Ed Dames

Ed Dames was a U.S. Army Major who served as training and operations officer in the classified remote viewing unit at Fort Meade, Maryland, during the Center Lane and Sun Streak phases of the program in the 1980s and early 1990s. Within the unit he occupied a managerial and analytical role rather than being a primary operational viewer himself, working with Edwin May and the DIA sponsorship structure. His post-military public profile, built on commercial remote viewing training and alarming predictions about planetary catastrophe, made him simultaneously the most publicly visible and most criticized figure to emerge from the Fort Meade program.¹

Fort Meade Service

Dames joined the remote viewing unit in the early 1980s and was trained in Coordinate Remote Viewing by Ingo Swann. As training and operations officer, he was responsible for maintaining the unit's methodological standards and coordinating the deployment of viewers for operational tasking from the Defense Intelligence Agency and other government clients.

His personality was described by contemporaries as forceful and controlling, with an intensity that generated friction within the small unit. Jim Schnabel's account of the program characterizes Dames as someone who took the unit's work extremely seriously and who bridged the analytical and the operational within the structure while maintaining a strong personal commitment to the reality of remote viewing phenomena.¹

The Center Lane project manager's record of a meeting with General Albert Stubblebine on November 30, 1983, reads: "We identified CPT Edward Dames as a perspective CENTER LANE member. He agreed to a future assignment to the project and to participate in the training. Major Laing had concurred in the training and CPT Dames involvement in CENTER LANE. Major General Stubblebine commented that Dames was a good choice."²

PSI Tech and Public Career

After leaving the Army, Dames founded PSI Tech, a commercial remote viewing company, in 1989 - before STAR GATE's 1995 declassification. PSI Tech offered training and contracted remote viewing services to corporate and private clients, capitalizing on former government program personnel credentials at a time when the program's existence was not yet officially acknowledged.

When STAR GATE was declassified in 1995, Dames became one of the first former unit personnel to appear publicly on television, including a 1995 appearance on the Nightline program that brought the remote viewing story to a mainstream audience. His media presence subsequently expanded through radio appearances, particularly on Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM program, where he made a series of predictions about catastrophic events including mass solar coronal mass ejections that he claimed would kill most of humanity.

The contrast between Dames's specific, confident, and typically non-materializing predictions and the more methodologically careful public statements of other former unit personnel such as Joe McMoneagle and Lyn Buchanan became a defining tension in how the program's legacy was presented to the public. McMoneagle in particular explicitly distanced himself from Dames's claims and methods in his own writing and interviews.¹