Edmund Thompson

Major General Edmund R. "Ed" Thompson served as the U.S. Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) from 1977 to 1981. He was a key figure in the establishment and early support of the Stargate Project, then codenamed Gondola Wish and later Grill Flame, having developed a personal interest in psi phenomena after reading Arthur Koestler's pro-paranormal book The Roots of Coincidence.¹

Thompson approved Skip Atwater's proposal to assemble a remote viewing team at Fort Meade, seeing it as an opportunity to involve the Army in psychic spying without relying too heavily on the Central Intelligence Agency or Stanford Research Institute. He provided initial funding, assigned Major Scotty Watt to lead the unit alongside Atwater, and later augmented the unit's resources by increasing the budget and allocating positions for three full-time remote viewers. His support was crucial in the project's early survival despite the skepticism of many within the military and intelligence communities, including his successor William Odom.¹

Thompson participated in a remote viewing session himself, attempting to remote-view Major Stone's location. He initially misidentified the target but later realized he had accurately perceived a nearby Masonic Temple, which he had mistaken for the Lincoln Memorial. He also briefed Congressman Charlie Rose on the program alongside Jack Vorona, contributing to Rose's staunch public support.¹

Later in his career Thompson expressed concerns about Albert Stubblebine's management of INSCOM.¹

The Documents

Major General Edmund R. Thompson was the Army's assistant chief of staff for intelligence from 1977 to 1981. By the spring of 1978 he "concluded there was sufficient evidence to warrant the development of a comprehensive program" in remote viewing; he "cancelled the Gondola Wish effort, placed a complete security envelope over Army's interest in psychoenergetics, and implemented a new program directed towards intelligence collection using remote viewing," and in October 1978 tasked INSCOM to build it, verbally. He told a British television series: "I had one or more briefings by SRI and was impressed. The decision I made was to set up a small, in-house, low-cost effort in remote viewing." He sat on the Grill Flame oversight committee formed on November 28, 1978, with Jack Vorona of DIA, Rear Admiral S. Shapiro, commander of the Naval Intelligence Command, Major General J. L. Brown of Air Force intelligence, and Lowell Dailey for the under secretary for research, "responsible for insuring that research and experiments fall within the legal guidelines."²³

His eyes-only memorandum on the steering committee warned that Representative Charles Rose had an "oft-repeated desire to be kept up to date on a continuing basis" and that "a situation as before in which the last briefing was done at his instigation, forcing us to be reactors rather than action takers, should be avoided." By January 1980 he "has briefed the DDO on the INSCOM program." On April 16, 1981, he sat with Lieutenant Colonel Murray Watt to brief Rose, assuring him that the Army wished to keep working with SRI, and on May 8, 1981, asked the Secretary of the Army to approve work with civilian contractors under Procedure 18 of the Defense Department's rules on human subjects, granted on May 27 on condition that it serve "an important foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purpose." In 1981 his office transferred management of the project to INSCOM.⁴⁵

Thompson received a copy of Ruth Davis's memorandum of November 20, 1978, on the oversight of the remote-viewing project; the report of the Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee records that in the spring of 1978 "the Army ACSI was designated focal point to develop a DA program" of "moderate intensity, low profile," that he sat on the steering committee at its first meeting on February 13, 1979, and that in 1979 "MG Thompson requested the Surgeon General designate, by name, a fully qualified behavioral scientist to act as consultant during protocol development." According to Major William Stoner, Ray Hyman's candidacy for the committee ended "because of a protest memo from MG Thompson to Dr LaBerge," and at the briefing of January 14, 1980, "when quizzed by MG Thompson on what the word 'proof' in the report findings meant, Gale responded with a flurry of scientific buzzwords and jargon, the bottom line of which is that SCIENTIFIC PROOF has not been demonstrated."⁹⁰⁰

At Watt's briefing of Representative Rose on January 16, 1980, "Page 3 of Incl 1 was not provided to the audience at the direction of MG Thompson," and Thompson "had no objections to taping the briefing" for the subcommittee. An undated note of his to Lieutenant General Tighe reads: "Reference my 3 October memo discussing the GRILL FLAME Steering Committee, Dr. LaBerge agreed that the principals should meet soon. My office was asked to coordinate."⁹⁰¹