The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy

by Joseph McMoneagle

  It was then and still is my opinion that remote viewing is the greatest threat to my nation, and at the same time, possibly the single greatest discovery in our species' history. Remote viewing, when used correctly, has a capacity to make extensively destructive and creative contributions in our development.

  Back then, I had a responsibility to my commander, to the United States Army, and, ultimately, the population which I was sworn to defend. I chose to carry out that responsibility in spite of the issues I knew loomed on the horizon. Maybe reading this book will give some insight as to why I made that decision and why I feel even now that it was a good one.

  Acknowledgements

  This book would never have been possible if it were not for the contributions and efforts of a number of my closest and dearest friends. I need to thank Edwin May, who is my colleague and the brother I never had. Barbara Bowen, who is not only my friend, but is also about the best agent and editor one could ever hope for. And, to Palyne Gaenir, I owe a special thank-you. Your friendship can only be equaled by your frank and open honesty. Please don't ever stop being the person you are.

  Once in a great while someone comes along who can do magic with written words. I am eternally grateful to Frank DeMarco for working his magic on my manuscript. I will always envy your power with words and try to learn from you.

  Of course, no writer on the planet could or would ever finish a manuscript without the never-ending support of their significant other. My lovely wife, Nancy, and her unconditional love and emotional nourishment are the only reasons this book now exists in time/space form. Thank you for always being there. I could not have done it without you.

  And finally, I give thanks to all of you out there who continue to investigate and pursue remote viewing within the appropriate boundaries and protocols, and with a healthy skepticism. It's a difficult task you set for yourself. You constantly walk the razor's edge, somewhere between oversell and undersell, reviled by those who believe too much about it and criticized by those who lack the gift of an open mind

  Introduction

  By Edwin C. May, Ph.D.

  During my career as a research scientist, which now spans three decades, I have encountered many psychics. They range from self-professed yogis in India or New Age hopefuls to self-denied individuals who would never admit to being psychic yet can "knock your socks off" in double-blind laboratory tests or field operations. A precious few survive the rigors of scientific validation and among those that do, Joseph W. McMoneagle is the best, by far.

  I first met Joe in 1979 when he was part of a team of six people who were sent by the U. S. Army as part of a "technology transfer" program at SRI International. What that actually meant, when stripped of its military jargon, was that we were to test all six people for their possible remote viewing ability using a double-blind (that is neither the viewer nor anyone in contact with the viewer knows the target), scientifically valid protocol. When it was Joe's turn, my colleague Hal Puthoff served as a "beacon" person and for each of six days stood at a different randomly chosen location for about 15 minutes. Joe was supposed to describe the surroundings where Hal was standing using only his mental impressions.

  Determining whether Joe had any remote viewing ability required a fair and independent judge who was required to pick the target from a set of six locations, only one of which was correct. Naturally, the judge must not know the answer until after his or her assessment. I was that judge for Joe. The results were far different than chance would allow, and the series of six remote viewings were the best of that set of Army people. That began what is now a 24year-long partnership in trying to understand how psychic abilities work and how they may be improved.

  In the very beginning of Stargate Chroniclesi, Joe expresses frustration over the lack of good scientific protocols, which is unfortunately all too common with some of the material that purports to pass as valid remote viewing that can be found on the World Wide Web. Joe is especially qualified to speak on these matters because in addition to his contribution as a test subject, he has also evolved to be a fully qualified, contributing researcher. To my knowledge, Joe is the only "subject" to qualify as a full member of the Parapsychological Association, or PA for short, an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The PA is a professional organization with rigorous and strict entrance requirements.

  I found reading Stargate Chronicles a special treat. Joe gives us a remarkable and candid glimpse into not only his multifaceted career but equally as important, he shares an intimate view of the many trials, tribulations, and successes of his personal life. It is clear from Joe's writing that there are many more interesting, important and sometimes quite funny stories to be told, but we will have to wait for further books.

  From my perspective as Joe's close friend and co-researcher, two things emerge from the Stargate Chronicles. First and perhaps foremost is the very complexity of psychic functioning that range from technical details for a good experiment to critical psychological factors. We have seen all too often that some people become consumed by the process and in some way "go off the deep end." In this regard, Joe is as comfortable with his failures as he is with his successes and takes the psychic process in stride. We joke together about being on "ego" watch, and Joe has given me permission for the two-by-four cure: That is, a whack on the head if I ever see him losing it.

  Second, while not directly stated, Stargate Chronicles displays for us the immense personal and physical sacrifice and hard work that is required to become the top in your field. Of course, we would expect that this is true for nearly all exceptional-human performance. Consider a football star or a virtuoso violinist.

  What separates Joe as a psychic from the pack is the detailed and independent evaluation, both in the laboratory and in the field. To be scientifically valid, it is insufficient to hang out a shingle as a self-declared practicing psychic. Rather, the psychic material must be submitted for critical analysis and the results published in peer-reviewed journals.

  In the real world of intelligence applications, scientific evaluation is much more difficult. Joe gives two examples where a military client tested an intelligence operation where 100 percent of "ground truth" was known. Joe scored exceptionally well on an electron accelerator target and support activity and on a high-energy microwave device. The best testimony for his excellence in real operations using remote viewing is Joe's Legion of Merit Award. At his retirement from the army, he was given this honor for providing a vast amount of accurate and useful material to the intelligence community.

  In short, Joseph W. McMoneagle is the most tested and certified psychic in history. In Stargate Chronicles, Joe tells the sometimes-tortured, sometimes-joyous, but always fascinating story of how he got there.

  —Edwin C. May, Ph. D., president,

  The Laboratories for Fundamental Research,

  Palo Alto, California

  Chapter One

  Childhood: Troubles and Experience

  I'm selecting 1962 as a starting point, but only for describing the things as far back as I can remember, which occurred much earlier. If I tried a point of recall further back than that, the complexities of detail would become mired in the fog of developmental childhood emotions. I do remember things from earlier, but my relatives disbelieved this, convinced that I had to have been too young.

  One of my favorite people was my twin sister's namesake, my Aunt Margaret. One afternoon in the summer of 1962, just past my sixteenth birthday, we were talking about memory, and how much one could or could not remember, a more than interesting topic to me no because much later in life, she suffered from Alzheimer's disease.

  I said that I could remember when she held me as a small baby, something she said she could not believe. I told her my memory included being held in her arms while lying on my back, which would have made me less than a year old. I distinctly remember looking up at her face and her gentle smile. I remember having a feeling that this was someone who w
as protection, someone who loved me a great deal. To underscore the event, I remarked that I also remembered seeing her dressed at the time in a totally white outfit with a very large wide-brimmed hat made of white straw. This was unusual, because otherwise I had no recall of ever seeing her wearing a hat of any kind at any other time. I said the hat was distinctive, because the sparkles of sunlight were coming through the small woven holes, reflecting light as through the facets of hundreds of diamonds.

  She laughed and accused me of inventing the memory. I insisted that the event took place out of doors, because I remembered the bright sunlight as being directly in my face at times. She humored me, while impressing on me the fact that she had never even owned an all-white straw hat.

  Some weeks later, I received a phone call from her. She said if I would stop by for a few minutes, she had something she wanted to share with me. She wouldn't tell me over the phone what it was, which of course made it all sound quite mysterious—especially as I didn't even recall our previous discussion.

  I arrived at her house after school the following day and she made a big deal out of pulling a small suitcase down from the upper shelf of a closet. Then she retrieved a photograph from the large pile contained within. She told me she had come across the picture quite by accident while looking for something else. She passed it to me with shaking hands.

  I was stunned by what I saw. She was standing in the center of the photograph, holding my twin sister and me in her right and left arms. The photograph was in color, which was unusual for the period, and my aunt was dressed completely in white, wearing a wide-brimmed, finely woven, straw hat, which was also entirely white. A penciled note on the back said it was the day my sister and I were christened. We were a little less than three months old. She said it had been noon when the picture was taken and someone had loaned her the hat in order to keep our faces in the shade.

  I think this shocked my aunt more than it did me. But what it did to me was interesting. Seeing the picture was like having a lightning bolt discharged through my head. It woke up a part of my mind I had never experienced. Suddenly I was filled with dozens if not hundreds of images, flashes of things remembered, and flashes of things that made absolutely no sense to me. Images that I had not had until that moment. Many of these images were commonplace, but some were frightening in their context. It was as if the doorway to my earliest memories was suddenly opened. As if by magic, I had sudden recall of events previously blocked from my perception.

  I know that for some this would not be a significant event. But for someone who had nearly a complete block to memories prior to age five, this was a significant development.

  I suddenly found myself recalling with near-perfect and vivid imagery my time as a three-year-old on my grandfather's farm in Stone Mountain, Georgia. I could remember the colors of the walls in the small wood-framed house, the floor layout of the farmhouse, even the direction you needed to walk to get to the truck garden, the barn, and cornfields. I vividly remembered the smell inside the barn, the odor of my grandfather's mules, the stink of the chicken coop—even the open and rank septic field behind the farmhouse. I had instant recall of the sound of the hand-cranked corncob stripper, the kindling popping in the wood stove in the kitchen, picking bugs from the spinach plants in the garden, collecting doodlebugs in the warm sandy soil under the porch, and my grandmother's homemade pies—especially rhubarb. I could even see, floating in front of me, the bent nail on which my grandfather hung his hat by the kitchen door.

  Memories of fishing off an old dock in a mountain pond behind my aunt and uncle's cabin in Franklin, North Carolina, jumped into sparkling clarity: the long, tall timbers that supported the rear room 25 feet up the slope; me, sitting on the dock, holding a small stick with a couple of yards of white cotton string and a safety pin for a hook. I spent a lot of time feeding small balls of bread dough to the tiny fish I now know as bream, until I fell asleep. When I had woken up, they were cooking fish in the kitchen, fish they told me I had caught. (I was four when we visited there the first time, so I believed them.)

  At one point I remember being given a small plastic shovel, a hoe, and a rake. They told me to go out and dig for gold along the circular drive in the front of the cabin. (Unfortunately, I have no recall of finding any.)

  There were other images and feelings, not quite so comforting. I remember being less than four years of age and being forcefully held down and tied by my ankles and wrists, spread-eagle on my back, while faceless beings with large eyes operated on me. The pain was incredible and indescribable. I remember screaming until I blacked out, then awakening to find them still working on me, and screaming again to unconsciousness. I woke up in a box, very much like a cage. There were bars all around me and heavy netting was stretched across the top. I could pull myself up, but was unable to break out. My legs were wobbly and weak, I hurt terribly, my small body awash with pain, and I screamed until I was too hoarse to scream any longer. Beyond that the images fade.

  Of course, I didn't speak of these images to my aunt. They were too disturbing, too terrifying to contemplate. I tried to rebury them, but was unable to do so. Those images haunted me for years. I would have repetitive nightmares in which I was reliving those images and memories. Huge entities, wearing one-piece suits, with no faces and large eyes, would come in the night and take me screaming to a brightly lit room, where I would be secured spread-eagle on my back. Large nails would be driven into my arms, then I could feel the excruciating pain. My body would be awash with it until I blacked out in my dream, or awoke from the recurring nightmare soaked in sweat.

  It wasn't until I returned from my first tour to Southeast Asia that I finally brought it up with my parents. My mother was shocked. She said the doctors had promised her that I would never have recall of the experience because I was far too young when it happened. She then related the events surrounding major surgery I had had when I was less than four years of age. It was corrective surgery, a result of being born more than two months premature.

  When I came into the world, I weighed in at around a pound and twelve ounces, while my twin, Margaret, tipped the scales at a pound and a half. Back in January of 1946 we were not supposed to survive. If it were not for the heroic efforts of our family doctor, Robert Mayer, we probably would not have. In any event, I ended up needing surgery. Back then there apparently were questions in the minds of some doctors regarding how much pain medication should be given to such a tiny child. The consensus was, far better too little than too much. The belief was that really young children would never remember the experience anyway. Well, guess what? They were wrong.

  The immediate effect of these recalled memories was terrifying, mystifying, as well as mind-expanding. Before long, I was recalling whole periods and events. I found that I was also linking the events I was remembering to their long-term effects, events occurring at ages when I was too young to understand, or too young to know.

  Was this an effect of reevaluating memories with an adolescent mind? Or was this psychic knowing kicking in early? Back then I didn't know anything about psychic functioning. I only knew that I was having large amounts of recall, some good and some bad. So, I shared it with the only person I could wholly trust, my twin.

  My mother was a complex person. Originally she wouldn't touch alcohol. I could see from a very early age that she understood the effects that alcohol had on a person, and she was determined to protect her children from it. She was also extremely intelligent. A straight-A student throughout high school, she should have gone to college and become a teacher or pursued a career in the humanities. She had so much natural talent with art and literature, and in the early years so enjoyed music. All through high school she was a majorette, and was very involved in music and the arts. I still have all of her state merit and honor roll pins for writing and dissertation. I thank her for whatever smarts or natural abilities I was born with.

  Anyone who knew her would tell you that her only problem in life was falling
deeply in love with my father. She had just turned eighteen, and my father was 27 when they married. He met her at Burdines Department Store in Miami, where he worked in the furniture department. They met one Christmas season while she was working part-time as a gift-wrapper. They fell passionately in love and were married almost immediately. As a result, my sister and I arrived within a year.

  As a new mother, she was terrified. I think she realized too late that she was never going to be able to change my father. Because he lacked a formal education and was an alcoholic, he was never going to do any better than he had already done—stock clerk in a department store. There is nothing wrong with that, except that it guaranteed a permanent minimal income, living in "the projects" (what most call slums), and ugly battles over booze. I believe it was in the middle of this realization that she suddenly found herself a brand-new mother of twins.

  For years I truly hated my mother. I hated her for her relentless and dogged pursuit of discipline and control, and for her overly protective attitude. She watched me and my twin like a mother panther watches her young. As a result, she was always tougher on us than she would have been with a stranger's child.

  Being young, with no understanding of what was really going on, I couldn't see the fear in her eyes every time my sister or I went out in the yard to play. Five-year-olds have little appreciation for the dangers associated with growing up in a slum. The metal framework in the duplex windows was designed to prevent easy access to our bedrooms. Those invulnerable barred windows and the heavy door bolts and crossbars at the points of entry to our abode were meaningless to me. I thought everyone lived that way.