The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) keeps a 1983 Army report in its public archive that studied a program designed to expand human consciousness beyond ordinary limits.
Quick Take
- A declassified Army document called “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process” sits in the CIA’s public Reading Room.
- Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell wrote the report in June 1983 for the Army’s Operational Group at Fort Meade.
- The report studied the Gateway Experience, a method meant to sync brainwaves and alter consciousness.
- The document was formally released to the public in 2003 and remains available online today.
A Cold War Army Report Finds a Public Home at the CIA
The file sits in the CIA’s online Reading Room under the title “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process.” It carries the catalog number CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5 and can be downloaded directly from the agency’s website. The document is not a rumor or a leaked rumor passed around online. It is an official scanned record, stamped and filed the same way thousands of other declassified intelligence papers are stored for public review.
The report is dated June 9, 1983, and addressed to the commander of the U.S. Army Operational Group at Fort Meade, Maryland. The cover page names its author: Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell. That detail matters. It turns a mysterious government file into a traceable document with a real writer, a real date, and a real chain of command behind it.
What McDonnell Was Actually Asked to Study
McDonnell’s assignment was narrow. He was tasked with assessing something called the Gateway Experience “in terms of its mechanics and ultimate practicality”. The Gateway Experience was a training technique built around synchronizing brainwave patterns between the brain’s two hemispheres to produce altered states of awareness. McDonnell’s job was to evaluate whether the method worked and whether it had any practical use for the Army, not to declare paranormal powers scientifically proven.
That distinction gets lost easily once a story spreads online. Some coverage has framed the report as the government confirming people can leave their bodies or bend time and space. The document itself reads more like a technical evaluation, weighing theories about consciousness against the physics and neuroscience understanding available at the time. It raises questions and offers analysis. It does not deliver laboratory proof.
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
Why the CIA, Not the Army, Hosts the File
Readers often assume that because the CIA hosts the document, the CIA wrote it or backed its conclusions. The paper trail says otherwise. The U.S. Army Operational Group and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command produced the report, with McDonnell listed as the sole author. The CIA Reading Room functions as a public storage shelf for declassified government records from multiple agencies, not a stamp of agency endorsement on every page.
That setup fits a broader pattern from the era. CIA historians confirm the agency examined claims of extrasensory perception starting in the 1970s before handing that research over to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Years later, oversight of the related Stargate remote-viewing program shifted back to the CIA, which then commissioned an outside review by the American Institutes for Research in 1995. That review found the program had never produced usable intelligence and recommended shutting it down, a decision that followed shortly after.
Settling the Release Record
The release notation on the document reads “Approved For Release 2003/09/10,” placing its declassification squarely in September 2003. Separate library catalog records describe the same 1983 Army report and confirm its release that year. Minor differences in page count and exact release day appear across secondary archive listings, but the core facts, the author, the date written, and the year of release, line up consistently across every source.
What remains clear cuts through any confusion: a named Army officer wrote a real evaluation of a consciousness-training program in 1983, and the federal government released it to the public two decades later. That is a documented fact, not a theory. How readers interpret the Gateway Experience’s claims about the mind is a separate conversation from whether the report exists and says what it says.
For a public used to secrecy around intelligence work, a document like this offers something rare: a direct paper trail from writer to agency to public release, free of the guesswork that usually surrounds Cold War-era government files.
Sources:
cia.gov, archive.org, documents2.theblackvault.com, popularmechanics.com, irp.fas.org, irva.org
