Keenan sent Atwater’s proposal up the chain of command. It landed on the desk of one of the most powerful people in Army intelligence, Major General Edmund R. Thompson. A pioneer in new technology systems, Thompson had played a major role in the formation of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). He was the general responsible for fielding the first Combat Electronic Warfare and Intelligence units. Now he was the assistant chief of staff for Army intelligence.
Strong opinions about extrasensory perception and parapsychology are almost always deeply personal beliefs. A few years earlier, Thompson later revealed, he’d read a book called The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler, which discussed Jung’s concepts of synchronicity. Koestler’s book put forth the idea that events with no causal relationship are meaningfully related, and that this underlying mechanism was also at work in extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. After reading Koestler’s book, Thompson developed an interest in ESP and PK. When he read Atwater’s proposal, he asked to be briefed on where the Soviets stood. He was startled by what he learned. “There was evidence that [the Russians] were particularly active in long distance, telepathic communication,” Thompson said. “Also in PK, that they call telekinesis, and possibly in telepathic hypnosis, in order to disrupt individuals in key positions or handling sensitive equipment.” This is similar to what the Army’s Office of the Surgeon General, Medical Intelligence Office, had first warned about in its secret report in January 1972.
Atwater was sent to meet with Brigadier General John A. Smith, INSCOM’s deputy commander and the man in charge of the unit’s budget. Atwater’s proposal was modest, with a budget of a couple of thousand dollars to cover travel expenses until the end of the year. Smith took out a budget request form, jotted down a few notes, signed it, and handed it to Atwater. “That was it,” Atwater recalls. The project was given the temporary code name Gondola Wish, soon to be Grill Flame.
It was October 1978. Atwater and an Army major named Murray “Scotty” Watt were now in charge of this unusual new program. Their civilian partner in this endeavor was SRI, with Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ acting as lead scientists. Puthoff and Targ would teach Atwater and Watt protocols for running the program. And once a solid group of candidates had been preselected, they would help choose six or so psychics who would be part of Gondola Wish.
The first order of business for Atwater and Watt was to start looking for Army personnel. Using a personality profile created by Puthoff and Targ, the screening process began. Most of the interviewees were at the time working as imagery analysts at the National Photographic Interpretation Center, the CIA’s photo interpretation unit, or at the Army Photographic Interpretation Center at INSCOM. Imagery analysts were people who had a special talent for detecting things in photographs that others couldn’t see. Over the next few months Atwater and Watt screened 2,000 potential candidates. Finally they narrowed the pool down to 117. The interview process could begin.
Warrant Officer Joe McMoneagle worked at INSCOM headquarters at Arlington Hall Station in Virginia, building one-of-a-kind computer-driven black boxes for airplanes. A senior projects officer in Signals Intelligence and Electronic Warfare, he was thirty-two years old. His personal life was a mess, and he disliked the Army. From his perspective, he had given his employer everything, and it had given him back very little. He’d nearly died in a helicopter crash in Vietnam in 1967. Since then the military had moved him around incessantly, it seemed, from country to country, base to base. From 1971 to 1973 he was in Thailand, where he worked on classified missions that continued to give him nightmares. Now his second marriage was falling apart. He felt estranged from his only son. He had health issues. Pessimism was the dominant force in his life during this troubled time.
One day in October 1978, McMoneagle’s senior adviser handed him a note. The instructions were cryptic, he recalls. He was to report to a sterile room on the third floor of the Arlington Hall Station headquarters building at a specific time, on a specific day. This was the Army, so he went. Inside the secure room were two men in civvies who introduced themselves as military intelligence officers and asked him to sit down. The men were Fred Atwater and Scotty Watt. Atwater opened his briefcase and spread a stack of papers across the conference table. Some were marked classified, others not. McMoneagle recalls that among the papers were many newspaper clippings, some from America but others from English-language papers published abroad. McMoneagle read the headlines, all seemingly referring to psychics, he recalls: “I thought, ‘This is a setup.’” The two military intelligence officers asked what he thought of the subject matter in front of him. The way McMoneagle remembers it, he said something along the lines of, “I’m not sure I believe any of this, but if it’s only half true it should be looked into.”
The men gathered their papers and told McMoneagle not to discuss the meeting with anyone, not even his supervisor in Signals Intelligence and Electronic Warfare.
Back at his desk, McMoneagle’s boss asked what the meeting had been about.
“OPSEC people conducting a survey,” McMoneagle replied.
Weeks passed. Then one afternoon McMoneagle received a telephone call from Scotty Watt. McMoneagle’s presence was requested at another meeting, Watt said, details forthcoming. None of this could be discussed over the telephone. Watt told McMoneagle that if his supervisor asked any questions, he was to say he’d be attending a meeting at the behest of the Army chief of staff.
For the second meeting, McMoneagle traveled to Fort Meade. There, he reported to the 902nd Military Intelligence Group. The address was an old brick building, and McMoneagle was surprised at how many security doors he had to pass through before he arrived at the specified room number at the specified time. Inside this large room with oak-paneled walls he counted eighteen people sitting around a conference table: sixteen men and two women. Some wore uniforms and others civilian clothes. McMoneagle was asked to sit down. After a while two military intelligence officers McMoneagle recognized as Fred Atwater and Scotty Watt joined the group. As they’d done with him earlier, they spread a sheaf of papers across the table. Some were marked classified, others not, and as before, he spotted headlines about psychics from American and foreign newspapers. His intuition remained the same: Be careful here, he told himself. This could still be some kind of elaborate psychological operations experiment.
After the briefing finished, two men came into the room and introduced themselves as Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, physicists from the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. A movie was shown that featured something called an outbounder-beacon experiment, filmed at SRI a few years before. In the film, Puthoff and another researcher open a sealed envelope while sitting in the passenger seat of a car, then drive to the Stanford Medical Center courtyard as instructed on an index card. The film featured a simultaneous sequence of a man locked inside a sealed room, called a Faraday cage, at SRI’s Radio Physics Lab. This man was a psychic named Pat Price, McMoneagle and the others were told. The film showed Price sketching what he “perceived” the outbounders (i.e., Puthoff and the researcher) were seeing in the Stanford Medical Center courtyard in real time.
McMoneagle remembers watching with fascination as Price “drew a very clear approximation of where Puthoff was in the hospital courtyard,” and that “there was a clear accuracy to the size and relationships of objects.” He recalls thinking that unless this was some kind of elaborate hoax or an INSCOM psychological operation, the film “was mind-boggling and frightening. It left me feeling that a new door to reality had just opened,” McMoneagle says. There were situations in his past that he had never shared with anyone, things that remained inexplicable to him. When he saw the film, these strange occurrences made a faint kind of sense to him.
After the briefing ended, McMoneagle was taken into a room where he sat alone with Puthoff. For roughly fifteen minutes Puthoff asked relatively basic questions, to which McMoneagle gave relatively neutral responses, he recalls. T
hen came a question that tripped him up. “Have you ever experienced anything called a paranormal event?” Puthoff asked.
It was a direct question in a classified military environment. He decided to answer the question as accurately as he could, however unusual his response might seem. In Vietnam, when he was behind enemy lines in the jungle, he’d first experienced a hint of what might be called a sixth sense—“other forms of information transfer,” he told Puthoff. His Army job title had been “emitter location and identification specialist,” which meant it was up to him to locate where enemy transmissions might be coming from. “It was not an easy job,” he recalls. “In wet jungle canopies you had to be nearly standing on top of a radio to know where it was.” This meant that when you located what the Army wanted you to find you were very likely standing on a high-value enemy asset. The Viet Cong had the obvious advantage. Emitter location and identification specialists and their teams were regularly ambushed, individual members picked off by sniper fire. “My life was saved more than once by simply doing what my inner voice suggested,” McMoneagle told Puthoff, “even if at the time it seemed foolish or stupid, or that I might embarrass myself.” If McMoneagle felt compelled to clear out a certain bunker, he did. If he felt a violent urge to leave a site, he left. Others in his unit took notice and began to follow his moves.
Toward the end of his tour McMoneagle was flying back to the base at Pleiku when his helicopter was hit by enemy fire. One minute he was flying along listening to the rotor blades and the next minute, wham, his aircraft was going down. He woke up in an Army hospital with his leg in traction and pins in his skull. He recovered, was shipped out of Vietnam and sent to a small town in southern Germany called Bad Aibling. In 1970 he became detachment commander of a unit stationed at Pocking, Germany. That summer, he told Puthoff, he had a near-death experience at a restaurant on the Inn River, in Braunau.
He and his wife had met a colleague from the detachment for a drink. After a few sips McMoneagle began to feel queasy and excused himself. Had he been poisoned? he wondered. He’d just made it outside into the fresh air when he heard a weird sound, like a pop, inside his head. After that it was as if he were watching a film of himself, he said, standing on the cobblestone road, observing a surreal scene as it played out in front of him, outside the pub’s front door. “Events then unfolded as though I were just outside the boundaries of reality,” he recalled. He stuck out his arms and watched rain pass through his hands. Fears were replaced by fascination, he said. “I drifted over to see what the commotion by the door was all about and found myself staring down at my own body, lying half in and half out of the gutter.” McMoneagle had swallowed his tongue and stopped breathing. He watched his wife and their friend load his body into a car. He watched the car drive to the hospital, in Passau, as if he were flying alongside it. He watched doctors and nurses try to revive him. He recalled falling into a long tunnel and observing the emergency room receding into the distance. For a while, he said, he remained there—wherever there was.
He reviewed his life. He felt sorrow and remorse. Growing up with two alcoholic parents in the Miami slums, he’d endured an unenviable childhood. Sometimes his father would hit him so hard his ears would ring and his face would bleed. Money went to booze, not meals. His twin sister was his best friend and his confidante—the one person who really understood him—but then she got pregnant in high school and the nuns took her baby away. She was sedated, became dependent on drugs, and was never “normal” after that. “And then I had an intense feeling of forgiveness flood over me,” McMoneagle recalled. “At that point a voice in my mind said that I could not stay, that I had to go back. It was not time for me to die.” McMoneagle argued with the voice, to no avail. “There was a second sudden popping noise and I sat up on the hospital bed and looked around.” The room was empty.
When his wife came to visit, she explained that when McMoneagle had arrived at the hospital he was clinically dead. After he came to, the Army had moved him to this private clinic in Munich to convalesce. Here he began having out-of-body experiences, he said, a terrifying situation for him over which he had no control. He could read the minds of others, he believed: “I wasn’t actually hearing them thinking, nor was I reading their thoughts verbatim but I was picking up on the general gist or subject matter contained within their thoughts.” McMoneagle told the nurses what was happening to him, but then surmised that sharing these kinds of experiences in a hospital environment was not a good idea. He stopped discussing the situation with others, but he knew he had experienced some kind of change. “Once you have had a near-death experience it is almost impossible to act normal again. It alters the very color of the light in which you see things,” McMoneagle says.
After several weeks he was released from the clinic and assigned a new job in Munich, in Army intelligence. Everything was different now. Fear of death abandoned him. He began reading voraciously: philosophy, theology, parapsychology, and ancient religious texts. He read everything he could get his hands on about these topics, from Carlos Castaneda to Madame Blavatsky to Aristotle. For a poor kid from the Florida projects this intellectual exploration felt exhilarating: “Parts of my character began to fade and be replaced with other elements that were totally strange to me.” Life was about discovery now, with “the newfound clarity of my paranormal mind.” He was twenty-five years old. But there were bills to pay, and he was an enlisted man in the U.S. Army. His next assignment was an operation in Thailand. Because this operation remains classified as of 2017, McMoneagle is not at liberty to share details. But this dark wartime experience further shifted his perceptions about the meaning of life, he says. Back in America after the war, he worked at a series of unsatisfying Army jobs. He divorced and remarried, and then his second marriage was heading toward divorce. That’s when the two military intelligence officers named Fred Atwater and Scotty Watt showed up, asking questions about psychics and phenomenology.
After interviewing Joe McMoneagle, Hal Puthoff recommended him for the new unconventional Army program. McMoneagle was just the kind of person Puthoff believed could be trained in remote viewing for use in intelligence collection. Atwater and Watt asked McMoneagle if he was willing to join a prototype six-man unit at Fort Meade, a classified program called Grill Flame. This unit was experimental and part-time. McMoneagle would be sent out to SRI for training, and after that he would participate in a series of outbounder-beacon experiments at Fort Meade. McMoneagle signed on and was designated Remote Viewer 001.
Also chosen for the team were three civilian Army employees and two intelligence officers. They were Melvin Riley, a photo interpreter and former aerial observer; Hartleigh Trent, a National Photographic Interpretation Center officer and former Navy SEAL training instructor; Fernand Gauvin, a veteran counterintelligence officer who’d worked espionage operations in France since the early days of the Cold War; Captain Kenneth Bell, a counterintelligence expert; and Nancy S., an imagery analyst about whom little has been revealed. The unit’s first office was located in Building 4554, in a secure room across the hallway from Colonel Keenan.
The group, called Detachment G, or Det G, was an oddity, a secret unit whose work was unprecedented in Army intelligence history. Because Grill Flame was a clandestine operation, its participants were allowed to dress like civilians and wear their hair long. After people began making inquiries, Colonel Keenan decided to move the viewers to a more discreet location down the road on Llewellyn Street. The unit’s new home was inside a former World War II mess hall, across from a hospital in a grove of oak trees. Administrative work took place in Building 2560, a long skinny structure with desks and filing cabinets lined up front to back. Building 2561, across the street, was the remote-viewing facility. Here, inside an electronically shielded room, members of this unorthodox unit now found themselves lying in a dark room, eyes closed in a trancelike state, practicing how to perceive things that were not physically there. There was lots of downtime, and viewers were encouraged to
cultivate habits that helped them relax. Fern Gauvin practiced yoga. Mel Riley did Indian beadwork. Joe McMoneagle painted a massive, multicolored mural of the cosmos on the office wall.
Early Army memos indicated that “preliminary results show high-level interest” in the unit’s progress, not just from DIA but from superiors at the Pentagon as well. General Thompson approved a budget increase, and McMoneagle, Riley, and Bell were given full-time positions. Work progressed. Then, in September 1979, Det G garnered the attention of the National Security Council (NSC), the president’s principal forum for considering national security matters. Members of the NSC were shown photographs, taken by a KH-9 spy satellite, revealing a beehive of activity inside a massive building at the Severodvinsk Naval Base in Russia. Located 650 miles north of Moscow near the Arctic Circle, Severodvinsk was strategically positioned at the edge of the White Sea and there was concern in the intelligence community that the Soviet Union was building its first aircraft carrier inside this mysterious building.
The National Security Council delivered an official request for information to the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff of Intelligence, Department of the Army, which in turn relayed the request to Det G at Fort Meade. There, Fred Atwater assigned the intelligence collection effort to Joe McMoneagle. As revealed in declassified documents, what followed gave Det G its first, eight-martini results. In Remote Viewing Session C54, date unrecorded, Atwater placed a sealed envelope on the table in front of McMoneagle and asked him to provide information about the photograph concealed inside. McMoneagle described a huge building “near some kind of a shoreline, either a big lake or some bay.”