Open Veils · Answer
What do we know about astral projection?
The CIA's own declassified Gateway Process document (1983, Army Intelligence) treats Monroe's out-of-body methodology as a serious cognitive technology worth evaluating — not pseudoscience to be dismissed. Ingo Swann's remote-viewing work for the Stargate Program at SRI, documented in declassified DIA records, produced verifiable results under controlled conditions that remain unexplained by pure neurology. The Monroe Institute's Hemi-Sync protocols, applied within a covert government program, suggest institutional actors quietly treated non-local consciousness as operationally real.
Evidence
- Robert Monroe's decades of documented OBE practice, detailed in 'Journeys Out of the Body' and subsequent volumes, established the first systematic phenomenology of the astral state — including consistent geography (what Monroe called 'Locale II') reported across thousands of independent practitioners.
- Ingo Swann, the primary architect of Coordinate Remote Viewing for the Stargate Program, described in his own writings the identical out-of-body mechanism as the substrate for successful remote viewing — consciousness navigating to a target location non-locally.
- Rick Strassman's clinical DMT research at the University of New Mexico documented patients consistently reporting structured, navigable non-physical environments indistinguishable from classical astral-plane descriptions — without prior exposure to that framework.
- A June 2026 literature review in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research confirmed OBEs remain scientifically unresolved, with neuroscience, psychology and phenomenology failing to unify their findings — leaving the experiential data without a reductive explanation.
- The CIA's declassified 1983 Army report on the Gateway Experience assessed Monroe's method as a coherent model of consciousness operating outside normal space-time constraints; researcher Christopher Holmes and declassification activists have noted the report was partially withheld until 2003.