Perceptions of a Paranormal Subject

Editor’s Note. The following paper is based on a dinner address Mr. McMoneagle presented at the annual banquet of the Rhine Research Center on February 21, 1997. It is being published in the Journal at my invitation. The Journal does not ordinarily publish experientially-based papers authored by psychic practitioners. However, an exception has been made in this case because, in my opinion, Mr. McMoneagle has unusual, detailed insight into the process of his remote viewing, as well as an exceptional ability to articulate that insight. Because remote viewing is one of parapsychology’s foremost research paradigms, such an account could be especially valuable to researchers as well as to others interested in the topic. Of course, the degree to which Mr. McMoneagle’s experience generalizes to other successful remote viewers remains to be seen. Remote viewing has had much exposure in the media since November 1995. For those who have never heard of remote viewing, it is the ability of a subject to describe a target person, place, object, or event of which they have no knowledge, regardless of distance or time. The difference between remote viewing and any other psychic functioning is that remote viewing is always done under rigorous scientific control. Within a research program, the intended target for a remote viewing is randomly chosen from a pre-set or pre-selected group of targets. The target is unknown to all participants within the actual experiment, and the results are independently judged by someone who has not been privy to or part of the information collection process. Unfortunately, even these simple but well-established distinctions between remote viewing and other psychic functioning have been generally ignored or overlooked by the media. This probably results from the near feeding frenzy generated by the Central Intelligence Agency’s disclosure of their use of remote viewing for intelligence collection purposes. As a result of this disclosure, I am now allowed to refer to this project, which is known as Stargate. Stargate actually began on or about October 1978, as Project Grillflame, a Department of Defense initiative designed to see if potentially psychic Army personnel could be identified, trained, and used to collect intelligence information through psychic means. (An additional focus of the project was trying to determine what the Soviets and Chinese were doing in their own efforts at paranormal research.) Over the course of 17 years, the program was also known as Centerlane and Sunstreak; it became Stargate under the aegis of the Defense Intelligence Agency. After 17 years of operating in the shadows, public exposure of the program was disclosed as a result of the American Institutes for Research report dated September 29, 1995, which was delivered unclassified to the U.S. Congress in November, 1995. This report was compiled at the request of the CIA, which had the task of evaluating the program prior to assuming management authority of the program from the Defense Intelligence Agency. Although the report findings were generally negative, it did bring the extent of the project to light. I will not go into a lot of reasons why I believe this report to be totally bogus, other than to say quite simply that it commented on the efficacy of remote viewing for intelligence collection without reviewing 99 percent of the intelligence material collected by remote viewing. I believe this to be an unconscionable action. In other words, they tried to sweep under the rug, without comment, 17 years of support to nearly all the intelligence agencies in America. Nevertheless, the media – many of whom still blindly and irrationally support the deficient AIR report – and even some short-term participants in the project have created a rather foggy picture of what remote viewing is. In some cases, they are even presenting remote viewing as something it is not. It is not a panacea, nor is it a solution for the difficulties of gathering certain kinds of information.