HOCUS POCUS

HOCUS POCUS

IS ED DAMES EXPLOITING MISSING AND MURDERED CHILDREN FOR SELF PROMOTION?

A classic UFO Watchdog article (c) by Royce Myers, III

eddames

In 1981, Dames and his intelligence staff were asked to identify components of a Russian biological weapons program. Frustrated at failure after failure, Dames contemplated using psychics to collect the data. Later, the military funded its first 'psychic spy' program using a technique called Remote Viewing which had been the focus of a major experiment funded at the Stanford Research Institute. Dames is recruited for the program. Dames said the program began to fall apart when the unit starting employing psychic frauds. Compelled to not lose the Remote Viewing technology, Dames formed the firm Psi-Tech near the end of his military career and offered Remote Viewing to the private sector...So the story goes...

ED DAMES - SOME BACKGROUND

A former Major in the U.S. Army, Dames joined the military at the age of 17 as a paratrooper and later transferred to military intelligence. Returning from the Army in 1974, Dames pursued an education and reentered the military through an ROTC program.

BE ALL YOU CAN BE...?

The all too familiar banter of the U.S. Army, "Be all you can be." In the case of Dames, the banter might read, "Be all you can be and whatever else you can make up along the way." While Dames was indeed heavily involved in military intelligence, many of his claims involving Remote Viewing appear to fall very short. As for being in charge of the unit, Dames was only a Captain at the time and was outranked by several other people involved in the project.

Dames claimed to have been "the operations and training officer" for the military remote viewing unit, to have established the unit and to have been in it "most of its life." Dames also stated, "As operations officer I ironed out the wrinkles..." However, some people involved with the military unit had something else to say about Dames' involvement in the unit.

Joe McMoneagle, a former military remote viewer involved in the program, offered something different regarding Dames and his involvement in the group. In a press release, McMonegle stated, "There were seven commanders of the unit from 1977 to 1995, none of them were named Ed Dames...Dames was a 'monitor/interviewer' of remote viewers, not a remote viewer....Dames was not the 'operations and training officer' for the unit in 1983, as he wasn't then a member of the unit...Dames left the unit with a normal rotation to a new assignment in 1987, and had no further contact."

Dames stated about McMoneagle, "...I think his name was Joe McMoneagle, he was a warrant officer assigned to our early team...he was employed by me against a number of intelligence operations." McMoneagle, however, states that he was one of the original members in the program when it started and that Dames wasn't assigned to the unit until 1985.

In an interview on Coast To Coast AM with Art Bell, McMoneagle was asked about Ed Dames, to which he stated, " The claim was made that, by Ed Dames, that he was the only person who was qualified to train or teach other people to remote view, and that he was the most accurate remote viewer in the project, and the only one who was a responsible viewer. And my comment was that his primary job while he was with the unit was to act as a monitor and interface with the viewer in terms of handling or setting up remote viewings, and that he was not a primary trainer. He may have trained in the sense that he ran practice sessions and that sort of thing...Where I have a problem is where he makes claims then attributes them to himself when they in fact don't have anything to do with him..."

During the Coast To Coast show, Bell asked McMoneagle the following: "In private moments, you gentlemen have, have you not, referred to Ed Dames as "Dr.Doom?" To which McMoneagle answered, "This was a nickname that was given to him in the unit before he came to us. He was called Dr.Doom over there. He's been predicting doom, death and destruction for years and years and years now."

In the book, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies, author Jim Schnabel reports an interesting event that was supposed to have taken place during Dames' time with the unit:

Ed Dames was, if anything, proud of his status as a troublemaker within the unit, a maverick who dared venture into unknown realms. But he was also developing another kind of reputation - a reputation for becoming too involved in his monitoring of RV sessions, for pushing the viewer, however unconsciously, towards whatever target description he, Ed Dames, happened to favor. Occasionally Dames knew in advance of the session what the target was, but even when he was "blind" at first, he tended to develop strong opinions as the session went on.

There was one episode, in late 1987, which some regarded as a good illustration of this problem. The branch chief at the time was a genial lieutenant colonel named Bill Xenakis, who had taken over after Bill Ray left, earlier in 1987, and would run the unit until Fern Gauvin took over in 1988. Xenakis called in Dames and explained that an Ops-type target had just come in. He told Dames only that the target was a possible event.

Dames set up the target in the usual fashion...and went over to the CRV room to start running viewers against the target: Riley, Smith, Buchanan, and Gabrielle Peters. Dames soon noticed that the viewers' descriptions of the target were remarkably consistent. Their impressions all seemed to involve some kind of unusual aerial vehicle. It had a large payload - box-like objects of various sizes - and the colors red and white featured prominently. The pilot was obese, and the vehicle seemed to be open-topped, with sled-like runners underneath. It was going to come across the northern U.S. border sometime a few weeks in the future. It was going to come down over Canada, down from the Arctic pole.

Some of the data generated by the viewers were very strange, but Dames decided it was probably analytical overlay. For instance, Paul Smith said for some reason that there were livestock associated with the target. Riley drew the vehicle with eight strange objects out in front of it. It didn't matter; it was obvious to Dames what was going on here: Some kind of terrorist attack was being planned. The target was apparently an ultralight plane or a specially modified helicopter, loaded with an atomic bomb - or bombs - and designed to fly under U.S. and Canadian radar surveillance. Stage Four data, designed to pull out intentions and purposes associated with the target, suggested that the device was meant to fly into the United States somehow, surreptitiously, by night. Dames guessed that a Middle East country was involved, maybe Syria or Iran or Libya.

Dames was in the CRV room with Riley when he decided it was time to act. He told Riley he was going to run over to 4554, the nearest INSCOM building, and get access to a secure phone so he could alert his friends elsewhere in the intelligence community. To Riley, he seemed to be worried that Xenakis and others at DIA would suppress the data as unreliable if he tried to go through their channels. A terrorist nuclear attack on the United States . . . This was big.

Xenakis, meanwhile, was watching the session from the control room, trying not to allow his laughter to be heard across the hall in the CRV room. When Dames came out into the front room of the ops building, on his way to find a secure phone, Xenakis and everyone else were waiting for him, wearing big grins.

It had been Mel Riley's prank, a measure of revenge for all the brain-bending bilocations he'd had to endure on advanced training targets. The prank was that the target's identity had been known to the viewers all along. It was not a terrorist attack; it was Santa Claus and his sleigh. Each viewer had simply gone through the usual structure of a CRV session, describing Santa's raw attributes, and even making rough sketches of the sleigh and reindeer, but never actually naming the target. The idea had been to see what interpretations Dames would make, when presented with such unusual material. Xenakis had agreed to go along, and Dames, it seemed, had fallen right into it.

When he realized that he'd been fooled, Dames goodnaturedly laughed it off. But as time wore on, and the unit's problems worsened, Dames seemed to laugh less often. By the middle of 1988, his three-year tour in Sun Streak, which had started in early 1986, was nearing an end. He now realized he didn't intend to stay for a second tour.

PART II