CIA Mind Spies: The Government’s Secret Proof That Your Consciousness Has No Limits

In September 1979, the CIA handed a man named Joe McMoneagle a set of geographic coordinates for a location deep inside the Soviet Union. McMoneagle sat down in a chair at Fort Meade, Maryland, closed his eyes, and described what he saw inside a heavily fortified building 4,000 miles away. He reported a submarine with twin hulls and forward-slanted missile tubes — a design that did not exist in any naval inventory at the time. He sketched it, estimated its dimensions, and predicted it would launch in about four months. When satellite imagery finally caught up, the vessel was exactly as he described. It was the first Soviet Typhoon-class submarine, the largest ever built.

The Cold War catalyst

The program that produced McMoneagle did not emerge from a vacuum. It was born from Cold War paranoia and a specific fear: that the Soviet Union was already weaponizing the human mind. The primary catalyst was a 1970 book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, by American journalists Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder. They documented Soviet state-sponsored research into telepathy, psychokinesis, and what they called "telepathic hypnosis" — claims that researchers could put subjects to sleep from miles away. The book also detailed the case of Nina Kulagina, a Russian woman filmed moving objects with her mind under laboratory conditions.