Joseph McMoneagle

Joseph W. McMoneagle was born on January 10, 1946, in Miami, Florida. He has written, in autobiographical material published after the program's declassification, about a difficult childhood that included a stepfather's alcoholism and frequent moves through the segregated American South. He left home young, joined the U.S. Army in 1964 at the age of eighteen, and made the Army his career for the next twenty years.

McMoneagle's Army record before remote viewing is a conventional intelligence-warrant-officer's: signals work, analytical assignments, a tour in Vietnam. In 1970, while serving in West Germany, he reported what he later described as a near-death experience following a sudden illness. He said the experience changed his understanding of his own perceptual abilities and left him persistently aware of phenomena he had not previously paid attention to.

In 1978 the Defense Intelligence Agency stood up a small experimental unit at Fort Meade, Maryland, to test whether the remote-viewing methodology developed at SRI could be transferred to military personnel. McMoneagle was one of the first six soldiers screened into the program. He was assigned the viewer designation 001.

The Severodvinsk session of September 1979, in which McMoneagle described a large submarine under construction inside Shipyard No. 402 before U.S. satellite imagery had clearly identified the Typhoon-class boat, is the case most commonly cited as his canonical operational result. The May 22, 1984 Mars sealed-envelope session is the case most commonly cited for its strangeness. Between these two extremes sits a much longer record of more routine tasking: hostage cases, Soviet weapons sites, foreign-leader location work. By the program's internal records he produced more sessions, across more years, than any other military viewer.

In December 1984 the U.S. Army awarded McMoneagle the Legion of Merit. The citation, declassified later in partial form, named specific intelligence-related contributions across his time in the unit. The Legion of Merit is one of the higher peacetime decorations available to a military officer. It has not been awarded for remote-viewing work since.

McMoneagle retired from active Army duty in 1984. He continued to work with the program as an outside consultant under contract to SRI International until the 1995 shutdown. After the program ended, he founded a private consulting firm with his wife Nancy, called Intuitive Intelligence Applications, and continued to publish under his own name. His books include Mind Trek (1993), The Ultimate Time Machine (1998), Remote Viewing Secrets (2000), and The Stargate Chronicles (2002), the last of which is one of the primary published sources on the operational side of the program. He lives in central Virginia.