Remote viewing · 12 MIN READ · 7 SOURCE QUOTES
Stargate & remote viewing
Stargate is the name the public came to use for the U.S. government's long effort to test remote viewing, the claim that a trained person can describe a distant or hidden target without ordinary access to it. After laboratory work at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the early 1970s, an Army intelligence unit at Fort Meade, Maryland, began recruiting its own viewers in the late 1970s, gave them real intelligence questions and trained new ones. The unit worked under a succession of code names, among them Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane and Sun Streak, and the Defense Intelligence Agency later ran the program as Star Gate. It stayed classified until 1995.
The Monroe Institute is woven into that history. Skip Atwater, the unit's operations and training officer, met Bob Monroe in 1977 and eventually had some of the Army's viewers trained with Hemi-Sync. Joe McMoneagle, the first viewer recruited and known as Remote Viewer 001, spent about fourteen months of long weekends in Monroe's lab, where Monroe made him a Hemi-Sync tape and worked with him on controlling spontaneous out-of-body experiences. By McMoneagle's account, the famous 1984 Mars session was done there. Atwater later became the Institute's research director, and McMoneagle teaches remote viewing there.
What the program proved is disputed. Participants such as McMoneagle describe successes and a strict protocol. In September 1995 the American Institutes for Research, working for the CIA, reported a statistically significant laboratory effect but found no case in which remote viewing had guided an intelligence operation, and the CIA decided not to continue. The two outside reviewers of the laboratory work, Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman, read the same data and disagreed about what it showed.
A secret U.S. Army and DIA remote-viewing program, its ties to Monroe's lab, and what the 1995 evaluation found.
Key points
It began as a counterintelligence worry
Atwater says his involvement started with a defensive question. As an Army counterintelligence specialist who had read Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ's book Mind-Reach, he was briefing commanders at Redstone Arsenal when someone pulled the book from a briefcase and asked how the Army could protect itself from remote viewing. At Fort Meade, a general approved a trip to SRI. McMoneagle remembers the pitch from the other side: Atwater and a major said the Army meant to identify the threat and work against it, and asked how he felt about that.
Five code names for one long effort
The unit did not keep one name. McMoneagle recalls Gondola Wish when he was recruited, then Grill Flame, Center Lane and Sun Streak, the last after the Defense Intelligence Agency took the project over. Army papers released by the CIA show Grill Flame work approved for continuation in April 1980 and halted in September 1982 over National Foreign Intelligence Program restrictions, then restarted in December 1982 as Center Lane; a December 1985 DIA document describes a DIA special access program called Sun Streak. The 1995 evaluation calls the DIA program Star Gate, while the CIA's own web story gives a different order, calling Stargate the DIA's first name and Grill Flame a later one. Popular retellings call all of it Stargate.
Numbered viewers and strict protocols
McMoneagle was the first viewer recruited and was numbered 001. He says the next recruit got a three-digit number so the numbering would not reveal how many viewers existed. A January 1994 DIA protocols document gave each operational viewer a constant code number and drew targets from a varied pool. Atwater describes two working styles: Ingo Swann's structured controlled or coordinate remote viewing, developed at SRI under Army contract, and McMoneagle's habit of lying down in a meditative state, now called extended remote viewing.
How the Army came to the Monroe Institute
Atwater says he investigated Hemi-Sync as one way to train soldiers, officers and civilians in his unit. He met Bob Monroe in 1977 and could not tell him he was training what he calls psychic spies, but built a friendship, and he recalls later handing Monroe a contract and a $25,000 check so McMoneagle could work in his lab. In 1983 Army Lt. Col. Wayne McDonnell wrote an assessment of the Gateway process, later released through the CIA's reading room, that weighed its uses, including information collection from the out-of-body state.
Fourteen months of long weekends in Monroe's lab
Each week McMoneagle left Fort Meade on Thursday night, worked in Monroe's lab from Friday morning to Sunday night and drove back at about four on Monday morning. The first goal was to shorten the cool-down he needed between targets, which had grown to an hour or more. Monroe made him a tape he describes as very similar to a Focus 10 tape, and he says the cool-downs fell to three to five minutes. The Army was also interested in whether he could learn to control his spontaneous out-of-body experiences. He says he succeeded and that it was formally tested. He adds that his accuracy statistics did not change, though the quality of his sessions improved.
The 1984 Mars session
The best-known session linked to Monroe's lab is a CIA-released transcript dated May 22, 1984. Its target, Mars about one million years B.C., was on a card in a sealed envelope, the monitor read out coordinates, and the participants appear only as monitor and subject. The subject describes huge smooth stone walls, pyramid-like structures and tall, thin, ancient people sheltering in a dying world, with one group leaving in a rounded metallic vessel. McMoneagle says he was the viewer, that Defense Department visitors brought the target, and that he later obtained photographs of the coordinates and saw what he had described.
The 1995 evaluation: an effect in the lab, no use in the field
The CIA contracted the American Institutes for Research, and its report, An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications, is dated September 29, 1995. It found a statistically significant laboratory effect, meaning hits occurred more often than chance, though the experiments did not explain the phenomenon. On operations, evaluators interviewed users, viewers and the program manager. They found the reports broad, vague and inconsistent between viewers, with no case in which the information guided an intelligence operation, and concluded that continued operational use was not warranted.
Utts and Hyman: same data, different conclusions
The report included two outside reviews of the laboratory work. Jessica Utts, a UC Davis statistician, concluded that psychic functioning had been well established by the standards applied to other sciences. Ray Hyman, a University of Oregon psychologist, took the critical side. He agreed that the later experiments avoided the flaws of the early SRI work and that the effect sizes were too large and consistent to be flukes. But he held that statistics alone do not show anomalous cognition, that hidden flaws could not be ruled out, and that results had to hold across judges and laboratories.
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 was the first one recruited for the Stargate program, which back then was called Gondola Wish at the time. So they assigned me 001. When they recruited the second guy, they realized if he got 002, they'd be telling everybody how many viewers they had. So he got three something, 375 or something. So I was the only one with a double zero.”
“They asked us about remote viewing. They actually pulled [Puthoff and Targ's] book out of a briefcase and put it on the table and said, 'What do we do to protect ourselves from this?' That was a keynote day in my life and was the beginning of the next 10 years in my life in becoming involved in a US government counterintelligence effort in remote viewing.”
“So in 1977 I met Bob Monroe. Now, at that time this was all deeply classified, not declassified until 1995. So in 1977, when I met Mr. Monroe, I couldn't say to him, 'Gee, I trained psychic spies for the government, how would your system work?' I could not say those words to him. But I did develop a friendship and a rapport, and he described his technology, allowed me to experience that technology, and eventually we wound up training some of our remote viewers in this Hemi-Sync process.”
“Well, we talked the military into hiring Bob to try to help me with my cooldown period, and they were secondarily interested in whether or not I could actually learn to control my [out-of-body experiences]. They saw that as a probable secondary targeting mechanism. So I came, and I started coming to the Institute on a regular basis. I would come on long weekends for approximately 14 months.”
“I ripped the end off and pulled out a sheet of paper, and it said 'Mars, 1 million BC.' Which is, like, now I got to tell you, I hate, I hate these targets. They're like UFO targets. I don't like UFO targets because how am I going to know whether I got something valid or invented it? You can't tell unless you have some form of feedback.”
“One is that the remote viewer and whoever the interviewer is in the room with the remote viewer have to be totally blind to the target, meaning they can't have any possibility of knowing what the target is. The target itself, the person who selects the targets or controls the target pool, cannot participate in any of the other parts of the experiment.”
“You have the paradox of great value with little accuracy. This is the very essence of why RV-developed information isn't, and shouldn't be, used as stand-alone material. In an industrial or criminal investigative scenario, or in any other mode of application, RV is unlikely to ever exceed the accuracy expected in research. Statistically, the very best world-class remote viewers under laboratory conditions tend to run 50/50 as to whether they are on or off target.”
Important things to consider
Laboratory results and field use are separate questions
The evaluators judged them separately and reached different verdicts: a statistically significant laboratory effect, but no operational value. McMoneagle draws a similar line. Research scores everything a viewer says against the target, while intelligence collection can prize one correct detail nobody knew, which is why he says viewer reports should never stand alone.
A target you cannot check needs feedback
The Mars session shows what a viewer reported, not whether it was right. A target a million years back on another planet offers no photograph or building to compare, and McMoneagle says that is why he dislikes such targets. His account of matching Jet Propulsion Laboratory photographs to his description is his recollection; the transcript itself carries no names and no feedback.
Dates drift in recollection
McMoneagle dates his introduction to Monroe to about 1979 and, in his 1996 article, says his office proposed a one-year arrangement with Monroe before 1983. He places the Mars session in the middle of his fourteen months in the lab, yet the transcript is dated May 1984. Either the lab period came years after the introduction or a date is off. Use dated records for chronology and participants for what the work was like.
Not everyone becomes a viewer
McMoneagle wrote in 1996 that remote viewing is probably a talent, like athletics or music, and rejected claims that anyone can become an exceptional viewer or that accuracy runs 95 percent. Atwater tells prospective students that a Monroe program is not a switch that turns remote viewing on, though it is a good experience.
Stargate is not the Gateway Experience
The Gateway Experience albums and the Gateway Voyage are consciousness-exploration programs, not military remote-viewing courses, and no Army record turns every Gateway exercise into a remote-viewing test. Remote viewing at the Institute is a separate seminar built on targets, monitors and blind judging. The overlap is in people and method: Hemi-Sync and trained attention.
Popular retellings add claims the record does not
Podcasts and videos about Stargate often add hidden bases, UFO sessions and the Ark of the Covenant. Those stories rest on individual recollections, sometimes secondhand, and are not part of the 1995 evaluation. Weigh them as stories, not findings.
Common questions
What was Project Stargate?
Stargate is the popular name for the U.S. government's remote-viewing research and intelligence program. The CIA says it began its own research in the summer of 1972 and handed the program to the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1977. An Army unit at Fort Meade, Maryland, recruited and trained viewers and tasked them with intelligence targets under code names including Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane and Sun Streak; the DIA's version was called Star Gate. Participants describe the effort as running from the late 1970s to 1995. It was declassified that year, and after an outside evaluation the CIA decided not to continue it.
How is the Monroe Institute connected to Stargate?
Through people and through the lab. Skip Atwater, who handled operations and training for the remote-viewing unit, met Bob Monroe in 1977, looked into Hemi-Sync as a training method and eventually had some of the unit's viewers trained with it. Joe McMoneagle, Remote Viewer 001, spent about fourteen months of long weekends in Monroe's lab under an Army arrangement, working on faster mental clearing between sessions and on controlling out-of-body experiences. An Army officer also wrote a 1983 assessment of the Gateway process. Atwater joined the Institute staff in 1988, served as its research director and later became its president, and McMoneagle teaches its remote viewing program.
What happened in the 1984 Mars remote viewing session?
A session dated May 22, 1984 targeted Mars about one million years B.C. The target was in a sealed envelope, and the transcript labels the participants only as monitor and subject. The subject describes huge smooth stone walls, pyramid-like structures and tall, thin, ancient people waiting in shelters as their world died, with one group leaving in a rounded metallic vessel. McMoneagle says he was the viewer, that Defense Department visitors brought the target to Monroe's lab, and that he later obtained photographs of the coordinates and saw what he had described. He also says he dislikes such targets because they cannot be checked without feedback.
Did the government conclude that remote viewing works?
No. In 1995 the American Institutes for Research evaluated the program for the CIA. It reported a statistically significant laboratory effect, meaning hits occurred more often than chance, but found no case in which remote viewing had guided an intelligence operation and concluded that continued operational use was not warranted. The CIA did not restart the program. The outside reviewers disagreed: Jessica Utts said psychic functioning had been well established, while Ray Hyman said statistics alone do not show it. McMoneagle noted in 1996 that the report called the basic research good, and he agrees viewer reports should not stand alone as intelligence.
How is remote viewing different from the Gateway Experience or an out-of-body experience?
McMoneagle defines remote viewing as describing or drawing a place, person or thing you have no prior knowledge of, under controls: the viewer and monitor are blind to the target, someone else picks it and someone else judges the result. The Gateway Experience is a set of Hemi-Sync exercises for exploring Focus levels; its reports are personal experience, not scored against hidden targets. An out-of-body experience is a reported sensation of being outside the body. McMoneagle says out-of-body work is harder to use for collecting information because the traveler gets distracted, while remote viewing is faster, though the Army treated out-of-body control as a possible secondary targeting method.
Can I learn remote viewing at the Monroe Institute?
The Institute has offered a residential remote viewing program taught by Joe McMoneagle, who took over from Skip Atwater. One 2024 attendee describes learning to work as viewer, monitor and analyst. McMoneagle's own caution is that remote viewing is probably a talent, like athletics or music, so results vary, and he says 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. Check the Institute's current schedule, because programs and instructors change.
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