The Mars surface session (May 22, 1984)

On May 22, 1984, an Army warrant officer named Joseph McMoneagle was handed a sealed envelope at a small facility on Fort Meade, Maryland. The envelope contained a piece of paper with a set of map coordinates on it. McMoneagle was not told what planet they referred to, what year they referred to, or what he was supposed to look for. He was told only to describe what he saw at those coordinates.

The transcript of the session, declassified in the 2017 Stargate document release, runs to nine pages. McMoneagle reported tall, thin people in long, form-fitting clothing. He reported large, pyramidal structures and obelisks. He reported what he understood to be the survivors of a catastrophe, sheltering in chambers underground, knowing they would not last. He believed he was looking at a time period he could only describe as "very, very, very old."

When the session ended the monitor showed him the rest of the contents of the envelope. The coordinates were on the surface of Mars. The date was approximately one million years before present.

The Mars session is the single most discussed transcript in the Stargate archive. It is the document people search for when they search for Stargate. It is also the one the program's later defenders are most hesitant to cite. The session was a deliberate provocation, conducted under a sealed-envelope protocol that ruled out cueing but also ruled out any way to evaluate accuracy. There is no Voyager flyby to compare against, no later document confirming or denying any element of the report. The session sits alone.

The CIA's American Institutes for Research review of the Stargate Project in 1995 did not cite the Mars session. The agency's official position is that the Stargate Project produced no actionable intelligence and was terminated. McMoneagle's own account, in interviews and in his 2002 book The Stargate Chronicles, treats the session as one he was instructed to perform and offers no claims about what it proved.

The transcript itself is preserved in the CIA reading room. It records a man, alone in a room at Fort Meade, calmly describing the last days of a Martian civilization.