Joe McMoneagle, known as “Remote Viewer No. 1,” was the most gifted psychic spy in the CIA’s classified Stargate program, responsible for over 200 intelligence contributions, saving countless lives, and earning the Legion of Merit. He remote-viewed a massive pyramid and other structures on Mars from one million years in the past, and has spent decades arguing that consciousness, remote viewing, and non-local perception are real, trainable abilities — and that humanity’s future may depend on taking them seriously.
The Nature of Psychic Ability
Psychic ability is not rare or supernatural — it is an innate human capacity that atrophied as language and modern culture developed.
Early humans in small family units (12–15 people) communicated non-verbally out of necessity, reading each other’s intentions and environmental cues to survive dangerous hunts and encounters with predators.
The corpus callosum, which divides the brain’s hemispheres, may act as a filter that dampens psychic perception — a theory supported by cases like Kim Peek (the inspiration for Rain Man), whose absent corpus callosum correlated with extraordinary cognitive abilities.
Non-verbal autistic children show unusually high rates of clairvoyance, suggesting that language development may come at the cost of other perceptual abilities.
McMoneagle recalls being psychic as a child — hearing voices warning him of danger, scouting threats for local gangs, and maintaining constant situational awareness.
He draws a parallel to shamans in early tribes, who were often physically frail but essential to group survival because they noticed environmental signals (like bird behavior) that predicted danger.
Military Career and Recruitment into Intelligence
McMoneagle joined the military expecting to work on the Sidewinder anti-tank weapon system, but the program was obsolete before deployment.
He was recruited into intelligence after a chance encounter with a civilian intelligence officer at a base beer hall, who helped him re-enlist for a six-year commitment.
He graduated at the top of three consecutive intelligence training classes, including one focused on operating Chinese, Russian, and American radios and sending/receiving International Morse code at 20 words per minute — a skill he cracked under extreme pressure just before graduation.
His first overseas tour was 18 months at a classified site in the Bahamas, under the cover of air rescue.
He survived a helicopter RPG attack in Vietnam in late 1967, falling over 100 feet and suffering compression fractures from jaw to buttocks. He was put in traction with screws in his skull and sandbag weights, then sent back to his unit with a jar of Percocet and told to “walk it off.”
He credits combat with sharpening his situational awareness — he once heard a voice yell “freeze” before entering a bunker that was immediately destroyed by a Viet Cong explosive, killing everyone inside.
The Stargate Program and Remote Viewing
The CIA’s interest in psychic spying began in 1972 when Russell Targ and Dr. Hal Puthoff tested a retired police commissioner named Pat Price, who remote-viewed a classified Soviet site instead of the intended target (a cabin in the woods), accurately describing safes, project files, and nuclear testing equipment inside steel spheres.
Price was subsequently tested on other denied-area targets in Russia with high accuracy, prompting the CIA to fund the program.
Remote viewing, as McMoneagle practiced it, requires strict protocols:
The viewer must be completely blind to the target (sealed envelope, unknown coordinates).
The ego must be removed from the process — McMoneagle would mow the lawn or give his ego a task to keep it occupied.
The transmission (raw sensory data) must be separated from analysis. The subconscious has no language, so it borrows images from memory. The viewer must “down-analyze” — breaking images into base elements (texture, smell, taste, emotion) without jumping to conclusions.
A monitor acts as the viewer’s left brain, asking clarifying questions. McMoneagle argues the monitor is also functioning psychically, since knowing the right question to ask requires intuition.
Intent is the single most important variable: if the intent is strong enough (e.g., saving a life), it overrides all known conditions that suppress psychic function (time of day, sun position, electromagnetic interference).
McMoneagle criticizes skeptics like James Randi, whose million-dollar challenge was structured so that Randi himself chose the target, judged the results, and would only pay out over 30 years — a setup designed to fail.
Statistician Jessica Utts reviewed the Stargate data and found it far more statistically significant than typical psychology research, with p-values “off the chart.”
Cold War Intelligence Successes
The Soviet Submarine (1979): McMoneagle and fellow viewer Harley Trent were tasked with a massive building near a Soviet harbor. McMoneagle described a revolutionary submarine — two hulls welded together with high-intensity lasers, slanted missile tubes (allowing launch while moving), and 20 warheads per missile, each 50 megatons (Hiroshima was <1 megaton). The CIA’s top Soviet analyst, Robert Gates, dismissed it as “total fantasy.” But an admiral arranged satellite photos 114 days later, confirming the submarine tied to an aircraft carrier, matching McMoneagle’s description within 3 feet. The intelligence gathered in 4 days exceeded the entire prior history of Soviet submarine intelligence.
The TU-22 Bear Bomber in Africa: Three psychics in three different cities were given “all of Africa” as a target to find a downed Soviet bomber. All three drew circles that overlapped in Zaire — where the plane was found. President Carter reportedly called it “the craziest thing I’ve ever experienced” and inadvertently revealed the program’s existence on national television.
The MX Missile Program: McMoneagle and the Stargate team wrote a one-paragraph white paper to the White House predicting the MX missile “shell game” (hiding ICBMs among hundreds of identical rail cars) would fail because remote viewers could locate the live missiles every time. After a year of testing confirmed this, the $100 billion program was cancelled. Senator Cohen sent a formal letter of thanks.
Defense Against Remote Viewing
The U.S. spent over 20 years and millions of dollars trying to develop a defense against remote viewing — and failed.
McMoneagle argues this is itself proof of the phenomenon’s validity: if it can’t be blocked, it’s a genuine intelligence threat.
The program was ultimately shut down not because it didn’t work, but because politicians feared the stigma of being associated with “psychics” — and because mid-level bureaucrats, whose budgets and authority were threatened by a capability that could replace conventional weapons systems, actively worked against it.
Near-Death Experience and Its Aftermath
In 1970, McMoneagle was poisoned in Austria and delivered DOA to a clinic in Pösel, Germany, with no detectable heartbeat for nearly 40 minutes.
He had a profound out-of-body experience: he watched his own resuscitation from outside his body, then was enveloped in an intensely bright white light filled with unconditional love. A voice told him “you can’t stay, you have to go back.”
When he regained consciousness, his eyes had turned crystal blue and appeared to emit fire, according to a German patient in the room who fled in terror.
The experience transformed him: he stopped carrying a gun, became deeply depressed for six months (feeling “stuck” in a “regressive” world), and was later rebuked by an entity during another out-of-body experience that “slapped him with words” for wasting his life — telling him to enjoy the planet and teach people.
Mars One Million Years Ago
The DoD tasked McMoneagle with remote-viewing Mars at a GPS coordinate, without telling him the target was Mars or the time period.
He described a massive pyramid far larger than Giza, with enormous internal chambers, and humanoid figures approximately 12 feet tall who were dying as the atmosphere turned hostile. He interpreted the pyramids as hibernation chambers where survivors were waiting to be rescued.
When he learned the target was “Mars, 1 Million BC,” he was angry because the result was unfalsifiable — but he later went to JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and obtained the original photographic negatives for those exact coordinates.
The negatives show clear pyramidal structures, including a four-sided pyramid on a triangular piece of land adjacent to a 3,000-foot-deep impact crater. Based on shadow analysis, the pyramid is thousands of feet tall — a “shard” that could not have been placed there by natural forces.
McMoneagle possesses approximately 60 photographs from JPL mapping satellites showing what he describes as clearly artificial structures on Mars: buildings in rows, a 30-mile perfectly straight cliff edge, a subterranean cavern with wiring on top, and a bright red light that was present when first photographed but has since gone out.
He also has a photograph of what appears to be a 3-foot-long metallic object on the Martian surface with buttons and a rotating component — which JPL cannot explain.
The Case for Ancient Martian Civilization
McMoneagle believes Mars once hosted a technologically advanced civilization that was destroyed by a catastrophic event — possibly a rogue planet passing through the solar system, stripping Mars’s magnetosphere and atmosphere.
He hypothesizes that some survivors may have come to Earth, and that humanity itself may be descended from Martian refugees — explaining both our lack of respect for our planet (“we take, take, take”) and the sudden appearance of advanced civilizations on Earth.
He points to the Great Pyramid of Giza as potentially being a transmitter (possibly of signals to Orion’s Belt, which it aligned with around 10,600 BC before precession shifted the pole star) and suggests the stones may have been poured as a concrete-like mixture rather than carved and transported.
He also notes that the first recorded UFO sighting occurred within 7 days of the Trinity nuclear test in 1945, and that UFOs have consistently targeted nuclear weapons — disabling or “denaturing” them — suggesting an extraterrestrial interest in preventing nuclear war.
Remote Viewing Historical and Religious Targets
McMoneagle has remote-viewed historical targets including the legend of Himiko, a female empress who ruled Japan around 249 AD, introduced rice culture, ended warlord conflicts, and was also a mind-reading shaman. He was hired by a Japanese group to locate her palaces and temples, which they believe they found.
He was asked about Ingo Swann’s book Penetration, which claims Swann was taken to an underground facility, shown a UFO, and remote-viewed an alien base on the dark side of the moon. McMoneagle, who knew Swann well, believes Swann was “playing a game” — testing how far he could take people — and notes Swann never discussed the book’s claims directly, only saying “read the book.”
McMoneagle’s own view on UFOs: they are almost certainly robotic probes (“droids”) sent by a civilization capable of instantaneous star-to-star travel — not physical spacecraft traversing space. If they meant us harm, we would already be destroyed. Their interest appears to be monitoring and possibly intervening to prevent self-destruction, particularly nuclear war.
The Future
McMoneagle believes 2025 represents a convergence of crises — AI, quantum computing, geopolitical instability, and the UFO disclosure movement — and that humanity is approaching a moment of direct extraterrestrial contact.
He predicts the interaction will amount to a “straighten up, fly right” warning: get your act together or face consequences.
He sees the core problem as humanity’s failure to improve — stuck in greed, overpopulation (now 9+ billion, beyond the food system’s capacity), and corrupt governance that serves profit rather than people.
He believes the aliens’ purpose is stabilization — to stop humanity from destroying itself before it can evolve further.
