The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [50]
Initially, the Stargate story received broad media attention—including a special investigative report on ABC’s Nightline—and made minor celebrities out of a few of the psychic spies, such as Ed Dames and Joe McMoneagle. As regular guests on Art Bell’s pro-paranormal radio talk show Coast to Coast, the former spies spun tales that, had they not been documented elsewhere, would have seemed like the ramblings of paranoid delusionists. For example, Ronson connects some of the bizarre torture techniques used on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison with similar techniques employed during the FBI siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. FBI agents blasted the Branch Davidians all night with such obnoxious sounds as screaming rabbits, crying seagulls, dentist drills, and (I’m not making this up) Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” The U.S. military employed the same technique on Iraqi prisoners of war, replacing Sinatra’s ballad with the theme song from the PBS kids’ television series Barney and Friends—a tune many parents concur does become torturous with repetition.
One of Ronson’s sources, none other than Uri Geller (of bent-spoon fame), led him to Major General Albert Stubblebine III, who directed the psychic spy network from his office in Arlington, Virginia. Stubblebine thought that with enough practice he could learn to walk through walls, a belief encouraged by Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon, a Vietnam vet whose postwar experiences at such New Age meccas as the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, led him to found the “first earth battalion” of “warrior monks” and “Jedi knights.” These warriors, according to Channon, would transform the nature of war by entering hostile lands with “sparkly eyes,” marching to the mantra of “ohm,” and presenting the enemy with “automatic hugs” (acts colorfully carried out by George Clooney’s character in the film version of The Men Who Stare at Goats). Disillusioned by the ugly carnage of modern war, Channon envisioned a battalion armory of machines that would produce “discordant sounds” (Nancy and Barney?) and “psycho-electric” guns that would shoot “positive energy” at enemy soldiers.
As entertaining as all this is, can anyone actually levitate, turn invisible, walk through walls, or view a hidden object remotely? No. Under controlled conditions, remote viewers have never succeeded in finding a hidden target with greater accuracy than random guessing. The occasional successes you hear about are due either to chance or suspect experimental conditions, such as when the person who subjectively assesses whether the remote viewer’s narrative description matches the target already knows the target location and its characteristics. When both the experimenter and the remote viewer are blinded to the target, psychic powers vanish.
Herein lies an important lesson that I have learned in many years of paranormal investigations: what people remember happening rarely corresponds to what actually happened. Case in point: Ronson interviewed a martial arts teacher named Guy Savelli, who claimed that he was involved in the psychic spy program and had witnessed soldiers killing goats by staring at them, and that he himself had done so as well. But as the details of the story unfold we discover that Savelli was recalling, years later, what he remembered about a particular “experiment” with thirty numbered goats. Savelli randomly chose Goat 16 and gave it his best death stare. But he couldn’t concentrate that day, so he quit the experiment, only to be told later that Goat 17 had subsequently died. End of story. No autopsy or explanation of the cause of death. No information about how much time had elapsed between the staring episode