The "CIA Proved Astral Projection" Document, Read Straight

This is Part 5 of 8 in the series The Gateway. We've covered the man, the machine, and the research. Now we go to the document that launched a thousand viral posts.

You've seen the claim. The CIA proved astral projection is real and wrote a report about it.

Let's read the actual document.

It's titled "Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process." Dated June 9, 1983, at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. Written not by the CIA, but by U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell of the Army's Intelligence and Security Command. The CIA only released it, declassified through its CREST archive in 2003. It went viral around 2017. Twenty-nine pages.

McDonnell's assignment was practical: does the Monroe Institute's Gateway Experience have any intelligence applications? To answer it, he tried something remarkable for a military assessment. He built a physics of consciousness. He drew on Itzhak Bentov's model of the body as a vibrating system, resonating near 7–7.5 Hz, close to the Earth's Schumann resonance. He drew on David Bohm's holographic universe and Karl Pribram's holonomic brain. And he gave a careful technical explanation of binaural beats and the frequency-following response.

Here's what the memes leave out. The report is explicitly speculative. McDonnell concedes empirical proof is lacking. He calls Gateway plausible in terms of physical science and worth further study. It contains no controlled experimental findings. The holographic discussion is an Army officer applying existing theory to Monroe's reported experiences, not a conclusion from government labs.

And the best detail: page 25 went missing from the declassified release for 18 years. The CIA said it didn't exist. In 2021 a journalist found that the Monroe Institute had the complete document all along and simply emailed it over. Page 25 covers consciousness and "the Absolute."

So what does the document prove? That in 1983, during a Cold War when both superpowers were funding consciousness research (the U.S. had Stargate, the Soviets had their own programs), an Army officer took Monroe seriously enough to spend 29 pages theorizing about it.

It proves curiosity. Not certainty.

Next up, Part 6 of 8: The Button. The strongest science in this story didn't come from parapsychology. A Swiss neurologist found a spot behind the ear that can make you leave your body.

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