36: Project: STARGATE. The CIA, Mars and... Time Travel.
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Hey, it's your buddy AJ from the Y-Files. And Hecklefish. Right, and Hecklefish. We just wanted to tell you that if you want to start a podcast, Spotify makes it easy. It'd have to be easy for humans to understand it. Will you stop that? I'm just saying. Spotify for Podcasters lets you record and edit podcasts from your computer. I don't have a computer. Do you have a phone? Of course I have a phone. I'm not a savage. Well, with Spotify, you can record podcasts from your phone, too.

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you to hurry up with this stupid commercial. I got a packed calendar today. I'm sorry about him. Anyway, check out Spotify for Podcasters. It's free, no catch, and you can start today. Are we done? We're done, but you need to check your attitude. Excuse me, but I don't have all day to sit here and talk about Spotify. Look, this would go a lot faster if you would just let me get through it without...

When the first human visits Mars, it will be the biggest scientific breakthrough since landing on the moon. Probably bigger. But what if I told you the CIA and the United States military have already been to Mars? But they didn't use spaceships to get there. They used psychics. Let's find out why. The Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union involved a lot more than spy planes and secret agents. The two countries have spent billions on some crazy projects.

Like the CIA's Operation Acoustic Kitty. Okay, I'll bite. What the hell is an acoustic kitty? I'm glad you asked. Acoustic Kitty involved implanting a microphone into a cat's ear canal and a transmitter at the base of its skull. And its job was to listen in on two men having a conversation in a park outside a Soviet compound in Washington, D.C. Did the cat hear anything? Just the sound of a taxi horn. Oh boy, do you mean... Yep, it was hit by a car as soon as it was let out of its cage. Ugh.

What did that little experiment cost? $20 million. And one perfectly good cat. Ouch. And the Russians experimented with using low-frequency radio waves to control the brains of dogs. I didn't know dogs had brains. In 1972, a classified report was circulating in the American intelligence community.

The report claimed that the Soviet Union was pouring millions into programs to research ESP, mind reading and telekinesis, all for the purpose of espionage. And this made the CIA nervous. So they immediately requested funding to develop their own program to train psychic spies. Did they get the funding?

Sorry, stupid question. Later that year, the CIA, US Army and Defense Intelligence Agency set up secret facilities all over the country and recruited people who claimed to have ESP. And researchers were specifically interested in people who are skilled in remote viewing. Which is...

Exactly what it sounds like. A psychic in one location describes what they see in another location. And they actually found people who could do this? Well, in 1976, a Russian bomber went down in the Congo, and the details of the crash were sent to CIA psychic researchers operating at a Patterson Air Base in Ohio. There, a psychic named Rosemary Smith drew maps of the Congo and pointed to a specific place where she claimed the plane was.

So, a paramilitary unit was dispatched to that location. They found the plane? They found the plane. Whoa! The CIA was convinced they were onto something. So the various psychic projects going on around the country, and there were quite a few of them, were all consolidated to Fort Meade in Maryland.

This became known as Project Stargate. And Project Stargate ran for years. It was finally shut down in 1995 after Nightline reported about it. But in those 23 years, CIA remote viewers were used in all kinds of operations, and they delivered results. Remote viewers drew renderings of secret Soviet bases. They located hostages of the Red Brigade in Italy and victims of the Israeli hostage crisis.

They saw locations of Scud missiles during the First Gulf War. And a remote viewer even saw the eventual attack of the World Trade Center, though his warning was ignored. In 1989, a remote viewer named Angela Ford was asked to help track a former customs agent who was on the run. And she told researchers she was able to see him in Lowell, Wyoming. Was he in Lowell? Well, there's actually no such place as Lowell, Wyoming. Oh.

But there is a level Wyoming, which is only one letter off. And he was there? He was there. You're blowing my mind. So researchers began to wonder if we can use remote viewing to see places here on Earth, can we use remote viewing to visit other planets? Can we? Well, that brings us to the story of Joe McMoneagle, who, if you believe him, is the first person to ever visit Mars and the first person to ever travel back in time. Ah!

Joe McMonagle was a U.S. Army intelligence officer who served in Vietnam. In 1970, he was seriously injured in a helicopter accident and almost died. And when he recovered, he realized he had psychic powers and began working for Project Stargate as a psychic spy. And between 1978 and 1984, McMonagle was involved in 450 separate CIA missions.

Now, he helped locate hostages in Iran. He once discovered a shortwave radio hidden inside a KGB agent's calculator. But his strangest mission took place on May 22nd, 1984. Here's how it went. McMonagle was in a room with one other person, a researcher. He was given a sealed envelope and instructed not to open it. He was then given a set of geographic coordinates and asked to describe what he saw. All right, using the information in the envelope, please focus on 40.89 degrees north, 9.55 degrees west.

Uh, I want to say it looks like, uh, I don't know. It sort of looks like pyramids. It's very high. Okay. I'm seeing... It's like a perception of a shadow of people. Very, very tall, thin. It's only shadow. It's as if they were there and they're not there anymore. Go back to a period of time where they are there. Uh, I don't know.

It's like I get a lot of static on the line and everything. It's breaking up all the time. It's very fragmentary pieces. Just report the data. Don't try to put things together. Just report the raw data. I just keep seeing very large people. They appear thin and tall, but they're very large. Wearing some kind of strange clothes.

He's then directed to explore other sets of coordinates, still with no other information. Now, McMonagle describes seeing a large obelisk that reminds him of the Washington Monument. He sees what he describes as rounded bottom carved channels like road beds. He sees pyramids that appear to be storm shelters and in the pyramids, more thin, shadowy people that seem to be hibernating.

He claims these are an ancient people dying and past their time or age. After his visions fade, the envelope is torn open and on it reads: Holy sh*t. Now look.

Some of these stories may sound crazy, but all the information we've presented today comes from a CIA document dump about Project Stargate and other psychic projects. Yeah, but these document dumps are always a little light. How many pages are we talking? 25? 50? 12 million. 12 million?!

Yep, so you might not believe in psychics or ESP, and that's fine, but the United States government absolutely does. And it's easy to marginalize someone like Joseph McMoneagle and call him a kook, but he was and is a serious guy. He wasn't reading tarot cards at a county fair somewhere. When he retired from the army, he was awarded the Legion of Merit for outstanding service. He's written books, given lectures, he's been interviewed countless times, and he believes he was part of a very important and effective research project.

Now, of his hundreds of missions, they weren't all successful, but even being successful at remote viewing 1% of the time is extraordinary. But according to the CIA, McMonagle was successful 20% of the time. It's not like anyone could just guess the location of a sunken Soviet Typhoon class submarine, but Joe McMonagle was able to do it. If this was so effective, why did the government shut it down? Once the government starts a program, does it ever really go away? Nope.

Project Stargate was shut down in the 90s, but that was by no means the end of government research into ESP. In 2014, the Office of Naval Research launched a four year, four million dollar program to explore the use of premonition or six cents among sailors and Marines. And there are others.

Dr. Edwin May, the former head of the Stargate Project, continues to say ESP is a legitimate tool for military intelligence. In the scientific community, the military, intelligence organizations, and in the highest levels of government, there are plenty of people who support research into the paranormal. Personally, I consider myself a skeptical believer, or an open-minded skeptic.

But I think this is still a subject worthy of study. I mean, open any congressional spending bill and look at the junk in there. We spent $27 million to teach people in Morocco how to create pottery. $3 million to encourage Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly. Oh, I hear a few congressmen supported that one. $600,000 to study why chimps throw their feces. I wish I could do that. I'm glad you can't. So, yeah, if we can spend a million dollars studying the effect of cocaine on the sexual habits of quail...

we can spend a few bucks on ESP. And look at it this way. As long as there's a CIA, and as long as there's a United States Congress, this channel will have plenty of material. Are there any studies about the effect of vodka on goldfish sex? I don't think so. Well, let's start researching, baby! Hey!

Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. My name is AJ. That's Hecklefish. This has been the Y-Files. If you had fun or learned anything, do me a favor and like, subscribe, comment, and share. Defeating the YouTube algorithm is harder than locating the ancient civilization on Mars, but together we can do it. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.