The document is 29 pages long. A United States Army Lieutenant Colonel named Wayne McDonnell wrote it in June 1983. He submitted it to the CIA. They classified it. It sat in a file for twenty years until declassification in 2003, and then it sat in the CIA's FOIA reading room for another eighteen years until someone posted it on Reddit in 2021 and millions of people read it in a week.
The document's title is "Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process." Its subject is out-of-body travel. Its conclusion, delivered in the measured language of a military assessment, is that human consciousness can detach from the physical body, move freely through space, and access information across time.
What made it famous was not the conclusion. It was the gap. The public version moved from page 24 to page 26. Page 25 did not exist in the released file. No redaction marks. No explanation. One page simply gone, and it fell precisely where the document's most sensitive operational material would logically have appeared.
For years, page 25 was the mystery inside the mystery. Theories accumulated. FOIA researchers filed requests. The CIA offered no explanation. The document remained 28 pages in every copy anyone could find.
The page has been found. It is published in full at The Classified Record, which hosts the first complete word-for-word transcription of all 29 pages sourced directly from the CIA FOIA archive.
What page 25 actually says is not what anyone expected.
Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process — Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell — US Army Intelligence and Security Command, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland — 9 June 1983 — CIA FOIA document CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5 — STARGATE collection — Declassified September 9, 2003 — 29 pages — Full transcript: theclassifiedrecord.com
What the Document Is
McDonnell was tasked to evaluate the Gateway Experience, a consciousness training program developed by the Monroe Institute using binaural audio technology called Hemi-Sync. The technique works by delivering slightly different frequencies to each ear through headphones. The brain, detecting the difference between the two frequencies, generates a third frequency internally, one that corresponds to specific brainwave states associated with deep meditation, REM sleep, or expanded consciousness.
Monroe claimed that with enough practice, the technique could train a person to achieve out-of-body states at will. The Army wanted to know whether this was real and whether it had intelligence applications.
McDonnell's assessment ran 29 pages. He did not approach the subject through psychology. He approached it through physics. His framework draws on quantum mechanics, holographic theory, and the biomedical research of Itzhak Bentov to argue that consciousness is an energy field capable of operating outside the boundaries of the physical body, and outside the dimension of time as we normally experience it.
His conclusion was that the Monroe Institute's program was scientifically coherent and that its objectives were achievable with sufficient training. He recommended a specific accelerated protocol combining Hemi-Sync frequencies, REM sleep induction, hypnotic suggestion, and autohypnosis for use by Army intelligence personnel. He also recommended preparing those personnel to encounter, in his words, non-corporeal intelligent energy forms when time-space boundaries are exceeded.
That last line has generated considerable attention. It is in the document. It is not speculative. A Lieutenant Colonel wrote it in an official assessment for the US Army in 1983.
The Missing Page
For years the assumption was that page 25 contained the document's most sensitive material. The pages immediately surrounding it deal with the operational potential of trained Gateway practitioners and the specific techniques for achieving out-of-body separation. Whatever fell between page 24 and page 26 would logically have been the operational heart of the assessment.
The full text of page 25, recovered from the source CIA FOIA document, is transcribed below. It continues directly from McDonnell's description of how out-of-body separation is achieved.
foot of his physical body) and sliding out through either end of his body.
32. Role of REM Sleep. It is interesting to note that Bob Monroe informed the Gateway class that finished 7 May 1983 that an ex-trainer of his operating in Charlottesville, Virginia found that he could guarantee out-of-body movements by bringing participants down into a rapid eye movement (REM) state of sleep and then use the Hemi-Sync tape technique. This may well be a function of the fact that most if not all people reputedly go into an out-of-body state during REM sleep. REM sleep is the deepest possible level of ordinary sleep and involves complete disengagement of the body's motor cortex functions from the neck down and nearly complete suppression of consciousness in the left brain hemisphere. The effect of this is to put the body in a state of complete stillness so far as the skeletal muscle structure is concerned, thereby further promoting the state of deep rest needed to eliminate the bifurcation echo. In addition, it leaves the right hemisphere of the brain free to respond to the instructions and suggestions contained on the Gateway tape. However, use of the Hemi-Sync tapes at this point may be less a factor in actually achieving the out-of-body state than it is a matter of focusing the brain enough so that a residual memory of having naturally achieved an out-of-body state is carried into the waking state.
The page picks up mid-sentence from page 24's description of out-of-body separation techniques, rolling out, lifting out headfirst like a telephone pole, sliding out through either end of the body. It then moves directly into McDonnell's discussion of REM sleep as a mechanism for reliably inducing the out-of-body state, drawing on a report from a Monroe Institute trainer who claimed he could guarantee the experience by combining REM induction with Hemi-Sync frequencies.
There are no suppressed conclusions on page 25. No encounter protocols. No classified program names. The page is technical, methodological, and fully continuous with the surrounding text.
Which raises an obvious question. If page 25 contained nothing sensitive, why was it missing?
Why the Gap Existed
The most likely answer is administrative rather than conspiratorial. The CIA's FOIA processing of the STARGATE collection involved scanning physical documents. A scanner feed error, a page stuck to another during digitization, a simple misfiling during the original classification process, any of these could account for a missing page in a document that was not considered high-priority for careful handling at the time of its declassification in 2003.
The page was present in the source document. It was simply not captured in the version that entered wide circulation. When researchers went looking for it, they were searching the same circulating copy, not the original archive.
This is a less satisfying explanation than deliberate suppression. It is also more consistent with how government document management actually works.
What the Document Actually Argues
The Gateway document deserves attention for reasons that have nothing to do with the missing page. McDonnell's physics argument is serious and specific. He draws on Planck's Distance, the holographic universe theory of David Bohm and Karl Pribram, the resonance research of Itzhak Bentov, and quantum entanglement to build a coherent model in which consciousness is an energy field that can exceed the boundaries of time and space under specific conditions.
His argument about time is worth sitting with. He describes the universe as a hologram in which all points in time coexist simultaneously. Past, present, and future are not sequential in this model. They are concurrent layers of the same structure. Consciousness operating outside the body, freed from the linear constraints of physical existence, can in principle access any of them.
He wrote this for the US Army in 1983. Not as philosophy. As an operational assessment.
The document was produced inside the same institutional environment as the Stargate Project, the government's two-decade remote viewing program which ran from 1972 to 1995 and was funded jointly by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency. Stargate's statistical results were significant above chance. The program was terminated without publicly resolving the question it was studying.
McDonnell's Gateway assessment was one data point in a much larger classified research effort. The full scope of that effort has never been disclosed. What has been disclosed, including this document in its complete 29-page form, suggests the questions being asked were serious and the answers, whatever they were, were worth keeping classified for twenty years.
Page 25 is not the story. The story is that a Lieutenant Colonel filed a 29-page assessment concluding that consciousness can travel through time, and the US Army received it without apparent surprise.
The fiction begins where the documents stop answering questions.
A neural mesh connecting every settler at Arcadia Base on Mars. James Harlan spent eight years wired into other minds. He knows what a clean signal feels like. He knows when something else has gotten in.
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