The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Frederick Atwater.md

created	updated	title	aliases	tags	category	summary	born	location
2026-05-17	2026-10-09	Frederick Atwater	Frederick Atwater Skip Atwater Frederick Holmes Atwater F. Holmes Atwater Frederick H. Atwater	KeyFigure Person Military Stargate RemoteViewing MonroeInstitute PSI 1970s 1980s	Military	Army lieutenant of the 902d Military Intelligence Group attached to Grill Flame in 1978 for his earlier research, who screened the first Army remote viewers and was acting project manager of Center Lane in 1983.	1947-01-01	Glendale, California

Frederick Holmes "Skip" Atwater (born 1947, Glendale, California) was the U.S. Army intelligence officer at Fort Meade, Maryland, who proposed the formation of a military remote viewing unit in 1977, recruited its initial personnel, and served as its operations officer through the program's most active period until his retirement from the Army in 1987. His proposal directly initiated what became the Stargate Project series of programs - Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak - that constituted the military's remote viewing research and intelligence effort for nearly two decades.

Army Career and STARGATE Initiation

Atwater joined the U.S. Army and completed officer candidate school and military intelligence training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, before arriving at Fort Meade in the summer of 1977. He was assigned to the Systems Exploitation Detachment (SED) within the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command structure. He had a personal interest in parapsychology and had heard reports of extensive Soviet research into psychic phenomena and CIA experiments at Stanford Research Institute.

Atwater discovered files left by a predecessor suggesting that remote viewing might constitute a security vulnerability - if Soviet remote viewers could perceive U.S. classified installations, the Army needed to understand the threat. He proposed to Colonel Robert Keenan, head of SED, that a small team of Army intelligence personnel be screened and assembled to test remote viewing from the inside. The proposal was approved by Major General Edmund Thompson, the Army's assistant chief of staff for intelligence.

Atwater and commanding officer Major Murray Watt visited SRI to learn how to screen candidates for remote viewing ability. They identified artistic talent, visual-spatial intelligence, and creativity as associated markers and recruited six initial Army personnel: Joe McMoneagle, Mel Riley, Ken Bell, Nancy Stern, Fernand Gauvin, and Hartleigh Trent. The six were selected under the Army's Grill Flame program, an experimental part-time unit, in late 1978 and early 1979; the chronology states "Of the 251 personnel considered for GRILL FLAME, 117 were interviewed and six individuals were actually selected for training," and records the six INSCOM personnel beginning training at SRI in April 1979.¹ The code name Gondola Wish belonged to an earlier plan of the 902d Military Intelligence Group to train three personnel at the Monroe Institute.²

As a second lieutenant in the 902d Military Intelligence Group's CI Studies Section, Atwater signed memoranda of May 18 and July 31, 1978 as project officer of the group's Gondola Wish plan to train personnel at the Monroe Institute, which the Army staff cancelled on September 25, 1978.²³ On February 21, 1979 he was named as Watt's alternate on the Grill Flame committee roster.⁴

Operations Officer

When the program transitioned from experimental to operational status and was redesignated Grill Flame in late 1978, Atwater continued as operations officer. His role was to receive incoming intelligence taskings from requesting agencies - CIA, NSA, DIA, military commands - shape them into appropriate remote viewing protocols, select the viewer and monitor for each session, manage the actual session process, and package the product. He maintained a deliberate "blind" protocol for initial sessions, ensuring viewers received only the minimum necessary targeting information (often just a geographic coordinate or object description) to minimize analytical contamination.

He identified the unique operational profiles of each viewer: McMoneagle's particular accuracy with technical details and nuclear material; Riley's artistic descriptive ability; Bell's strength with human targets; Trent's responsiveness to structured guidance. Matching viewer profiles to target types became a core element of his operational management.

The program faced intense pressure during the 1980 Iran hostage crisis, with remote viewers receiving repeated taskings to identify the hostages' location and condition. The sustained operations tempo during this period contributed to burnout among some viewers.

Retirement and Monroe Institute

Atwater retired from the Army approximately in 1987. He subsequently joined the Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia - the consciousness research organization founded by Robert Monroe that had been a resource for some STARGATE viewers interested in out-of-body techniques and altered states. He served as the institute's director of research, then acting director following Laurie Monroe's death, and was appointed president in 2006, a position he held until his retirement in 2012.

He published a memoir, Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul: Living with Guidance (Hampton Roads, 2001), describing his Army remote viewing career and subsequent work at the Monroe Institute. In 2024, he published Project 8200: UFO/UAP Bases and Activities: The Original Remote Viewing Transcripts, presenting declassified STARGATE session transcripts.

The Documents

Frederick H. Atwater, known as Skip, was a lieutenant in the Special Security Detachment of the 902d Military Intelligence Group at Fort Meade when INSCOM began its remote-viewing project in October 1978. The project manager, Major Murray Watt, reported in February 1979 that "the initial concern of the Project Manager (PM) was to develop a full understanding of parapsychology and the various aspects of the phenomena. Towards this end, the PM has been greatly assisted by Lieutenant Frederick H. Atwater. LT Atwater, although assigned to the Special Security Detachment, 902d MI Group, was attached to the GRILL FLAME project because of previous research into this area during work on a separate project." Watt and Atwater "were busy preparing a method that would help them select the INSCOM personnel who would volunteer for participation," considering 251 and interviewing 117, and on January 12, 1979, the two visited the Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity at Aberdeen Proving Ground, which was running its own tests of the SRI protocol.⁵

He remained the unit's operations officer through Grill Flame and Center Lane. INSCOM's chronology records, under July 7, 1983, "CPT Frederick Atwater assumes duties as Acting Project Manager," and under August 15, 1983, that Lieutenant Colonel Brian Buzby assumed duties as project manager.¹ Published accounts by participants credit him with recruiting the first six viewers, among them Joe McMoneagle and Mel Riley, and with the unit's training in Robert Monroe's Hemi-Sync method, which the Center Lane briefing dates to the end of 1980. After retiring from the Army in 1988 he became research director of the Monroe Institute's laboratory and, in 2006, its president, and was a founder and president of the International Remote Viewing Association.⁵⁶⁷

Footnotes

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1. US Army Intelligence and Security Command, "List of Events from September 1977 to January 1986," CIA-RDP96-00788R001100020001-8 and the attachment to CIA-RDP96-00788R001500180001-7, cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001500180001-7.pdf. ↩︎

2. 902d Military Intelligence Group, memorandum for Chief, OPSEC Support Division, "GONDOLA WISH (U)," May 18, 1978, signed Frederick H. Atwater, 2LT, MI, CI Studies Section, CIA-RDP96-00788R002000160007-7, cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R002000160007-7.pdf. ↩︎

3. 902d Military Intelligence Group, "Attendance at Scientific Seminar in Support of GONDOLA WISH (U)," July 31, 1978, signed Frederick H. Atwater, Project Officer, CIA-RDP96-00788R002000160013-0, cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R002000160013-0.pdf. ↩︎

4. Memorandum for record, "Minutes of the Grill Flame Committee Meeting, 14 Feb 79," with the representatives roster as enclosure 1, CIA-RDP96-00788R002000130002-5, cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R002000130002-5.pdf. ↩︎

5. US Army Intelligence and Security Command, "INSCOM Project Grill Flame: Progress Report #1," February 21, 1979, with enclosures, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100070001-3. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎

6. US Army Intelligence and Security Command, "List of Events from September 1977 to January 1986," CIA-RDP96-00788R001100020001-8. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. US Army Intelligence and Security Command, "Briefing - Project Center Lane," c. 1984, CIA-RDP96-00789R002100180002-8. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎

7. Monroe Institute and International Remote Viewing Association biographical notices, and Atwater, F. Holmes. Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul. Hampton Roads, 2001; McMoneagle, Joseph. The Stargate Chronicles. Hampton Roads, 2002. ↩︎