Wednesday, June 19, 2013

#604: Ed Dames


A.k.a. “Dr. Doom”

The absolutely legendary Major Edward Dames is a retired US Army soldier who worked as a remote viewer in Project Star Gate and was trained by the equally legendary Ingo Swann (though Dames quickly became known as “extreme”, having target sessions on Mars, Atlantis, and alien spacecrafts). After he left the military Dames founded the company Psi Tech to offer his remote viewing services to the general public. Much hilarity would ensue, though Dames has not yet quite got the joke.

For these purposes Dames teamed up with Harry Deligter, a guy who ran a company producing videos on paranormal subjects. The companionship ended in a court settlement after Dames ran off with some of Deligter’s material and tried to produce them with his own employee F.M. Bonsall. After the court case Dames was apparently forced to retire, and his ex-wife Joni Dourif took over Psi Tech (no, I haven’t quite managed to disentangle the various intertwined narratives here). So Dames founded another company, the TRV intstitute. Somewhat later, according to Psi Tech’s new CEO Dane Spotts, Bonsall would break into Dourif’s house and steal lots of material that he would bring to Dames.

Psi Tech is still running, though, and offers paranormal assistance for instance to criminal investigations, as exemplified by (Spotts, Dourif, and others) making profound fools of themselves in the Elizabeth Smart case (also here). Their product is demolished by Randi here, but they nevertheless continue to offer educational opportunities, in more or less complete disregard of the fact that no remote viewer has ever been close to figuring out anything whatsoever.

Ok, that’s the rough background story. Remote viewing apparently involves viewing not only distant locations but also the future, and Dames has made a name for himself predicting large-scale disasters and destruction (hence the “Dr. Doom” alias, though something in the vicinity of “Nostra-Dames” would have been equally daft). Among the more interesting predictions is the claim that the world would be destroyed by alien fungus spores in 1998, as well as “the killshot: […] a series of powerful, deadly solar flares which will be impacting the Earth in the near future.” As evidence that he actually has the ability to see the future he offers the alleged fact that two remote viewerseach won the “Texas Pick Three” lottery twice. In 1993 Dames declared that he and his team had remote-viewed UFOs landing in the New Mexico desert, and that the desert is home to colonies of hibernating aliens. Furthermore, there were alien-human hybrid children in existence “not far from Earth.”

Dames is of course a mainstay on Coast to Coast AM, and particularly respected for his continued commitment to “evidence” for various theories that Art Bell has admitted to having fabricated (though it is easy to see Dames’s predicament: Bell makes a claim, Dames concurs and claims that he has remote-viewed what Bell claims to have seen; then Bell admits that he made it up … what is Dames supposed to do?)

If you want to do some remote viewing yourself, you can always buy TRV’s Magical Technical Remote Viewing Pen (now “anyone can learn this formally top secret skill and for less than a dollar convert an ordinary pen into a magic pen worth millions”). There is a fair and balanced review of said item here). On TRV ‘News’ you can furthermore learn that if you attend TRV University “… you will be trained along with the best and brightest minds on the planet” to use your Magic Pen to be able to “accurately sketch a nuclear weapon located inside a mountain in China, thousands of miles away” (wtf?) and “probe the mind of Osama bin Laden in real time, uncovering his current intent and next move.” (this was written before bin Laden’s demise, but I am not sure that would have mattered much). The “university” offers you a certification: “Having the Technical Remote Viewing Certification guarantees you a certain level of credibility amongst the law enforcements, amongst science and technology – who already know about us by the way.” I suppose. Whatever.

A too generous but comprehensive description of the failures of Ed Dames can be found here.

Among Dames’s pupils and, I suppose, TRV University alumni you will find the absolutely incredibly insane Aaron C. Hanson.

Diagnosis: Incorrigibly out of touch with anything but his highly incoherent imagination, Dames still manages to collect money enough to keep things going. Dangerous insofar as he panders to people in desperate situations, although the world would admittedly be a less colorful place without him and his helpless attempts to locate himself anywhere close to reality.

12 comments:

  1. Now that we are at the D's, I would like to nominate Charlie Daniels, Mark Dice, and Thomas DiLorrenzo.

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  2. All I have is a regular old, cheap dime-store pen, so I don't know if my results are accurate, but I am pretty sure that I just had a remote vision of James Randi laughing about never having to pay out on his offer to anyone who can scientifically demonstrate genuine psychic events.

    And although it's just a regular old pen, I had an uncanny remote vision of someone who looked exactly like Ed Dames, and he was having his head XRayed -- but they didn't find anything.

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  3. I went on Ed's RV forum to ask if anyone was making money with his gambling, stock, or lottery training. Boy did I hit a nerve with that! Of course no one said they were making real money and Ed proceeded to dodge my initial question and then began the insults and name calling like a child. He then blocked me so I couldn't respond anymore. This proves to me Ed is a fraud and makes his money selling seminars and DVD's and not by using RV.

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  4. He seems sincere; I think he really believes this stuff. I wonder why he makes people sign a nondisclosure when attending his presentations.

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    1. Key word 'seems' sincere. I wish the Federal Trade Commission had a bigger budget, they protect American Consumers from fraud.

      Noting your good natured face and your degree, I clicked on your blog link and noticed on your blog about the first day of teaching school, you commented that "The experts tell us that in a job interview results are probably decided in the first two seconds. "

      Heh I also didn't know the difference between Doctorate in Education vs PhD. I learned a bit here of useful information!

      You seem to have good critical thinking skills- the perfect person in your role no doubt. The last thing in the world one would want is to tell a child that Ed Dames 'mentalism' is real, that could really mess someone up until they figured it out in their 20's.

      I think it took about 2 seconds for me to realize Ed was self promoting his paid workshops. I think Ed must have seen that one Columbo episode where they do this and realized, hey - I could probably convince people with an IQ below 115 that this stuff is real.

      Let's face it though, Ed Dames and his 'end of the world predictions' aren't too far from Christianity End Days- my neighbor actually believes it's the end of the world. I personally think it's a crime to tell ANY child it's 'end days' or 'end of the world' - while their intellect isn't developed to be critical and see through that? Both Ed's predictions and said 'prophecy' noted above are highly damaging to the psyche of a child.

      OF course, Art Bell's entire show genre was selling baseless fears to the masses, and of course in between the guests promoting said fears Art was there to sell you survival gear.

      Thankfully the internet has allowed for a broader forum to constructively criticize those that - let's just say- need more criticism than others.

      I loved your 'I wonder why he makes people sign an NDA'. Heh. Indeed, no doubt so they can't share with people that things just didn't work.

      I only wish Art Bell's show had a legal mandate - must be over 18 to listen, for he really sells some garbage, as in 90% of his guests are self promoting fear mongers who always have their 'book' for sale at the end of the show.

      I'm happy Bell is off the air. He took away more than be brought.

      As to Dames, how on Earth does he avoid forced commit to a mental hospital with what he promotes.

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  5. The only loons are the loons who have no understanding of the power of the mind, the sixth sense, so reliant upon the Goc. to tell you when to take a chit , no wonder you can't see, or think straight. Ed Dames has a mind that would those who say loon to shame.

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    1. Nope, Dames is a fraud and likely also a nutcase! Welcome to the real world, my friend!

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  6. Ed's endless wrong predictions on the Art Bell show, tells a tale of a disturbed lying duche bag

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  7. Just heard this "Major" on Coast to Coast. I laughed the whole time. I want to see his military papers. A DD214. I'm having sincere doubts he was in the military, let alone some ultra top secret unit.

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  8. I heard him a few times on Art Bell. I also looked around on his remote viewing board years ago. He's clearly a salesman and a shameless self-promoter. He comes across as the guy who would have denounced his own grandmother during the McCarthy Hearings if it meant a job promotion.

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  9. Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target, purportedly using extrasensory perception (ESP) or "sensing" with the mind.

    Remote viewing experiments have historically been criticized for lack of proper controls and repeatability. There is no scientific evidence that remote viewing exists, and the topic of remote viewing is generally regarded as pseudoscience.

    Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person or location that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance.

    Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, parapsychology researchers at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), are generally credited with coining the term "remote viewing" to distinguish it from the closely related concept of clairvoyance, although according to Targ, the term was first suggested by Ingo Swann in December 1971 during an experiment at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City.

    Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s upon the declassification of certain documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program that had started in 1975 and was sponsored by the U.S. government, in an attempt to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. The program was terminated in 1995 after it failed to produce any actionable intelligence information.

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