Gateway Process: Bentov and the CIA's Classified Report

Itzhak Bentov survived the Holocaust, built Israel’s first rocket without a university degree, invented the steerable cardiac catheter in a church basement in Massachusetts, co-founded the company that became Boston Scientific, and wrote a book arguing that human consciousness operates like a radio receiver tuned to a universal frequency field. Then he died in the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 at O’Hare Airport in 1979. He was 55. Four years later, the U.S. Army published a classified report that used his theoretical framework as its scientific foundation for investigating how human consciousness might transcend the boundaries of space and time.

Bentov never saw what the military did with his ideas. Yet the trail he left — from biomedical engineering through meditation research to a declassified CIA document — connects to programs and claims that run through the Monroe Institute, the NSA, the Gateway Process, and into the present day. Frequency is the common thread.

The Inventor

Bentov came from Humenné, Czechoslovakia, born in 1923. The Nazis killed his parents, younger brother, and sister in concentration camps. He escaped to British Palestine, joined the Israeli Science Corps — which David Ben-Gurion folded into the Israeli Defense Forces one month before Israel declared statehood in 1948 — and built weapons for a country that did not yet formally exist. Remarkably, his daughter, English professor Sharona Ben-Tov Muir, did not learn about this part of his life until after his death. She documented it in her 2005 memoir, The Book of Telling.

After emigrating to the United States, Bentov set up a workshop in the basement of a Catholic church in Belmont, Massachusetts. He had no formal engineering degree. Instead, what he had was a chemistry lab, an electronics bench, a milling machine, an extruder for working with polymers, and an apparently limitless mechanical intelligence. In 1967, he built the steerable cardiac catheter — a flexible tube that could be guided through blood vessels during heart procedures, replacing rigid instruments that carried significant risk of internal damage. As a result, the invention attracted businessman John Abele. Together they founded Medi-Tech in 1969, the company that Peter Nicholas and Abele later used as the basis for Boston Scientific. Bentov held dozens of patents across pacemaker leads, EKG electrodes, automobile brake shoes, and — improbably — diet spaghetti.

None of this is the reason his name appears in a CIA document.

The Theory

Bentov meditated daily for decades. Accordingly, he attached electrodes to his own head, connected them to a function generator, and experimented with how different frequencies and waveforms affected brain function. He built a seismographic device to record the reverberations of the heartbeat within the aorta and discovered something specific: during normal breathing, the echo off the aorta’s bifurcation at the pelvis is out of phase with the heartbeat. During meditation, when breathing slows and the body enters a particular rhythmic state, the echo locks into phase with the heartbeat. The system synchronizes. Energy expenditure drops. Awareness, according to Bentov, expands.

He published these ideas in 1977 in Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness. The book’s central argument was mechanical, not mystical: the brain does not generate consciousness. Rather, it receives it — the way a radio converts invisible electromagnetic signals into sound. Consciousness, in Bentov’s model, is a field phenomenon. In other words, the brain is a transducer. Meditation works by tuning the body’s internal oscillations to match the frequency characteristics of a broader information field that permeates all matter. He described the universe as a toroidal system — a self-recycling doughnut of energy that continuously expands, curves, and returns — and proposed that at specific frequencies, human awareness could access information normally outside the bandwidth of ordinary perception.

He illustrated the book himself, with hand-drawn diagrams. The writing is clear, often funny, and relentlessly concrete. In particular, he used the analogy of pebbles dropped into a bowl of water to explain holographic information encoding — the same analogy that would later appear, cited to Bentov, in a classified U.S. Army intelligence document.

The Gateway Process Report

On June 9, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell submitted a report to the Commander of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Meade, Maryland. The document — “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process” — carried a classified designation and remained restricted until its partial declassification in 2003. It has since become one of the most discussed intelligence documents on the internet, largely because of what it says and what it draws on to say it.

What the Report Built On

The Army tasked McDonnell with evaluating the Gateway Experience, a consciousness-training program developed by Robert Monroe and the Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia. Monroe, a radio broadcasting executive, had spent the 1970s developing audio techniques — binaural beats delivered through headphones — designed to synchronize the electrical activity of the brain’s left and right hemispheres. He called the resulting state Hemi-Sync. In practice, the Gateway program used a series of audio tapes to guide participants through progressively deeper altered states, with claimed applications ranging from enhanced focus to out-of-body experience.

Specifically, McDonnell opens the report by acknowledging that he needed a scientific framework capable of explaining how the process might work. He found it in Bentov. “Initially, based on conversations with a physician who took the Gateway training with me, I had recourse to the biomedical models developed by Itzhak Bentov to obtain information concerning the physical aspects of the process,” he wrote. From there, he integrated quantum mechanics, holographic theory, and Monroe’s audio technology into a unified model of consciousness that treats the brain as a coherent energy system capable of operating beyond the space-time dimension.

Across its 28 pages, the report references Bentov’s work repeatedly — his pebble-in-water hologram analogy, his model of consciousness as oscillating energy, his description of how the body’s rhythmic systems synchronize during meditation. Bentov’s framework provides the biophysical layer. Monroe’s Hemi-Sync provides the applied technology. Structurally, the Gateway report marries the two — a military intelligence officer’s attempt to determine whether consciousness can be systematically trained to access non-local information, and if so, how.

The Missing Page

McDonnell concludes that the Gateway technique is “a viable means of altering consciousness” and that the altered states it produces have potential applications. Notably, Page 25 — allegedly the section dealing with practical implications — went missing from the declassified version for years, fueling extensive speculation. Analysts eventually located and released a version of the missing page, though questions about its completeness persist.

The Operational Thread: Dan Sherman and Project Preserve Destiny

If Bentov provided the theory and Monroe provided the technology, then Dan Sherman’s account describes what the operational endpoint may have looked like.

Sherman served in the U.S. Air Force for twelve years (1982–1994), receiving the Air Force Commendation Medal, multiple Achievement Medals, and recognition for service in the Persian Gulf War. In 1992, while training as an electronic intelligence specialist at the NSA facility at Fort Meade, Sherman claims he was simultaneously inducted into a classified program called Project Preserve Destiny. A FOIA request later confirmed the project’s existence under NSA jurisdiction.

Sherman’s account, published in his 1998 book Above Black, describes training that reads like a crude operationalization of Bentov’s principles. Handlers took him to a secure facility, gave him unidentified pills, and seated him before a computer screen displaying a sine wave. His task: mentally flatten the wave without physical input. No keyboard. No mouse. Concentration only, producing a specific internal “click” that generated visible changes in the waveform on screen. The exercises progressed from single waves to multiple simultaneous frequencies. Moreover, the entire training took place in total isolation — no communication with other trainees, no reading material, no context provided about what the exercises served.

The Operational Endpoint

After completing the training, Sherman’s handlers assigned him to a workstation where he performed his normal ELINT duties alongside a second, hidden function: receiving what he describes as telepathic transmissions — streams of alphanumeric data including identifiers, codes, and what he believed were geographic coordinates — which he entered into a secure system for his NSA handlers. He received over 75 such transmissions across a ten-month period from a source he nicknamed “Bones.”

Sherman’s claims remain extraordinary and unverified beyond his documented military service record and the FOIA confirmation that Project Preserve Destiny existed under NSA authority. Significantly, Edward Snowden’s 2013 leak of the NSA’s Sentry Eagle program structure — which revealed how the agency hid deeply classified programs beneath less classified ones as covers — corroborated the architectural mechanism Sherman described years earlier. Even so, the substance of his claims — telepathic communication with non-human intelligence — rests entirely on his testimony.

Ultimately, what connects Sherman to Bentov is the mechanism: frequency manipulation as the interface between human consciousness and information that cannot be accessed through conventional sensory channels. Bentov theorized it. Monroe built tools to induce it. The Army evaluated it. Sherman claims to have trained in it. Whether these represent a continuous institutional thread or parallel developments drawing on the same speculative framework is a question the classified record has not answered.

The Current Generation: Jozak and the Skywatcher Program

Jordan Jozak, a former USAF member, has emerged in the mid-2020s as part of a new cohort of insiders making claims that extend the frequency line into the present. In particular, his association with the Skywatcher project — a private research operation involving defense insiders, physicists, and intelligence community veterans — has drawn attention. Jozak has hinted at crash retrievals and reverse engineering programs, and has reportedly received invitations to collaborate with foreign governments on related research.

The Skywatcher team’s published work focuses on infrared harmonic analysis of UAP emissions, frequency profiling of observed objects, and what they term “psionic interface” — the hypothesis that certain UAP respond to coherent human consciousness as a control input. Their research papers describe UAP emissions exhibiting structured harmonic patterns, with frequency conversions yielding tones that align with biological resonances including, they claim, vibrational modes of human DNA.

Whether this represents rigorous science or sophisticated pattern-matching projected onto ambiguous data is an open question. Nevertheless, the conceptual framework — consciousness as a frequency phenomenon, the brain as a tunable receiver, coherent mental states as an interface with non-human systems — traces a direct line back to a Czech-born inventor who built heart catheters in a church basement and wrote a book about pendulums.

The Through-Line

Bentov proposed a testable mechanical model: the body produces standing waves during meditation; those waves synchronize internal oscillations; that synchronization alters the brain’s reception characteristics; altered reception permits access to information outside normal sensory range. He grounded this in measurable physiology — aortic reverberations, heartbeat phase-locking, EEG frequency bands.

In response, the U.S. military took that model seriously enough to classify a 28-page assessment of it. Subsequently, the Monroe Institute built a commercial training system around the audio technology that the report validated. Meanwhile, an NSA program — whose existence FOIA requests have confirmed — allegedly trained personnel in frequency-based mental exercises consistent with the model’s predictions. Today, a new generation of researchers applies the same framework to UAP sensor data.

Still Running

The Monroe Institute did not close when the Cold War ended. Nor did it shut down when Stargate lost its funding. It still operates from its campus on 300 acres in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Faber, Virginia — the same location where Army intelligence officers trained in the 1980s. Its flagship offering remains the Gateway Voyage — the program that McDonnell’s classified report evaluated — which runs as a week-long residential retreat and as a virtual program. Robert Monroe’s original binaural beat exercises remain in use. The Institute has since updated the audio tapes and now calls its technology Monroe Audio Support rather than Hemi-Sync, which a separate company acquired — but the underlying methodology is the same system the Army assessed in 1983.

The Instructor Who Never Left

Joe McMoneagle — Stargate’s Remote Viewer #001, recipient of the Legion of Merit for his intelligence contributions, the man who described a Soviet Typhoon-class submarine under construction before satellite imagery confirmed it — still teaches at the Monroe Institute. McMoneagle leads the Remote Viewing I and Remote Viewing II residential retreats and a virtual basics course, drawing on 47 years of experience in what the Institute calls “anomalous cognition.” According to the program pages, if McMoneagle is unavailable, trainers he personally prepared over the past 15 years deliver the curriculum using his recorded material. As of this writing, he remains the primary instructor.

This is the part of the story that receives the least attention and deserves the most. Analysts declassified the report. Congress defunded and acknowledged the intelligence programs. Bentov published the theoretical framework in a book anyone can buy. And the institution at the center of it all — the place where the Army sent its people, where the technology took shape, where McMoneagle trained and now teaches — stands open to the public. A website advertises it. A reservations system books it. Three hours separate it from Washington, D.C.

What It Proves and What It Doesn’t

None of this proves that consciousness operates the way Bentov described. Instead, it proves that the U.S. intelligence community behaved, for decades, as though it might — and that the infrastructure built around that possibility outlived every program that funded it. The investment, the classification, the programs — all real. The institution still stands. Yet the question of whether any of it produced what it aimed to produce remains, as it has since 1983, on the other side of a classification wall that no one with the authority to open has chosen to.

Bentov died on his way to share his ideas with a group of Japanese scientists. His book remains in print. His cardiac catheter continues to save lives. And his model of consciousness still carries a classified designation in the one context where officials took it most seriously. In the Virginia mountains, on a campus he never visited, people still sit in darkened rooms with headphones on, listening to tones calibrated to do what he said the body already does on its own — if you can get it quiet enough to hear.

“I speak from my present level of ignorance. The more you know, the more ignorant you become, because ignorance grows exponentially — the more answers you get, the more new questions arise.” — Itzhak Bentov

The Frequency Line: One Man’s Theory, the Army’s Classified Secret