Gateway Process: The Army Report That Tried to Explain Consciousness

On June 9, 1983, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel filed a report arguing that the universe is a hologram, that consciousness can leave space and time, and that a set of stereo audio tapes might help soldiers get there. It was an official assessment, written for his commander, and it now sits in a public intelligence archive where anyone can read it.

The document is called "Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process." Its author was Lt. Col. Wayne M. McDonnell.

A radio man and the Army

The story starts with Robert Monroe, a successful radio producer born in 1915. According to the Society for Psychical Research's Psi Encyclopedia, Monroe reported his first out-of-body experience in the spring of 1958, during his own experiments with sound and sleep. He described being hit by something like a beam of warm light, followed by paralysis and violent vibration.

Monroe did what a broadcaster would do: he turned the experience into a format. His book Journeys Out of the Body appeared in 1971, and in 1975 he received the first of several patents on an audio technique he called Hemi-Sync. The idea is simple to state: play a slightly different tone into each ear, and the brain perceives a third, pulsing "binaural beat." Monroe claimed that this pulse could coax the two hemispheres of the brain into a synchronized state suited to deep meditation and, he believed, to travel outside the body.

By 1977 the Monroe Institute in Virginia was running a residential course built on the tapes. It was called Gateway.

In the early 1980s the Army was quietly funding psychic research, including the remote viewing effort later known as Star Gate. One of its remote viewers, Joe McMoneagle, attended a Gateway course in 1982 and reported that it helped, according to the Psi Encyclopedia. Interest moved up the chain.

McDonnell was assigned to find out how the thing was supposed to work. As Vice summarized the report in 2021, the commander of the U.S. Army Operational Group wanted an explanation of the Gateway Experience in terms a military reader could evaluate. McDonnell states his aim as a model grounded in physical science rather than occult vocabulary.

What he produced, across roughly 29 typed pages, is a remarkable piece of synthesis. He compares Gateway to hypnosis, transcendental meditation and biofeedback. He leans heavily on the biomedical engineer Itzhak Bentov, whose writing treated the human body as a tuned vibrating system resonating with the Earth. Then he goes cosmic.