The Men Who Stare at Goats (13 page)

In a pristine white house in a very rich suburb of San Diego, California, in mid-March 1997, a former music teacher from Texas named Marshall Applewhite turned on his video camera, pointed it at himself, and said, “We’re so excited we don’t know what to do because we’re about to reenter the level above human!”

He turned the video camera away from himself to a room full of people. They were all dressed exactly the same, in buttoned-up uniforms of their own design, like something out of
Star Trek,
with a patch on the arm that read
HEAVEN’S GATE AWAY TEAM
.

They were all, like Marshall Applewhite, grinning.

“Heaven’s Gate
Away
Team!” said Marshall Applewhite into the video camera. “That’s exactly what that means to us. We’ve been away, and now we’re going back. I’m very proud of these students of the evolutionary level above
human. They’re about to leave, and they’re
excited
about leaving!”

Someone from this group had posted a message on their web site. It read: “Red Alert! Hale-Bopp brings closure to Heaven’s Gate.”

The web site also included a link to Art Bell’s site.

Marshall Applewhite and his thirty-eight disciples went to a local restaurant for their last supper. They all ordered exactly the same thing from the menu—iced tea, salad with tomato vinaigrette dressing, turkey, and blueberry cheesecake.

Then they returned to their communal home.

A few nights later, as Hale-Bopp drew close enough to Earth to be seen with the naked eye, Prudence stood on the balcony of a Holiday Inn in Atlanta and arched her neck uncomfortably to see over the trees, the iron railing digging into her chest. And then she saw the comet.

“It was so beautiful,” she said.

“But it was by itself,” I said.

“It was by itself,” said Prudence. “I was just standing there, trying to figure out where the companion object went, and then someone came running up the stairs.”

Thirty-nine people had died.

Marshall Applewhite and his thirty-eight disciples had all put on the exact same Nike sneakers. Each one put a roll of quarters in his pocket. They lay down on their bunk beds and each took a lethal cocktail of sedatives and alcohol and painkillers because they believed that doing so would get them a ride to the level above human on Prudence and Courtney’s Hale-Bopp companion object.

“It was awful,” said Prudence. “It was …”

She fell silent and put her head in her hands, staring off into the distance.

“They believed they were going to join the companion object to the comet,” she said.

“Hmm,” I said.

“All those people,” she said.

“Uh,” I said.

“It’s kind of stressful to talk about,” she said.

“I don’t really know what to say.”

“I guess you weren’t to know that all the excitement would, uh, lead to a mass suicide,” I said.

“You’d think that if you’re a remote viewer you should have been able to figure that out ahead of time,” said Prudence.

Chuck Shramek—the man who took the “companion” photograph—died of cancer in 2000. He was forty-nine. After his death, a childhood friend of his named Greg Frost told
UFO Magazine
that Chuck had always been an inveterate prankster: “I was there on one occasion when he ran his voice through a filter that made him sound like Zontar the Warp Master while he communicated with some gullible ham-radio operators. Chuck had convinced a whole flock of them that he was a space alien from Venus.”

My guess is that Chuck Shramek heard Ed Dames and then Courtney Brown on Art Bell and decided to play a trick on the remote viewers. So he doctored a photograph and got his friend to telephone Prudence. If this is what happened, I have no idea whether Suzy was in on the scam.

Art Bell banned Prudence and Courtney Brown from ever
again appearing on his show. Major Ed Dames is still a regular and popular guest. He is routinely introduced by Art Bell as “Major Edward A. Dames, U.S. army, retired now, a decorated military intelligence officer, an original member of the U.S. army prototype remote-viewing training program, the training and operations officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, psychic intelligence, or PSIINT collection unit… .”

Military acronyms are truly mesmerizing.

Ed’s most recent appearance on Art Bell at the time of this writing was in the spring of 2004. He told the listeners, “Now this is important. Before everybody goes to bed, listen to this. When you see one of our space shuttles being forced to land because of a meteor shower, that is the beginning of the end. That is the
harbinger.
Immediately after that will begin some drastic geophysical changes in the Earth, resulting in a wobble and possibly an entire pole shift—”

“God!” interrupted Art Bell. “There will be some who live through this, Ed? Or will no one live through it?”

“We’re looking at a couple of billion people who are going to get crisped,” Ed replied.

I have noticed, however, a certain irreverence creeping into Art Bell’s more recent interviews with Major Dames. Nowadays, amid the mesmerizing military acronyms, Art Bell sometimes refers to Major Dames as “Dr. Doom.”

According to Prudence, Dr. Courtney Brown’s Farsight Institute dwindled from thirty-six students to twenty students to eight students to no students at all during the months that followed the suicides (although it has since recovered). He stopped giving interviews. He hasn’t spoken
about what happened for seven years. (I think he went on Art Bell one more time to be shouted at.) I visited him in the spring of 2004.

He still lives in Atlanta. He is very thin now. He took me into his basement.

“Heaven’s Gate?” he said.

He acted for a moment as if he couldn’t quite remember who they were. He was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows.

“Heaven’s Gate?” he said again. His look suggested that he had the memory of a vague academic and that I should bear with him for a moment.

“Oh!” he said. “Oh, yes. That was an interesting group. They were eunuchs. That’s what I read in the newspaper. They castrated themselves and eventually they killed themselves.”

Dr. Brown fell silent for a moment.

“It was like Jim Jones,” he said. “Their leader was probably a crazy type of guy who was getting older and, seeing that his group was going to unravel in front of him, he was probably looking for some opportunity to finalize it.”

Dr. Brown took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“Eunuchs!” He chuckled dryly and shook his head. “That’s pretty heavy psychological control to get people to castrate themselves, and eventually he had them all kill themselves as well, looking for an opportunity. You know, uh. That was an interesting group. That was a wild, wild group. That was a crazy group. That was a … that was a tragedy waiting to happen.”

Dr. Brown made me some herbal tea.

He said, “You have to understand, I’m an academic. I’m
not trained in dealing with masses of people. I found out through the school of hard knocks that it is better not to deal with masses of people. It’s not that they don’t deserve the information but they really react in very strange ways. They get panicky and excited, or overexcited, and it is so easy for academics to forget that. We’re trained in math. We’re trained in science. We’re not trained in the masses.”

He paused.

“The public is extremely wild,” he said, “uncontrollably wild.”

Then he shrugged his shoulders.

“You have to understand,” he said, “I’m an academic.”

If you walk about five hundred yards down the road from the Fort Bragg goats, you come to a large, modern, gray brick building with a sign at the front that reads
C COMPANY 9TH PSYOPS BATTALION H-3743.

This is the army’s Psychological Operations headquarters.

In May 2003, a little piece of the First Earth Battalion philosophy was put into practice, by PsyOps, behind a disused railway station in the tiny Iraqi town of al-Qā’im, on the Syrian border, shortly after President Bush had announced “the end of major hostilities.”

The story begins with a meeting between two Americans—a
Newsweek
journalist named Adam Piore and a PsyOps sergeant named Mark Hadsell.

Adam was traveling in a PsyOps Humvee, driving into the town of al-Qā’im, past the coalition checkpoints, past the main road sign, which was shot up and dilapidated and now read
A
Q
M
. They pulled up in front of a police station. It was Adam’s second day in Iraq. He knew virtually nothing about the country. He badly needed to urinate, but was worried that if he peed in front of the police station or in the
bushes, he might offend someone. What was the protocol regarding public urination in Iraq? Adam mentioned his concern to the PsyOps soldier sitting next to him in the Humvee. This was PsyOps’ job—to understand and exploit the psyche and the customs of the enemy.

“Just go on the front tire,” the soldier said to Adam.

So Adam jumped out of the Humvee, and that’s when PsyOps sergeant Mark Hadsell wandered over and asked him if he wanted to be shot.

Adam was telling me this story two months later, back in the
Newsweek
offices in New York. We were upstairs in the boardroom, which was decorated with blowups of recent
Newsweek
covers: a masked Islamic fundamentalist with a gun under the headline
WHY THEY HATE US
, and President and Mrs. Bush in the White House garden under the headline
WHERE WE GET OUR STRENGTH
. Adam is twenty-nine, he looks younger, and he trembled a little as he recounted the incident.

“So that’s how I met the guy,” said Adam. He laughed. “He said did I want to get shot? So I quickly zipped up… .”

“Was he smiling as he said it?” I asked.

I pictured Sergeant Hadsell, whoever he was, with a big, friendly smile on his face asking Adam if he wanted to be shot.

“No,” Adam said. “He just said, ‘Do you want to be shot?’”

Adam and Sergeant Hadsell ended up friends. They bunked together in the PsyOps squadron command center in a disused train station in al-Qā’im, and borrowed DVDs from each other.

“He’s a very gung-ho type of guy,” said Adam. “The
squadron commander used to call him Psycho Six, because he was always ready to go in with firepower. Ha! He once told me that he pointed a gun at someone and pulled the trigger, and the gun wasn’t loaded, and the guy peed in his pants. I don’t know why he told me that story, because I didn’t think it was funny. In fact I thought it was somewhat twisted and disturbing.”

“Did
he
think it was funny?” I asked Adam.

“I think he thought it was funny,” Adam said. “Yeah. He was an American-trained killer.”

The people of al-Qā’im didn’t know that Baghdad had fallen to coalition troops, so Sergeant Hadsell and his PsyOps unit were there to distribute leaflets bearing this news. Adam was tagging along, covering the “end of major hostilities” from the PsyOps’ perspective.

May 2003 was a pretty calm month in al-Qā’im. By the end of the year, U.S. forces would be under frequent guerrilla bombardment in the town. In November 2003, one of Saddam Hussein’s air defense commanders—Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush—would die under interrogation right there at the disused train station. (“Natural causes,” said the official U.S. military statement. “Mowhoush’s head was not hooded during questioning.”)

But for now it was peaceful.

“At one point,” Adam said, “somebody ran by and grabbed a pile of leaflets. Hadsell talked about how important it was, the next time that happened, to find the guy and punish him so he wouldn’t do it again. That was probably to do with studying Arabic culture. You have to show that you’re strong.”

One night, Adam was hanging out in the squadron command center when Sergeant Hadsell wandered over to him. Hadsell winked conspiratorially and said, “Go look out by where the prisoners are.”

Adam knew that the prisoners were housed in a yard behind the train station. The army had parked a convoy of shipping containers back there, and as Adam wandered toward them he could see a bright flashing light. He could hear music too. It was Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”

From a distance it looked as though some weird and slightly sinister disco was taking place amid the shipping containers. The music sounded especially tinny, and the light was being joylessly flashed on and off, on and off.

Adam walked toward the light. It was really bright. It was being held by a young American soldier, and he was just flashing it on and off, on and off, into the shipping container. “Enter Sandman” was reverberating inside the container, echoing violently around the steel walls. Adam stood there for a moment and watched.

The song ended and then, immediately, it began again.

The young soldier holding the light glanced over at Adam. He continued flashing it and said, “You need to go away now.”

“Ha!” said Adam to me, back in the
Newsweek
offices. “That’s the term he used. ‘You need to go away.’”

“Did you look inside the container?” I asked him.

“No,” said Adam. “When the guy told me that I had to go away, I went away.” He paused. “But it was kind of obvious what was going on in there.”

Adam called
Newsweek
from his cell phone and pitched
them a number of stories. Their favorite was the Metallica one.

“I was told to write it as a humorous thing,” said Adam. “They wanted a complete playlist.”

So Adam asked around. It turned out that the songs being blasted at prisoners inside the shipping container included Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”; the soundtrack to the movie XXX; a song that went “Burn Motherfucker, Burn”; and, rather more surprisingly, the “I Love You” song from Barney & Friends, the Barney the Purple Dinosaur show, along with songs from Sesame Street.

Adam e-mailed the article to New York, where a
Newsweek
editor phoned the Barney people for a comment. He was put on hold. The on-hold music was the Barney “I Love You” song.