Ed Dames

Edward "Ed" A. Dames is a retired US Army major who claims that he was trained by Ingo Swann as a remote viewer in Project Star Gate while serving in the Army, but since the military doesn't publish organizational charts of their classified projects, it's anybody's guess what his role was or what he actually did.

Career
According to one report, some of his Project Star Gate colleagues pranked Dames by informing him that a remote viewing session had gathered data indicating a man dressed in a red suit was flying over the North Pole in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. Dames interpreted this as being a warning of an imminent missile attack.

After leaving the Army, he founded his own company called Psi Tech to offer "remote viewing services." Dames went on to team up with Harry DeLigter, whose company Light Productions produced videos on paranormal subjects. However, DeLigter sued Dames and Psi Tech after Dames reportedly tried to cut him out of the profits. Dames was forced to cough up $435,000 after a breach of contract judgment and stepped down as president of Psi Tech, which was then taken over by his ex-wife Joni Dourif. He later claimed that he left the company for "ethical reasons". Dames then set up a new company, the TRV Institute.

Later, Dane Spotts, who became CEO of Psi Tech, claimed that a former Psi Tech employee named F.M.Bonsall burgled Dourif's house and made off with several boxes of files belonging to Psi Tech, which he allegedly handed over to Dames. Spotts filed a lawsuit against Dames, his wife Jane, and Bonsall. According to "remote viewer" Aaron Donahue, Dames mentored him until the pair had a falling out.

LearnRV.com
Dames has spent a lifetime trying to convince people they can mentally leave their bodies and access hidden knowledge. And he can teach them —if only they will pay him money. After he abandoned Psi Tech due to legal troubles, he opened up shop as TRV Institute which then morphed into LearnRV.com, but it was all his own unique brand of snake oil called "technical remote viewing" with the emphasis on technical. His website is peppered with buzzwords like "target-associated gestalt patterns of information" to form a liberally-seasoned word salad of technojargon:

The TRV techniques result in an accurate transfer of information from the viewer's unconscious mind into the conscious awareness, before the aware, creative, and analytical part of the mind has time to distort, contaminate, or otherwise interfere with the data flow. The target information is then converted into words or sketches, using only a pen and plain white paper. During this process, the viewer becomes linked directly to the collective unconscious--the Matrix.

According to Ed, paying customers can obtain such miraculous abilities by using a set of random eight-digit numbers separated by a hyphen.

And it's not cheap. He charges anywhere from a few thousand bucks to attend his seminars to a few hundred for packaged DVD training courses.

Of course, if remote viewing actually worked, everyone would be stock market billionaires, missing persons would be immediately found, and no crime would ever go unsolved. Heck, people would be too busy digging up treasures and winning lotteries to commit crimes. And Ed Dames could avoid his various legal problems by using remote viewing to foresee impending lawsuits in advance.

But so far, that hasn't happened.

Predictions
Dames is notorious for making bizarre predictions:


 * Said Martians would be caught stealing fertilizer from U.S. companies
 * Said that the existence of Satan would be proven by science
 * Said Bill Clinton would be killed in April 1998 on a golf course by lightning
 * Claimed to know the exact location of Amelia Earhart's plane

He is most well-known for his predictions of catastrophic, Armageddon-like events, earning him the nickname "Dr. Doom":


 * Claimed a cylindrical object containing deadly fungus spores released by an alien intelligence was headed towards Earth in 1998.
 * Claimed that Africa would be hit with major famine due to a wheat fungus that would eventually spread to the Americas.
 * Claimed 300 m.p.h. winds would sweep over the U.S.

Poor Ed Dames. If any of his various "end of the world" predictions come true, no one will be around to give him credit. But hey, two remote viewers each won the "Texas Pick Three" lottery twice. So he's got that.

The killshot
Ed predicted that "a series of powerful, deadly solar flares" he termed "the killshot" would impact the Earth and wipe out civilization between 2011 and 2013.

When that didn't happen — not wanting to tarnish his self-proclaimed track record of being "amazingly accurate regarding globally recognized disasters and events" — he simply pushed the timeline for the killshot event ahead to the near future and retconned his prediction accordingly.

The catastrophe won't be caused by solar flares after all. Instead, it will be the result of a close encounter with Planet X which is supposedly on a collision course with Earth.

All the more fertile soil upon which to peddle crank DVDs promising to reveal the mysterious "alien agenda" behind this impending disaster, while also advising the suckers consumers about the location of various "safe places" in the world which they can relocate to in order to avoid extermination.

One would think that helping as many people as possible survive the calamity by not charging for this information would be the moral thing to do, but hey — burning DVDs at home ain't free, pal.

Aliens
In 1993, Dames claimed that he and his team of remote viewers had remotely viewed UFOs landing in the New Mexico desert, which contains colonies of hibernating aliens from a dying planet, and learned that alien-human hybrid children were in existence "not far from Earth". Reportedly, Dames has since denied making these claims.