Since 2021 it has been circulating across TikTok, Reddit and YouTube: a declassified CIA document that supposedly proves you can leave your body and travel through space and time. The clickbait headlines do not do the text justice – but the real document is almost more interesting than the myth. It is titled "Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process", dated 9 June 1983, and written by an army officer named Wayne M. McDonnell. His task: to soberly assess whether an audiotape method from Virginia was useful for intelligence work – and, along the way, to explain why it might work. It is precisely that attempt at explanation that has made the paper legendary.
What the document actually is
Lt. Col. Wayne M. McDonnell wrote the report as an internal memo to his commanding officer at the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) – the same army intelligence apparatus that, at the same time, ran the secret remote viewing program at Fort Meade. It is not a peer-reviewed paper, not an experiment and not a policy decision, but an assessment: is the Monroe Institute's "Gateway Experience" program worth taking seriously? The paper sat in the archives for decades and resurfaced only through the CIA FOIA Reading Room, where anyone can now read it. Its 2021 virality is about its content – not about a new revelation.
The Monroe Institute and "Hemi-Sync"
Behind the program stands Robert Monroe (1915–1995), a successful US radio producer. In the late 1950s he repeatedly experienced spontaneous out-of-body states, which he described in his 1971 bestseller Journeys Out of the Body – the book that popularised the now-common term "out-of-body experience". Monroe founded an institute in Faber, Virginia, to produce such states deliberately and reproducibly.
His core technique is called Hemi-Sync (for "hemispheric synchronization"). The idea: play slightly different tones into each ear – say 100 Hz on the left, 104 Hz on the right – and the brain "hears" the difference as a pulsing beat (4 Hz), a so-called binaural beat. This is said to bring the two hemispheres into a shared rhythm and so ease altered states of consciousness. The "Gateway Experience" is a series of such tapes, ordered by focus levels:
- Focus 10 – "mind awake, body asleep": body deeply relaxed, mind alert.
- Focus 12 – a state of expanded awareness.
- Focus 15 – "no time": an experience beyond time.
- Focus 21 – the boundary to "other energy systems".
McDonnell's explanation: the holographic universe
This is where the memo becomes unusual. Instead of simply ticking the program off, McDonnell tries to explain how consciousness could reach information beyond space and time at all – and reaches deep into the fringe physics of his day. His most important source is the biomedical engineer and inventor Itzhak Bentov and his book Stalking the Wild Pendulum (1977), which frames consciousness and matter as a matter of vibration and resonance. To this he adds two prominent names:
- the physicist David Bohm with his "implicate order" – the idea that the visible world is the "unfolding" of a deeper, undivided wholeness, much like a hologram;
- the brain researcher Karl Pribram with his holographic brain model – memory and perception not stored locally but distributed across the whole brain like an interference pattern.
McDonnell's conclusion: if both the universe and the brain operate on holographic principles, then in the right frequency state the brain could read the "hologram" of the cosmos directly – non-locally, independent of distance and moment in time. He calls the ordering energy behind it "the Absolute" and pictures it as a "cosmic egg", a constantly flowing spiral. It is exactly the kind of bridge between physics and consciousness that researchers still work on today – for instance in the debate around consciousness and quantum mechanics.
The legendary "page 25"
The document owes its cult status to an accident. For years the circulating scans were missing page 25. Page 24 breaks off mid-sentence – "…the eternal thought or concept of self which results from this self-consciousness serves the…" – and page 26 abruptly resumes. The gap fell exactly where McDonnell develops his central thesis about the self-awareness of "the Absolute". The internet concluded sharply: here the "secret of existence" had been censored.
The sober resolution came later: the page had never been suppressed, just omitted during microfilming. In 2021 it was retrieved from the archives – and contains no sensation, but McDonnell's (admittedly convoluted) continuation of his train of thought. The myth was bigger than the content. A good reminder that a missing page is usually an archiving error, not a conspiracy.
The same apparatus as Stargate
The Gateway memo does not stand alone. McDonnell wrote for INSCOM – the part of the army that ran the decades-long Stargate remote viewing program in parallel. The link is more than coincidental: the best-known operational viewer, Joseph McMoneagle ("Remote Viewer 001"), was closely connected to the Monroe Institute and used its consciousness techniques. The Gateway document is therefore not an esoteric curiosity on the margins, but part of a documented, state-funded engagement with the question of whether consciousness is bound to space and time – a question that here, for once, comes with a file number and a rank.
What is there to it? An honest appraisal
Let us separate the levels. Binaural beats are real and measurable – and at the behavioural level they do work: a meta-analysis by Garcia-Argibay and colleagues (2019, 22 studies) found a medium overall effect (Hedges' g ≈ 0.45) on cognition, anxiety and pain perception, strongest for anxiety reduction (g ≈ 0.69). What does not hold up, however, is precisely the proposed mechanism: that the tones "synchronise" the hemispheres and measurably force the brain into a unified rhythm. A 2023 systematic review (14 EEG studies) found five studies in favour and eight against – so the "Hemi-Sync" idea of brainwave entrainment is exactly what is not supported. A relaxation effect is simply not proof of astral travel.
The out-of-body experience itself can also be reproduced neurologically: a disturbance of the temporoparietal junction, dissociation or sleep paralysis can produce very vivid "I am floating above myself" impressions without anyone leaving the body. And McDonnell's holographic cosmic physics is a bold analogy, not a proven model – Bohm and Pribram supplied mental images, not confirmation of clairvoyance.
But that does not settle the matter – it is where it begins. That the brain can produce such states is undisputed. The real question is a different one: is information ever gained in such states that the brain could not have obtained by normal means? This is the hard test – not in an assessment memo, but in research on veridical perception: checkable, later-confirmed observations from states in which the brain should not have been perceiving at all – including reports from blind people. The Gateway document itself supplies not a single piece of evidence for this – it is an assessment, not an experiment. The burden of proof must come from the actual science, not from a 40-year-old memo.
Conclusion
Anyone who reads the paper as "the CIA confirms astral travel" thoroughly misunderstands it. Its value lies not in its (physically dubious) explanatory model, but in a plain fact: a serious intelligence apparatus considered the question of whether consciousness is bound to space and time important enough to examine it officially. McDonnell's attempt to ground extraordinary experience in physics was both ahead of its time and overstretched. Whether the bridge he built between hologram and clairvoyance holds is decided, in the end, not by the memo – but by the data.
Sources:
• Wayne M. McDonnell, Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process, 9 June 1983 (CIA FOIA Reading Room, doc. CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5).
• Internet Archive: scan of the Gateway document (incl. page 25).
• Robert A. Monroe, Journeys Out of the Body, Doubleday 1971.
• Itzhak Bentov, Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness, Dutton 1977.
• Miguel Garcia-Argibay et al., Efficacy of binaural auditory beats in cognition, anxiety, and pain perception: a meta-analysis, Psychological Research 2019.
• Binaural beats to entrain the brain? A systematic review, PLOS ONE 2023.
• Wikipedia: The Monroe Institute.
• Wikipedia: Hemispheric synchronization / Binaural beats.
Related posts: Stargate – the CIA's secret remote viewing program, Joseph McMoneagle – Remote Viewer 001, David Bohm – implicate order and the holographic universe, Eugene Wigner – consciousness and quantum mechanics, Veridical perception in near-death experiences, Psi programs worldwide.