The Strangest Paper in the CIA's Reading Room
By June Hargrove ·
In 1983 an Army officer was asked whether a meditation tape could carry the mind out of the body. His answer ran 29 pages, cited quantum physics, and sat classified for two decades.
In the summer of 1983, a United States Army lieutenant colonel named Wayne M. McDonnell was handed an assignment with no good precedent: explain, for the commander of an Army intelligence group, whether a commercial meditation course could move a human mind beyond the reach of its body. His answer ran to more than two dozen pages, leaned on quantum mechanics, lasers and holograms, and carried the driest possible title — "Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process." Then it disappeared into the classified world for twenty years.
The document that came back out is now the most requested file in the CIA's FOIA reading room, and it is not close.
What the Army actually asked
The subject of the memo was the Gateway Experience, an audio training program sold by the Monroe Institute of Virginia. The institute's founder, radio executive Robert Monroe, claimed that layered sound frequencies — one tone in each ear, the brain splitting the difference — could synchronize the hemispheres and loosen consciousness from the body. The Army, then quietly funding research into remote viewing that would later be consolidated under the code name STAR GATE, wanted to know whether there was anything underneath the claims.
McDonnell's approach was the memorable part. Rather than dismiss the program or endorse it, he attempted a physics of the soul: consciousness as an energy field, the brain as a holographic processor, the universe as an interference pattern that a properly tuned mind might read from anywhere. He cited the biomedical engineer Itzhak Bentov's work on vibration, and he wrote sentences that no other document in the reading room contains, including a sober discussion of what it would mean to slip outside spacetime.
- The memo was written in June 1983 for the commander of a U.S. Army operational group.
- It was approved for public release in 2003, under the CREST declassification program.
- It runs 29 pages in the released copy — with one page conspicuously absent.
The missing page
For years the copy on the CIA's site jumped from page 24 to page 26. Page 25 — mid-argument, in a section on climbing "the problem of the absolute" — was simply not there, and its absence did more for the document's fame than any page it kept. A generation of readers discovered the file online, hit the gap, and concluded the government had held back the best part.
The truth, as usual in this archive, was duller and stranger at once. When public pressure mounted in 2021, the Monroe Institute produced a complete copy from its own files, and the missing page turned out to be more of the same cosmology — no revelation, no censor's hand, most likely a copying error that survived four decades because nobody with the original cared to check. The lesson generalizes: in declassified records, a gap is evidence of a gap. What filled it has to come from a document, not from imagination.
Why it mattered to the program
Gateway was a sideshow to a larger bet. From the early 1970s until 1995, U.S. intelligence agencies spent roughly $20 million on remote viewing — the attempt to collect intelligence through minds alone, first at SRI International under the CIA, later under Army and Defense Intelligence Agency management at Fort Meade. The STAR GATE collection in the CIA's reading room holds the residue: session transcripts, target folders, internal reviews, and memos like McDonnell's, in which serious officers tried to build a respectable frame around a program that could never quite produce one.
The end came on the record. In 1995 the CIA commissioned the American Institutes for Research to evaluate the program; the reviewers found the laboratory results too inconsistent, and the operational product too vague, to justify another dollar. STAR GATE closed, and its files began their slow walk into the open.
McDonnell's memo survives that verdict better than the program it served. Read today, it is not proof of anything beyond the reach of its own pages — it is one officer, asked an impossible question in an era that took the question seriously, answering with everything the physics section of a 1983 library could give him. The reading room keeps stranger claims than his. It keeps very few documents that try harder.