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THE STARGATE CHRONICLES: MEMOIRS OF A PSYCHIC SPY by Joseph McMoneagle. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company. Pp. 299. $24.95 (hardback). ISBN 1-57174-225-5.
Few events in the history of parapsychology have garnered as much press attention as the 1995 release of the CIA's evaluation of Stargate remote viewing (aka psychic spying) and the subsequent revelations about the program. Today, putting "remote viewing" in an Internet search engine will locate tens of thousands of sites. A surprising number of them offer various training programs for a fee, so you too can learn the secrets of the psychic spies, often from someone claiming to have been one of the military remote viewers. Sometimes it seems that it will soon be hard to tell fact from fiction regarding the military remote viewing program.
One of the people trying to demystify remote viewing is Joe McMoneagle, the first of the US government's psychic spies and reportedly the best. In his latest book he gives us his unique insider's perspective on how the program developed and operated. This is not just a history book, however. We also learn just what made at least one of the psychics tick, and what it was like to be a psychic spy. One thing is clear -psychic spying was not as glamorous as spying is in a James Bond movie.
As expected in a memoir, The Stargate Chronicles is part autobiography, part history, part soul-searching, with a bit of railing against the system.
The first quarter of the book deals with McMoneagle's childhood and his career in conventional Army intelligence. McMoneagle's childhood was difficult and beset by the problems of parental alcoholism, but not especially remarkable. There were some incidents that, with hindsight, suggested he had some psychic talent, but otherwise it was just a tough life for an all too normal kid. When the time came for McMoneagle to escape his circumstances, college didn't suit him, so the military was his only ticket out of town. He chose the Army in particular because only the Army recruiter didn't try to oversell his branch of the service with wild promises of adventure and advancement. McMoneagle's test results got him assigned to the intelligence wing, and subsequent hard work, achievement, and a bit of luck...