“There were two things that blew Henning away at a PK event at my home in northern Virginia,” Alexander recalls. “The first was the bending [of a spoon] by an eleven-year-old girl. The other was that Henning’s manager had a spontaneous bending happen,” meaning that the spoon bent in his hand while he was holding it out in front of him. “That meant no physical force was involved. Since it was Henning’s guy, obviously we had not set him up.”
The controversial and contentious world of psychics, magicians, and skeptics experienced another extraordinary moment in 1987. At the height of his popularity, Doug Henning quit stage magic. He left “illusion magic” for what he said was “real magic,” the kind that science could not yet explain. Henning thereafter focused on transcendental meditation (TM) and began spending much of his time with the movement’s founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. “Magic is something that happens that appears to be impossible,” Henning told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. “What I call illusion magic uses laws of science and nature that are already known. Real magic uses laws that haven’t yet been discovered.”
In 1999, Henning was diagnosed with liver cancer and died five months later. James Randi blamed his death on the Maharishi. “He and his multi-million-dollar kingdom of sycophants caused the death of my friend Doug Henning, who dedicated himself to the Transcendental Meditation notion so deeply that he abandoned regular medical treatment for liver cancer, continued to pursue his diet of nuts and berries, and died of the disease,” Randi wrote.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Psychic Training
Dale Graff stood on an upper floor of the partially built U.S. embassy in Moscow, a high-powered, experimental X-ray scanning machine designed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory at his feet. He stared out over the Moscow River and across the city that represented America’s arch-nemesis. It was 1983. Fierce winds whipped through what amounted to the shell of a building, just steel framing, floor joists, and window frames. Winter here in the Soviet capital was brutal, and the snow and wind stung his face. Graff was dressed in a mountaineer’s jacket and boots, and carried mountaineering ropes. Pausing for a moment, he asked himself the proverbial What am I doing here?
There were easy short answers, including one that had to do with his job at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Graff was in Moscow as team leader on a classified counterespionage effort called Project Spitfire. But it was finding an answer to the bigger question that most interested him. What mystery lies behind causality? he wondered. Is there a force responsible for cause and effect? Or is a man’s life a series of random events strung together from which meaning is derived? Graff considered another reason for his presence here, events that had occurred a few months earlier when he had attended lectures in the cafeteria at the new DIA headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.
“DIA had a recreation club that would meet at lunchtime,” Graff recalls. “By 1983, I’d been taking Arctic canoe trips for almost ten years. During lunch I’d show Super 8 movies of me dragging my canoe over icy rivers in the Arctic tundra.” Bureaucrats and analysts alike crammed into the lunchroom to hear Graff talk about his sojourns in the far north. “Word got around,” he recalls. Right around that time DIA issued a solicitation for a team leader needed for a classified mission with an unusual set of qualifications. “The person had to have a background in physical sciences and have a proven ability to survive in harsh winter weather,” says Graff. “Apparently there was only one guy at DIA who fit the bill. Me.”
So here he was in Moscow, in charge of Project Spitfire, a highly classified foreign technology investigation. The CIA had received intelligence that this new embassy, being built at a cost of $200 million ($485 million in 2017), had been bugged at its core, that sensors had somehow been embedded deep inside the structural framing materials. Graff was charged with determining whether this assessment was accurate.
“Paranoia was high. We had to be sure,” he recalls. So much was at stake. In 1983, in the middle of what seemed like an ever escalating crisis between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, the United States could not afford to falsely accuse the Soviets of espionage. At the same time, it could not afford to fall prey to a massive Soviet eavesdropping and surveillance program.
The new U.S. embassy in Moscow was not just any embassy. It was going to be the most elaborate and expensive such edifice built by the United States to date. Eight stories tall and set on a ten-acre parcel overlooking the Moscow River, it would stand as a Cold War symbol of prosperity, power, and freedom. It was located right around the corner from many important Soviet Politburo buildings and a short walk from the ambassador’s private residence. The negotiations on erecting the building had been going on for more than a decade. Now, finally, the United States and the Soviets had agreed on terms, and construction had commenced. The Soviets were in control of fabricating the embassy’s structural system, with Russian supply companies providing precast concrete blocks for the building’s exterior. The Americans would be responsible for the building’s finish work, including walls, flooring, windows, and doors—the places where bugging devices were traditionally hidden.
When Graff arrived in Moscow, the building was still a shell. “There was no elevator nor was any stairwell complete,” he recalls. “We used mountain climbing ropes to get ourselves around the building, which was also how we got the X-ray machine in.” This machine was the centerpiece of the counterespionage operation, engineered by Los Alamos scientists with specifications that were classified. “It weighed four hundred pounds,” Graff recalls, and getting it to Moscow was an arduous task. First it had been flown from New Mexico to Helsinki on an Air Force plane. Then it was secreted into Moscow by rail, disguised as U.S. embassy office equipment. Graff recalls that in exchange for several cases of vodka, local construction workers helped him and his team raise the heavy machine from the street to an upper floor of the building with climbing ropes. For weeks, the Spitfire team had been using the machine to scan each concrete block for bugging devices. Soviet officials became suspicious of the machine, which they were told was checking for cracks in the concrete construction work.
“Each block weighed seven thousand pounds,” explains Graff. “The suspicion was that the Soviets had embedded sensors directly into these massive precast blocks.” There were several thousand of them in total, and each had to be inspected. Back at Fort Meade, remote viewers from Det G conducted sessions to determine where Graff and his team should look for bugs. “We had viewers targeting certain areas, certain pillars on specific floors,” Fred Atwater recalls. The viewers’ information would prove futile, but it did not take long for the members of Project Spitfire to confirm the CIA and the State Department’s worst fears. Not only had the Soviets embedded sensors into the precast blocks, they had also devised a scheme whereby they mixed garbage with the concrete, which made it impossible to see high-tech sensors among the Russian trash. Thus there was no way to identify and remove individual sensors. The embassy was, in essence, a giant antenna. First the Moscow Signal at the previous embassy, now this. There was nothing left for Graff and his team to do but pack up and head home. When the story finally broke as news three years later, in 1987, the Senate Committee on Intelligence described the Soviet effort as “the most massive, sophisticated and skillfully executed bugging operation in history.”
Back in the States, as director of the Advanced Concepts Office at DIA, Graff had an abundance of work to catch up on. When he’d left for Moscow, the Grill Flame program was on track, with two remote viewers working on intelligence operations and four individuals undergoing training with Ingo Swann. Upon his return, Graff found himself in the middle of the drama unfolding at the Monroe Institute. One of the sideline participants in the saga was a young Army captain named Paul H. Smith, who recalled the story in 2015.
When Paul Smith arrived at Fort Meade in September 1983, he had been in the Army for seven years. He’d worked as an Arabic linguist, an electronic warfare operator, and
a strategic intelligence officer. Recently recruited into the remote-viewing unit, Smith had no background in anything psychic or paranormal. He was a practicing Mormon who wore thick glasses and listened to heavy metal. He also possessed an artistic talent that helped recruiters identify him as a good candidate for the remote-viewing program. In college at Brigham Young University, Smith had worked as a botanical illustrator and had mastered the art of stippling, creating complex images out of thousands of dots.
Smith’s first assignment in the Army’s psychic spy program was to learn Coordinate Remote Viewing from Ingo Swann. At first it went well, he says. But just a few months into his training, he felt stuck. “I was having trouble acquiring and decoding the signal line,” Smith recalls. He’d completed several stages of the protocol, out at SRI in California and also at Swann’s home in the Bowery, in New York City, but Swann had recently told Smith he needed to loosen up. Stage One of the CRV training involved learning how to draw ideograms, quick visual sketches of the target or symbols representing an idea. His ideograms were “too stiff and scripted,” Swann said, and suggested that the young captain place a Coke bottle under his wrist to relax his hand and get into the flow of drawing without intellect. It was weird, Smith thought, but it helped.
When Smith heard that Bert Stubblebine, INSCOM’s commanding general, was sending hundreds of Army intelligence personnel to the Monroe Institute for Hemi-Sync training, he signed up. Smith knew quite a bit about the secret program, because for several weeks now, he and a personnel specialist named Charlene Cavanaugh had processed the paperwork for those who wanted to attend the RAPT seminar. There was a waiting list, and when Paul Smith learned that he’d been picked, he was thrilled with the prospect.
On December 2, 1983, with a weekend bag in tow, Smith headed over to the parking lot outside Nathan Hale Hall and boarded a bus headed to Monroe. His seatmate and roommate for the weekend, a former Morse code intercept operator named Edward Dames, had also recently been assigned to the remote-viewing program. “He was smart, dedicated and very enthusiastic about remote viewing,” Smith recalls. “He had a reputation as an innovative, imaginative thinker,” someone known for thinking outside the box to solve intelligence problems.
To Smith’s eye, Ed Dames looked more like a California surfer than an intelligence officer. He had a mop of sandy brown hair, with a thick set of bangs across his forehead in a razor-straight line. “He was an odd combination of single-mindedness and sardonic humor,” says Smith. “One moment he could be gravely assuring you that the Soviets were likely to unleash vile biological weapons any minute now, and the next moment he’d be making a rude or irreverent joke.” Smith liked him immediately, he says.
Dames loved to pontificate. “Most of the four-hour trip Ed spent talking about space aliens and UFOs,” remembers Smith. Growing up in Utah as a strict Mormon, Paul Smith had been taught that intelligent life existed on other planets. “Mormonism holds these extraterrestrial beings are creations of Deity,” he says, “not the stuff of flying saucers or invaders from Mars.” Still, he listened to Dames talk and decided to remain agnostic on the subject of UFOs and Dames’s obsession with the subject. “He exuded confidence. Seemed knowledgeable, and hinted at insider access to some of the details,” Smith recalls.
The Monroe Institute’s main building, called the Center, was set on a sprawling, grassy lawn lined with trees. It was three stories tall and warm and friendly inside, with wall-to-wall carpeting, soft comfortable furniture, and wood paneling. Because it was built into a hill, participants entered on the middle floor, which gave newcomers a sweeping view of the Center’s Great Hall. All three floors featured wraparound balconies and double-occupancy rooms. Each room contained a pair of sleep chambers known as controlled holistic environmental chambers, or CHEC units. Each unit contained two bunks with twin air mattresses and blackout curtains that could be drawn around each bunk for privacy. The CHEC units were wired for sound, with built-in speakers that played Monroe’s suggestions, Hemi-Sync audio signals, white noise, and new age music.
RAPT participants were encouraged to lie naked (most remained clothed) in their berths while Bob Monroe’s voice guided them through various Focus Levels, starting at Focus Level One, which was physical waking consciousness, and moving through higher levels. On Focus Level Twelve, a person could achieve expanded awareness; Focus Level Thirteen was where no time existed; Focus Level Eighteen was where unconditional love resided. Focus Level Twenty-Three and above were inhabited by people who were already dead. “The signals were mixed with music or white noise on tapes that lasted for an hour or ninety minutes at a stretch,” Smith recalls. After each audio session, everyone gathered in the meeting area to talk over their experiences: “imagery we encountered, or new insights, or—and this is what everyone was most anxious to hear about—the occasional report of something that might have been an out-of-body event.” The sessions were always led by a trained psychologist. Other activities included strolling around the property and listening to Monroe’s lectures. By day five, participants were expected to be prepared to move from Focus Level Fifteen to Twenty-One, a place where participants were most likely to enter an ethereal dimension, Monroe said.
As the RAPT session drew to a close, General Stubblebine came down from INSCOM with more than a dozen staff members and delivered a motivational speech. Then it was on to a final exercise. All RAPT participants were asked to assemble in the Great Hall for a group remote-viewing session. Stubblebine wanted all the Army intelligence personnel present to collectively try to predict the future, a feat he believed was possible. “The general had a lot of really far-out ideas,” recalls John Alexander, and group precognition was one of them. Participants were asked to lie on their backs, close their eyes, and hold hands. On the surround-sound system, Monroe guided everyone through a series of relaxation exercises. Then came the questions, starting with “Will there be a terrorist attack against a government facility in Washington, D.C., area in the next few months?”
“The effect was jarring,” recalls Paul Smith. It sounded as if Monroe was reading from a script. “After seven days of drifting without clocks in a setting designed to approach serenity and bliss,” he says, “this sudden talk of terrorism was a shock.” The way Smith remembers it, he and his fellow Army intelligence personnel did the best they could in these circumstances. They’d been given pens and paper, and many people began jotting down notes and recording whatever came to mind.
“Where will the next terrorist attack take place?” asked Monroe’s disembodied voice. And finally, “When will the next terrorist attack take place?”
Smith was new to the unit, hardly an expert on protocol, but the procedure struck him as not likely to be successful, he says. “It began to remind me more and more of a game I had played in high school,” the game where everyone lies on the floor with their head on someone else’s stomach. “Someone would giggle and the bouncing of the laugher’s stomach would set off the next person, then the next person, until in a chain reaction the entire room would be laughing hilariously.” The difference, Smith says, was that during the RAPT seminar, everyone was seriously trying to look into the future. “No one laughed.”
While this and other RAPT seminars were taking place, one hundred miles to the north, at Arlington Hall Station, Virginia, a thirty-year-old intelligence analyst named Angela Dellafiora was one of the scores of INSCOM personnel on the classified waiting list hoping for an opportunity to attend. Dellafiora worked at the INSCOM Watch Center as a civilian intelligence analyst. Her specialty was Central America, which meant that she wrote papers on current military crises in hot spots like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. One week she might be writing on the activities of leftist guerrilla forces and counterrevolutionaries, another week she could be profiling a country’s political leaders. Before working for Army intelligence, Dellafiora had been with the FBI, entering fingerprints of convicted criminals into the new FBI database. She dreamed of becoming a sp
ecial agent, but her eyesight was poor and she failed the bureau’s vision test. When she learned that the Defense Intelligence Agency was hiring young civilians with degrees in political science, she leapt at the chance.
The work at Arlington Hall Station was challenging, and she received high marks for her contribution. One day she found out about General Stubblebine’s paranormal program. As a Special-Access Program it was a closely guarded secret, but her twin sister’s astrologer knew about the Army’s black program, and told her. From that moment forward, says Dellafiora, “I just had to get into the program. All these people were training to try and become psychic. Well, I am psychic. That’s who I am.”
Angela Dellafiora was born in Coral, Pennsylvania, a poor coal-mining town fifty miles east of Pittsburgh. It was a roadside community of a few hundred people, predominantly immigrant families from Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, most of whom who worked in the mines and coal yards up the road in Lucerne. Coral’s few roads were named for trees and lined with small clapboard houses and trailer homes. The streets were unpaved. There were no sidewalks and no stores. The one business establishment in town was a tavern owned by Dellafiora’s aunt and uncle. Her father, prosperous by coal miner standards, owned a beer distributorship in the next town over, across Highway 119.
Bertha Dellafiora, a housewife, raised her twin daughters Angela and Louise in an environment filled with books and radio programs about mystical and supernatural subjects, including reincarnation, channeling, and ESP. She read books by Edgar Cayce, the so-called father of mystical healing, and Ruth Montgomery, a foreign affairs reporter turned past-life advocate, and she encouraged the psychic abilities that seemed evident in her twin daughters. Angela remembered being psychic as a young girl, but in high school her abilities waned. In college they returned, owing to the encouragement of her chemistry professor, Carl W. Bordas. During World War II, Bordas had worked as a surgical technician with the Army and was part of the group that liberated Ebensee concentration camp in Austria. The experience altered his perception, he said, and he began to think about the sixth sense. After the war, Bordas offered adult education classes in extrasensory perception that Angela, Louise, and their mother attended. Through these and other courses, Angela learned to access her “third eye.” “The third eye helps you see. It’s a very old idea,” she says. “It’s located in the middle of the forehead. When you are being psychic, you have to open it up. When you are not being psychic, it’s important to have it closed down.”