Joseph McMoneagle is a former United States Army officer who worked as a practitioner of Remote Viewing (RV) within the US military’s Project STARGATE programme, where he was designated remote viewer number 001.1 Within that role, he is credited with helping the United States Army locate hostages held in Iran2 and with pointing Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers to a shortwave radio concealed inside the pocket calculator of a suspected KGB agent captured in South Africa.3 McMoneagle told the Washington Post that he took part in approximately 450 missions between 1978 and 1984.4
At the outset of Project STARGATE, considerable effort was made to ensure the psychological stability of participants through testing, multiple interviews, and a long-term vetting process.5 That vetting process was later dropped in order to reduce costs,6 and McMoneagle has said that, in more than one case, this left previously stable participants stripped of their psychological boundaries and emotionally or mentally unstable.7 He has acknowledged that he has personally been at risk of falling into self-delusion regarding remote viewing on more than one occasion, and expects it may happen again.8 According to McMoneagle, Edwin C. May remarked in an interview on “Put to the Test” that some of McMoneagle’s drawings were a near-perfect match for the target,9 separately estimating that McMoneagle provided spectacular detail in remote viewing about twenty percent of the time - “as close to a miracle as scientists can get” -10 and putting his overall target hit rate at around sixty to sixty-five percent.11
McMoneagle also became a full-time research associate and partner with Cognitive Sciences Laboratory The Laboratories for Fundamental Research in Palo Alto, California, providing consulting support to remote viewing research and development.12 He has said that the phrase “perform well”, used in Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ’s SRI International report, did not imply world-class remote viewing ability but rather the capacity to display psychic functioning under controlled conditions with a better-than-chance result.13 He also operated Inc. Intuitive Intelligence Applications, through which around twenty percent of those who contacted his office were seeking help regaining stable pre-exposure attitudes after their own involvement in remote viewing; McMoneagle, who is not a psychiatrist or psychologist, referred them to qualified counsellors.14 He lived in Nelliesford, Virginia, the same location as The Monroe Institute.15 In his 2013 book Remote Viewing Secrets, he laid out a system of remote viewing skill levels modelled on the belt-ranking structure of the martial arts, referred to as “RV’do”;16 by that year he had studied both martial arts and remote viewing for more than twenty years.17
McMoneagle’s writing also sets out remote viewing protocol. In the Outbounder Remote Viewing protocol, a monitor may sit with the viewer to help with collection methodology or ensure adherence to protocol, but never to guide or lead the session,18 while a separate evaluator judges the collected material and has no contact with the outbounder team until analysis is complete.19 He recommended blind targeting, keeping a viewer blind to the entire target so the resulting ground plan could be compared against the real target for verification,20 and taught front-loading - handling advance knowledge of a target - as a distinct skill area at an advanced stage of his RV’do system.21 The Coordinate Remote Viewing protocol, he wrote, differs from Outbounder Remote Viewing only in the absence of an outbounder at the target site and in how feedback is delivered to the viewer.22 On UFOs specifically, McMoneagle said such targets usually make poor subjects for remote viewing23 and that, in his experience, the likelihood of a UFO-related statement obtained through remote viewing being correct was very close to zero.24 He considered remote viewing generally not well suited to phenomenological or unverifiable targets such as UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, or Sasquatch,25 though he was not opposed in principle to targeting possible sites of downed UFOs or crop circles, since verifiable information might still turn up as feedback.26 He also believed that almost any form of meditation could help develop the ability to be a good remote viewer.27
According to podcast host Chris Ramsay, McMoneagle was sent on weekend retreats to the Monroe Institute during his time on the Stargate Project to test whether leaving his body would make his remote viewing sessions more accurate,28 travelling there from Fort Meade at weekends for Out-of-Body Experience (OBE) training.29 Ramsay has recounted a session, described to him by both McMoneagle and Edwin C. May, in which experimenters placed ping-pong balls over McMoneagle’s eyes to produce a Ganzfeld effect intended to induce an out-of-body state, before asking him to view a photograph sealed in an envelope in another room;30 unable to interact with the envelope physically, McMoneagle instead projected to where the photograph had been taken and produced a drawing said to match it exactly.31 Julia Mossbridge has noted that McMoneagle could produce matching drawings of target photographs without going out of body, which she said makes the out-of-body result hard to interpret,32 and understood McMoneagle to have felt that leaving his body did not help his remote viewing very much.33 Ramsay has said he initially disbelieved McMoneagle’s account of leaving his body, suspecting he was misinterpreting a dream, until he had an out-of-body experience of his own;34 he has said he regards McMoneagle as having been very good at remote viewing, and believes he still is.35
Luis Elizondo has recounted that McMoneagle was told by one senator that he was doing the work of the devil and would burn in the fires of hell, and separately by another lawmaker that he was doing God’s work.36 Mossbridge has separately recalled hearing a story, which she believed came from Edwin C. May but possibly from McMoneagle himself, that in the 1990s Russian counterparts told their American opposite numbers “you killed all your psychics”, a remark she understood to refer to Pat Price.37