Joe McMoneagle

 Background. 

Joe McMoneagle (1946- ), a distinguished American Army officer, now retired, has been described as “the best Operational Remote Viewer in the history of the U.S. Army’s Special Project – Star Gate” (McMoneagle, 2002, front page). He was selected for the remote viewing project by the army because he was one of the small group of people who kept surviving the most dangerous situations against all odds in various ways, somehow “knowing” when something was about to happen in a particular location, to the point when others would mimic his actions in the field.

After graduating from high school, McMoneagle joined the US Army. In 1978 he took part in a trial of psychic ability carried out on  behalf of the Army by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute. He was one of six people selected for the project of remote viewing (generally now known as Star Gate), and this was the beginning of his career as a ‘remote viewer’ in the military, working on operational requests from various bodies, including CIA, FBI, Army Intelligence and a number of other agencies. He retired from his career in the army after 13 years, with the Legion of Merit Award for distinguished military service. (McMoneagle, 2006) His task as a remote viewer in the Star Gate programme was to locate and describe military and other facilities using geographical coordinates as targets, and to provide detailed descriptions of devices kept inside such facilities. The case described below is probably his most famous exploit and provides a detailed account of the process.

 The case of the Typhoon Submarine: seeing the present and the future 

There are many accurate accounts of the viewing of the Typhoon submarine, probably the best known, most detailed and perhaps the most astounding case of remote viewing. The one given here is based on that by Paul Smith, another famous remote viewer, a military “outsider” who later became an “insider” (Smith, 2015, pp. 45-63):

The story of the remote viewing of the Typhoon is not hearsay. It is not just another old “war story” that my fellow Star Gate remote viewers and I expect you to believe just on our say-so. The provenance (the chain of custody) for this information is impeccable. Copies of nearly all the original documents that still exist became available when the CIA publicly released the Star Gate project’s archives in 2004. Until then they had been in the protective custody of the CIA. The account I have given in this book of the remote viewing of the Typhoon is authentic, taken from the actual records and not from anyone’s faulty memory.”

There were 10 remote viewing sessions over 2 months in the autumn of 1979. They were aimed at discovering what was happening inside the building at Shipyard 402 on the White Sea in what was then the Soviet Union.

The remote viewers were Joe McMoneagle and Hartleigh Trent. They reported that inside the building the Russians were building submarines. This was regarded as impossible, because the building had no access to water, while the submarine described by Joe was  totally unlike any known submarines: twice the size of anything that existed, built against the principles of naval architecture, with missile tubes in the “wrong” place. The National Security Council dismissed the data as fantasy.

However, soon after, an enormous canal was excavated between the building and the water, and almost 11 months after the remote viewing sessions the first Typhoon super submarine, of the new design precisely as described by Joe McMoneagle, was photographed in the new canal alongside the building on 28 September 1980. In the words of Paul Smith:

“At the time, I was serving as the strategic intelligence officer for the Special Forces command in Germany and had not yet even so much as heard the term “remote viewing.” It was my job to review … the latest top-secret intelligence obtained by the Special Security Office in Munich. I still recall the almost panicked tone of the intelligence cables and briefs I read and passed on to the colonel. The Soviets had outmaneuvered the Western intelligence services, taking them completely by surprise, and both sides knew it.”

In this case we also learn about the process of remote viewing, from Joe McMoneagle himself (McMoneagle, 2006, p. 124). His first target was a set of geographic coordinates from which he was able to describe the location and the facility. He “saw” the right place, a cold wasteland with ice, rocks, a very large industrial building and a harbour and sea with ice caps in the distance. Next he was given a photograph of a large building of industrial type, near a large body of water, with general materials stacked outside, located somewhere in Russia (it later turned out to be Severodvinsk on the White Sea (p. 121). As he describes it: “Spending a considerable amount of time relaxing and trying to empty my mind, I imagined myself drifting down and slowly passing through the shed-like roof to the inside of the structure. … I felt as though I was hovering inside a building that was the size of two and a half to three shopping centers, all under one roof. I had completely misconstrued the size of the building … [here McMoneagle gives a detailed description of the inside, of giant bays between walls, scaffolding, interlocking steel pipes, cylinders being welded…] … I felt as though I were standing inside the building and able to actually see vividly what was going on. This rarely occurs in remote viewing, but for some reason it was happening on this target … “My vision of the target was so precise that it almost seemed unreal. … I had an overwhelming sense that this was a submarine, a really big one, with twin hulls”.

 The case of the kidnapped general 

This ability to focus extends to pinpointing the location of a kidnapped general and being aware of his thoughts. Brigadier General James Dozier, deputy chief of staff at NATO headquarters in Italy in Verona had been abducted in December 1981 by members of the Italian Red Brigade. Three remote viewers, including Joe, were charged with trying to locate him. They were given a picture of Dozier; initially they were not totally accurate about the course of the kidnapping, but all gave similar accounts. They targeted the general over a number of days and had similar impressions: “We all reported him alive and having his eyes and mouth taped shut, with a set of earphones taped over his ears, as if he were being forced to listen to music he didn’t like.”

A later, very successful session by McMoneagle started “… with an almost perfect image of a coastline the right-hand side of Italy towards the north”. It was followed by vivid images, which felt as if he was floating over the area, able to see what he wanted to see. He seemed to be following in the footsteps of the kidnappers:

“I suddenly found myself hovering directly over a fairly large town not far from the coast and just south and southeast of a very large mountain range. I moved closer to the ground and began to pick out roadways and buildings. I followed the roads and eventually found myself near a small central plaza, across from some kind of a fountain, and picked up the smells of a butcher shop, and the faint hint of a place where they did some kind of tanning or worked with hides. I got an image of a very large apartment building and settled in on the second floor. I came out of the session knowing that I could pretty much replicate the images and streets that I had seen.” McMoneagle produced a regional map that was specific enough to identify the city as Padua. He then sketched a rough street map, pointing out the location of the apartment house where the kidnapped general was being held on the second floor.

General Dozier was released unharmed from an apartment in Padua after 42 days (not on the basis of the information provided by remote viewers, which was not used). However, the General judged their viewing accurate, especially stunning in “thought-content”, the personal aspect: “information in our reports had originated within his own thoughts while he was being held – blindfolded, tape across his mouth, being forced to listen to hard rock, heavy-metal music through headsets … (McMoneagle, 2006 pp. 116-120).

McMoneagle also successfully finds missing persons and on at least two occasions accurately locates dead bodies, very much like Jackowski.  This is something which was done spectacularly on one occasion by Stefan Ossowiecki, although he is more famous for other things.

The Mind At Large

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