Yes — that’s the part worth looking at closely.
The “missing Page 25” story concerns the 1983 Gateway Process assessment, often circulated online with claims that a page discussing the pineal gland, consciousness, and psychic phenomena was deliberately removed by the CIA.
The key point is that the story is more complicated than “the CIA hid the truth about the pineal gland.”
The document is titled “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process” and was prepared for the U.S. Army by Lt. Col. Wayne M. McDonnell in 1983. It examines the Monroe Institute's Gateway training and attempts to construct a theoretical explanation for reported altered states of consciousness.
The assessment discusses ideas involving:
The pineal gland does appear in the broader material, but it isn't presented as a newly discovered psychic organ by the CIA.
There are actually three different things that tend to get blended together online:
1. What the Gateway report says
The Army analyst discusses various theories about consciousness and physiological mechanisms. Some of these theories were speculative even at the time.
2. What other researchers hypothesized
The report draws upon people such as Itzhak Bentov, whose ideas included unusual interpretations of bodily vibration, consciousness, and the brain. References to the pineal gland can therefore appear in discussions surrounding these theories.
3. What social media claims
This is where statements such as:
“The CIA discovered the pineal gland is the third eye.”
or
“The CIA removed Page 25 because it revealed the pineal gland activates psychic abilities.”
start appearing.
Those statements go beyond what the document establishes.
This is particularly interesting because different scans/versions of the declassified material circulate online, and people have interpreted gaps, page numbering, and document formatting as evidence of deliberate suppression.
But a missing or unavailable page in an online copy isn't by itself evidence that the CIA removed it because it contained a revelation about the pineal gland.
The safest way to investigate this is to look at the actual declassified document and its surrounding pages, rather than relying on screenshots or TikTok/YouTube interpretations.
If you want, I can go one step further and walk through the Gateway report page-by-page around the alleged Page 25, quote the relevant pineal-gland passages, and explain what McDonnell was actually claiming versus what the internet later attributed to the CIA.
