#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.

#577: Chip Coffey & Lisa Miller

Chip Coffey is a psychic from Elmira, New York, who has appeared as a medium on various television programs dealing with the paranormal, primarily “Paranormal State” and the revolting “Psychic Kids”. The latter show, among the most cynically exploitative ever aired on television, is discussed here and here. Coffey’s role is to be a mentor for children who have allegedly experienced psychic abilities (primarily seeing ghosts), which strongly suggests that he is not a particularly good person. Coffey is, among other things, also the proud recipient of a JREF Pigasus Award for 2009 for being “the psychic who tricked the most people with the least effort.” There is some background for the award here, and some rather stunning examples of why Coffey heartily deserved it.

Lisa J. Miller is the co-host of Psychic Kids. She is in fact Associate Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and she justifies the show thusly: “this is an opportunity to share more broadly with our culture the psychic experiences of children and to understand what their experience says about our own daily lived reality.” More sanity-oriented people may reasonably ask some questions about how on earth someone notionally related to anything having to do with science could end up where Miller does without compromising one’s personal integrity, but we’ll leave that question open here (it’s discussed here). “What I’m concerned about is that clients who come in with psychic experiences are wrongly diagnosed as being psychotic,” says Miller. She does seem to think that we (Westerners) are deficient as a culture because we don't follow the example of advanced spiritual societies like China and Mexico, where psychic experiences are apparently more widely accepted.

Here’s a discussion of Examiner.com’s Elizabeth Costanza’s endorsement of the show.

Diagnosis: Coffey is a creepy skeevo; Miller a staunchly deluded (POMO seems to feature prominently) scientific alibi. Together they form a not insignificant threat to sanity, truth, civilization, and the well-being of real people. Appalling.

#532: Courtney Brown

Courtney Brown is a social scientist at Emory University also known for promoting the use of nonlinear mathematics in social scientific research but, more widely, the use and efficacy of remote viewing, a form of extra-sensory perception explored featured in the documentary Men who stare at goats.

Brown's research into the latter has received notable positive reviews from other advocates of psychic powers such as Fred Alan Wolf, William A. Tiller, and Daryl Bem. The claims have been dismissed by all serious scientists, of course, and Brown’s supporting evidence has been described as “singularly unimpressive” by his colleague Scott Lillienfeld (the link is to a pretty darn good assessment). Brown has refused to subject his ideas and his own purported psychic powers to independent scientific testing on what has been described as “curious” grounds (see previous link)

In his book Cosmic Voyages: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth, Brown claims to use powers of remote viewing to visit Mars and observe the actions of aliens. He purports to have uncovered indisputable evidence that two races of extraterrestrials, Martians and Greys, left the red planet centuries ago and have taken up residence in the dark recesses of Earth. His powers have furthermore revealed that Adam and Eve were architects of a genetic engineering project and that numerous Star Trek episodes were written with the assistance of aliens; he claims to have “entered the mind” of an extraterrestrial and investigated its psychological make-up, and to have conversed with Jesus about various topics.

By contractual agreement Brown is not permitted to mention his affiliation with Emory during interviews about remote viewing.

Brown has augmented his scientific training with studies of Transcendental Meditation, the TM-Sidhi program, as well as Yogic Flying (also here) at the Golden Dome of Pure Knowledge at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield. He himself directs the “Farsight Institute” in Atlanta, where he promises to provide attendees with the psychic abilities he himself has mastered.

Diagnosis: Since “fraud” has a clear legal definition and should not be applied lightly, we will instead suggest that Brown’s actions – insofar it is not the case that he does indeed believe his own claims – are borderline ethically questionable.

#525: Dannion Brinkley

Dannion Brinkley is an author best known for describing two near death experiences in his 1994 book Saved by the Light (later adapted as a movie), and for subsequently becoming a prominent figure in the New Age and New Thought Movement. He has, for instance, worked closely with the famous near death ”researcher” Raymond Moody (to be covered later).

In his near-death recounts Brinkley claimed that he met 13 Beings of Light who told him that “those who go to Earth are the real heroes and heroines [in othre words, Brinkley is really an angelic being on a mission from God], because you are doing something that no other spiritual beings have the courage to do. You have gone to earth to co-create with God,” and, apparently, to receive visions of future events. Brinkley foresaw that there would be a breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1990 and subsequent food riots (according to Moody the forecast struck him as ”silly and absurd” at the time but later proved accurate – funny enough Moody only mentioned this after the fall of the Soviet Union). Brinkley's visions also reportedly included the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War, but unfortunately Brinkley never mentioned these visions to anyone before his 1994 book. A pity, isn’t it? And extremely surprisingly, the forecasts he did make in 1994 –  a 1995 nuclear accident in Norway and a pre-2000 economic collapse in the United States – never occured. Brinkley also claims the events surrounding his first near death experience left him with ”special powers”, i.e. psychic and paranormal abilities, but these don’t seem to be testable (presumably, they magically refuse to work in controlled situations).

His most recent book (with Kathryn Peters-Brinkley, presumably his wife) is The Secrets of the Light: Spiritual strategies to empower your life ... here and in the hereafter, which contains a garbled mess of quantum woo and claims to the effect that ”chaos is not something to be avoided, but is, if used with intent, an unfailing source of spiritual growth, so we should welcome it” (according to his fan Don Croft). Brinkley is currently apparently writing a new one: ”is this like The Secret? Well, yes, sort of, but it’s soooo much more.” Indeed.

Among Brinkley’s other claims are recounts of his alleged actions as a CIA sniper in Laos during the Vietnam War, even though military records show that he was stationed in Georgia as a truck driver throughout the events.

To be fair, Brinkley does seem to have done some pretty decent charity work in his life, but that doesn’t quite disqualify him from receiving an entry.

Diagnosis: He does seem to enjoy some popularity, but primarily among those with a tenuous grasp on reality to begin with. Probably rather harmless.

#488: Daryl Bem

Daryl J. Bem is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University, the originator of the self-perception theory of attitude change, and proud recipient of the 2012 Pigasus Award (Category: Scientist). To the wider public he is most famous for carrying out research (i.e. credulously endorsing and propping up by confirmation bias and badly constructed experiments) on a range of psi-related phenomena and other branches of pseudoscience, including handwriting analysis.

More recently, Bem has investigated backward causation, and one cannot help to suspect that the “research” is part of a desperate attempt to save some post-hoc fallacies. Backward causation could of course in theory almost explain fortune tellers – admittedly with less predictive success than the “they don’t really predict the future”-hypothesis, but the backward causation thing is of course more exotic.

Bem really rose to fame in 2011, when he published the article “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The article offered purported statistical evidence for psi phenomena. Of course, the paper itself and its methods were crap, and its statistical analysis would have been deeply flawed –when corrected the extremely small but statistically significant effect disappeared – even if the test itself had been sound. The effects have furthermore not been replicated (more on that and the paper itself here; brief summary here). Indeed, Bem even admitted to committing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy at occasions in the experiment. He did not admit that he purposely waited until he thought there was a critical mass that wasn't a statistical fluke, which is, to put it mildly, not something you’re allowed to do in real science.

Indeed, the publication also prompted a wider debate on the validity of peer review process for allowing such a paper to be published, though that wasn’t quite the debate Bem was looking for.

Though it received wider dissemination, the publication was not Bem’s first attempt at carefully shoehorning data to fit a cherished hypothesis. With Charles Honorton, Bem has earlier claimed to have found “substantial evidence that the meditative state, the dream state, the hypnotic state, the sensory deprivation state, and certain drug-induced states are conducive to psi.” The “experiments” are discussed here, and were in fact also published (back in 1994) despite the horrible quality of the paper. Bem is also known to defend the, shall we say, “discredited” ganzfeld experiment.

And now for something entirely predictable. Bem, utterly unsurprisingly, thinks there is a connection between psi and quantum phenomena. Bem thinks there is such a connection because he understands quantum phenomena more or less as well as Dean Radin.

Diagnosis: Living proof of how far confirmation bias and post hoc reasoning can take you.