18-minute reading time

Richard Thieme. (2001). Interview with Joe McMoneagle, Remote Viewer. ThiemeWorks

Who is Joe McMonagle?

I think ETs are a teaching tool for expanding the sophistication of how we view sentient beings and the universe at large.

Wikipedia
Joe McMoneagle (born January 10, 1946, in Miami, Florida) is a retired U.S. Army NCO and Chief Warrant Officer. He was involved in “remote viewing” (RV) operations and experiments conducted by U.S. Army intelligence and the Stanford Research Institute. He was among the first personnel recruited for the classified program now known as the Stargate Project (1978 – 95). Along with colleague Ingo Swann, McMoneagle is best known for claims surrounding the investigation of RV and the use of paranormal abilities for military intelligence gathering. His interests also include near-death experiences, out of body travel, and unidentified flying objects.

Back Cover Blurb
Joseph McMoneagle is now known as the best Operational Remote Viewer in the history of the U.S. Army’s Special Project Stargate. His intelligence collection results have never been surpassed and rarely equaled. Among his achievements:

• He described the interior of a top-secret Soviet manufacturing plant and accurately predicted a new class of submarine under construction there.
• He sketched the location and described the thoughts of a kidnapped U.S. Army General being held by the Red Brigade in Northern Italy.
• Nearly a year in advance he accurately predicted when Skylab would leave orbit and where it would impact on the Earth’s surface.
• After conventional reconnaissance failed, he and others were able to locate a downed Soviet bomber that had been carrying nuclear materials.

He achieved these results using scientifically designed and tested double-blind protocols. And in the years since his retirement he has continued to demonstrate these abilities on camera for national television in three countries, in the lab at the famed Monroe Institute, and for private companies.

McMoneagle gets radiation burn from UFO encounter in 1966

RT: The people I speak to seem to accept the extraterrestrial hypothesis as the least unlikely, and when so many people of this caliber take it seriously, I am suggesting that we should too… how would you define your understanding of or relationship to UFO phenomena?

Our perception was that it shot over the horizon very quickly, almost instantaneously, but in retrospect it could have just folded out of time-space too.

JM:  I have two levels of experience. One is through remote viewing. The other is what I personally experienced. In 1966 in the Bahamas I had a UFO experience – an unidentified flying or at least hovering object that had a profound impact on me. There were physiological effects. I wound up getting a really bad sunburn from it. I was working on an island called Eleuthera, a downrange missile tracking site from Canaveral, and my partner and I were heading back toward quarters, taking a shortcut across the sand dunes. It was about 12:30 in the morning and the whole place lit up like high noon, as if the sun had come up. We looked up to see where the source of the light was and it was a very large disc, an oblique disc, probably fourteen hundred feet above us, going in a sort of start-stop fashion. It was intriguing, because it was very much there – you could see panel lines in it and dimples and opaque sections – it was very very bright, you had to squint – and all sound went away, it was like being in a bell jar. After about fifteen seconds, our perception was that it shot over the horizon very quickly, almost instantaneously, but in retrospect it could have just folded out of time-space too. He and I went back up to the club and had a few beers and talked about it. We decided we weren’t going to report it because we were in the military and didn’t want to go to southeast Asia.

The next morning, he was taken back to Homestead AFB and hospitalized, and I had a really bad sunburn, what I called a sunburn, it was obviously radiation burns of some kind. I probably got away with it better than he did because I was darker skinned at the time. I had been in the water more. As a result of that, I was immediately convinced that UFOs were real.

McMoneagle’s Hypothesis around ETs

RT: There is certainly something physically real. Only those who claim to know what is in government documents or activities can claim extraterrestrial origin. The only way to assert that is crash-retrievals or captured aliens or contact scenarios including communications. We have stories about those things, but they are stories. With a physical description like yours, we can do a physical analysis of the data.

On the basis of your remote viewing, however – what is your best working hypothesis at this point? The NSA targeted the dark side of the moon which did not mean looking for aliens. The statement was made that every one of our remote viewers has contacted non-earthly intelligence –

JM: I would agree with that to some extent.

RT: What is your hypothesis?

JM: I have a number of hypotheses. My first is this:

So the fact that they are able to do that makes them time machines.

I suspect that because they are time machines,

It may be that we came to the earth or appeared here 190,000 years ago but when we came from may be a whole different issue. You have to look at it in a different context. There is some evidence for that.

There is more than sufficient evidence that there has been communication between us and non-human entities or sentient beings for thousands of years. It’s written about in our earliest writings – in religious texts, medieval texts, everywhere. Saints battle demons. There is so much evidence for similar occurrences going on for thousands of years. So I think an argument can be made that the phenomena is some form of communication.

RT: Is it all one thing, though? These are complex psychological processes – and you were burned physically in 1966. Is it all one thing? Do scriptural texts of folk documents about people encountering entities – can we connect that experience with an experience of the lights going on at night and you seeing a physical craft?

JM: There’s a possibility. I did a remote viewing in early 1980s, 82 or 83, where a UFO target was mixed in with other targets, so I had no idea it was a UFO target. It was very general – the targeting material was a newspaper clipping from 1952 referring to a sighting in Tacoma, WA, a pattern of lights dancing on the horizon, people getting out of their cars and watching for a few minutes. It was double wrapped in a thick envelope. My actual remote viewing was unique in that it was not the dissociative kind of RM, it was an automatic out-of-body experience. I found myself inside a white cube. That had never happened and has not happened since. Finding myself in this cube, I started to look for windows, doors, some kind of ingress-egress, and while I was looking, an apparition of my father appeared. He had died three years earlier. The apparition was very angry and told me to leave, that I had no business being where I was, which was not my father’s nature. He would never have done that, so I knew it was a projection of some kind. My response was to continue to look for an ingress-egress point. The apparition seemed to be confused for a minute and then vanished, to be replaced by a light being that folded into two of itself, it seemed to be arguing with itself in some strange language. My first perception was to be concerned, my second was that I was supposed to be concerned, so I wasn’t going to be, which confused the light being. I was then threatened with a light being which I thought was ridiculous, I almost said it out loud. The entity argued with itself some more then folded up and disappeared.

I had a sense that something reached inside my being and strummed a nerve ending that instantly made me ill. I felt I was going to projectile vomit and found myself slam bang back in my body sitting bold upright and I collided heads with my monitor. Both of us were walking around the room holding our heads in pain. I explained to him what had happened, and it turned out I had gone almost comatose, slipped backwards on the chair, and he became concerned. He figured things were out of control and we terminated the remote viewing. We recorded the material and opened the envelope and discovered that the target was the UFO target.

Now, here’s the fascinating part: the length of the remote viewing session was almost identical to the length of the UFO event. In the newspaper report, they said the lights just winked out at the end of the UFO event. The particular physicist who had given us the target said, jeez, I wonder if you’re the reason why the lights winked out. Or are you the reason why there were lights in 1952?

You have to start wondering where reality begins and ends when you get involved in these kinds of things. For me this experience was very real, but I can only report it. I think there is a great deal of similarity between that experience and the sorts of interactions people have reported where they have not been in control, not the standard abduction experience. It may be a tangency of realities that we have perhaps learned to invade because of the increase of sophistication in the way we think.

JM: I have a hypothesis or theory about it that is kind of complicated. Do you want to hear about it?

RT: Yes. I am thinking of electromagnetic fields and their impact on consciousness and trying to understand consciousness as an electromagnetic field that enables diverse kinds of experiences to take place–

JM: I think it’s even more complicated than that. I think if you go back to the beginning, one of the constants that has been changing very slowly but very dynamically over a long period of time is that we have been growing more and more layers to our craniums and becoming more and more sophisticated as sentient beings and our world has become more and more complex. I mean by that that it took us 30,000 years to discover fire but only a few years to learn how to build a pump laser.

Through the studies we’ve done on remote viewing, we’ve discovered that there’s a certain amount of noise emanating out of the core of the galaxy and that noise has an effect on our ability to be psychic or do remote viewing. When we’re immersed in that broadband noise, our ability to be psychic or be a remote viewer is reduced, not because it is blocking us, but because we’re having to deal with a whole lot more information being generated by that noise band. Studying it from a remote viewing standpoint is very interesting, but if you take remote viewing out of the equation and look at the fact that we have to operate while constantly immersed in that broadband noise, we can make certain assumptions. One is that

With the presence of superior beings [as mentors], we experience an attraction toward possibilities latent in us.

So we believe that out of our wonderment and creativity we generate a pump laser when in fact the concepts for the reality of that may lie within the broadband noise and only when we reach a certain level of sophistication are we able to understand it and therefore build it.

This implies a very interesting proposition: it implies that all sentient beings are dealing with the same source of information. It implies that our more esoteric thoughts like thoughts of a creator or God may be very similar across sentient minds. It implies that our rate of growth might be accelerating and following a path that others have preceded us in.

RT: This is true to my experience. The Apostle Paul used the expression “upward call.” My experience is that in the presence of superior beings which is the true function of mentoring we experience an attraction toward possibilities latent in us which – if too far away, we don’t even try to realize and which if too easy, is not a real upward call – but if we are challenged just enough, like raising the bar just enough –

JM: Exactly.

RT: So we are challenged to reach toward something which—without the presence of the mentor— we would never have realized. Maybe the slab in 2001 was supposed to represent this. Are you following me?

RT: So we are challenged to reach toward something which without the presence of the mentor we would never have realized. Maybe the slab in 2001 was supposed to represent this. Are you following me?

JM:  Absolutely.

RT:

JM: Right. People want to talk about a whole lot of different things, but no one seems to address the commonality we share with other sentient beings regarding a creator, a beginning, morality issues, those kinds of things.

RT: They would have to be emergent realities in any complex species or civilization.

JM: Exactly. Those are my thoughts.

RT: (Described to him a spontaneous experience in which I found myself as it were in another place and having an encounter with an “alien being” that I experienced communicating from a higher plane of consciousness about deeper truths which I could only translate as all the different ways we humans talk about love but which was in fact about principles of coherence.)

JM:

RT: We impose a pattern prematurely on the data.

McMoneagle discusses near-death experience

I think [ET’s] are a teaching or learning tool for expanding the sophistication of how we view sentient beings or the universe at large.

JM: One example of that is the near-death experience. The first time it happened to me, I was engulfed by the “white light” and my first assumption was that this must be what God is. It was a feeling of completeness, wholeness, being in the absolute home, and I had nothing to relate it to, nothing in my experience that overwhelming and perfect, so I assumed this must be what God is. For a long time, I told people God’s a white light, you can’t die, you can’t cease to exist as an entity, that sort of thing. But then I had a second NDE that was slightly different. In that one I was what I called kept local, not allowed to wander off, because I was actively seeking this white light and I was allowed to see it but not go through it.

This created a huge philosophical problem for me because the light had edges and my definition of God did not include boundaries. So the light had to be something other than what I had assumed. I concluded that it must have something to do with the mortality of self and what we identify as self. Maybe my conceptualization of what God is must be changed. I concluded as a result of that exercise that there was no way I could define God because in my quest for an unbounded principle, I can’t put boundaries on it, so the best I can do is see some shadow or reflection on the wall. I was looking for what constitutes the right thing in the human condition, and I find that not just in humanity but in many of the contacts with a lot of these entities. It’s an expansion of the conceptualization of “sentient beings.” I think there is something very dynamic and specific about these experiences and I think they’re a teaching or learning tool for expanding the sophistication of how we view sentient beings or the universe at large.

Conclusions

RT: (Described to him the essence of my short story “Species, Lost in Apple-eating Time” [included in Mind Games] published at anotherealm.com)

We’ve been flip-flopping from one side to another for thousands of years trying to figure out that secret. We may be entering an age in which humankind at large is realizing that we aren’t getting answers from either side. There has to be a blend.

RT: Simultaneously, not either/or.

JM: Exactly.

RT: You have to have followed a particular path to arrive at the point where this kind of conversation makes sense. You have to have been lucky or blessed –

JM: Yes, and to reject the need to come to conclusions. That has come out of the remote viewing side of me, I think. In order to do remote viewing, you have to reject conclusions, so I have pretty much disciplined or instructed myself to be able to at least evaluate some of these things in a different light.

RT: And remain agnostic in regard to your own experience and hold it all lightly.

JM: Right. Exactly.

RT: You watch your mind begin to form patterns, and it forms them more quickly when anxious or afraid, and you have to step back and observe your reaction as one more interesting input into the whole experience.

JM: Exactly.

RT: Are you still working privately with companies as a remote viewer?

JM: Oh yeah. I sure am.

RT: How do people find out about you?

JM: Word of mouth. I still have too much work and cannot get everything done.

I have done seventeen live remote viewings on camera in four countries. I do those live within double-blind protocols so there is no way it can be faked.

RT: It does take a lot of energy to do this work.

JM: When you look at the hours it takes compared to what you can charge for it, it doesn’t pay the bills. I don’t charge anything at all for pain. When someone is in pain, I don’t charge. Police departments, attorney general offices contact me in relationship to kidnappings, for example, and I never charge for that. I have worked extensively with people at the FBI. It’s almost always one-on-one for specific individuals or department heads. I develop those relationships over many years, and there is mutual trust. I never divulge what I am doing for them, and they are never embarrassed by it.

When someone is in pain, I don’t charge. Police departments, attorney general offices contact me in relationship to kidnappings, for example, and I never charge for that.

RT: In terms of helping others understand what you do, you have to be appropriate and confidential. How do you communicate the details that disclose possibilities to others, in light of the mentoring we were discussing, how do you let people know something concretely?

JM: I can give you an example. I have decided to demonstrate it in public. I have done seventeen live remote viewings on camera in four countries. I do those live within double-blind protocols so there is no way it can be faked. Thirteen of those seventeen have been eminently successful and put people in a situation in which they could not deny it. In Japan last year, for example, I did two live remote viewings on national television. The head of the Department of Physics at the University of Tokyo is a skeptic and he said if he could not identify the trick I used, he would resign his position at the University of Tokyo. I not only did his double-blind target, but a double-blind target live on the show involving sending a woman off in a bullet train for three hours. Both were judged by the audience as being near 95% accurate. The professor has been back in to review the film – he came in three days in a row – and the only pictures are of me sleeping in the green room. I lay down on the tatami mat and went to sleep. So he has never been able to identify the “trick” I used. This has generated a huge amount of conversation in Japan.

I did two live remote viewings in England. One was the brand-new MI6 Building, a supersecret building, and that created such a row that they were not allowed to use the material on international television, which they pointed out. As to having an impact on peoples’ beliefs, I get calls from Norway, Stockholm, Russia, from very professional businesspeople who are very serious asking for remote viewing support, which I try to do as best I can. So I am making an inroad very slowly that way.

RT: Is there any organizational support for this? A friend was speaking to Russell Targ which is where he learned that the NSA as well as the CIA had done remote viewing –

What would really make the difference is when a company one day says yes, we’ve been using remote viewing for ten years, and it’s made us a quarter of a billion dollars.

RT: Are you still working privately with companies as a remote viewer?

JM: Oh yeah. I sure am.

RT: How do people find out about you?

JM: Word of mouth. I still have too much work and cannot get everything done.

RT: It does take a lot of energy to do this work.

JM: When you look at the hours it takes compared to what you can charge for it, it doesn’t pay the bills. I don’t charge anything at all for pain. When someone is in pain, I don’t charge. Police departments, attorney general offices contact me in relationship to kidnappings, for example, and I never charge for that. I have worked extensively with people at the FBI. It’s almost always one-on-one for specific individuals or department heads. I develop those relationships over many years, and there is mutual trust. I never divulge what I am doing for them, and they are never embarrassed by it.

RT: In terms of helping others understand what you do, you have to be appropriate and confidential. How do you communicate the details that disclose possibilities to others, in light of the mentoring we were discussing, how do you let people know something concretely?

JM: I can give you an example. I have decided to demonstrate it in public. I have done seventeen live remote viewings on camera in four countries. I do those live within double-blind protocols so there is no way it can be faked. Thirteen of those seventeen have been eminently successful and put people in a situation in which they could not deny it. In Japan last year, for example, I did two live remote viewings on national television. The head of the Department of Physics at the University of Tokyo is a skeptic and he said if he could not identify the trick I used, he would resign his position at the University of Tokyo. I not only did his double-blind target, but a double-blind target live on the show involving sending a woman off in a bullet train for three hours. Both were judged by the audience as being near 95% accurate. The professor has been back in to review the film – he came in three days in a row – and the only pictures are of me sleeping in the green room. I lay down on the tatami mat and went to sleep. So he has never been able to identify the “trick” I used. This has generated a huge amount of conversation in Japan.

I did two live remote viewings in England. One was the brand-new MI6 Building, a supersecret building, and that created such a row that they were not allowed to use the material on international television, which they pointed out. As to having an impact on peoples’ beliefs, I get calls from Norway, Stockholm, Russia, from very professional businesspeople who are very serious asking for remote viewing support, which I try to do as best I can. So I am making an inroad very slowly that way.

RT: Is there any organizational support for this? A friend was speaking to Russell Targ which is where he learned that the NSA as well as the CIA had done remote viewing –

JM: Uh-huh.

RT: Conversations like that around the edge is where we learn. Any think tank support?

JM: No, it’s people having to do it as I am doing it, and it’s really unfortunate. What would really make the difference is when a company one day says yes, we’ve been using remote viewing for ten years, and it’s made us a quarter of a billion dollars. That’s the kind of thing that will change peoples’ minds.

RT: Any clients willing to talk about the work so we could make a solid case?

JM: No. That’s the problem. For example….

RT: It’s just not mainstream enough yet.

JM: Right, and clients are very careful within their own company, what people know I do or don’t do. I am always introduced as an information officer, head of CI or something.

RT: Is there more acceptance within CI itself of remote viewing?

JM: Absolutely. I know of at least three countries using remote viewers for competitive intelligence. The Russians are very much using it. The Hungarians as well I would bet. I have met my counterparts in most of those countries. I was in Russia for three and a half weeks last year and met my enemies, so to speak. In fact, I did a remote viewing with the best they had, and we targeted one another and did a drawing that was a mirror image drawing which even blew them out of the box. Which is kind of funny, because their head remote viewer and I got along very very well, I think because neither of us buy into politics. The spirituality of it is identical.

RT: Once you’ve gone to the places you’ve gone, it changes you. You can’t pretend you don’t know what you know.

JM: Exactly. It’s like opening a door, it’s impossible after that to back out and shut the door again.

RT: Do you have enough people to talk to? I do interviews like this so I can have conversations like this. Otherwise it gets lonely!

JM: Oh yeah, I understand exactly what you’re saying. No, probably not. I seldom ever have a conversation like this, in fact, not without either being at great risk or finding someone who will talk at this level.
RT: This is wonderful, and I appreciate it on all the levels. So thanks very much.

JM: You’re welcome.