A once-secret Army report on bending time and human consciousness has sat in plain sight for years, inside the CIA’s own online library.
Quick Take
- The CIA Reading Room hosts a declassified 1983 Army report called “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process.”
- Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell wrote it for the Army’s Operational Group at Fort Meade.
- The report studies the Gateway Experience, a training method said to alter brainwaves and expand perception.
- The document carries a release stamp from 2003, two decades after it was written.
What The Document Actually Says
The file is titled “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process,” and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) keeps a copy in its public Reading Room under file number CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5. It is dated June 9, 1983, and addressed to the commander of a specific Army unit. The report says its job was to study the Gateway Experience “in terms of its mechanics and ultimate practicality,” a narrower goal than simply proving psychic powers exist.
The Gateway Experience itself was a training program built around sound patterns meant to sync the brain’s two hemispheres. The idea was that this syncing could push a person into deeper states of focus or awareness. McDonnell’s report walks through the theory behind this process, drawing on physics and psychology ideas popular at the time, rather than simply declaring the method a proven success.
Who Wrote It And Why
The author was not a CIA scientist. Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell wrote the assessment for the U.S. Army Operational Group and the Army Intelligence and Security Command. That matters because it shows the Army, not the CIA, built the original analysis. The CIA’s involvement came later, when the document was gathered up and released as part of a broader declassification effort.
Catalog records outside the CIA website back up these basic facts. The New York Public Library describes a 28-page 1983 Department of the Army publication matching the report’s title and date. Archive.org also hosts a copy, confirming the document as a real government paper rather than an internet myth with no paper trail.
The CIA’s Role In Keeping It, Not Writing It
The release notation on the document reads “Approved For Release 2003/09/10,” showing the government cleared it for public viewing more than 20 years after it was written. Hosting a document in the Reading Room means the CIA approved its release under public records law. It does not mean the agency wrote the report, ran the experiments described in it, or signed off on its conclusions as scientific fact.
The Cold War Hunt For Psychic Spies
The Gateway report fits inside a much bigger story. CIA historians confirm the agency looked into extrasensory perception as far back as the 1970s, later handing that work to the Defense Intelligence Agency under what became known as the Stargate program. In 1995, the CIA hired an outside research group to review decades of this work. That review found the program never produced usable intelligence and recommended shutting it down.
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
That 1995 shutdown closed the book on the government’s formal psychic research efforts, but it did not erase the paper trail. Records from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Army were swept into later declassification batches, which likely explains how a niche Army report on brainwave training ended up filed next to Cold War spy records.
Separating Authenticity From Proof
The report is a real, dated, authored government document sitting in an official archive. That is a settled fact. Whether its claims about altered consciousness or expanded perception hold up under modern scientific testing is a separate question the document does not answer. Readers can trust the paper trail while still treating the Gateway Experience’s claims as unproven theory rather than established science.
For conservatives who value government transparency, the real story here is accountability. Taxpayer money funded decades of Cold War research into fringe science, and the public now gets to see the paperwork. That openness, more than any claim about bending time, is the part of this story worth taking seriously.
Sources:
cia.gov, nypl.org, archive.org, documents2.theblackvault.com, popularmechanics.com, irp.fas.org
