The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  6. PRIVATIZATION

  This has so far been a story about secret things undertaken clandestinely inside military bases in the United States. From time to time tangible results of these covert endeavors have made their way into everyday life, but always far removed from their supernatural roots. Nobody who came into contact with Colonel Alexander’s Sticky Foam, for example—not the prisoners who were glued to their cells by it, not the TV crews who filmed its partially disastrous deployment in Somalia, not even, I would guess, the soldiers who carried it into Iraq in the hope of spraying it all over the WMDs—was aware that it was the product of a paranormal initiative from the late 1970s.

  All of a sudden, though, in 1995, a palpable chunk of the craziness leaked from the military community into the civilian world. The man who did the leaking was an errant prodigy of General Stubblebine.

  This is what happened.

  As a child, growing up in the 1970s, Prudence Calabrese loved watching Doctor Who and science documentaries. She lived in a run-down mansion in New England. When her parents went out on Saturday nights, the children would whip out their homemade Ouija board and try to contact the ghost of the previous owner who had apparently hanged herself in the barn as a result of being alcoholic and unpopular with the neighbors. They held pajama-party séances.

  “We wanted to have unusual experiences,” Prudence told me as we sat at her kitchen table in Carlsbad, near San Diego. “We would all get together and light candles and turn the lights down and try to make a table rise just by touching it.”

  “Did it ever rise?” I asked her.

  “Well, yes,” said Prudence. “But we were kids. Looking back, I’m not sure if everybody just added a little bit of effort and that made it rise.”

  “With your knees?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Prudence. “Hard to tell.”

  Sometimes Prudence and her friends would run outside and try to spot UFOs. They thought they saw one once.

  Prudence went to the local university but she got pregnant when she was eighteen, so she dropped out and began managing a local trailer park with her first husband, Randy. She moonlighted as a dancer in a pig costume at the state fair, went back to college, studied physics, dropped out, had another four children, taught belly dancing to pensioners in Indiana and finally ended up with a new husband named Daniel in an apartment in Atlanta, running a web-site-design business. It was here, in 1995, that Prudence turned on the TV one night. A military man was on the screen.

  “What was he saying?” I asked Prudence. “Didn’t he say he was a real-life Obi-Wan Kenobi?”

  “That’s exactly the words he used,” said Prudence. “A ‘real-life Obi-Wan Kenobi.’”

  “Working for the U.S. military?”

  “Working for the U.S. military,” said Prudence.

  “And until that moment nobody even knew that these people existed?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Prudence. “Until that time they had been kept completely secret. He was talking about how he used just his mind to access anything in the whole universe. And how the military used him, and other psychic spies like him, to avert wars and discover secret things about other countries. He said they were called remote viewers. Yeah. According to his story, he was part of a secret team of psychic spies, and he was one of the leaders of the unit. And he just didn’t look like what you’d expect. He didn’t look like he had super secret powers.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Prudence laughed.

  “He was short and scrawny and he had this crazy hairdo from the seventies, and a mustache. And he didn’t even look like a military guy, let alone a psychic spy. He just looked like a weird person, a person you’d see on the street.”

  The man on the TV said he had top-level clearance. He said he knew the exact location of Saddam Hussein and the lost ark of the covenant. Prudence was transfixed. As she watched the TV, her long-forgotten childhood passions came back to her: the Ouija board, Doctor Who, the science projects she used to do at school.

  “I remembered why I was so excited about science fiction and reading all those stories about psychics and aliens,” she said.

  Prudence determined in that moment that this was what she wanted to do with her life. She wanted to be like the man on the TV, to know the things he knew, to see the things he could see.

  His name was Major Ed Dames.

  General Albert Stubblebine had been happy to discuss with me his inability to pass through walls and to levitate, and his apparent failure to interest Special Forces in his animal-heart-bursting initiative. He recounted those incidents to me in a jolly way, even though they can’t have been good memories for him. The only time during our meetings that an anguished look crossed his face was when the conversation turned to the subject of his prodigy, Major Ed Dames.

  “It bothered me so badly that he talked,” he said. “There he was, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap.” The general paused. “Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap,” he said, sadly. “If anybody should have had a gag put in his mouth it was Ed Dames. He clearly was out talking when he should have been listening. Very upsetting, incidentally.”

  “Why?”

  “He’d taken the same oath I took: ‘I swear I will not divulge.’ But he ran over everyone to talk. He puffed up his chest. ‘I was one of them!’ He wanted to be king.”

  Ed Dames had been one of General Stubblebine’s personal recruits. When the general took command of the secret psychic unit in 1981, he allowed a bunch of fellow enthusiasts from within the military to join the program. The government’s psychic research had, until that time, basically centered on three men: an ex-policeman and building contractor named Pat Price, and two soldiers, Ingo Swann and Joe McMoneagle. These three were regarded by all but the most hardened skeptics to have some kind of unusual gift. (Joe McMoneagle’s gift apparently manifested itself after he fell out of a helicopter in Vietnam.)

  But General Stubblebine passionately believed the First Earth Battalion doctrine that every human being alive was capable of performing supernatural miracles, so he opened wide the doors of the secret unit, and Ed Dames came in.

  As a child, Ed Dames had been a great fan of Bigfoot, UFOs, and sci-fi shows. He had heard rumors about the unit while he was stationed, conventionally, up the road from the psychic spies at Fort Meade, so he petitioned General Stub-blebine to let him in. Perhaps this is why the general remains so angry with Ed Dames nine years after Prudence watched him reveal the secrets of the unit on TV that night. Maybe he feels partly responsible for the terrible things—involving Prudence—that happened next.

  In 1995, Ed suddenly, and repeatedly, spilled the beans in a big way. He took to appearing on TV shows and radio shows. He didn’t mention the goat staring, or the wall walking, or the First Earth Battalion, but he spoke with relish about the secret psychic unit.

  But it was the Art Bell show that really turned Ed into a superstar.

  Art Bell broadcasts from the very small desert town of Pahrump, Nevada. Pahrump seldom hits the news, although it did once make the headlines for having America’s highest suicide rate per capita. Nineteen of Pahrump’s thirty thousand townspeople are inclined to kill themselves each year. Pahrump is also home to the world’s most famous brothel, the Chicken Ranch, a few dusty streets away from which lies Art Bell’s house. This is blue and sprawling and fenced off and surrounded by antennae. Art Bell may be situated in the middle of nowhere, and his show may go out in the dead of night, but he is syndicated on more than five hundred AM stations to an audience of something like 18 million Americans.

  At his peak, I have been told, Art Bell had 40 million listeners, many of whom were attracted by the appearance of Ed Dames. Dames became something of a regular fixture on the show. Here is a typical excerpt from one of his appearances in 1995.

  ART BELL: If you’ll recall, the government, over many years now, has dumped a lot of money and time and effort into remote viewing. So, it’s not as crazy as it might seem. I managed to get Maj
or Dames on the line. I know it’s very, very late. Major, welcome to the program.

  ED DAMES: Thank you, Art.

  ART BELL: What can you tell us?

  ED DAMES: Well, in addition to our training, and our high-level contracts that we perform for various agencies—tracking terrorists for the government—we have data indicating that human babies will be dying soon, many human babies… . It appears there is a bovine AIDS virus developing. This bovine AIDS will become a toxicological insult to human babies and they will die in relatively large numbers.

  ART BELL: God. Whew! ... No escape, huh?

  ED DAMES: No, there doesn’t appear to be an escape.

  ART BELL: Oh, God, this is horrible news.

  Art Bell has played host to many prophets of doom over the years, but this one, sensationally, was a major in the United States Army with top-level security clearance. Ed continued: Yes, millions of American babies were imminently to develop AIDS from drinking infected cows’ milk. This was, he said, something he had psychically perceived while still in the army, and he had passed the information to his superiors.

  So the highest-ranking military intelligence officers knew this too.

  Art Bell gasped at the revelation that advance knowledge of this impending cataclysm went to the very top.

  Furthermore, Ed said, 300-mph winds were soon to ravage America, wiping out all the wheat, and everyone would have to stay indoors for pretty much the rest of their lives.

  “It was great!” reminisced Prudence at her kitchen table in San Diego. “These were the glory days of remote viewing. People were so excited about it. It seemed so fantastic. Ed Dames immediately became one of Art Bell’s very favorite interviewees ever. He was on all the time. He said we were going to be scorched by this huge solar flare, which was going to wipe out most of life on Earth. And he said that an incoming comet, Hale-Bopp, was going to drop a plant pathogen.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He said an alien race had attached a canister to Hale-Bopp and it was going to drop this canister on Earth and some kind of virus was going to come out and eat all the plant life and we’d have to live on earthworms and live underground.” Prudence laughed.

  “Ed Dames said that?”

  “Oh yeah! And he had specific dates for this. He said it was going to happen by February 2000.”

  We both laughed.

  “And what about the bovine AIDS?” I asked.

  “Bovine AIDS!” said Prudence. She turned serious. “Mad Cow,” she said.

  Between 1995 and today, in addition to the bovine AIDS and the 300-mph winds, Major Ed Dames has publicly predicted the following, mostly on the Art Bell show: pregnant Martians living underground in the desert will emerge to steal fertilizer from American companies; AIDS will be found to have originated in dogs, not monkeys; flying fungus from outer-space cylinders will destroy all crops; the existence of Satan, angels, and God will be proved beyond all doubt; and lightning on a golf course in April 1998 would kill President Clinton.

  “And mixed up with this,” said Prudence, “he talked about his experiences with the military, which made all that wacky stuff seem so much more real and tangible. The government did not dispute that he was a psychic spy; they lauded his efforts; he won medals. He was honorably discharged. Everything about him checked out.”

  “It must have sometimes sounded to some of Art Bell’s listeners like they were eavesdropping on top-level meetings inside the Pentagon,” I said.

  “It sounded so real,” said Prudence. “He would talk about how the military had put twenty million dollars of taxpayers’ money into the research, so it all made sense.”

  What Art Bell’s listeners didn’t know was that Ed Dames was an atypical military psychic spy. Most of Ed’s colleagues in the secret unit at Fort Meade spent their time psychically viewing extremely boring things, mostly map coordinates. Ed, meanwhile, was psychically concluding that the Loch Ness monster was the ghost of a dinosaur. Had one of Ed’s less-colorful contemporaries chosen to spill the beans instead, and gone on Art Bell to talk about map coordinates, I doubt that the listening millions would have been so spellbound.

  Ed’s media appearances may have hastened the demise of the secret unit. The CIA officially declassified it and shut it down in 1995. General Stubblebine’s foot soldiers had been trying to be psychic for the best part of their careers, and now it was over. After years of living simultaneously in a world where they routinely shot forward and back in time and space—inside Noriega’s living room in Panama City one minute, psychically creeping through Saddam Hussein’s palaces in Iraq the next—they emerged into perhaps the strangest world of all: the civilian world.

  For a while in the mid-1990s it looked like there might be a lot of money to be made. Ed Dames moved to Beverly Hills, where he took high-level meetings with Hollywood executives. He began dealing with Hanna-Barbera, the makers of Scooby Doo, about the prospect of transforming himself into a cartoon character for a Saturday-morning kids’ show about supersoldiers who used their psychic powers to defeat evildoers. He set up a psychic spying training school, charging students twenty-four hundred dollars for a “highly personalized (one on one), rigorous four-day program.”

  His company slogan was “Learn Remote Viewing from the Master.”

  On a Saturday in the summertime, Ed Dames and I roared through Maui in his jeep. (Like Jim Channon, and Sergeant Glenn Wheaton, who first let slip to me that Special Forces had undertaken covert goat-staring activities in Fort Bragg, Ed has set up home in the Hawaiian Islands.)

  Ed wore big wraparound sunglasses—his eyes were the only part of his face that looked his age. Ed is fifty-five now, but everything else about him is teenage—his surfer hair, his torn jeans, his manic energy. He held a Starbucks coffee in one hand and steered the jeep with the other.

  “Were people in the military cross with you for spilling the beans about the existence of the secret unit on the Art Bell show?” I asked him.

  “Cross?” he said. “Irate? Angry? You bet.”

  “What was your motive for doing it?” I asked.

  “I didn’t have any motive.” Ed shrugged. “I didn’t have any motive at all.”

  We continued driving. We were on the beach road.

  “I moved here for the peace and the beauty,” said Ed. “But, yes, over the horizon there are some very, very nasty things coming. Things will get grim. Things will get ugly. This is a good place to be when that happens.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “We’re all going to die!” said Ed. He laughed.

  But then he said he meant it.

  “In the next decade, humanity will see some of the most catastrophic changes to civilization it’s seen in all of its recorded history. Earth changes. Biblically prophetic types of things.”

  “Like plagues?” I asked.

  “No, that’s minor,” said Ed.

  “Worse than plagues?”

  “Diseases will ravage humankind, but I’m talking about actual Earth changes and I’m not kidding.”

  “Volcanoes and earthquakes?”

  “The axis of the Earth will wobble and that’ll shake up the oceans,” said Ed. “Geophysically, we’re in for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride within the next decade.”

  “These are things you’ve psychically viewed?” I asked.

  “Many, many times,” said Ed.

  “Prudence says it was turning on the TV one day in Atlanta and seeing you that first got her interested in remote viewing,” I said.

  There was a silence. I wanted to gauge Ed’s reaction to hearing the name Prudence. So many terrible things had happened, I was curious to see if he would flinch, but he didn’t. Instead he turned vague.

  “Most of the people practicing remote viewing on the streets today are either my students or students of my students,” he said.

  This was true. Although many of Ed’s former military associates eventually set up their own training schools after the unit’
s closure, Ed ran a campaign implying that many of the other secret psychics were psychically inferior to him. It worked. While Ed’s house in Maui is in a fabulously opulent gated community near the beach, some of his former colleagues—like psychic Sergeant Lyn Buchanan—are compelled to struggle through as computer engineers, and so on. Lyn Buchanan is a legendary figure on the UFO circuit, but his gentle personality has denied him the opportunity to carve himself a niche in the increasingly cutthroat psychic spying private sector.

  Prudence wanted Ed to teach her how to be a psychic spy, “But Ed didn’t have any openings,” she said. “He was booked solid for two years straight. Everybody wanted to be a psychic spy like Ed Dames.”

  So she settled for second best—an Atlanta-based lecturer in political science. His name was Dr. Courtney Brown.

  Courtney Brown’s credentials were impressive. He may not have been a top-level military spy, but he was an academic from a well-regarded university whose “vision statement,” as outlined in their prospectus, was “to excel at discovery, generate wisdom, instill integrity and honor, set standards followed by others, be sought and prized for its opinions, and make discoveries that benefit the world.”

  “It was amazing to me,” said Prudence. “Dr. Courtney Brown was just about Ed Dames’s very first ever civilian student, then he set up his own training school, the Farsight Institute, in Atlanta. I was in Atlanta. I was living in the only city outside of L.A. where you could get training in remote viewing. So I signed up right away!”

  Dr. Courtney Brown is handsome and clever, doe-eyed and tweedy. Having taken an eight-day one-on-one psychic-spying course with Ed Dames, he began teaching his version of the Dames method to scores of students.