Two-body Coulomb explosion processes of methanol (CH3OH) in an intense laser field (0.2 pW/cm(2), 60 fs) are investigated by the coincidence momentum imaging method. In the coincidence momentum images, the hydrogen ejection processes, CH3OH2+ ->, H-m(+) + CH(3-m)OH+ (m = 1-3), are securely identified. From the anisotropy in the angular distributions of the fragment ions, the lifetimes of the corresponding precursor ions CH3OH2+ are estimated to be 70-290 fs for the H+ ejection, 110-550 fs for the H-2(+) ejection, and much longer than 1.4 ps for the H-3(+) ejection. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.