Joe McMoneagle has defended remote viewing as a real phenomenon while recounting his claimed psychic observation of an ancient Martian civilization.
McMoneagle, a former US Army participant in the classified Project Stargate program, spoke about his experiences on the Align podcast hosted by YouTuber Aaron Alexander. The military investigation into psychic phenomena ran from 1977 until its shutdown in 1995, exploring whether abilities like remote viewing could serve intelligence purposes. McMoneagle was among those interviewed by journalist Jon Ronson for his 2004 book The Men Who Stare at Goats, which later became a George Clooney film.
“Some [out of body experiences] are objective observations and some are subjective experiences,” McMoneagle said during the podcast interview. “You got to be careful of the subjective experiences, because like I said every human being is in their own world.”
McMoneagle expressed particular frustration about one remote viewing session that he said targeted Mars. He explained that unverifiable targets upset him because they prevented him from improving his understanding of the technique.
“Yeah I got targeted on Mars, it made me very angry because if I can’t prove what I’ve targeted to some extent at a later date or whenever […] then I get upset because I’m not learning better things about remote viewing,” he said.
To address his doubts, McMoneagle said he traveled to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the West Coast and obtained a packet of materials. He provided GPS coordinates from his remote viewing session, and a contact there reportedly identified the location as the old city of Mars. The contact then opened a drawer and handed over four-by-four negatives covering those exact areas, McMoneagle claimed.
He examined these photographs alongside others he had collected of the planet, looking for evidence that would confirm his psychic impressions were grounded in reality.
“They show foundations of buildings, machines that are broken down and partially destroyed, paths, roads, mines,” McMoneagle said.
McMoneagle also claimed to have perceived a shipping container during his Martian remote viewing. He went further, asserting that everything he observed on Mars involved human beings.
“My perception is everything that I remove viewed on Mars had humans involved,” he said. “They’re just like us only twice our size, you can account for that over gravity.”
He speculated about a connection between these supposed ancient Martians and modern humanity.
“I’m making a long hairy guess that’s probably us and something happened on Mars that was eradicating us as an entity, and we were brought here deliberately to save us,” McMoneagle said.
Remote viewing, the purported ability to perceive distant or unseen targets without physical presence, is widely regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community. Project Stargate investigated this and related phenomena for nearly two decades before the CIA terminated the program. Ronson’s book and subsequent film adaptation brought broader public attention to these military experiments with New Age concepts, with McMoneagle serving as one of Ronson’s sources.
McMoneagle’s appearance on the Align podcast represents a continuation of his decades-long public discussion of the classified program and his personal claims about its successes.