Phenomena

  Geller says that several officials asked privately whether he would meet with them discreetly, in their homes. He recalls being surprised at how similar these meetings were. “They wanted to know about themselves. About their own personal careers. What the future would bring for them.” Many people are superstitious. Some will admit this publicly, but most will not. It is human nature to grapple with the powerful ideas of destiny, providence, and fate. Geller recalls going to Al Gore’s house and telling him that one day, Gore would be elected president. Reached for confirmation, the former vice president declined to comment.

  The following year, the association of divination with national security was once again in the news, this time involving the president of the United States. In May 1988, Donald T. Regan, former White House chief of staff, revealed in his memoir that President Reagan had sought the advice of a private astrologer during his tenure at the White House. “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared by a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in favorable alignment for the enterprise.” The revelation was stunning to some, perhaps even more so when the White House press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, went before the cameras and confirmed the statement.

  “President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, are both deeply interested in astrology,” Fitzwater said. Others, like Washington Post reporter Sally Quinn, said it was simply a well-kept secret. “I have known since before Reagan was elected [president] that they went to astrologers, and that’s why I’m surprised at all of the surprise and shock.”

  The astrologer was a San Francisco socialite named Joan Quigley. After it was revealed that Quigley allegedly cast star charts for the president, she became the subject of considerable public interest. In her memoir, What Does Joan Say?, Quigley wrote, “Not since the days of the Roman emperors—and never in the history of the United States Presidency—has an astrologer played such a significant role in the nation’s affairs of State.” When a reporter with United Press International asked the president whether he believed that psychics could see the future, he said, “I’ve found it difficult to write them off entirely. The Scriptures say there will be such people.”

  The potential of prophecy as a military intelligence tool was also being investigated by the Defense Intelligence Agency under the Sun Streak banner. The classified project was identifiable inside the Special Access Program by its code name, Project P—as in prophecy. Graff and Vorona were examining the possibility that remote viewing could be used as a tool to foresee future events. As per declassified documents, Project P was “a utility assessment initiated to determine a remote viewer’s ability to function effectively in a purely predictive mode.”

  In 1987 the Persian Gulf was a particularly dangerous place, and America’s military presence there represented the largest massed naval strength since the Vietnam War. “Based on the premise that near-time exposure to future events might enhance remote viewer access to significant occurrences (e.g., the President Kennedy assassination) four remote viewers conducted ‘free-flight’ sessions against events of foreign intelligence significance in the Persian Gulf,” reads a declassified Sun Streak report covering the winter of 1987 (“free-flight” meant that viewers functioned without the assistance of a monitor). When analysts at DIA reported that sessions were yielding “weak correlations” to actual events, “remote viewer enthusiasm of Project P waned considerably.” Upon review, it was “Suggested this project be held in abeyance pending completion of an in-depth review of this effort,” according to DIA.

  There was more than enough work to keep the remote viewers at Fort Meade busy. In addition to sessions against foreign facilities targets, a new methodology was being developed for Project N-1. This new utility assessment tested a viewer’s ability to read a document remotely “and substantially determine the nature of its contents.” The broader military intelligence goal was “To access and report against foreign documents with a reasonably acceptable rate of success.” Declassified documents indicate that during training sessions, only two viewers “successfully described the substantial content of the [test] document and provided conceptual drawings in support of their findings.” Dale Graff confirmed that one of the successful viewers was Angela Dellafiora (the other’s viewer number is not specified and could not be confirmed), which meant that she was assigned to many Project N-1 operations while other viewers were asked to continue training sessions with Ed Dames. This led to many of the same problems that had arisen the year before, namely that Dames was directing viewers to anomaly targets.

  Declassified documents reveal that in the winter of 1987, Dames tasked remote viewers to dozens of sites of celebrated UFO encounters and alien abductions. Paul Smith reports that many in the unit were “fed up with Ed Dames’s shenanigans and chafed at his parade of extraterrestrial targets,” but official documents indicate that his folly seems to have had a Pied Piper effect on others in the unit, with many viewers following his lead. This is evident in hundreds of pages of declassified operations logs.

  One example of this kind of target assignment involved a visit to the J. M. Davis Arms and Historical Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma, with instructions that the viewer learn about an alien “visitation” alleged to have occurred there. In the log, Dames noted that aliens likely visited this museum to learn about human weapons technology; the gallery of guns included “firearms from the 1300s” as well as ones “used by Pancho Villa and Pretty Boy Floyd.” In another example, on June 23, 1987, Dames sent viewer “LB” back in time to inquire about “a possible UFO encounter [and] abduction,” at a Methodist parsonage in Midway, Texas, “between hours of midnight and dawn.” The viewer spent two hours and six minutes on the task. His report included contact with “a long rounded object,” covered with “red and black raspy, sharp” points. For a while during the experience the remote viewer reporting feeling paralyzed: “a liquid (semi-solid) has me stuck in place.” Dames’s goal, he wrote, was to support his hypothesis that a group of extraterrestrials called the Supreme Galactic Council of Aliens was working to control Earth. With the help of other remote viewers in the unit, Dames sought to identify various alien bases already established on Earth, he said, including ones on Mount Hayes, in Alaska, in South America, and in Africa.

  Dames’s anomalous targets were not limited to UFOs. He asked viewers to examine crop circles, to search for the lost city of Atlantis, and to try to locate the Ark of the Covenant. He asked viewer 032 to go back in time to learn the truth about who shot President Kennedy and to watch gladiator games at the Colosseum, in Rome, circa 79 AD. When an unidentified commander examined the data on these rogue targets he wrote, “Not Verifiable, Cannot Evaluate, No Ground Truth” (militaryspeak for the reality of a tactical situation) and had the reports filed away.

  Smith says a new Detachment G commander, Lieutenant Colonel William Xenakis, ordered Dames to lay off the bogus targets. While not excusing Dames’s frivolous actions, which were performed at the taxpayer’s expense, Atwater says he had witnessed enough strange behavior in his decade running the remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade that Dames’s targeting was not uniquely aberrant. Fred Atwater, just months from retirement, was also expanding his own supernatural ideas, he says, but insists they did not interfere with his professional life. Atwater had recently purchased a parcel of land at the Monroe Institute, where he would eventually serve as president. There, he would lead instruction in the Human Plus seminars, teaching clients how to communicate with nonphysical entities who, according to conference-approved Monroe literature, were “inhabitants of the distant future.” Given Atwater’s personal belief system, Dames’s ideas were not so far afield. Whether they were appropriate for U.S. military projects was a separate issue.

  On November 26, 1986, Ed Dames had asked Paul Smith to remote-view Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, keeping the extraterrestrial nature of the target secret. Dames’s goal, he wrote in the Sun
Streak operations log, was to locate evidence that aliens lived and worked there. During this training session Smith reported seeing “land, water and some structures” at the target area, which Dames took as confirmation that this was “part of an observation post” on Saturn. When Smith found out that he’d been sent to an anomaly target, he was furious. “You have to remember, as viewers we were like mushrooms,” he recalled in 2016. “Kept in the dark. We were blind to the target. We did not know if Dames was sending us to a real place or an anomaly. He was the operations manager. We went where we were told.”

  Eventually the information about the anomaly targets reached Jack Vorona, DIA’s head scientist at the Directorate of Science and Technology. Repercussions followed. Dames had originally been slated to replace Atwater after he’d retired. Vorona denied the position to Dames and redesigned the branch chief position as a civilian job. The position went to Fernand Gauvin, a former viewer from the Tehran hostage days. He had been working in human intelligence as a civilian at INSCOM.

  The unit’s morale took another hit, while viewer accusations about Angela Dellafiora continued to swirl. Some posited that she might have an eidetic memory and had memorized Earth’s coordinates, which might account for her uncanny accuracy. A new protocol was put in place, one that had originally been designed by scientists at SRI back in 1985. Viewers would now be given what were called encrypted coordinates: “For example, 20 degrees, 34 minutes west, 48 degrees, 13 minutes, would be put into a programmable calculator and come out as 7308 2159,” explains Smith. Because real coordinates are synonymous with real places, some of which were familiar to operations managers, the idea was that the encrypted coordinates would remove any level of cuing, either subconscious or intentional, and clear up suggestions about the system being gamed.

  Then, in late 1987 or early 1988, all members of the unit were summoned for a meeting. For the first time in Sun Streak history, a new training technique was going to be added to the Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) protocol. This new technique was called Written Remote Viewing, or WRV. Paul Smith was horrified. “WRV means automatic writing,” he observes, as in “a tool of the occult.” In an interview in 2015, Smith explained why this was intolerable to him. “What this new approach amounted to,” he says, “was channeling.” He’d been training in Coordinate Remote Viewing for years. There were six stages to follow, each with its own specific set of techniques, Smith explained. Automatic writing was not one of them. Now, as if with the wave of a magic wand, a new protocol was being introduced by management, and he was certain Angela Dellafiora was behind it.

  Of the numerous occult practices, channeling is among the most maligned. It is generally defined as a process whereby an individual, the so-called channeler, speaks through an entity, or a force, outside themselves. A channeler is similar to a medium or a seer. Ancient history’s most famous seer, the Oracle of Delphi, was a woman who would go into a trance and channel information for kings and generals. This figure was so important to national security that in 585 BC, Greek tribes fought the First Sacred War to determine who would control it. The historian Herodotus indicates that Croesus, king of Lydia, visited the Oracle of Delphi in 560 BC to learn what his next conquest should be.

  Mediums, oracles, and seers have been around for millennia, but in the mid-1970s the activity took on a contemporary twist when a young poet named Jane Roberts wrote a bestselling book, Seth Speaks, about her channeling. Now, a decade later, channeling was again part of the public discourse. While the WRV drama was unfolding at Fort Meade, ABC television was airing the five-hour miniseries Out on a Limb, based on Shirley MacLaine’s autobiography, which included her work with mediums and channelers. The magician James Randi became so incensed with the channeling craze that he embarked on another hoax. This time he created a fake channeler he called Carlos, and took the young man on a tour around Australia to prove how gullible people are. Publicity material claimed Carlos was a young American artist named Jose Alvarez, who was able to channel a 2,000-year-old entity who had last appeared in the body of a twelve-year-old boy in Venezuela in 1900. Audiences across Australia fell for the Carlos hoax. When the deception was revealed on 60 Minutes, Australian news outlets felt duped. Randi’s point, he said, was that audiences were gullible and journalists were not doing their jobs. No one bothered to fact-check the story of Jose Alvarez, Randi said, and he had a valid point. People were easy to deceive.

  At Fort Meade, Paul Smith became angry during the meeting about Written Remote Viewing. Automatic writing was channeling, and channeling was occult, he said. As Defense Department employees with secret clearances, it was their duty to know who their intelligence sources were, Smith argued. “How do we know [the entities] aren’t liars, pranksters, or evildoers?” he asked. Who vetted them as intelligence assets? “My misgivings were shared by nearly everyone else at the table,” Smith later wrote. In his opinion Angela Dellafiora was getting undue praise and attention. Now, it seemed, she was essentially being allowed to rewrite the rules. He was frustrated. He wanted to be useful to the Army. And he was tired of working rogue targets with Ed Dames.

  On May 15, 1987, Ed Dames tapped Smith on the shoulder and told him to get ready to head over to the viewer room for a session. “Protocol forbade me from asking what the session would be about,” Smith recalls. He figured he was in for another anomaly target, something or someplace that did not really exist.

  Smith headed over to Building 2560 and into the viewing room. He put on his Sony Walkman and hit Play on a mixtape of hard rock. AC/DC came on, his favorite band, followed by Guns N’ Roses, his second favorite. The lights went down in the room, and with music pounding in his ears he began to relax. After the twenty-minute cool-down period, Dames came into the room and sat down at one end of the long table, Smith recalls. Smith got out of his chair and sat across from Dames. What some viewers did before a session, Smith among them, was to make a list of anything that was bothering them before a viewing session began. This was a way to clear the mind of worries that could distract them from the task at hand. On this day, Smith’s list was long, he recalls. His car kept breaking down, and bills were due. His wife had moved out two weeks earlier, and his three children were understandably upset and confused. Smith was over the proverbial barrel at this moment in his life. It felt good to get all this off his chest. When he finished the list, Dames recorded the date and time in the operations log and the session began. It was May 15, 1987, 10:23 a.m. The coordinates came first.

  Smith saw “land, water, then structure,” he said and wrote this down. He heard a clanging sound and sniffed a faint odor, he said, something “like sautéed celery.” After a few moments, he wrote down the words “forbidding” and “taken aback.” His hand began moving, and he sketched out a tall structure like a tower, with steep stairs. He wrote “tall” and “weapons.” There was water. This was a vessel. The U.S. Navy was involved. In declassified logs, Smith made three similar drawings. Each unmistakably resembles a radar tower attached to a frigate, or warship.

  “Weaponry, water, stanchions, extrusions, braces, appurtenances, radar,” Smith wrote in quick succession. He recalls looking up at Dames and seeing what appeared to him to be a lack of research protocols and laboratory controls. “He was clearly bored, his chin resting on his hand, his eyes staring at the tasking sheet in front of him. Whatever I was reporting didn’t seem to be what he wanted,” Smith later wrote. This wasn’t a UFO site, and Dames often appeared uninterested during sessions that had nothing to do with UFOs, aliens, or unsolved mysteries.

  Smith continued reporting what he saw at the target site. The vessel was a “moving structure,” he said. It had something to do with “waiting and watching,” and a “magnetic envelope,” whatever that meant. He saw “people” and got the word “tasking.” He wrote, “reminds me of PSP [pierced steel planking] runway or flight deck of a ship.” Then the session took a radical turn. “Loud sound,” he reported. “Zzzzt sounds,” he wrote. “Sense of unexpected.
Degree of occurrence greater than anticipated. Effects pronounced. A dome of light. Misidentification. Accidentally on purpose. Like a game of chicken,” he said aloud and wrote down “Troubling.” Something had happened. The target was an event, some kind of an incident. He wrote, “Aircraft involved. US Ship… blinding crew and electronics.”

  He finished the task, returned to the headquarters building, signed out, and went home. On Monday morning, as he was getting his children ready for school, the phone rang. It was Fred Atwater. He sounded agitated and wanted to know where Smith’s notes were from the session on Friday morning. Smith said they were where they were supposed to be, locked in the office safe. Atwater told Smith to get over to the office fast.

  When Smith arrived, there was a newspaper on his desk. The headline read “28 Killed on U.S. Frigate USS Stark—Didn’t Use Defenses—‘Don’t Know Why,’ Navy Says.” The Stark had been patrolling within the general vicinity of the coordinates Paul Smith had been given by Ed Dames, off the coast of Saudi Arabia near the Iran-Iraq war exclusion boundary, when it was struck by two missiles fired from an Iraqi aircraft. Thirty-seven U.S. sailors were dead, twenty-one wounded. For reasons unknown, the ship’s electronic warfare support systems had not detected the incoming missiles. Iranian prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi called the incident a “divine blessing,” and said the Persian Gulf was “not a safe place for the superpowers.”