output is worth most as one piece of a puzzle rather than stand-alone evidence. The 1995 CIA-commissioned evaluation found a statistically significant laboratory effect but no actionable intelligence, so his accounts of operational successes are best read as his own report of the work.
Remote Viewer 001 of the Army's Stargate unit, who spent months in Bob Monroe's lab and now teaches remote viewing at the Monroe Institute.
Key points
Recruited at Fort Meade by Skip Atwater
McMoneagle says he was doing intelligence work for the Army when he got a call from a lieutenant he did not know, Skip Atwater, and a major. At Fort Meade they showed him material that ranged from newspaper articles on psychics to classified Soviet and Chinese papers. Anyone who heard the full briefing was committed, he says, and about a dozen people stayed. Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ of SRI then interviewed each one. His file held an envelope marked for the INSCOM commander; Atwater opened it and found McMoneagle's medical records from a near-death experience in Europe. He was soon reassigned to the project, then called Gondola Wish.
Near-death experiences and spontaneous out-of-body experiences
In a conversation recorded around 1993, McMoneagle dated his first near-death experience to 1970 and a second to 1985, a heart attack with open-heart surgery; a 2014 profile also dates the first to 1970. He says the first was followed for years by spontaneous out-of-body experiences he had no name for. He describes the relief of having them explained by someone in the program, who then invited him to study the material. The Army's interest in whether controlled out-of-body travel could serve as a second collection method, he says, is why the Defense Department sent him to Monroe.
Six trial viewings at SRI
After recruitment McMoneagle went to SRI and did a series of six outbounder viewings over about two weeks; he dates his first six viewings to 1978. He describes the SRI design: a pool of 200 to 300 sealed locations within 30 or 40 miles of the lab, a random number drawn before each trial, and an outbounder who drove to the site while the viewer and interviewer waited in a windowless room. In one trial he drew a building that he and Targ then visited, the entrance of the Stanford art museum; he says it looked exactly like his sketch.
Fourteen months in Monroe's lab
McMoneagle says the cool-down between targets had stretched to between an hour and an hour and twenty minutes, as impressions of one target lingered into the next. Atwater introduced him to Monroe, the military hired Monroe, and McMoneagle came for long weekends: arrive Thursday night, work in the lab Friday to Sunday, drive back to Fort Meade at four on Monday. Monroe built him a tape much like a Focus 10 tape, and his cool-downs fell to three to five minutes. He also learned to control his out-of-body experiences, a result he says was formally tested.
The Mars session
In McMoneagle's account, Defense Department visitors came to the lab while he napped in the black box after a long day. He was woken, handed a folded envelope and found a sheet reading Mars, 1 million BC. The transcript is dated May 22, 1984, and calls the participants only monitor and subject. The subject describes huge stone walls, pyramid-like shelters, tall thin people in a failing world and a group leaving in a metallic vessel. McMoneagle says he later got photographs of the coordinates and saw what he had described, and that he dislikes such targets because without feedback you cannot tell valid from invented.
What he says Hemi-Sync changed
In a 1996 Hemi-Sync Journal article McMoneagle lists what the year in Monroe's lab gave him: better inner focus and centering, control of altered states such as mind awake, body asleep, control of lucid dreaming, alpha and out-of-body states, reduced inner noise, more holistic thinking and the unlearning of erroneous thought patterns. Asked whether his remote viewing improved, he answers yes: his statistics did not change, but the quality, cognition and overall comprehension of targets improved a great deal.
A teacher at the Institute
McMoneagle speaks regularly to Gateway Voyage groups and took over the Institute's remote viewing seminar from Atwater. In a December 2012 conversation, a retiring Atwater described the seminar he had built on the military program's methods and a coaching approach, and said McMoneagle would bring a 21st-century model; McMoneagle said he valued the coaching concept and might add modern ideas within it. A 2024 attendee describes learning to work as viewer, monitor and analyst. McMoneagle cautions that however long someone has been a viewer, they will have as many failures as successes.
His rules of thumb for remote viewing
A 2014 profile reports McMoneagle comparing remote viewing to any sensory ability: we see a deer because it moves, and a viewer perceives a target through differences in informational entropy. He calls it a talent, like athletics or music, and rejects claims that anyone can be taught to be exceptional, that accuracy runs 95 percent or that anything can be targeted. He says out-of-body travel is slower and more distracting than remote viewing, which he calls instantaneous, and that neither viewer nor monitor may know the target.
In their own words
Quotes are checked word for word against the recordings and documents they come from. Bracketed words correct transcription errors; “…” marks an omission.
“I suddenly got a call one day, and it was somebody I didn't know, was [Skip Atwater]. He was the first lieutenant at the time, and he and another man, a major, asked me to come over to Fort Meade, and they wanted to talk to me. So I went over there, and what they did is they had a whole lot of information, a lot of [it] was classified and [a lot] was unclassified, and it ranged from newspaper articles on psychics to very highly classified papers that the Russians had, that we had gotten from the Russians and the Chinese and a number of other places, on psychic functioning.”
“What you call an out-of-body, and I didn't know that's what it was called then, but I was having out of bodies. They were spontaneous for many years after my near-death experience, and he explained what they were and why I was having them. That gave me a great deal of relief.”
“I had had spontaneous out of bodies after my near-death, my first near-death experience. It would just happen spontaneously, and they heard about this. So they, being the military, so DoD, Department of Defense, decided that I should learn to control them, to see if, comparatively speaking, they were better for intel than remote viewing. So they found the guy who is best at it, and that was Robert Monroe at the Monroe Institute. So they made a deal with him. I would work with him in the lab on long weekends.”
“So in that period I was using that tape to do my cool downs. I'd listen to the tape, and it was starting to reduce my cooldowns from an hour, possibly an hour, down to something like three to five minutes between remote [viewings]. That proved to be really effective at helping me de-stress from doing the many remote viewings I was doing back at Fort Meade. So it worked extremely well for getting the mind right for doing a remote viewing.”
“Now, in the middle of that, DoD sends some people to the lab. At least that's the word I got. I'm in the black box sleeping to recover from working all day. We, we would work 15 hour days a lot. So I'm taking a nap. He woke me up, and he said, 'I have some people here from DoD.'”
“Specific applications/areas that have been affected are: better inner focus and centering; control of altered states (mind awake/body asleep); control of lucid dreaming, alpha states, and out-of-body states; reduced inner noise; opening of holistic insight; and the extinguishing of erroneous cognitive patterns. Did my RV improve? Ultimately, the answer is, 'Yes.' My statistics didn't change. But the quality, cognition, and overall comprehension of targets improved a great deal, along with my understanding of the process.”
“[Joe McMoneagle], one of my best remote viewers ever, said, 'You're sending these other people to training here and other people to training here,' and being a warrant officer in the Army, they always have something called Advanced Training. You know, your basic training, and then you get your MOS training, and then there's always some additional training.”
“Skip Atwater, whom we called Fred Atwater at that time, had been Joe's training officer, and he was already here because … we had known Fred all the way back in the '70s at Whistlefield, as he was always coming and bringing papers to Bob and so forth and so on, trying to learn more about all this stuff, for obvious reasons.”
Important things to consider
The stories he tells are his account
The submarine story and the Mars photographs rest on McMoneagle's own telling. A senior Russian officer, he says, told him he knew more about a Soviet submarine than the officer did, and knew about it before it was launched. The public record here includes the 1995 evaluation, which found no actionable intelligence, and a Mars transcript with no names. Treat his stories as testimony from a central participant.
He names the limits himself
McMoneagle says the very best viewers under laboratory conditions run about 50/50 on or off target, that remote viewing is a talent not everyone has, and that targets with no feedback, such as Mars or UFOs, cannot be judged. His position is that remote viewing has value as one piece of a puzzle, never as stand-alone proof.
Dates drift between tellings
He puts Atwater's introduction to Monroe at about 1979, his 1996 article says his office proposed a one-year arrangement with Monroe before 1983, and he places the Mars session, dated May 1984, in the middle of fourteen months in the lab. Either the lab period began years after the introduction or one date is off. Check dated documents before relying on any date.
Hemi-Sync helped him, by his account
McMoneagle credits Hemi-Sync with shorter cool-downs, steadier focus and control of out-of-body states, and says his accuracy statistics did not change. That is one trained viewer's report from a year in a laboratory. The sources here contain no controlled comparison, so do not expect the tapes alone to make anyone a viewer.
Seminar details change
McMoneagle's seminar is separate from the Gateway Experience and the Gateway Voyage. Instructors, formats and schedules change, and he has said he updates the program, so confirm what the Institute currently offers before planning around it.
Common questions
Who is Joe McMoneagle?
Joe McMoneagle is a retired Army intelligence officer and author known as Remote Viewer 001, the first person recruited into the Army's remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade, Maryland, later popularly called Stargate. He worked in the unit for about six and a half years, retired in 1984, and kept working with SRI and SAIC on remote-viewing research through his company. He has written four books, including Mind Trek and The Ultimate Time Machine, and teaches remote viewing at the Monroe Institute. His wife, Nancy 'Scooter' McMoneagle, became the Institute's executive director and president.
How did Joe McMoneagle become a remote viewer?
In his own account, he was working in Army intelligence when Skip Atwater, then a lieutenant, and a major called him to Fort Meade. The Army treated foreign psychic research as a possible threat and wanted to understand it. After a briefing and interviews by SRI's Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, he was recruited as the first viewer, numbered 001, into a project then called Gondola Wish. He was sent to SRI for a series of six trial viewings. His file also held records of a near-death experience, which led to a conversation about the spontaneous out-of-body experiences he had been having.
How is Joe McMoneagle connected to the Monroe Institute?
Atwater introduced McMoneagle to Bob Monroe, and the military hired Monroe to help him. For about fourteen months McMoneagle spent long weekends in the lab, working on shortening the cool-down between targets and on controlling his spontaneous out-of-body experiences. Monroe made him a Hemi-Sync tape, and he says both goals were met. He kept coming back: he speaks at Gateway Voyage programs, teaches the Institute's remote viewing seminar, and married Nancy 'Scooter' McMoneagle, a former assistant to Monroe who later led the Institute.
What was the Mars session Joe McMoneagle did?
He says it happened during his time in Monroe's lab. Defense Department visitors arrived with a target in a sealed envelope that read Mars, 1 million BC. The declassified transcript is dated May 22, 1984 and labels the participants only monitor and subject. The subject describes huge stone walls, pyramid-like shelters, tall thin people in a dying world and a group leaving in a metallic vessel. McMoneagle says he later obtained photographs of the coordinates and recognized what he had described. He also says he dislikes such targets because there is no feedback to judge them by, so the session shows what he reported, not whether it was right.
Did Hemi-Sync improve Joe McMoneagle's remote viewing?
By his own account, yes in quality but not in statistics. In a 1996 article he says the year of work with Monroe improved his inner focus, reduced inner noise and gave him control of altered states, lucid dreaming and out-of-body states. His accuracy statistics did not change, but the quality, cognition and overall comprehension of his targets improved a great deal. He also says Monroe's tape cut his cool-down between targets from about an hour to three to five minutes. The sources here contain no controlled comparison, so this is one viewer's testimony.
Can I learn remote viewing from Joe McMoneagle?
The Institute has offered a residential remote viewing program taught by McMoneagle, who took it over from Skip Atwater. A 2024 attendee describes practicing as viewer, monitor and analyst under blind conditions. McMoneagle's own caution is that remote viewing is probably a talent, like athletics or music, and that even long-time viewers have as many failures as successes. Atwater tells prospects that a Monroe program is not a switch that turns remote viewing on, though it is a good experience. Confirm current dates with the Institute.
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