166. Psychic Spy Joe McMoneagle Tells How His Near-Death Experience Led to Remote Viewing

Summary: Interview with U.S. Army Remote Viewer Joe McMoneagle explains how his near-death experience led to being selected for the government’s psychic spy program. Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Joe McMoneagle, author of, Memoirs of a Psychic Spy. During the interview McMoneagle discusses the origins of the government’s psychic spy program: Joe McMoneagle: We heard rumors and picked up some details about the Russians using psychics to spy on America.   It was impossible, for obvious reasons, to get an actual agent inside their program; so when faced with the possibility that our enemy is doing something that we have no ability to judge, the best way to find what their capability is, or the limits of their capability, is to emulate them. So the initial intention was to just spend three years doing that--selecting people, targeting our own people at the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, that sort of thing. That didn’t work very long because we were able to successfully recruit six people and they turned out to be very, very good at doing what we thought the Russians were doing. They were good enough that people felt that it should be operational immediately. Alex Tsakiris: Tell us about your trips to Russia and your meeting with your Russian counterparts. Were they really spying on us with psychic spies? Joe McMoneagle: In actuality, they were. They were using spies, psychic spies, to target us and target many of our agencies. In my trips to Russia and the time I spent with the directors of their program and their actual remote viewers—I call them remote viewers. They probably shouldn’t be called remote viewers because they use nothing like our protocols. They displayed some interesting capacities in many of the things that they were doing but they did things completely differently than us. They did a lot of things that we didn’t do in terms of their attempts to manipulate the paranormal area, anyway. For instance, there were some efforts I know that they spent a great deal of time in trying to manipulate or affect the decision-making of some American politicians and that sort of thing. Joe McMoneagle's Website Play It: Download MP3 (67:00 min.) Read It: Alex Tsakiris: Today we’re joined by one of the world’s leading experts on remote viewing. Joe McMoneagle was psychic spy #001 for the U.S.’s Stargate Project that began at the Stanford Research Institute in the ‘70s. Joe was also a near-death experiencer and author of several books, including Mind Trek: Exploring Consciousness, Time and Space Through Remote Viewing, and Memoirs of a Psychic Spy: The Remarkable Life of U.S. Remote Viewer 001. Welcome, Joe, and thanks for joining me today on Skeptiko. Joe McMoneagle: I’m glad to be here. Thank you. Alex Tsakiris: You know, there are so many big picture topics that we could get into given your background that I hardly know where to start. I mean, you’re a military man and a soldier who spied on the enemy to advance our national interests. But at the same time you’re a man with this extraordinary spiritual experience that you had to reintegrate back into your life—this NDE that you had. Most people know, of course, that you’re a psychic, which you say remote viewers are psychic so you’re psychic. Not that you are “a psychic” but you’re psychic. But then you also have these spontaneous out-of-body experiences that I think people would just find fascinating. I don’t know how much we’ll be able to get to but I’m excited to jump into it. Where I thought we’d start is with this military background, so one thing that jumped out at me—here you are in the middle of the Vietnam War and you’re a college student and you decide to join the Army. Why? Joe McMoneagle: That’s a really good question. Actually I was going to go to college. I was accepted at the University of Miami and I went and bought all my books and registered for my classes and everything.