The Mars Session

The session is a transcript, and the transcript is real. It sits in the CIA's reading room under the reference CIA-RDP96-00788R001900760001-9, headed Mars Exploration, May 22, 1984. A monitor reads coordinates; a subject describes what he finds at them. Joe McMoneagle, the programme's first viewer, has said he was the subject. In the tellings he describes huge pyramids, one big enough to hold three of Giza's, a strange-looking sun, canals, and very tall thin human-like beings waiting out the death of their world in hibernation chambers before some of them board a large metallic ship.

What is on the record

Eleven videos across two channels carry the case and the archive resolves three claimants: McMoneagle, Bob Monroe and Lyn Buchanan. Monroe is there because two tellings have him as the monitor. One of them says the Department of Defense handed him the sealed target. Buchanan is there for a different session, covered below. The tellings of McMoneagle's session differ as one story retold ten times will. The beings are eight to twelve feet tall in one, twelve to fourteen in another, twice human size in a third. One dresses them in silky suits so close-fitting the viewer could not tell skin from clothing. Another sends a party of them out in a craft to scout a new home, and they find a violent young planet of electrical storms and volcanoes that the telling takes to be Earth. Two add that McMoneagle later obtained JPL photographs of the coordinates that matched his sketches, a pyramid at the edge of an impact crater among them. One channel's host says only about thirty percent of the viewing is held to be accurate, and that he debunked some of the images McMoneagle showed him. The eleventh telling is Lyn Buchanan's own viewing of Mars, merged in from a heading the archive used to keep apart: sand underfoot in an eroded pyramid, a dim sun in a wrong-coloured sky, large worm-like beings with atrophied limbs. He says he later matched his sketches to a NASA photograph. Buchanan was another viewer in the same programme describing a session of his own. He adds a second claim about Mars and no witness to the 1984 session.

Outside the archive's holdings the document confirms the setting and not the content. The transcript names nobody; monitor and subject appear as MON and SUB. The first coordinates it gives, 40.89 north and 9.55 west, sit in Cydonia, close to the mesa known as the Face. The fact sheet's best date of one million BC is the target written on the envelope and not the date of anything.

Why it sits where it does

This is not a sighting. A man in a room described images in his mind and a government programme wrote them down. The case grades L3 on three resolved claimants. One is the man who held the envelope and another viewed Mars in a different session. The independence the tier measures is thin: every telling of the 1984 session descends from McMoneagle's account of it, and Buchanan's descends from his own. The transcript is a primary document of the programme, not of the planet. What was in his mind that morning is not resolved here.