Transcript of the Army's attempt to remote-sense Martian life via astral projection

On May 22, 1984, the Army asked Joseph McMoneagle -- a "psychic spy" -- to astrally project himself to the planet Mars ... 1 billion years in the past.

The full transcript is online at the CIA's digital reading room, and it is exhaustively nuts. But a blast to read! Could someone hire a few actors and stage this? Or do a crackly-radio-serial recreation, as a podcast?

Slate actually tracked down McMoneagle to ask him about the experience:

As he tells it, neither he nor Monroe had any idea that he was being asked to examine extraterrestrial sites. "Neither of us knew what we were working on. Our assumption at the time was that I was working on targets on Earth," he told me. This left him especially confused about the pyramids he claimed to perceive, since, as he said, "I was not familiar with any pyramids on Earth that had such large rooms."He professed confusion about why the Army would have chosen such a target-one from which actionable intelligence was not immediately forthcoming. "I have not got a clue. Absolutely none. It was so totally out of left field for me," he said. Indeed, he could only name one other occasion when he'd been asked to examine a similar target: a photograph that appeared to include incidental evidence of a UFO. On another occasion, he declined a request to mentally examine a similar object, reluctant to waste his time. "The problem that I have with targeting UFOs and Mars and things like that is that there's no real way to validate the information," he told me.

(Via Christian Bok)