A U.S. Army officer spent 1983 studying whether sound tapes could train soldiers to leave their bodies and bend time, and the government’s paperwork on it sits in plain sight today.
Quick Take
- The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) hosts a declassified 1983 Army report called “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process” in its public FOIA Reading Room.
- Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell wrote the report for the Army’s Operational Group at Fort Meade, Maryland.
- The document was approved for public release in 2003 and studies a meditation-style program called the Gateway Experience.
- The report sits alongside a much larger history of U.S. intelligence agencies probing extrasensory perception during the Cold War.
What The Declassified Record Actually Says
The file is officially titled “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process” and carries the CIA catalog number CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5. It’s hosted directly on the agency’s website as a scanned PDF, so anyone can open it and read the original pages. That direct access is what turned a dusty Cold War memo into a viral talking point decades later.
The report is dated June 9, 1983, and addressed to the commander of the Army’s Operational Group at Fort Meade. Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell is named as the author, and he writes that he was tasked with assessing the Gateway Experience program “in terms of its mechanics and ultimate practicality”. That’s a narrow, specific assignment, not a sweeping agency-wide verdict on the paranormal.
The Gateway Experience itself was a self-guided audio program built around sound patterns meant to sync a listener’s brain waves, supposedly unlocking altered states of consciousness. McDonnell’s job was to review the theory behind it and judge whether Army personnel could realistically use it. The report carries a release stamp reading “Approved For Release 2003/09/10,” confirming it moved from classified status to public record two decades after it was written.
Who Actually Wrote It, And Who Just Stored It
It matters who built this document versus who now keeps it on file. The report came out of the U.S. Army Operational Group and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, not the CIA itself. The CIA’s role here is custodian, not author. The agency’s Reading Room holds thousands of declassified records from across the intelligence community, and hosting a document is not the same as endorsing everything written inside it.
A declassified CIA file says the human mind can step outside time and space. Page 25 is missing.
The Gateway Process report, Army Lt. Col. McDonnell, 1983, declassified in 2003.
If it is nonsense, why lose the one page? pic.twitter.com/5FSwzT2bLQ
— Hidden Epoch (@HiddenEpochH) October 12, 2026
Outside library and archive catalogs back up the report’s basic identity. The New York Public Library catalog lists a 28-page 1983 Department of the Army publication matching the same title and date, while independent archive copies confirm the file’s authenticity through separate channels. The same document appearing in three unrelated institutional systems strongly suggests it is what it claims to be: a real, dated, government-authored assessment.
Why This Fits A Much Bigger Cold War Story
The Gateway report didn’t appear in a vacuum. CIA historians have confirmed the agency looked into extrasensory perception and related phenomena early on, eventually handing that work to the Defense Intelligence Agency under what became known as the Stargate program. Army, Navy, and intelligence units spent years testing whether people could remotely view distant locations or sense information through non-physical means.
That broader effort didn’t end quietly. In 1995, the CIA brought in an outside group, the American Institutes for Research, to independently evaluate the whole program. Their final report, released to the public that November, recommended shutting the effort down, concluding it hadn’t produced usable intelligence value despite years of funding. The Gateway report predates that verdict by over a decade, written while the broader psychic-research push was still active and funded.
That history explains why a document studying brain-wave tapes and consciousness carries an official Army letterhead instead of being dismissed as fringe speculation. The Cold War intelligence community treated these questions as worth taxpayer-funded investigation for decades, right up until an independent review told them to stop. The Gateway report is a genuine, dated artifact of that era, preserved exactly as government records are supposed to be.
What readers get from the declassified file is a clear paper trail: a named officer, a specific assignment, a formal release date, and a document anyone can download and read in full. What it does not provide is laboratory proof that the Gateway Experience worked as advertised. The Army assessed a technique; it didn’t certify a miracle, and the record itself never claims otherwise.
Sources:
cia.gov, nypl.org, archive.org, popularmechanics.com, irp.fas.org
