You’ve probably seen the clickbait. Maybe a TikTok video with spooky music or a grainy thumbnail claiming the government found aliens. But the actual story of CIA remote viewing Mars is way weirder than the memes—and it's sitting right there on the official CIA website in the CREST database. It isn't a conspiracy theory. It's a declassified transcript.
On May 22, 1984, a psychic sat in a room, closed his eyes, and tried to look across space and time.
The CIA wasn't just messing around. This was part of Project Stargate. They were spending millions of taxpayer dollars to see if human consciousness could pull off what satellites couldn't. It sounds like a bad sci-fi script, right? But the Army and the CIA took it dead serious for decades.
The Weird Specifics of the 1984 Mars Transcript
The session focused on a specific set of coordinates: 40.89 degrees North and 9.55 degrees West. If you plug those into Google Mars today, you’ll find yourself looking at the Cydonia region. That’s the spot famous for the "Face on Mars."
The remote viewer was Joe McMoneagle. He’s basically the Michael Jordan of remote viewing. He wasn't told he was looking at Mars. He was just handed a sealed envelope with coordinates.
He described a landscape that feels eerie. He saw giant pyramids. He saw "very tall" people who looked thin and wore "strange" silk-like clothes. But he didn't see a thriving civilization. He saw a dying one. He described them as "shadows" of people, hiding from a massive geologic disaster.
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Honestly, the transcript reads like a fever dream. McMoneagle talked about a "dusty" world with "canyon lands" and "obelisks." He felt like he was looking at a time period about one million years B.C.
Why Did the CIA Even Try This?
The Cold War was a hell of a drug.
The Soviets were dumping massive resources into "psychotronics." The U.S. panicked. They didn't want a "psychic gap." So, the DIA and CIA started recruiting people who claimed they could "see" things from a distance. It was called "Remote Viewing."
They didn't just use it for Mars. They used it to find downed Soviet planes, track hostages in Iran, and peek inside secret bunkers. The CIA remote viewing Mars session was likely a calibration test. They wanted to see how far the human mind could reach. If a guy can see a pyramid on Mars, he can definitely see a submarine in a Russian shipyard.
The Problem With the Evidence
Here is where we have to be real.
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Remote viewing is notoriously messy. It's not like watching a 4K livestream. It’s more like catching glimpses of a dream you’re trying to remember while someone yells questions at you. Critics like James Randi spent years debunking these programs, pointing out that "hits" were often just lucky guesses or the result of "front-loading"—where the interviewer accidentally gives away clues.
But the 1984 transcript is unique because of the "blind" nature of the test. McMoneagle didn't know the planet. He didn't know the year.
Yet, he described "huge platforms" and "smooth sections." This was years before high-resolution rovers gave us the clear pictures we have now. Skeptics argue he might have just seen the Viking orbiter photos from 1976, which already showed the "Face on Mars" and sparked public imagination. It's a valid point. If the imagery was already in the cultural zeitgeist, did he "see" Mars, or did he see the public's idea of Mars?
The Stargate Legacy
Project Stargate was eventually shut down in 1995. The official reason? A report by the American Institutes for Research concluded that remote viewing hadn't provided any actionable intelligence that couldn't be gathered through traditional spying.
But some insiders disagree.
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Major General Albert Stubblebine, who headed the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, was a huge believer. He actually thought people could walk through walls. He was obsessed with the idea that the "signal" was real but the "noise" was too high.
What We See Today at those Coordinates
We have better cameras now. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has flown over Cydonia many times.
What the CIA remote viewer called "pyramids," NASA calls eroded mesas.
The "Face on Mars" turned out to be a pile of rocks that just happened to catch the light at the right angle in 1976.
Does that mean McMoneagle was lying? Not necessarily. He might have been experiencing "mental overlay," where the brain tries to turn abstract shapes into recognizable objects. Or, if you're a believer, you might argue that he was seeing a Mars that existed a million years ago, a version of the planet that hasn't left any traces for our modern rovers to find.
The Actionable Truth
If you want to dig into the CIA remote viewing Mars files yourself, don't rely on YouTube summaries. Go to the source.
- Search the CREST Database: Use the CIA's official Reading Room. Search for "Mars Exploration" and the date "May 22, 1984." The PDF is free to download.
- Compare the Coordinates: Open a Mars map tool. Look at the Cydonia region. Compare the actual topography to the "viewing" descriptions. You'll see where the descriptions match and where they diverge wildly.
- Study the Methodology: Look into "Coordinate Remote Viewing" (CRV). It was a rigid, multi-stage process developed by Ingo Swann. It wasn't just "meditating." It was a protocol-heavy attempt to turn psychic ability into a repeatable science.
- Read the Debunking: Look up the 1995 AIR report (the Mumford and Hyman report). It provides the scientific counter-argument for why the government eventually pulled the plug on the $20 million project.
The CIA's foray into Martian psychic spying represents a bizarre moment in history where science, war, and mysticism collided. Whether it was a genuine breakthrough or a massive waste of money, the documents remain a fascinating look at how far the government was willing to go to win the intelligence war. It reminds us that the line between "impossible" and "unclassified" is thinner than we think.
Next time you look at a photo of the red planet, remember that in 1984, the U.S. government paid a guy to go there in his mind. And he came back with a story about tall shadows and ancient ruins that still hasn't been fully explained away.