22 A HAUNTED HOUSE
We thrived on adventure. You get men of action; we're not satisfied with sitting around and twiddling our thumbs year after year. Unless something happens, you're going to lose our interest. But there was enough happening in there to hold our interest.
-Ed Dames
AS THE PROGRAM DRIFTED IN THE MARGINS OF THE INTELLIGENCE community, and the rate of operational taskings dwindled, the remote viewers tried, not always successfully, to keep busy. Paul Smith read parapsychology books, and wrote analyses of the unit's work. Lyn Buchanan set up a computer database of remote-viewing session data. Robin Dahlgren read her tarot cards. Angela Dellafiora pored over books full of logic puzzles: Joe is married to Bob's sister. Bob is John's cousin. John's daughter is Catherine's niece. What is Catherine's relationship to Joe?
There was one member of the unit who seemed almost to personify the fate of the program. He was a thirty-four-year-old Army captain, David Morehouse, and he arrived in the summer of 1988. Though Morehouse had never seen combat, he had commanded a Ranger company and had later, briefly, been a member of a secret special-operations squad known as Intelligence Support Activity (ISA). Morehouse was intelligent, a smooth talker, and his career seemed to be on a fast track. Even taking into account the enormous exaggerations that go into military performance reports, it was clear from Morehouse's that he was a cut above most officers.
Morehouse heard about the remote-viewing unit while he was at ISA. He had no history of psychic experiences, but he had a casual interest in the paranormal, and the idea of being transformed from an ordinary Army officer into a shaman-spy attracted him, as it had so many others. Paul Smith, charged with evaluating potential recruits, thought Morehouse - who like Smith was a Mormon - would make a good candidate.
After arriving at the unit and training with Smith and Dames and Lyn Buchanan, Morehouse began to participate in DT-S's day-to-day activities. He seemed reasonably enthusiastic about remote viewing - he wanted to be a Jedi knight like the rest of them - and there were occasions when it seemed that he did have some talent. As time went by, however, and DT-S was increasingly separated from operational military reality, Morehouse responded much the way the others did: by finding other things to do. He had a small home-improvement business, House Tech, that he was already running on the side; after a few months at Fort Meade, he began to spend most of his time attending to it. He would get in late, and leave early, and even while he was at the office, he often seemed to the others to be preoccupied with his House Tech paperwork. Eventually he began turning up at the office only one or two days per week.
The decline of the remote-viewing unit seemed to wear hardest on Ed Dames. He angrily blamed it on "the witches" and their wiles, and on what he saw as the mismanagement of the program by Gauvin and Graff and Vorona and D'Amato.
Dames might have responded by sitting back, relaxing, and waiting for his next tour of duty, as most of the others seemed to be doing. Instead he intensified his involvement with remote viewing. He generated his own "operational" targets, selected from current events of interest to the Pentagon, and ran CRVers against them under the guise of advanced training. He targeted the mysterious crash of an Army transport plane at Gander, Newfoundland. He targeted suspected chemical and biological weapons facilities in the Soviet Union, the Far East, and the Middle East. His pride and joy was his penetration - he believed - of the Soviet Defense Council, the holy grail for a U.S. Army intelligence officer. He tried to send out the results through his own private channels, "under the table," urging his friends in the intelligence community to act on the information. Although most if not all of the information he generated this way was impossible to verify, Dames often seemed to assume that verification was unnecessary. Ingo Swann had promised him, and others, that CRV could be highly accurate as long as one "stayed in structure." Dames often reminded his colleagues of this promise. By the early 1990s, he would be claiming that CRV enabled virtually infallible "direct knowledge" of almost anything out there in the space-time Matrix.
Some "advanced training" targets were non-military, and were instead chosen for their maximum extrasensory impact on the viewer - a fifteenth-century brawl in Cornwall, the surface of an asteroid, the nuclear reactor meltdown at Chernobyl, a vertigo-inducing spot a mile above Grand Canyon. One time, Dames gave Riley a target, and Riley had a bilocation-type episode for a short period. He was in a kind of hypnotic, deep-ERV trance, murmuring descriptions of what he saw He saw a stadium, and oddly dressed people going in to see a football game. He went inside the stadium, and a roar rose up from around him, shrieking, boisterous, a familiar sound, but there was no football being played here. He saw the lions - this was the Colosseum, in Rome, circa 100 A.D. - and Dames pulled him out of there, and Riley was in something of a zombie mood afterward, bouncing off the walls.
As the targets became more and more exotic, a small band of advanced training aficionados formed. Initially it included Dames, Riley, and Paul Smith; later, Dave Morehouse occasionally joined in. Dames decided that the purpose of the group should be to use remote viewing to investigate all manner of anomalous incidents and paranormal phenomena. In other words, while the Pentagon prevented them from using RV to answer military questions, they would push on to more important, transcendent questions. Dames would later refer to the resulting corpus of work as "The Enigma Files."
For a given enigma-oriented operation, Dames would select a target and run the viewers in the group against it. Ostensibly, he was letting the viewers produce the information, but it seemed to some of them that Dames, in his enthusiasm, was apt to inadvertently coach them towards the answers he happened to favor. On occasion, he would even exchange roles with the remote viewer in the middle of a session, and would start remote-viewing the target himself.
Dames tasked his viewers with the Loch Ness monster, and determined that it was merely a dinosaur's ghost. He had his team remote-view Fatima, Medjugorje, and other reputed sightings of the Virgin Mary. He decided that longlost Atlantis was actually at the bottom of Lake Titicaca in Peru. In search of angels and demons and out-of-body shamanic adventures, he and his enigma-hunting colleagues went into deep, Hemi-Sync-assisted trances.
Christine Dames now saw that her husband's tremendous, restless energy had been channelled largely into his self-generated remote viewing work. He would go to Fort Meade at seven or eight in the morning and wouldn't come home for another twelve hours. After dinner and some time spent with their two boys, he would closet himself in his small study to do more remote viewing. After a few hours' sleep, he would then get up and go to work again On the increasingly rare occasions when Ed and Christine had conversations, he would tell her about the frightening spirits he had encountered, the great, age-old enigmas he was solving. Christine worried that he was becoming obsessed, but Ed seemed to shrug off such concerns. He had found a cause, a high adventure. If Christine couldn't keep up, she remembers being told, then that was her problem.
Dames and some of the others often talked about the phenomenology of the Matrix, the strange things that happened there. They liked to say, for instance, that remote viewing was like switching on a beacon within the Matrix. It attracted strange things, the way a porch light attracts bugs on a hot summer night. They all knew the story of what had happened to Gene Kincaid, one afternoon back in 1987. Kincaid had been in one of the RV rooms, running Angela Dellafiora against a target. This was before all the channelling began, and Angela was in ERV mode. She was going through her routine, murmuring impressions from down in her zone, when suddenly Kincaid looked up and saw his dead father, standing there in the RV room, looking at him.
Kincaid had clearly been frightened by the experience, but Dames had only so much sympathy for him. He believed that those were the kinds of things that happened out there. You had to face them; you had to wrestle with them. In Dames's opinion, Kincaid was one of those devout Irishmen, always afraid of ghosts and goblins. Bill Ray was the same. Ray had been in one of the RV rooms, by himself, one morning somewhere around the transition to DIA control. As the unit's branch chief, he probably shouldn't have been indulging in altered states anymore, but he liked to keep in psychic shape with an occasional remote-viewing session. On this morning, he was doing a solo session, in ERV mode. Though trained in CRV by Swann, he now preferred ERV because he could lie down, taking the strain off his bad back. He lay down on the ERV couch and went into his zone, into the Matrix, and at some point, he suddenly felt a hand grab him. It was very palpable. He rose from the ERV couch and saw . . . no one. Had it been some kind of tactile hallucination? Was it possible to hallucinate something so convincing? He wasn't sure. He returned to his office, thoroughly shaken. Thereafter, it was said, he tended to stay away from the ops building, and if he remote-viewed, he did so at home, with his wife nearby.
On another occasion, relatively early in the Sun Streak years, Ed Dames conducted a training session with Angela Dellafiora in ERV mode. She went into an altered state, and began to visualize the target. Something was a bit strange about the target site. It seemed too cold; everything was red. Eventually, Dames showed her the target folder. The target was a certain region on Mars known as Cydonia. Dames believed that an ancient humanoid civilization had lived there. Perhaps the Cydonian civilization was distantly related to modern Earth civilization.... Dellafiora promptly complained to Atwater and the unit's other managers about this bizarre targeting, and Dames was told to cease and desist.
From his boyhood, Ed Dames had always shown an interest in UFO sightings, the possibility of life on other planets, and other extraterrestrial-related subjects. As far as he was concerned, these were among the most important mysteries in human experience. Even in training at SRI, he had begun to think that remote viewing was a valuable tool for probing these mysteries. As long as he stayed in structure, he reasoned, the answers should come out right. In his hotel rooms in Menlo Park and Manhattan during training, Dames had even secretly tried to remote-view UFO-related targets he had assigned to himself. A few years later, with the advent of his "advanced training" at DT-S, he had moved his pursuit of extraterrestrials into high gear.
Such a pursuit might have seemed absurd, like trying to explain one magic trick with another. But remote viewing and ETs did appear to have some kind of weird attachment, not just for Dames but for many others involved in the program. Sooner or later, they were always seen together.
Even at senior management levels, those who supported the remote-viewing program seemed to have relatively strong beliefs in other areas of the paranormal and unexplained - especially when the subject had to do with extraterrestrials. SRI's Hal Puthoff, the CIA's Richard Kennett, the Army's General Bert Stubblebine, Senate staffer Dick D'Amato, and the DIA's Dale Graff all had an interest in the UFO lore. Some of them took great interest in stories that the Pentagon had secretly recovered a crashed flying saucer in New Mexico in 1947. In fact, when Dick D'Amato's power and influence were at their peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he allegedly embarked on a behind-the-scenes crusade to uncover the crashed saucer story. (D'Amato "has gone into official agencies with his list of crazy questions on [this] his stuff," said one former CIA official. "And memoranda get written, and basically what the analysts write is this guy asked me a bunch of crazy questions and I told him I didn't know the answers and he left in a huff.")
Even the head of the Sun Streak medical oversight board, a Navy captain named Paul Tyler, was a frequent visitor to UFO conferences. In 1993, he would tell an audience of UFO enthusiasts that flying saucers were probably piloted by "intelligent beings capable of doing things we can't."
Remote viewers themselves seemed just as captivated by the subject. And when they targeted UFOs in their remote viewings, strange things could happen. One of the strangest things was that they almost never failed to detect the UFO.
It could have been argued that this was part of a more general aspect of remote viewing. For example, among the practice targets generated at SRI and Fort Meade over the years, some were always easier than others to perceive psychically. This wasn't necessarily for straightforward aesthetic reasons. A visually striking building, simple to sketch and describe in real life, might be perpetually clouded by fog in the RV world, while a crumbling ruin, overgrown in a distant jungle, might shine like a lighthouse.
This area of remote-viewing phenomenology would always remain confusing, but in at least some cases, the characteristics of a target that made it "RV-friendly" were obvious: If a target had some religious or supernatural or paranormal significance, or was otherwise tinged with strangeness, remote viewers seemed to home in on it relatively rapidly. Or perhaps (though they tended to resist this explanation) they merely homed in on the strangeness, prompting flights of imagination which only obscured the real, mundane target.
One day back in 1976, during a formal series of longdistance outbound remote-viewing experiments at SRI, Gary Langford was asked to perceive the location of Russell Targ, then standing outside the New Orleans Superdome, two thousand miles away. Hal Puthoff, acting as the monitor, sat in the RV room with Langford. He could see Langford hesitating. The remote viewer was perceiving something, but didn't want to say what it was. Finally he told Puthoff he was seeing something that looked "like a flying saucer in the middle of a city," and he sketched out just that, modifying it later into a large domed building. Ironically, it turned out that Targ, standing by the Superdome and describing the scene around him into a tape recorder, had also compared the building to a flying saucer.
On several other occasions, remote viewers suddenly interrupted their sessions against a particular target to describe a flying saucer that they perceived to be in the vicinity. During a session at Fort Meade in June 1980, Joe McMoneagle was targeted against a site somewhere in the world, but found his attention drawn to an object over the site: He perceived a flat, discoidal, metallic craft at an altitude of 14,000 feet. Its outer edges were rotating, and the thing seemed to be powered by some kind of plasma, a gas made up of ionized atoms. It was moving, he estimated, at 4,500 miles per hour. He quickly lost interest in whatever else was at the target site.
A similar event happened to Ingo Swann once, while he was remote-viewing a Soviet submarine, trying to determine its location. He described the sub, but then remarked that he saw something in the atmosphere above it, something that seemed to be shadowing the sub. What was it? asked Puthoff. Swann shrugged and sketched a flying saucer shape. (In Out There, a book about UFOs published in 1990, author Howard Blum places this bizarre event (without giving names) at a meeting of SRI and assorted Pentagon and White House officials at the Old Executive Office Building, in 1985. However, according to a former source from the program, that meeting and the surprise description of a UFO by Swann actually happened separately.)
"Accidental" results like these led Puthoff and other officials - even Bob Monroe - to specifically target remote viewers against UFO incidents. McMoneagle, going down to his zone to find what he believed would be some operational target, was often surprised to find himself looking around the cramped, curved interior of an unearthly ship, filled with skinny, large-eyed humanoids - who often stared back at him, wondering what the hell he was doing there. Facing off with aliens was a rough business, it seemed, and on several occasions, McMoneagle returned from the experience drenched in sweat and xenophobic stress.
Pat Price had also done a great many UFO-related targets, and had even ventured out spontaneously, in his nightly reveries, to spy on flying saucers as they (supposedly) cruised in and out of Alaskan mountains. But Ingo Swann, asked by Puthoff if he would try to confirm some of Price's results, almost always refused. His argument was that UFO occupants - aliens - if they sensed him psychically spying on them, might swoop down to spy on him, invading his mind, possessing his soul. Ed Dames might have welcomed such a confrontation, but not Swann.
Still, despite Swann's apparent skittishness about extraterrestrial targets, he had given his favorite student Tom Nance a few during training. These included sites on the dark side of the Moon, and in the Cydonia region of Mars, where there were a number of strange-looking topographic features, including '"pyramids" and a mountain that, some said, resembled Senator Ted Kennedy's face. Nance, for whatever prosaic or paranormal reason, had come up with results suggesting that some kind of humanoid civilization had lived at Cydonia, or perhaps even lived there now.
McMoneagle was given the same targets by Bob Monroe, with similar results. He even drew the humanoids in detail, and called them "They." McMoneagle would later tentatively suggest, on the basis of his RV sessions, that a race of humanoids had fought for survival on Mars, had dispatched some kind of space-lifeboat to Earth, and had perhaps built the great pyramids of Egypt. He would also speculate that UFOs in modern skies were actually humanpiloted craft from the future.
Some time later, in the early 1990s, Ingo Swann would tell a few close friends and former colleagues about a series of official taskings he said he had been given, taskings which related to the extraterrestrial question.
The story, as Swann told it, began one day in about 1983 while he happened to be home in New York. He received a call from a trusted friend on Capitol Hill - a U.S. congressman, according to one version of the story - who asked him if he would do a job for some colleagues who needed a skilled remote viewer's assistance. Swann's friend, who had come to him with requests before, didn't specify what the job was about, and may not have even known, but he assured Swann that his colleagues could be trusted and would pay the remote viewer for his time.
Shortly thereafter, following his friend's instructions, Swann stood on a street corner outside a museum in Manhattan. Two men with pseudonyms picked him up in a car, placed a blindfold on him, and drove him for a few hours out of town. When the blindfold was taken off, Swann was in a large underground installation. No one wore a uniform, but from the haircuts and the physiques, and the way people took orders, he decided that at least some were U.S. Marines.
Swann was led into a windowless room, was introduced to some people, and was then allowed to settle himself before starting his remote viewing. The target was described only as a pair of coordinates. They were lunar coordinates, for Swann was being asked to remote-view a place on the moon.
He soon did, and more coordinates were given to him. Before the day was out, Swann had described a variety of monumental objects, not human-made but not natural either, scattered across the cold surface of Earth's dusty cousin. Swann, according to the story, was then paid several thousand dollars in cash, and was driven back to his apartment in New York.
It was an outlandish story, but this was just the beginning. Swann would tell of a later mission, in which the same mysterious outfit had flown him to Alaska, then had taken him by helicopter to a remote lake. Something strange happened here at this lake, his pseudonymous companions told him. It happened like clockwork - in fact, it was about to happen now. As Swann stood there, he saw a mist form over the lake, and then an unearthly triangular object rose out of the lake, sucking up water and shooting out bright beams of light, and then zoomed off into the distance. Well, his companions asked Swann, now that he had seen this strange thing, perhaps he could remote-view it and tell them what it was? Swann impatiently explained that that was not how remote viewing worked. He was too front-loaded now with information about the target to be able to remote-view it accurately, and in any case was too frightened by the experience to want to do any further remote viewings of extraterrestrials or their craft.
Swann would later describe these episodes in a few dozen pages of novelistic prose that he circulated among some friends. It sounded absurd, like the plot for some X-Files episode - yet it was true that there had been UFO-related targets among the official taskings brought to SRI and Fort Meade over the years. The feedback envelope, in these cases, might contain a spy-satellite photograph of some unusual, unidentified object in near-Earth orbit, or even a photo of a strange light in the sky, taken from the ground.
One day near his retirement from the Army, Joe McMoneagle was driven to the Pentagon and escorted to a secure room to do a remote-viewing session against such a target. He was given no advance information. All he knew was that the feedback package was highly classified (thus the need for the secure room). He sat back in a chair, went into a light trance, and dropped down to his zone. He saw a strange, complex high-performance aerial vehicle, apparently not of this earth.
Afterwards, his taskers opened the feedback envelope and showed him the photo inside, which had been taken a few weeks before by one of the latest-model U.S. spy satellites. The photo depicted a strange object that had seemed to zig and zag in front of one of the satellite's wide-angled tracking cameras. Some Pentagon officials had already declared it to be merely a "weather balloon," but McMoneagle considered that explanation laughable.
Around this time, someone brought to the Fort Meade unit a similar, albeit less sensitive photograph from the National Photographic Interpretation Center. Mel Riley, monitored by Ed Dames, worked a CRV session against the target and sketched a disk-shaped craft with a rounded bottom. After finishing the session, for which he had been given only random-number "encrypted coordinates," Riley was shown the feedback photograph. It was an overhead reconnaissance photo, from a plane or satellite, taken at an oblique angle to the ground. It depicted an object flying or hovering at low altitude, not far from a large lake. Dames had been told only that the object was considered an "enigma" by the Pentagon.
In time, Dames would generate many of his own UFO-related targets for the remote viewers, using famous UFO close-encounter and sightings cases as targets. On the basis of these sessions, he would conclude that extraterrestrials had numerous bases around the globe - in mountains, in deserts, under the oceans. He would later say:
If you have no opinion at all on whether a vehicle that is moving in from deep space is a bolide[meteor] or an intelligently-driven machine, and you use remote viewers who, across the board, say this is a hollow vehicle and there are humanoids in it and here's what they look like . . . that is quite a moving experience when you did not believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life to begin with.
But of course, few remote viewers could ever have been described, at any part of their adult lives, as not believing in the existence of extraterrestrial life.
* * *
In his experimentation with remote viewing, Dames developed something he called the "open search." Instead of writing down a specific target description - say, "the Eiffel Tower"- and then assigning it random-number "coordinates" and putting the description with the random numbers in an envelope, Dames simply assigned coordinates to the words "open search," and put that in the target envelope. In Dames's mind, the use of "open search" as a target would free the remote viewer's psi perception to soar up and away, looking for anything that was particularly interesting out there in the Matrix. It could be something that had just happened, or was happening, halfway around the world; or it could be something that was about to happen. In practice, Dames felt that it was the ideal technique for monitoring the alien spaceships that he believed were busy flitting in and out of Earth's atmosphere. It was, in other words, a sort of enigma detector.
One day, Dames had the enigma tables turned on him. He brought Paul Smith into the CRV room, and gave him the coordinates for an "open search." All Smith knew was that he had two random numbers. It seemed like a regular target.
Smith cooled down, playing heavy metal music on his Walkman, and when he was ready, Dames read him the random numbers. Smith did his ideograms, and his Stage Twos, vocalizing basic sensory impressions; then came dimensionals, and Stage Three sketches, and Stage Four tabulations. The session was no more than fifteen minutes old when Dames began to grow disgusted. Smith wasn't describing anything that sounded extraterrestrial. His sketches and descriptions seemed to involve a U.S. naval vessel, a missile, an explosion, a tragic loss of life. At times during the session, though his demeanor suggested nothing more than a man thinking aloud while doing routine desk work, Smith was nearly bilocating. He felt almost as if he were on board this ship, amid the explosion, amid an orange blast of chaos, confusion, dismemberment, death. Dames didn't really take it seriously. He assumed that Smith was in Aol drive.
After the session was finished, Dames took the sketches and descriptions, wrote up a brief cover analysis, and filed them away. He regarded the session as a waste of time.
The date was Friday, May 15, 1987. Forty-eight hours later, in the Persian Gulf, a U.S. Navy guided-missile frigate, the Stark, was hit by a French-made Exeoet missile fired from an Iraqi warplane. Two dozen of the Stark's crew were killed immediately, and another thirteen died later of their injuries.
Smith's session had been done at a time when there was already significant anxiety, in the military and the general public, over the Iran-Iraq War and its threat to U.S. naval vessels in the Persian Gulf. Although certainly surprising, it wasn't clearly an example of paranormal precognition. Even so, it was touted as a success in various briefings by DIA officials-who were probably unaware of the session's origin as an enigma-hunting exercise.
Ed Dames was, if anything, proud of his status as a troublemaker within the unit, a maverick who dared venture into unknown realms. But he was also developing another kind of reputation - a reputation for becoming too involved in his monitoring of RV sessions, for pushing the viewer, however unconsciously, towards whatever target description he, Ed Dames, happened to favor. Occasionally Dames knew in advance of the session what the target was, but even when he was "blind" at first, he tended to develop strong opinions as the session went on. A few of the viewers began to see him as a significant source of Aol.
There was one episode, in late 1987, which some regarded as a good illustration of this problem. The branch chief at the time was a genial lieutenant colonel named Bill Xenakis, who had taken over after Bill Ray left, earlier in 1987, and would run the unit until Fern Gauvin took over in 1988. Xenakis called in Dames and explained that an Ops-type target had just come in. He told Dames only that the target was a possible event.
Dames set up the target in the usual fashion. Xenakis had given him two four-digit random numbers to use as coordinates, and now he wrote them on the outside of an envelope. Then he wrote "possible event" and the coordinates on a slip of paper, sealed it inside the envelope, and went over to the CRV room to start running viewers against the target: Riley, Smith, Buchanan, and Gabrielle Peters.
Dames soon noticed that the viewers' descriptions of the target were remarkably consistent. Their impressions all seemed to involve some kind of unusual aerial vehicle. It had a large payload - box-like objects of various sizes - and the colors red and white featured prominently. The pilot was obese, and the vehicle seemed to be open-topped, with sled-like runners underneath. It was going to come across the northern U.S. border sometime a few weeks in the future. It was going to come down over Canada, down from the Arctic pole.
Some of the data generated by the viewers were very strange, but Dames decided it was probably analytical overlay. For instance, Paul Smith said for some reason that there were livestock associated with the target. Riley drew the vehicle with eight strange objects out in front of it. It didn't matter; it was obvious to Dames what was going on here: Some kind of terrorist attack was being planned. The target was apparently an ultralight plane or a specially modified helicopter, loaded with an atomic bomb - or bombs - and designed to fly under U.S. and Canadian radar surveillance. Stage Four data, designed to pull out intentions and purposes associated with the target, suggested that the device was meant to fly into the United States somehow, surreptitiously, by night. Dames guessed that a Middle East country was involved, maybe Syria or Iran or Libya.
Dames was in the CRV room with Riley when he decided it was time to act. He told Riley he was going to run over to 4554, the nearest INSCOM building, and get access to a secure phone so he could alert his friends elsewhere in the intelligence community. To Riley, he seemed to be worried that Xenakis and others at DIA would suppress the data as unreliable if he tried to go through their channels. A terrorist nuclear attack on the United States . . . This was big.
Xenakis, meanwhile, was watching the session from the control room, trying not to allow his laughter to be heard across the hall in the CRV room. When Dames came out into the front room of the ops building, on his way to find a secure phone, Xenakis and everyone else were waiting for him, wearing big grins.
It had been Mel Riley's prank, a measure of revenge for all the brain-bending bilocations he'd had to endure on advanced training targets. The prank was that the target's identity had been known to the viewers all along. It was not a terrorist attack; it was Santa Claus and his sleigh. Each viewer had simply gone through the usual structure of a CRV session, describing Santa's raw attributes, and even making rough sketches of the sleigh and reindeer, but never actually naming the target. The idea had been to see what interpretations Dames would make, when presented with such unusual material. Xenakis had agreed to go along, and Dames, it seemed, had fallen right into it.
When he realized that he'd been fooled, Dames goodnaturedly laughed it off. But as time wore on, and the unit's problems worsened, Dames seemed to laugh less often. By the middle of 1988, his three-year tour in Sun Streak, which had started in early 1986, was nearing an end. He now realized he didn't intend to stay for a second tour.
* * *
Back in about 1983, as one of the reactions to General Stubblebine's initiatives, the Army Research Institute had asked for a study of all the alternative, New Ageish techniques being promoted at INSCOM, including remote viewing. Jack Vorona, Dale Graff, and Hal Puthoff had hoped to arrange for a relatively receptive, open-minded scientist to head the remote-viewing part of the study. But the Army Research Institute had instead chosen George Lawrence, a Pentagon researcher who was widely considered a skeptic about psi. Lawrence had led the three-man team from the Pentagon that had visited SRI in early 1973, to investigate Uri Geller. After a brief look, Lawrence and fellow team member Ray Hyman, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, had skeptically dismissed the Israeli spoonbender and his feats.
For the Army Research Institute study, Lawrence proposed that Ray Hyman should head the analysis of remote viewing. Hyman was by this time a member of a controversial anti-psi group that called itself the "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal" (CSICOP). (CSICOP's members included the showman James Randi, the science writers Leon Jaroff, Martin Gardner, and Philip Klass, and the astronomer Carl Sagan.)
Hyman's conclusions therefore seemed easy to precognize, and Vorona and Graff saw to it that he was effectively shut out of the remote-viewing program. He was given no access to classified data, and was referred instead to Colonel John Alexander, who could give him only a few files on secret Soviet psi work.
The result was that Hyman ended up analyzing the sparse data published in the open parapsychology literature, much of which were long out-of-date. Hyman nevertheless drew a strong, angry-sounding conclusion:
By both scientific and parapsychological standards . . . the case for remote viewing is not just very weak, but virtually nonexistent. It seems that the preeminent position that remote viewing occupies in the minds of many proponents results from the highly exaggerated claims made for the early experiments, as well as the subjectively compelling, but illusory correspondences that experimenters and participants find between components of the descriptions and the target sites.
Subjectively compelling but illusory . . . Those in the program who had witnessed some of the great, eight-martini remote viewing sessions of the past, both classified and unclassified, simply shook their heads when they saw that phrase. In Hyman, they believed, they had an adversary who was utterly, religiously resistant to the concept of psi. He was a true unbeliever.
In any case, Vorona and Graff and other proponents of the program ducked down and weathered the storm. When they needed to convince someone, say, a senator or a White House official, they simply dipped into their treasure trove of classified remote-viewing data, which seemed compelling enough to convince almost anyone.
But further storms were to come, and this time the program's "special access" status (Sun Streak was not actually on the roster of the intelligence community's Special Compartmented Information programs. Vorona, Graff, and others effectively gave the program special-access status by controlling the list of people who knew about it.) would be no help. Late in 1987, the new secretary of defense, Frank Carlucci, announced that he expected to cut $33 billion from the next Pentagon budget. The last great burst of Cold War defense spending was over, and the search was on for savings. The search was on for potentially embarrassing units and programs, too. Carlucci didn't want anything like the recent Oliver North arms-for-hostages fiasco, or the Army's Yellow Fruit corruption case, happening on his watch. The political situation was therefore ominously similar to that which had caused the CIA, a decade before, to cut off funding for the remote-viewing program.
Sometime in 1988, around the time that a flurry of brief reports of Pentagon dabbling with psi appeared in the media, a Pentagon Inspector General's team arrived at the DT-S offices at Fort Meade, announcing their intention to look into the unit's operations and general practices. Riley and the other remote viewers were ordered by their bosses to make themselves scarce whenever any "IG" people were around. When the IG people weren't around - in fact, months before they arrived, and even after they had left - one of the unit's senior members busied himself at the document shredder.
What was being shredded? Opinions varied. Some said it was some of Angela Dellafiora's flakier channelled data, or Robin Dahlgren's tarot-card data. Others said the shredded data were from practice sessions against targets - Mother Teresa, say, or President Reagan - whom the DIA was not supposed to have "spied" upon. Still others believed that the shredded data were from old operational sessions.
Regardless of what was shredded, the outcome for the remote viewers was negative. The Inspector General's report concluded that DT-S was not ready to become an operational intelligence-gathering unit. The report recommended that the unit be shut down.
Ed Dames left DT-S in the late summer of 1988. Riley and the others threw a party for him, presenting a plaque they had made; it cited his "untiring, selfless, dedication to the study of, and understanding of, alternate universes and parallel dimensions."
Dames also received a Meritorious Service Medal from the DIA, of which he was just as proud. The MSM was mainly a straightforward recognition of ordinary service, and its citations were sometimes written by the recipients' colleagues in the unit. In any case, Dames's citation read like an appropriate epitaph for a program that seemed to have become increasingly separated from military reality.
His total dedication to the highest ideals of service and his selfless commitment were always evident in his performance of the duties and responsibilities inherent in his position as Project Officer for a special project within the Directorate for Scientific and Technical Intelligence. Captain Dames brought to the Directorate a bank of knowledge and experience in the management and handling of intelligence and security affairs. This ability proved to be absolutely vital to effective integration of this unit into the Defense Intelligence Agency mission. Captain Dames was crucial in his fusion of his unit's unique "cutting edge" technology with the ongoing critical National Intelligence efforts of the Directorate. His efforts resulted in an intelligence product of great value to the National Intelligence Community. Captain Dames's operational and analytical skills were instrumental to the successful execution of 47 major intelligence projects which involved more than 800 individual collection missions.... Most significantly, Captain Dames was instrumental in penetrating a key foreign threat decision-making body [presumably the Soviet Defense Council]. The consequences of this singularly profound effort contributed immeasurably to the national security of his country. . .
Jack Vorona, who had increasingly clashed with Harry Soyster and other top DIA officials over the remote-viewing program, announced his retirement at the end of 1989. For the remote viewers, the announcement was unexpected, and at Vorona's farewell party, there was a certain funereal atmosphere. At about the same time, it became clear that SRI's ten-million-dollar Pentagon contract, which had been running since 1986, was not going to be renewed, despite some favorable reports from the program's oversight committees.
From Capitol Hill, Dick D'Amato would manage to keep the Fort Meade side of the program alive, and it was assigned for a while, "experimentally," to the office of the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence. (The DCSI was a new, three-star position created in 1985 to replace the old two-star ACSI position. From September 1989 through the mid-1990s, the position was held by Lieutenant General Ira C. Owens.) But the remote viewers could see now that DT-S, far from contributing immeasurably to the security of their country, had faded irretrievably from significance.
Mel Riley, who had been in retirement mode for a while now, decided that he had had enough. His twenty years were up. He put in his retirement papers, and, as it happened, left the Army just before the first rumblings of the Gulf War, in July of 1990. With his wife, Edith, he moved back to Wisconsin, to a small town with a relaxed pace, amid woods and lakes, away from all the stress, all the craziness.