The Men Who Stare at Goats (11 page)

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 Major 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.

He and Prudence became great friends. She ran his web site. Together they sat in Dr. Brown’s basement and psychically spied on their favorite targets, aliens and mythical beasts and so on, the same fantastical things that Ed Dames used to remote view inside the military unit.

In July 1996, Prudence got a call from Art Bell. His millions of listeners had gone crazy for Ed Dames and were keen to hear anything related. Was Dr. Brown available to appear on his show?

“Every day was a new adventure,” Prudence told me, “but this was the greatest adventure so far.”

On the show, Art Bell asked Courtney Brown if he agreed with Major Dames about the “massive numbers of babies dying” and the imminent “tremendous winds on Earth.”

COURTNEY BROWN:
There definitely are climactic changes coming.

ART BELL:
Like what?

COURTNEY BROWN:
Within our children’s lifetime we will start entering a
Mad Max
scenario. It’s quite clear at this point that civilization has to hunker down and go into underground shelters.

ART BELL:
Underground shelters,
Professor Brown?

COURTNEY BROWN:
Yes. The population comes apart. The political systems fall apart. There are roving gangs on the surface. The population basically survives in underground bunkers. And not everybody gets to go in the bunkers. Most people have to slug it out on the surface.