The Gateway Experience: What the 1983 CIA File Says

What this article gives you: who wrote the file and why, what Hemi-Sync actually is, what the training tapes actually do, the one testable result buried in the report, the real story of the famous missing page 25, and what fifty years of measurement have and have not shown. What it does not give you: the claim that the CIA confirmed astral travel. It did not, and the document itself is the best evidence of that.

Fort Meade, June 9, 1983: "Frankly, sir"

The document does not open with a thesis. It opens with an admission. On the letterhead of the US Army Operational Group, Intelligence and Security Command, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, Wayne M. McDonnell writes to his commander that he has been asked to evaluate the "Gateway Experience" for its mechanics and its practical usefulness. To do that, he says, he had to understand how and why the procedure works — "Frankly, sir, that proved to be an extremely involved and difficult business." That sentence sits in the first paragraph of the transmittal letter. It is the most honest thing in the pages that follow.

The sender is not an outsider. The Operational Group at Fort Meade was in 1983 the home of the program then running under the cover name Center Lane and later known as Stargate — the unit that tested remote viewing as an intelligence method. McDonnell had taken the training himself, alongside a physician he then consulted about the physical side of it, and he refers to a Gateway course that ended on May 7, 1983 as an eyewitness. The analysis is dated June 9, 1983 and was declassified on September 10, 2003 under the file number CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.

What he does next he describes himself: he reaches for the "biomedical models" of the engineer Itzhak Bentov, then quantum mechanics, then theoretical physics, in order to render the out-of-body experience in scientific language and strip away "the stigma of its occult connotations." The report's bibliography runs to nine titles. Among them are Bentov's popular book Stalking the Wild Pendulum (1977), an article from Mother Earth News of March 1983, one from Science Digest of June that year, Monroe's Journeys Out of the Body, and an undated brochure by one of the institute's trainers. Not one peer-reviewed journal. That is not a verdict — it is the source base you need to know about before you read what the colonel built out of it.

The man behind the tapes

Robert Allan Monroe, born October 30, 1915 in Indiana, was a radio man — a New York broadcasting executive, as the institute's own brochure puts it. His company set up a research division which, according to the institute's history, began investigating methods of accelerated learning in 1958, explicitly without chemicals, drugs or expensive equipment, and in the process ran into what Monroe called "Type III learning": the kind that sticks from a dream.

1958 is also the year Monroe first experienced what he would later name the out-of-body experience: paralysis, a vibration, a bright light, then the sense of leaving the body. He took it for an illness; his doctor took it for overwork. In 1971 Doubleday published Journeys Out of the Body, the book that made the phrase ordinary English — deliberately avoiding the older term "astral projection," because Monroe wanted personal experience rather than an occult, religious or spiritual frame. The Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences was founded the same year, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge in Virginia.

The technical side has a date you can check. On September 30, 1970 Monroe filed with the US Patent Office a "method of inducing and maintaining various stages of sleep in the human organism"; it was granted on May 20, 1975 as US Patent 3,884,218. The claim is soberer than the later legend makes it: a familiar, pleasant, repetitive sound — the patent names surf or rain — is modulated with the pattern an EEG shows during deep sleep, that is, with delta rhythms and sleep spindles. It is a patent for falling asleep. The word Hemi-Sync does not appear in it; that became the trademark under which the institute sold the technique. Monroe died on March 17, 1995.

Two tones, and a third one in your head

What Hemi-Sync physically is can be said in three sentences, and two of them are a hundred and fifty years old. In 1839 the physicist Heinrich Wilhelm Dove described how two tones of slightly different frequency, fed separately to the left and right ear, produce a beat that does not exist in the air: the brain forms the difference. In 1973 Gerald Oster summarized in Scientific American what was known by then — the effect appears with carrier tones below roughly 1,500 Hz, and the perceptible difference lies broadly between 1 and 30 Hz. That is exactly the range in which the EEG has its bands: delta, theta, alpha, beta.

McDonnell describes the application this way: if the left ear hears a tone ten hertz below the right, "the brain elects to hear the difference." The Gateway system plays these beats at a practically subliminal, barely audible level, often hidden in pink noise or surf, with Bob Monroe's voice giving instructions over the top. The hypothesis behind it is called the frequency following response: the assumption that the brain adjusts its own wave activity to the beat it hears, so that someone awake hearing a theta beat drifts from beta toward theta. The stated goal is to quiet the left hemisphere, put the body in a "virtual sleep state," and bring both hemispheres into coherence.

That the beat arises has been established since 1839. Whether the brain follows it is the question that has been open for fifty years — and it is the question everything else in the file rests on.

Focus 10, 12, 15, 21 — a map with numbers instead of names

The institute brochure filed in the same Army folder explains why the stages carry numbers: "to avoid the connotations often associated with names." Focus 10 means "body asleep, mind awake" — a state of deep relaxation close to lucid dreaming, which the brochure declines to call hypnosis but cannot quite distinguish from it either: "Is this self-hypnosis? That depends on your definition."

McDonnell traces the course sequence, and it is the most precise part of his report. First the participant learns to stow the day's worries in an imagined "energy conversion box." Then "resonant tuning": a long hum on a single note, sung along with a recorded chorus until it vibrates in the skull. Then an affirmation repeated aloud — that one is more than one's physical body and wishes to expand one's awareness. Only then come the Hemi-Sync frequencies, the relaxation body part by body part, and the "energy balloon," an imagined shell flowing from crown to feet which, the report says, also serves as protection against "conscious entities of lower energy levels" should a first out-of-body experience occur outside the earthly sphere.

Focus 10 is followed by Focus 12, "expanded awareness," where the tools begin: "patterning" (holding a goal in mind until it arrives), "color breathing," the "energy bar tool" — the report itself draws the line to wands and scepters — remote viewing as an application of that tool, and the "living body map" for healing individual regions of the body. Focus 15 is travel into the past, a very advanced state almost nobody reaches in a training week; Focus 21 is the future. For out-of-body movement itself, McDonnell writes, only a single one of the many tapes is reserved, and the institute stresses that the program does not guarantee it. The techniques he lists are so plain they nearly disappoint: roll yourself out, stand yourself up like a telephone pole, slide out at one end.

The brochure also names the downside: the "fear threshold," where participants who move too fast dread the loss of self, and "clicking out" — believing you fell asleep and remembering nothing. Both admissions stand in a piece of the institute's own promotional writing. That deserves credit.

Bentov, holograms, and a colonel's model of everything

From paragraph 11 the report leaves the training program behind and builds what the cover letter promised: a model of consciousness. The material comes almost entirely from Bentov's Stalking the Wild Pendulum and from an article by Marilyn Ferguson about the neuroscientist Karl Pribram (Human Behavior, May 1978). The chain runs: the universe is a hologram; the human mind is one too; it tunes itself to the "universal hologram" and reads meaning out of it; beyond space and time lies "the Absolute," energy at complete rest, which can perceive itself only by projecting a hologram of itself. Bentov's image for this is the cosmic egg, a torus in which past, present and future are simultaneously present.

One passage shows exactly how physics is used in this model. Paragraph 19 explains that an oscillating consciousness briefly "clicks out" of spacetime at the rest points of every oscillation — specifically when "the velocity of oscillation falls below 10^-33 centimeters per second (Planck's Distance)." The Planck length is a length, about 1.6 × 10^-33 centimeters. It is not a speed. Bentov, whom McDonnell is citing, talks about distances; the report turns it into a rate. That is not a typo. It is the moment a popular-science image becomes a quantity to calculate with, without anyone doing the arithmetic. Whoever reads this file as "the CIA confirmed a holographic universe" is not reading that line.

The closing section draws the religious parallels: a Tibetan text, Indra's net of pearls, the cosmic egg of eastern scripture, Hebrew mysticism, the Christian Trinity — all, McDonnell writes, compatible with his model, and he had to check that so nobody would reject Gateway because it contradicted their faith. It is the section where the report is least an assessment and most a profession of belief. It is also the section where page 25 is missing.

Ten digits nobody ever got

The paragraph the commander at Fort Meade actually cared about is number 33: "Information Collection Potential." If a consciousness can leave the body and travel anywhere, what can it bring back? McDonnell relays the answer of a trainer at the institute: in numerous trials, people in the out-of-body state were sent from one coast to the other to read a series of ten computer-generated digits in a university laboratory. Most captured enough digits to show that their awareness had been present. "No one has ever been able to get all ten of them right."

That sentence is worth reading twice. It is the single place in the entire report where a testable result appears — and the result is that the test was never passed. McDonnell does not treat this as failure but explains it with interference: energy patterns from earlier events at the same location, thought forms mixing with reality, holograms that can be seen "pseudoscopically," inside out. Whether the laboratory existed, who recorded the trials, how many digits "most" captured: the report does not say, and the trainer is not named.

The recommendations at the end follow accordingly. Twelve points, A through L, for organization-wide use: Hemi-Sync tapes, then REM sleep frequencies, then hypnotic suggestion, then the expectation that an out-of-body movement will occur and be remembered. Point H proposes putting three people on a target at once — one in the present, one in Focus 15 in the past, one in Focus 21 in the future — and comparing the three accounts. Point J advises being "intellectually prepared to encounter possible intelligent, non-corporeal energy forms." Point K suggests groups in Focus 12 lay "holographic patterns" around sensitive facilities to repel unwanted out-of-body presences. This is the text that circulates as "the CIA confirmed astral travel." It is an officer's proposal to begin experiments. Whether they ever began is not in this file.

Page 25

The declassified file has a tear in it. Page 24 ends mid-sentence — the eternal thought of the Absolute "serves the" — and the next sheet is numbered 26 and starts at paragraph 37, "Motivational Aspect." Paragraphs 35 and 36 are gone. Since the 2003 release that gap became the document's real myth: Freedom of Information requests went in, the agency answered that it had never held the page, and online the suspicion grew that whatever one was not supposed to know was on it.

The resolution is unspectacular, which is precisely why it is instructive. In February 2021 Thobey Campion published a treatment of the report at Vice that was read millions of times. Four days later the Monroe Institute got in touch: it had the complete document, unregarded for decades, by its own account in a barn. It took weeks and a change of leadership at the institute, and then the page arrived by email. On April 8, 2021 Vice printed it. It begins with the word "Absolute," describes the spiral as a symbol in Christianity, the Hellenic labyrinth, the Hebrew tree of life and Chinese tradition, distinguishes the quantitative method of physics from the intuition of religion — and ends at "know thyself." No secret. Two paragraphs that close the arc from paragraph 34 to paragraph 37.

Why the page was missing from the Army copy nobody knows. Anyone who makes a cover-up of it has to explain why the agency released the paragraphs on holograms, out-of-body reconnaissance and non-corporeal beings, and withheld precisely the one about the spiral in world religions. The simpler explanation is a file copy with a sheet missing. It is also the only one with any evidence behind it.

What the instruments say: 1999 to 2023

The 1983 report contains not a single measurement. Those came later, and from a direction McDonnell had not anticipated: the operating room.

• 1999. A group led by Kliempt published a double-blind randomized study of 76 patients under general anesthesia in Anaesthesia. One third heard Hemi-Sync through headphones, one third classical music, one third a blank tape. The measure was how much fentanyl was needed to keep pulse and blood pressure stable. The Hemi-Sync group averaged 28 micrograms; the other two, 124 and 126.
• 2003–2004. The follow-ups split the result in half. Lewis, Osborn and Roth found a third less fentanyl in bariatric surgery and no difference in spinal surgery; a group around Dabu-Bondoc found no effect at all on the propofol needed for depth of anesthesia. Something acted on the pain component; nothing acted on the consciousness component.
• 2019. Garcia-Argibay, Santed and Reales pooled 22 studies of binaural beats in Psychological Research, 35 effect sizes, and found a moderate, consistent overall effect of g = 0.45 on memory, attention, anxiety and pain perception. That is not nothing. It is also not what Hemi-Sync promises — it is an effect of about the size many relaxation techniques produce, measured on tasks rather than on journeys.
• 2023. Ingendoh, Posny and Heine reviewed in PLOS ONE every study that had tested the brainwave-entrainment hypothesis with EEG. Fourteen qualified. Five supported it, eight did not, one was mixed, and the methods varied so widely that the team questioned whether they were comparable at all. Their conclusion: application studies invoking a "neuroscientifically established" alignment of brain waves should be read with caution.

So: that the beat arises in the head, yes, since 1839. That the brain follows it, open after fifty years. That a consciousness leaves spacetime while it happens, never measured. The hemispheric synchronization that gives the method its name is not a consistent EEG finding. If you want the same honesty applied to a neighboring claim, we did it for the morphic field and for near-death experiences.

Fort Meade and Faber: what the files show about the connection

The link between the Army unit and the institute is real, and it is smaller than either side sometimes tells it. Documented: an officer of the unit took the training in spring 1983 and wrote the assessment; the institute's brochure sits in the same folder; the institute's history page shows a photograph of Monroe with Pat Price and Russell Targ at Stanford Research Institute "around 1974" — Price and Targ being early figures in the remote-viewing program the CIA was then funding in California. The photograph is the institute's own self-presentation, but the names on it match the files.

The person who holds it all together is F. Holmes Atwater. In 1999 he signed a paper on the Hemi-Sync process as a member of the institute's research division; a 2002 interview in New Dawn introduces him as a former operations and training officer of the Army program who later became the institute's research director and president. Asked about military contracts he gives what is still the most precise statement anyone has made about this connection: there was "a classified government contract with Mr. Monroe, not with the Institute," namely the training of the remote viewer Joe McMoneagle; beyond that, service members came in groups to three Gateway courses, "as if it were a communications seminar," none of it secret. That is a participant's account, not a document. It matches what the file shows: one officer on a mattress in Faber, Virginia, one assessment, one brochure. Nothing more — and that is already remarkable enough.

Practical: how to read the file yourself

• Read the transmittal letter first. Two paragraphs, and they tell you the author's own estimate of his task.
• Check the bibliography before the conclusions. Nine titles, no journals. Everything downstream inherits that.
• Find paragraph 33. It is the only testable claim in the document, and it reports a failure.
• Find paragraph 19. Compare "centimeters per second" to what the Planck length actually is. One line tells you how much of the physics survived the trip.
• If you want to try the tapes, treat them as a relaxation practice. Not while driving or operating anything. People with epilepsy or a seizure history should talk to a physician before using any rhythmic audio or light entrainment, and anyone who finds dissociation distressing should give this a wide berth — see our honest answer on whether astral projection is dangerous.

Voices from practice

Subjective reader reports, not evidence:

• "I came for the astral travel and stayed for the nap. Focus 10 is the best forty minutes of rest I get all week, and I have stopped expecting anything else from it."
• "Reading the actual PDF was the thing that cured me of the TikTok version. It's a guy citing a paperback and hoping."
• "The energy conversion box is the only bit I still use, and I use it without the tape. Put the worry in the box, close the lid, pick it up afterward."

What we don't promise

• That the CIA confirmed out-of-body travel. A US Army officer called a training program plausible in 1983 and proposed experiments. The file does not record any being conducted.
• That binaural beats synchronize your hemispheres. After fifty years the EEG evidence for entrainment is split and methodologically inconsistent.
• That Hemi-Sync heals anything. The clearest measured result — less fentanyl needed in one anesthesia study — was only partly reproduced, and none of it is a treatment you can administer to yourself.
• That page 25 was suppressed. It was published in 2021 and contains a passage on the spiral as a religious symbol.
• Anything at all about your own experience. If rhythmic audio makes you dizzy, frightened, or detached from yourself, stop; and if you have a seizure disorder, ask a doctor first.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Gateway Process document real?

Yes. "Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process" by Wayne M. McDonnell is dated June 9, 1983, was written on US Army Intelligence and Security Command letterhead at Fort George G. Meade, and was declassified on September 10, 2003 under the file number CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.

Did the CIA confirm astral projection?

No. The report concludes that Gateway is "plausible in terms of its essential objectives" and recommends beginning experiments. The one testable result it contains — a ten-digit reading test — is described as never having been passed by anyone.

What is Hemi-Sync?

A trademarked audio method built on binaural beats: two tones of slightly different frequency, one per ear, producing a beat the brain constructs. Robert Monroe's US Patent 3,884,218, granted in 1975, covers modulating a pleasant repetitive sound with EEG sleep patterns. The patent itself does not use the word Hemi-Sync.

What was on the missing page 25?

Paragraphs 35 and 36, on the spiral as a symbol in Christianity, the Hellenic labyrinth, the Hebrew tree of life and Chinese tradition, and on the difference between physics and religious intuition. The Monroe Institute supplied a complete copy and Vice published the page on April 8, 2021.

Do binaural beats actually change brain waves?

Unclear. A 2023 systematic review in PLOS ONE found fourteen EEG studies testing the entrainment hypothesis: five supported it, eight did not, one was mixed. A 2019 meta-analysis of 22 studies did find a moderate effect (g = 0.45) on attention, memory, anxiety and pain — but that is an effect on tasks, not evidence of hemispheric synchronization.

Are the Gateway tapes safe to try?

For most people rhythmic audio is unremarkable, but never use it while driving or operating machinery. Anyone with epilepsy or a seizure history should consult a physician before using rhythmic audio or light entrainment, and anyone who finds dissociative states distressing should avoid it. The institute's own materials describe a "fear threshold" participants can hit.

Sources & further reading

• Wayne M. McDonnell, Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process, US Army Operational Group, INSCOM, Fort George G. Meade, June 9, 1983; declassified September 10, 2003, file CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.
• Robert A. Monroe, US Patent 3,884,218, "Method of inducing and maintaining various stages of sleep in the human organism," filed September 30, 1970, granted May 20, 1975.
• Robert A. Monroe, Journeys Out of the Body, Doubleday, 1971.
• Gerald Oster, "Auditory Beats in the Brain," Scientific American, 1973; and H. W. Dove's original description of binaural beats, 1839.
• Itzhak Bentov, Stalking the Wild Pendulum, 1977 — the principal source of the report's cosmological model.
• Kliempt et al., Anaesthesia, 1999 — double-blind randomized trial, 76 patients, fentanyl requirement.
• Garcia-Argibay, Santed and Reales, Psychological Research, 2019 — meta-analysis of 22 binaural-beat studies.
• Ingendoh, Posny and Heine, PLOS ONE, 2023 — systematic review of EEG evidence for brainwave entrainment.
• Thobey Campion, Vice, February and April 2021 — the recovery and publication of page 25.
• F. Holmes Atwater, interview in New Dawn, 2002, on the contract with Monroe and the group courses.
• More in the magazine: Remote viewing and the CIA Stargate files · Astral projection for beginners · What the near-death studies found

This article reads a declassified document and the published research around it. It makes no claim that the technique produces the effects it was built for, and it is not medical advice.

Plausible, considering, in terms of its essential objectives — the whole file is in those six words. #TempleOfDesire