The Gateway Process: what the CIA document actually is
A declassified US government document describing consciousness, holograms and the structure of the universe. It is entirely real, it is in the CIA reading room, and almost every viral summary of it misdescribes what it is.
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Every few years a document resurfaces online under headlines like "the CIA’s secret report on consciousness". It is real. It is called the Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process, it is dated June 1983, and it can be downloaded from the CIA’s public reading room in about thirty seconds.
What it is not is a CIA finding about the nature of reality, and the difference is worth walking through carefully because it is the entire story.
What the document is
It was written by Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell, an army officer, for the US Army Intelligence and Security Command. It is an assessment — a staff officer’s report evaluating whether a commercial training programme, the Monroe Institute’s Gateway Experience, had anything in it worth the army’s attention.
The reason it sits in a CIA archive is that CREST, the agency’s declassified records collection, contains an enormous quantity of material from across the US government. Presence in that archive means a copy passed through the system. It does not mean the CIA commissioned, endorsed or acted on it.
What it says
It is a genuinely strange piece of writing. McDonnell attempts to build a theoretical framework for how the Gateway audio techniques might work, drawing on hemispheric synchronisation, the physics of resonance, holographic models of the brain, and a good deal of speculative cosmology about consciousness escaping the constraints of space and time.
It is dense, sincere, and considerably more metaphysical than a defence assessment normally gets. That is why it reads so compellingly to a modern audience.
What it is not
It is not experimental. No study is reported, no data is presented, no subjects were tested. It is a literature review and a theoretical argument written by one officer who had clearly read widely and was reasoning from what he had read.
The famous missing page is worth mentioning: for years the scanned copy lacked its final page, which fed speculation about redaction. The missing page was subsequently located and published. It contains a conclusion, not a revelation.
What remains worth asking
Whether anything came of it. The assessment was written to inform a decision, and what that decision was is not clear from the document itself. Army interest in altered states in this period is documented elsewhere, and the connection has never been mapped properly.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
- 01
What decision was the assessment written to inform?
A staff report exists to answer a question somebody asked. Identifying who asked and what happened next would place the document properly for the first time.
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Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process
Wayne M. McDonnell, US Army Intelligence and Security Command · 9 Jun 1983 · no public copy located
CREST — the CIA Records Search Tool
Central Intelligence Agency
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