Whatever happened to... Pirate Prentice?

[pynchonoid]

Published on: 2003-12-28

Psychic spies knew of raid

By Henry Cuningham
Military editor

As Delta Force was trying to rescue U.S. hostages in
Iran in 1980, a psychic spy monitoring the operation
from the United States reported an explosion.

The National Security Council received the report 48
seconds before getting an electronic call about the
fatal explosion at the site known as Desert One, said
Joseph W. McMoneagle. He started working as a psychic
spy in the 1970s.

McMoneagle and Lyn Buchanan, who also worked on the
once-secret project, describe the incident in books as
"remote viewers." The controversial $20 million
CIA-military program was known as the Stargate
Project. It ended in 1995.

In a study of the project, Ray Hyman, a professor
emeritus of psychology at the University of Oregon,
questioned the reliability of the program's results.

Charlie Rose is a former congressman from Fayetteville
who lives in Marshall, Va. He talked to some of the
people in the program when he was on the House
Intelligence Committee. Rose said a former director of
Central Intelligence told him he was not convinced
that psychic spying was reliable enough to play a role
in military intelligence.

"I don't think our military or intelligence community
at this point is spending very much money on any
psychic program," Rose said.

McMoneagle, who retired from the Army as a chief
warrant officer, wrote about his role in his 2002 book
"The Stargate Chronicles." He discussed his
experiences during a lecture earlier this month at the
Rhine Research Center in Durham.

Practical problems

A psychic trying to gather military intelligence faces
some practical problems, he said.

"During the Iran hostage problem, we were revisiting
targets for the 100th time," McMoneagle said. "As a
psychic, when you are looking at the same problem over
and over and over on a daily process, it gets
extremely difficult to look at it with an open mind."

Either things don't change, or they change very
little, he said.

"We were being asked some pretty critical questions,
like, 'Are the guards getting tired? Are they changing
their armament? What's different about the room?' The
smallest changes could be critical to people
engineering hostage retrieval."

The project tried to gather information about Grenada
during the U.S. invasion in 1983. It also looked for
information on the whereabouts of Manuel Noriega, the
deposed leader of Panama, during the 1989 invasion,
and the intentions of Saddam Hussein during the first
Gulf War.

That's according to Buchanan in his 2003 book, "The
Seventh Sense: The Secrets of Remote Viewing as Told
by a 'Psychic Spy' for the U.S. Military."

Sensitive operations

McMoneagle said planning for the Iran hostage-rescue
operation was so sensitive that only a few people knew
about it; the psychic spies accidentally became aware
of preparations through extrasensory perception, he
said.

"It was one of the most sensitive secrets," McMoneagle
said. "In our remote viewings, it started to pop up.
We started seeing American soldiers stockpiling
weapons inside Tehran, to include trucks and munitions
and things. We started seeing some of the safe
houses."

The psychics reported their findings, and the planners
agreed to let them in on the secret, he said.

"They decided since we were already picking up on that
they would allow us to continue because we were
obviously seeing things ahead of time," McMoneagle
said.

"They decided we might in fact see the issues that
they did not have resolution for and thereby give them
the answers that they lacked."

Psychic spies might get lots of information about a
particular situation, but it's not always necessarily
what is relevant, he said.

"In the military projects, they would want to know
what the agents were doing on the second window over,"
McMoneagle said. "They would get everything but what
the agents were doing. They would get a detailed,
perfect picture of this tower. They'd say, 'That's a
miss. You didn't tell us what the agents were doing.'"

Military editor Henry Cuningham can be reached at
cuninghamh at fayettevillenc.com or 486-3585.

Copyright 2004 The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer
(http://www.fayettevillenc.com)

<http://www.fayettevillenc.com/story.php?Template=military&Story=6069306>

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