In her final consecutive Global Beacon Target session, Dellafiora delivered what is considered the holy grail of remote viewing: the ability to access alphanumeric data. On February 4, 1987, she was given a coordinate and told that “this is a new target. You have not seen this before.” It took her two minutes to get to the sanctuary, then another five minutes to get to the target site. The target was the Thoroughbred racetrack Churchill Downs, home to the Kentucky Derby. As noted in the logs, it is a place “characterized by the wearing of antebellum costumes, toasting with champagne and eating of strawberries and cream.”
Once Dellafiora arrived at the target site, she described the location as a “nice place where people play games.” They are “pretending,” she said, “wearing costumes… toasting with champagne.” She saw food vendors and smells. “People walking, people talking, animals,” she said. “Tall, wild, animal. Exotic. People get dressed up to have fun, the animals walk around. They are controlled by the people. The animals are used for the fun, to show how smart they are.”
Atwater asked her to describe the animals.
“A riding feeling, up and down, fast, when I get this riding feeling I can feel wind and I feel I can move fast,” she said.
Asked for more specifics, Dellafiora said the place was called “Church. Church.” Then, “town. Town. Town.” Not a far stretch from Churchill Downs.
When Dale Graff and Jack Vorona read the report, they knew they had a rare and unique viewer in Angela Dellafiora. They also knew they had a potential problem as far as operations were concerned. In point of fact, their best remote viewer could access reliable information because she was psychic, not because she had learned how to be psychic from a military manual. The Coordinate Remote Viewing manual was created to teach soldiers and civilians to be psychic because the Defense Department believed such a guide would solve some of its problems with antagonistic forces within the military and the Congress who had declared the program to be voodoo warfare, hocus pocus, and occult.
Government programs are designed to be egalitarian and training based. Battlefield skills are to be taught, learned, and honed. Too much reliance on one person was not good for protocol. So a new protocol was implemented to try to smooth over these interconnected problems. It was called large-scale remote viewing, and involved several individuals viewing the same target. The information was collected by the operations manager and delivered to Dale Graff. It was Graff’s job to cull the information and pass it on to his boss, Jack Vorona. Finally, Vorona would run the information by analysts at DIA who would help him decide what information to pass on to the client, be it the NSA, the Air Force, the CIA, or a host of other military and intelligence agencies.
The year 1986 marked a significant buildup in advanced technology weapons facilities, both in the United States and in the Soviet Union. “The Soviets were pursuing advanced technologies applicable to strategic defense, including laser, particle beam, kinetic energy and microwave technologies applicable to strategic weapons,” recalls Robert Gates, deputy director of Central Intelligence at the time. “The scale of the effort was impressive, with more than half a dozen major research and development facilities and test ranges.” Inside the Pentagon, Gates was known to be a vocal adversary of the psychoenergetic phenomena programs, but not everyone at CIA shared his views. Between 1986 and 1988, says Graff, “We did many facilities targets for the intelligence community. And with acknowledged, ground truth success.”
Many of these facilities targets involved large-scale remote viewing efforts. At Fort Meade, several people would view the same target, with coordinates provided by the client. The branch chief and operations monitor would sort through the data looking for common threads in a signal line. Viewers who delivered the most promising results would return to the target site for more information.
For Project 8701, viewers were sent to coordinates located outside Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in what was then south central USSR. Viewers consistently reported “large metal structures near a large building in a barren area,” with confirmed accuracy. For Project 8704, viewers were sent to coordinates where they described workers in protective clothing, containment areas, and livestock pens filled with chickens and pigs. Satellite photographs confirmed the location as a Soviet chemical and biological test site. For Project 8609, viewers were asked to gather information about a top-secret Soviet research and development facility in Kazakhstan. They “described infrastructure consistent with anti-ballistic missile testing,” according to declassified memos. The site was later revealed to have been Sary Shagan, an antiballistic missile, antisatellite systems testing range. Projects 8715, 8716, and 8717 were all facilities targets for the CIA. The detailed results of these three projects remain classified as of 2016.
In Washington, Graff and Vorona chaired the Remote Viewing Tasking Group for Sun Streak. Declassified memos reveal that representatives from CIA, NSA, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency regularly attended, as did intelligence officers with the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Also present was a congressional staffer from the House and Senate intelligence committees. Targets included underground tunnels near the DMZ in Korea, Silkworm missile launch facilities in Iran, and an errant nuclear-powered Soviet satellite called Cosmos 1900. The CIA requested information on a possible mole working deep inside the Agency. Declassified documents reveal that their target was Aldrich Ames, an American CIA analyst turned KGB mole.
For Dale Graff, the challenge remained what it had always been: how to pare down volumes of information in order to determine what might matter. With ten years of experience examining data, Graff believed he’d developed a sense of what was signal and what was noise. “I did not want to appear impartial,” Graff recalled in 2015, “but Angela’s results were consistently the best results.” This meant that Graff now gave many of the high-priority targets to Dellafiora. For some of the most sensitive projects, he took trips down to Fort Meade to run Angela Dellafiora’s remote-viewing sessions himself. And as the number of her sessions increased, so did tensions in the unit.
The remaining viewers were kept active doing remote-viewing training sessions with operations manager Ed Dames. But instead of cultivating and refining tradecraft on DIA-sanctioned targets, which included over one hundred landmarks, bridges, and monuments around the world, Dames began sending viewers to what would become known as anomaly or chimera targets—nonstandard destinations not in the DIA protocols. These targets did not exist or could not be verified—places like “alien bases” beneath the desert in Phoenix or on Mars. Dames’s personal interest in supernatural concepts like the Akashic Records, extraterrestrial visitations, and an impending apocalypse began working their way into his professional life and, by default, into the unit at Fort Meade.
Joe McMoneagle says of this time, “One difficulty in the study of psi [psychic functioning] is that it is not only possible to delude oneself into thinking something that isn’t true, in some cases it is highly likely. It can happen to anyone.” In time these actions would have grave consequences for the program. It was thoroughly ironic. In trying to divorce itself from the mystical and the supernatural, and by insisting remote viewing was a skill that any soldier could learn, DIA had opened the door to the irrational. For reasons that have never been explained, Dames was allowed to run wild with his anomaly targets. In an interview in 2016, Fred Atwater says he was getting ready to retire and had already been assigned to standard, outgoing administrative duties, and that he was not made aware of Dames’s anomaly targets until after he left Fort Meade. Dale Graff says he was not privy to the anomaly targets until the records were reviewed at a later date. But Graff’s deputy, a man by the name of Jim Salyer, raised a larger issue, one Salyer believed allowed problems such as Ed Dames’s anomaly targeting to exist.
In his “Secret Working Papers,” Salyer outlined what he called “existing problems” at Fort Meade. “Whereas the SRI group is managed by scientists with ext
ensive experience in understanding and researching psi [psychic] phenomena, the Army group has no one associated with it who has any understanding of psi phenomena or experience in researching or utilizing remote viewing,” Salyer opined. The experienced scientists were at DIA, located an hour south of Fort Meade at the new headquarters, in Washington, D.C. “The unit at Ft. Meade consists of Army personnel who were selected and trained to do remote viewing. Their problems are that no selection criteria were available when they submitted to an unevaluated training program, which was completed by only one member who has now left the unit,” Salyer wrote, referring to Tom McNear. “Essentially what you have is a group of amateurs, led by another amateur, and being trained by yet another amateur. Success in any science is rarely achieved by an amateur, hence it is not surprising that the results produced by their group have not been astounding.”
The damning assessment led to a critical review of the program, says Graff. “This document helped DIA establish a psi/RV intelligence community working group with representatives from CIA, NSA, State Department, and several of the military operational commands.” And eventually resulted, Graff remarks, “in DIA being given control of the Fort Meade personnel.” But before that occurred, the craziness would escalate.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The End of an Era
The mid-1980s marked the end of an era for the scientists who originally worked on anomalous mental phenomena programs for the CIA at Stanford Research Institute. Kit Green retired from CIA to work for General Motors’ Asia-Pacific division in China, where he became a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Hal Puthoff left SRI to lead a private research foundation in Texas, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin. Jacques Vallée resigned from his contract position on the SRI team and became a venture capitalist specializing in high technology in Silicon Valley. As general partner of Euro-America Ventures, he spearheaded the early-stage investments of what would eventually total sixty start-up companies, more than a dozen of which would go public through IPOs or acquisitions.
At the end of this era, while some of the pioneers of U.S. government psychic research thrived, others struggled. Apollo 14 astronaut Ed Mitchell was not faring so well. He remained deeply interested in ESP and consciousness studies, and this made him endless fodder for journalists. He began speaking out against the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, which he said could lead to the weaponization of space. The former astronaut’s outspoken opposition to the president’s ambitious space weapons program made him a pariah in military and defense science circles. Almost every news article about Mitchell made disparaging reference to the ESP tests he’d conducted in space.
In 1985 news broke that Mitchell was involved in a paternity suit and that the child’s mother was a former Playboy Playmate with whom he’d been having an affair. When Mitchell denied being the father and dismissed the suit as “extortion disguised as paternity,” the press descended upon him. When blood tests confirmed he was the child’s father, the press chastised him. In turn, he tried blaming the press for his hardship. “Publicity about the case had a devastating effect on my credibility, my reputation, and most of all my income,” he said, opening the door for further criticism. “If Edgar Mitchell left his footprints on the moon as an American hero, he has since become the man who fell to earth,” wrote a reporter for South Florida’s Sun Sentinel. “While Mitchell has been pursuing his goals for a higher understanding, he has also led a life of turmoil.” He was enmeshed in five separate lawsuits; he was under threat of eviction; he was getting another divorce—this and more was reported in the press. “I was suicidal,” he told a reporter. Life had become “a disaster,” he lamented.
The anti-ESP and -PK crusader James Randi had also fallen on difficult times. In 1986 he won a MacArthur Foundation grant worth $272,000, but according to the New York Times Magazine he “burned through almost all of [it]” in legal costs fighting libel cases brought on by Uri Geller. The organization James Randi helped found, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, told him to lay off making false statements, but Randi wouldn’t stop. His campaign against Uri Geller ultimately cost him his position on CSICOP. “When CSICOP board members demanded he stop discussing Geller in public, Randi resigned in fury,” wrote reporter Adam Higginbotham.
For Uri Geller, life was good. He had spent most of the 1970s and early 1980s in the spotlight, but by 1985 he’d become more private and family oriented. For a while he’d lived in a compound in Stamford, Connecticut, with his wife, Hanna, and their two young children, but had recently moved to England. He’d made a fortune divining information for petroleum and mining companies. The technique he used was map dowsing, what he’d done for Moshe Dayan in 1970. Geller’s clients included Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, in Mexico; Rio Tinto-Zinc, in England; and Zanex Ltd., in Australia. According to the Financial Times, Geller’s map dowsing fee was £1 million, and he’d been involved in at least eleven known dowsing projects—for an income total of roughly $35.75 million in 2017 U.S. dollars. He maintained contact with numerous government sources, Geller says, and on occasion assisted with FBI searches for missing persons. Then, one day in January 1987, he received a call from the State Department. The caller identified himself as being from Ambassador Max Kampelman’s office, in Washington, D.C., Geller says. Since 1985, Kampelman had served as head of the United States Delegation to the Negotiations with the Soviet Union on Nuclear and Space Arms in Geneva. His office was calling with an unusual request, Geller remembers, and he was asked to meet with Kampelman in London for a private discussion. There is no way to independently verify the call, but photographs taken by Shipi Shtrang show Geller and Kampelman shaking hands outside an office building in what appears to be London. “He wanted to know if I thought that a human mind could influence others at a distance in a positive way,” says Geller.
The following month, Geller was invited to attend a reception at the U.S. embassy in Geneva. Also in attendance would be Soviet and U.S. arms negotiators and their wives. Negotiations between the two nuclear-armed superpowers had been going on for years, and now it seemed as if closure might finally be at hand. The goal of the talks was to eliminate the Soviets’ ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles, called Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF missiles, stationed in eastern Europe. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had met three months before in Reykjavík, Iceland, but the talks had recently stalled. Much was riding on these Geneva disarmament talks, in which Ambassador Kampelman played a primary role.
Geller was flown to Geneva and driven to the U.S. embassy. Already present at the reception were five senators, including Al Gore, Arlen Specter, and Claiborne Pell, as well as Ambassador Kampelman and Anthony Lake, the U.S. national security advisor. “If the press spotted me, I was told to be described as an entertainer,” Geller recalls, “although whoever heard of entertainers at disarmament talks?” Geller had been given a secret mission that involved Yuli M. Vorontsov, Russia’s first deputy foreign minister and the lead Soviet arms negotiator in the Geneva talks, he says. Geller’s instructions were to stand near Vorontsov and try to influence his thoughts in a way that would get him to sign the INF treaty. As preposterous as it may sound, in 2009, British journalist Jonathan Margolis traveled to Claiborne Pell’s home in Rhode Island and verified the story.
At the reception, Geller located Vorontsov, who was engaged in a conversation with Senator Pell’s wife, Nuala. Geller joined the discussion. “I liked Vorontsov at once,” he recalls. “I felt no trace of hostility from him, and we soon began a pleasant and informal conversation ranging over world affairs in general and the abilities of individuals to alter the course of events by no more than the state of their minds and their real desire for peace. Vorontsov knew who I was, and since I had been brought along as an entertainer, I thought I had better do some entertaining.” Geller asked Vorontsov whether he could have his watch so that he could make the han
ds stop with his mind. Vorontsov refused. “So I decided to demonstrate how I could make a seed sprout in the palm of my hand by closing my palm and concentrating very hard,” Geller remembers.
Nuala Pell later said, “What I remember was Uri putting the grass seeds in the palm of his hand and they grew. He did it in front of us all. We just couldn’t believe it. Everybody was floored. The Russians just looked stunned. They didn’t know whether to believe it or not to believe.” Finally, Geller did what he’d been asked to do by Ambassador Kampelman, he says. “I went and stood behind Vorontsov. I stared at the back of his head. I repeated in my mind, ‘sign, sign, sign!’”
Seven days later, on March 6, 1987, Ronald Reagan made a statement to the world. “I have just met with Ambassadors Kampelman, Glitman and Lehman to hear their report on the nuclear and space talks in Geneva,” the president said, and added that “the Soviet Union has recently offered to move ahead with an agreement to cut longer range INF missiles. This is something the United States and our allies have long urged.” Now it had finally happened. “They signed,” remembers Geller. “Of course I would never take full credit for such a significant thing. But it worked. Whatever ‘it’ may be.”
Two months later Claiborne Pell asked Geller to come to Washington for a classified meeting on Capitol Hill. The meeting took place in the Capitol building’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, which is located in the top of the rotunda. “They wanted to know about my ability to place a single thought in someone’s mind. They wanted to know about what happened with Vorontsov. I showed them my abilities. I did a telepathy test with a senator. I bent a spoon.” Colonel John Alexander was sitting in the front row, watching. “By now I’d been trained by magicians on how to bend a spoon and I’d watched James Randi’s spoon bending video frame by frame,” he says. “Uri bent the spoon using no physical force. Then he laid it down on a chair a few feet in front of me and went back to talking. As he talked, the spoon continued to bend and fell on the floor,” says Alexander, who picked up the spoon and took it home with him. The meeting was supposed to remain a secret but appeared in the May 4, 1987, issue of U.S. News and World Report. “In a vault in an attic of the Capitol… government officials gathered to hear Israeli psychic Uri Geller reveal what he has divined of Soviet strategic intentions,” quipped a “Washington Whispers” columnist.
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