by Jim Schnabel
November 7, 1996

from MindControlForums Website

Part 1

It is a gray, uncomfortable day in May 1994 and I am through the doors and into Ward 54, one of the psychiatric units at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in north Washington D.C. A sergeant in fatigues is behind the desk, shuffling papers.

"I’m here to see Major David Morehouse," I say.

"Major Morehouse, Major Morehouse," says the sergeant in a tone of genial reflection. "A visitor for Major Morehouse . . ."

The sergeant, who apparently is also a trained nurse, opens a visitor’s log for me to sign, and sends a lower- ranking soldier, a thin young man also in fatigues, around a corner to fetch the major. As I sign the logbook a woman quietly enters the room and stands beside me. She is watching me write. I look up at her.

She is pretty, in her late thirties, with a certain intensity etched around her eyes.

"I’m Debbie Morehouse," she says, shaking my hand. "I’m here to see Dave, too."

It is not the happiest of coincidences. I’ve come to Walter Reed in hope of getting an interview with Morehouse - - there is no other way to reach him, I’ve been told -- but now his loving wife will occupy his attentions. He’ll want to spend time with her alone.

I remain several cautious paces behind when she rounds the corner in search of her husband. And there he is, trailing behind the orderly in fatigues. He’s dressed in civilian clothes, walking slowly, frowning. Short, muscular, but getting heavy, he has a nose that looks like it was broken once or twice. He greets his wife not with a smile but with a contemptuous deepening of his frown and a slight lifting of his head, as if to say, "Not you again."

She does not seem to mind the coldness of it. It is obvious that she’s used to this. In any case, Dave Morehouse has much to be unhappy about. He is about to be court-martialed by the Army for a range of offenses involving the wife of an enlisted man who was under his command. Other investigations are underway by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division and counter-intelligence units, involving his apparent disclosures of classified information.

Morehouse’s Army career is over, and he faces a possible jail sentence. He is here in Walter Reed because he apparently had had some kind of breakdown a few months ago. He is stable now, but tells friends that he still speaks to angels now and then.

Morehouse listens to a few quiet words from his wife, words that I do not hear, and then for the first time he turns his head slightly and looks in my direction.

I explain that I am writing a book about the secret military project he was once part of.

The project trained military personnel as "remote viewers," psychics who tried to spy on intelligence targets around the globe. Morehouse, from 1988 to 1990, was one of those remote viewers. And now he is blaming the program, in part, for his mental breakdown. He also is claiming that the government has mounted a secret campaign to harass him: There have been strange packages sent to his wife, with tape-recordings of his phone conversations. Strange people have been following him -- disappearing into crowds as soon as they’re spotted.

Explaining to Morehouse that it is a coincidence that his wife and I arrived at the same time, I ask whether it is possible for me to interview him on a later day.

He looks at me sideways. His eyes seem to be locked on something well to the left of mine. Some ghost, or some calculation. Finally he says,

"Have you talked to Sandra?"

Sandra -- Sandra Martin -- is not his lawyer, or his doctor. She is his agent.

For the past five years, in fact almost from the start of my career as a journalist, I have occasionally written about people with wild tales to tell. There have been spirit- mediums, UFO abductees, inventors of perpetual motion machines, and would-be shamans touched by God. Some of these people, despite being outrageous, half-demented liars, have managed to make a decent living from their stories.

A few have even become celebrities. But none of these storytellers, with their campaigns for fifteen minutes of fame, has ever seemed as . . . breathtaking is the best word I can think of -- as David Morehouse. To me, his story is not just about the depths to which one human can sink. (Morehouse is, in the end, perhaps only a sleazier, crazier version of the old Sgt. Bilko character.) Somehow his story also reflects the current state of things in America -- a country that seems to be going insane.

Insane is the right word: What else to call a people who feed hungrily, via The X-Files and other forms of that hugely popular genre, on paranoid conspiracy-fantasies otherwise found only on psychiatric wards? What else to call a people who, according to polls, increasingly believe that the X-Files picture of the world is an accurate one? Let us not be too harsh on Morehouse, when his book mounts the bestseller list and is followed in a year or two by a summer-blockbuster film. He is merely telling America what it wants to hear.

Morehouse, despite several promises to do so, never let me interview him in person. I had only a half-hour conversation with him by phone in August 1995, in which he talked fast at me about remote viewing and psychiatric issues, and then switched to a discussion of his book project and all the publicity it had attracted.

So I know relatively little about Morehouse from Morehouse himself. But then, Morehouse is perhaps not the best source on such matters.

About Morehouse’s background I have been told only a few things: He grew up in Carlsbad, California. In high school he was a wrestler, and a member of the cheerleading squad. Between high school and university he joined a company that trained cheerleaders.

Ed Dames, who was his closest friend in the remote-viewing unit (and was still Morehouse’s friend when I interviewed him in early 1994) remembers talking with Morehouse about those days:

"He travelled with this company and its president. They had a big bus, with about 16 females and 7 males, and they travelled from campus to campus, training cheerleaders. Dave has pictures of this; they would bring tears to any healthy man’s eyes: extremely nubile females, in great numbers, both within the troupe, and at each campus where they had fresh meat."

Morehouse attended Brigham Young University on an Army ROTC scholarship, converted to Mormonism to marry Debbie, and graduated in 1979 with a commission as a second lieutenant. His Army career was promising. Morehouse’s superior officers regularly praised his intelligence and energy. In the early 1980s, as a first lieutenant, he served briefly in Panama as the aide de camp for Brigadier General Kenneth Leuer, commander of the 193d Infantry Brigade.

Leuer wrote in Morehouse’s officer efficiency report:

The most outstanding lieutenant I know. Dave Morehouse is far ahead of his contemporaries in demonstrated performance, maturity, and total professionalism. . . . His ability to work with and influence senior officers throughout this wide ranging command reflects his self-confidence, organizational ability, and unique sensing of what is desired

 

. . . . A charming wife and family join him in being a total part of the team and community. . . . Would do an outstanding job as a major today. Destined to wear stars [i.e., to become a general].

By 1986 Morehouse was a captain in command of a Ranger company. In late 1987, apparently thirsting for a sexier assignment, he joined the Army’s Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), a hush-hush unit that specialized in quick- reaction intelligence-gathering, covert-action, and counter- terrorist missions. ISA, according to military affairs specialist Steven Emerson in his 1988 book Secret Warriors, had been at its inception "the most secret unit in the Army."

It was apparently at ISA that Morehouse’s career began to run into trouble. According to a source familiar with the case, Morehouse was stressed by a situation involving the wife of a colleague.

Morehouse’s version was that he was merely counseling the woman. The colleague’s version, apparently, was different. In any case, things were getting hot. Morehouse himself sought counselling, and also sought a new assignment. He heard about the remote-viewing program, which was then under the management of the DIA, and asked Col. Dennis Kowal, an Army psychologist who had knowledge of the program, about it.

The project, labelled DT-S within the DIA’s bureaucracy, was code-named Sun Streak. Morehouse wasted no time applying for a job there.

Morehouse’s application was reviewed by remote viewer Paul Smith, an Army captain of similar age, who was also a Mormon. To Smith, Morehouse seemed like a high flier, a good choice for the program. In Morehouse’s application there was no mention of any prior paranormal ability, but none was expected. As Dennis Kowal put it later, in testimony for the court martial at Fort Bragg:

His personality was different from the individuals who were traditionally in the program, but he demonstrated three factors: A great deal of intelligence, a good ability to imagine, and a very creative mind. Those three components account for 75 percent of the variance in selecting people who are successful in being able to perform the duties.

[N.B. This and other quotes below are taken from the 700-page record of U.S. v. Morehouse, available by FOIA request from the XVIII Airborne Corps at Ft. Bragg, NC.]

The remote-viewing unit was then based in two small buildings at Fort Meade, Maryland, as it had been almost since its beginning in 1978. Morehouse began turning up for work there, and trained in the standard remote viewing techniques, and began to take part in occasional "operational" taskings by the DIA and other agencies.

Unfortunately DT-S, which had always been controversial, had by this time been pushed to the outer margins of the intelligence community. Only a few intelligence consumers took it seriously, and those few had to conceal their interest by saying their use of DT-S was merely "experimental." For most of the time in those little buildings at Fort Meade, a somnolent atmosphere prevailed. DT-S’s remote-viewers read books, did crosswords and logic puzzles, and otherwise tried to occupy their time. "It was that or sit around and stare at the walls," remembers former remote viewer Lyn Buchanan.

Morehouse managed to keep himself busier than most. He had a small home-improvement business, House Tech, that he ran on the side. As time went by, he began to spend more and more of his days away from the office, doing House Tech work.

Former remote viewer Paul Smith told me:

"I remember many times when Dave would have been useful and he wasn’t there."

Lyn Buchanan has a similar recollection.

"He was taking a lot of time off to do his own work -- his homebuilding business. He’d call in a lot, and would get in late, and leave early."

When Morehouse did bother to turn up, remembers Buchanan, he still spent much of his time on private business.

"He’d do all his House Tech paperwork there in the office."

At some point, Morehouse helped build a wood deck in Ed Dames’ backyard. Dames and Morehouse were by this time best friends. One day, when Dames was away at the office, Morehouse arrived to work on the deck. Dames’s wife was there.

She remembers:

"Dave said, `I really miss your cooking.’ Then he said, `I really miss you, too.’"

She just laughed nervously, and was grateful when Morehouse didn’t press the matter. She never told her husband that his best friend had made a pass at her.

Thanks to exaggerated officer efficiency reports, Morehouse continued to look good on paper at Fort Meade. But by the end of his stay there, his colleagues were disgusted by his long absences from work, as was DT-S’s branch chief. When Morehouse finally left in mid-1990, hardly anyone noticed. And no one ever asked him to come back.

Following Ed Dames, who had left DT-S in June 1988, Morehouse jumped to another hush-hush, sexy unit known as Team Six, based in Baltimore. Dames told me it was a "strategic deception" unit, and said it had originally been set up to deceive the Soviets on major strategic issues, for example involving ICBMs and Star Wars technology. (In conversation, Tim Wiener of the New York Times called it a "mind-fuck" operation.)

Morehouse’s officer efficiency reports from the period make clear that it now had an anti- narcotics role, and closely coordinated with the U.S. Southern Command in Panama as well as the special operations community.

Apparently it was one of the Army’s many recent attempts to play James Bond games.

The woman at the center of Morehouse’s court-martial case -- let’s call her Angela Connor -- remembers Morehouse describing his life at Team Six:

. . .they could pretty much do whatever they wanted to. He and the other guys that were doing these spooks -- the operation missions and things that they were doing -- he said that a lot of times that they wouldn’t even work. He had told me that this would be like cover for them that they were supposed to be like big businessmen and that they would go into these different places and have elaborate dinners . . .

In any case Morehouse, now a major, wasn’t happy at Team Six.

"At times he didn’t get along with other key people in the organization, which regrettably caused him problems," remembers a senior officer who knew him there. "I would say that, often times, his aggressiveness got him into trouble because sometimes people are more conservative and are a bit leery of someone who . . . comes up with ideas that don’t always agree with the normal."

Among other things, Morehouse proposed that Team Six should make use of remote viewers in its counter-narcotics operations against drug lords in South America.

"You can pretty well tolerate aggressiveness on the part of people, as long as it doesn’t exceed the boundaries of common sense," adds the Team Six officer. "At times I’d say Dave was on the edge of that boundary."

According to Angela Connor’s testimony at the court- martial, Morehouse in those days was stressed for another reason: Through his Team Six "undercover" work, he had met a Maryland woman named Mary R---, and was having an intense affair with her. For a while (according to Angela Connor) he had planned to divorce his wife Debbie and marry Mary instead.

While all this was going on, Morehouse managed to keep House Tech going. He and Dames also started a company called PSI TECH, which offered the moonlighting services of Morehouse and DT-S remote viewers to private and commercial clients. There were only a few takers, and the targets they provided tended to be a bit flaky. One client asked PSI TECH to uncover the truth about the mysterious "crop circles" in English fields.

Dames’s analysis of the remote viewers’ data suggested that the circles were being made by small, fast-moving extraterrestrial vehicles.

How far Morehouse went along with this extraterrestrial enthusiasm is unclear, but during one official visit to Los Alamos on behalf of Team Six, Morehouse and Dames took a few days out to venture into the high deserts of northwestern New Mexico, apparently convinced that an alien base was somewhere out there under the mesas.

Morehouse lasted only briefly at Team Six, then worked at the Army’s Personnel Command before heading in 1992 to Fort Leavenworth, to the Army’s Command and General Staff College. He graduated in early 1993 and was assigned to the 82d Airborne Division at Fort Bragg.

On the surface, Morehouse’s life and career seemed to be back on solid ground again. He had a traditional assignment, as executive officer of an airborne battalion, and with Command and General Staff College behind him, seemed destined for early promotion to lieutenant colonel. But beneath the surface, things were still slipping.

Some time in 1992 or 1993, Ed Dames -- now retired from the Army -- had decided to write a book about remote viewing. He had been put in touch with New York literary agent and infomercial producer Sandra Martin, who specialized in popular, often New Ageish projects. M

orehouse was invited to join the effort, although ultimately the writing was handed over to Jim Marrs (author of the bestselling conspiracy thriller Crossfire, which had helped give rise to Oliver Stone’s film JFK). Some time in late 1993, Martin sold Marrs’ proposal for $100,000 to Harmony Books, a division of Crown Publishing. According to Dames, the money (after Martin’s commission) was split equally among Marrs, Dames, and Morehouse.

Morehouse’s share came either in lump sums or in less direct disbursements (one document from the time shows that Morehouse claimed $1,500 per month income from "Night Vision Films, Inc.," which perhaps was Martin’s production company). In any case, the book would be the Dames and Morehouse story, and they would jointly have editorial control over its content. Morehouse heard about the Harmony deal over his field phone while on exercises with his battalion in the wilds of North Carolina. Later, he went out and leased a Mercedes. "It’s for you, babe," he told one of his girlfriends of the time.

That girlfriend was Angela Connor. Angela Connor was the wife of Alan Connor, an enlisted man who until recently had been Morehouse’s driver, but was now at another posting.

He had told Morehouse about his marital problems, and Morehouse had briefly served as an unofficial counselor in this regard. Not long after Alan Connor left Fort Bragg for a post in Texas, in the spring of 1993, Morehouse invited Angela to dinner, drove her home, and seduced her. The method he employed was one which might make even hardened womanizers wince.

According to Angela Connor, Morehouse invited himself into her house, saying he needed to use the bathroom.

Then:

He started telling me about something. He said, "I don’t know how to say this to you or how to bring this up," but he said, "I need to tell you some things about Alan" -- speaking of my husband. . . . My husband used to be here at battalion [headquarters] and [Morehouse] said that my husband had been going around telling people that when we first got married that I was sleeping with him and his friend at the same time, that when my husband had to go out to the field, he would be telling his commanders and other people that he didn’t want to go out to the field because his wife was back home sleeping with all the other "Joes" or something like that.

And I started crying. I really got upset and I went to the bathroom. I was in there for probably 15 to 20 minutes. I mean, I was devastated. I couldn’t believe that my husband had said these things [at this point the Army stenographer notes that Ms. Connor began to cry] and I didn’t believe it. I said, "My husband would never say anything like that," and so I went back out and I couldn’t believe it. I was upset and [Dave] knew that I was upset. It was almost like he enjoyed me being upset about this or something. And then he told me, he said, "Well I know those things aren’t true anyway, so obviously Alan has been going around telling all these lies." . . . I was sitting there and I still had -- I was wiping tears from my eyes and I was rubbing my neck . . . and Dave reached over and he started massaging my neck and then he kissed me on the neck.

And that night, the deed was done. Morehouse assured Angela that he loved her. In fact, he said, he had loved her for a while. He was already legally separated from Debbie, he claimed, and when everything was ready, he would divorce her and marry Angela. He urged Angela to legally separate from her own husband Alan (who later vehemently denied what Morehouse had claimed about him).

When Morehouse had merely been her husband’s boss, Angela Connor had admired and respected him. Now she fell in love with him. She listened with fascination to his tales of remote viewing and other secret "spook" projects, and the sensational book he was working on with Ed Dames. She believed him when he told her that he loved her and would marry her.

She even agreed, eventually, to his requests to have unprotected anal sex with her:

"He called me, quote, ’my little virgin ass.’"

In the throes of love, Angela tried not to think about some of Morehouse’s stranger behavior. At dinner, he liked to cut her food for her, and "sometimes asked if he could feed me." On a few occasions, he bragged that he could kill her.

Once during sex:

He was squeezing my neck with my jugular vein or something and I asked him, "What are you doing?" He said, "Oh, I was just trying to find your jugular vein. How does that feel? Do you know how easy it would be for me to kill you right now?" ...I thought it was a little odd.

Another night, he drove her in the Mercedes on interstate 95. She didn’t know where they were going:

He was acting very strange that night and was kind of quiet, too. He kept looking around. I asked him, I said, "What are you looking for? Why do you keep looking around?"

 

He said, "I’m looking for a good area, a good set of woods, so I can take you out and tie you up to a tree and murder you." ...A few minutes later, he just started laughing.

According to Angela, Morehouse often claimed that the psychic techniques he had learned at DT-S enabled him to spy on her at will. Once when Alan returned from Texas briefly, Angela remembers:

"[Dave] said, 'You better not dare let him put his hands on you, because if you do, I will know about it.’ He said, `If you do, that’s the end of our relationship.’ See, this man was constantly telling me that he was psychic."

Toward the end of 1993, Angela Connor learned that Morehouse was about to leave for a new post in the Washington DC area. It was clear now that he was not in love with her. He was not going to marry her. She also came to the conclusion that Morehouse had all along been sleeping with other women, including two waitresses at local franchise restaurants (one later admitted to Fort Bragg investigators that she had spent the night in a hotel room with Morehouse, but she said that they had merely "watched movies").

Connor was so angry -- "he had manipulated me and [was] using me and my husband, and everything was a game to him" -- that she took the unusual step of complaining, first to a Fort Bragg chaplain and then to Fort Bragg military prosecutors.

In civilian life, what Morehouse had allegedly done was not even legally punishable. Angela Connor would have had to declare Morehouse a rake and a liar, and leave it at that. But under the military code, Angela’s accusations had to be taken seriously. "Fraternization" between the ranks was discouraged anyway, but an officer definitely could not play around with the wife of an enlisted man, especially not one under his command. To do so would not just be ungentlemanly; it would be an abuse of the trust placed in him as an officer and a leader.

The Fort Bragg prosecutors made the charges sound fearsome: adultery, sodomy, communicating a threat, conduct unbecoming an officer, and larceny (regarding a computer that Morehouse had "borrowed" from Fort Leavenworth and then loaned to Angela).

All in all, however, it wasn’t such a high stakes case. It boiled down to a jilted girlfriend, and an officer who did a good job at work but had a habit of overmanipulating people and couldn’t keep his pants zipped. ("He’s got too many -- what is it? X genes or something?" Ed Dames told me at the time.)

But there was more. In one of her first statements to prosecutors, Angela Connor mentioned the expos on remote viewing that Morehouse was working on with Dames. One of the prosecutors wrote in the margin of the transcript:

"What book? Find out."

The apparent possibility that Morehouse was about to disclose -- or had already disclosed -- information about a classified program led to further investigations of Morehouse by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, Army counterintelligence, and the Defense Investigative Service. Morehouse was now in deep trouble.

He responded, one could say, with the creativity and energy he had always shown. In April 1994, a few days after the Army decided to send his case to a full court martial, Morehouse checked in to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. He told doctors he was talking to angels. His lawyers soon suggested he was no longer competent to stand trial. They said the Pentagon’s remote viewing program had unhinged their client.

They asked the judge for special clearances, to look through the files of DT-S and its predecessors.

The impending court martial of Dave Morehouse, it was now clear, would not be about Morehouse’s sordid and rather petty misconduct; it would instead be a three ring circus of allegations and bizarre revelations about the politically embarrassing remote viewing program. And Morehouse would be transformed from a sleazy villain into a victim and celebrity.

While the Army tried to decide what to do next, Morehouse began to claim to friends that he was the target of some kind of secret harassment campaign by shadowy government operatives. Letters and packages were sent to his wife, he said. Some of the packages contained tape-recordings of conversations he had held with Jim Marrs, or Sandra Martin. Morehouse saw people following him.

Later, in Psychic Warrior, he would even claim that his car tires were slashed and that the government tried to kill his family by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Astonishingly, even Sandra Martin joined in with these claims. She told me that a strange man had taken her picture while she sat at a cafe outside her office in midtown Manhattan. She told me that another strange man had growled at her on the subway to "stop representing Dave."

Now, I can believe that a legitimate counterintelligence investigation would include wiretapping, and possibly even physical surveillance. The remote viewing program was not exactly one of the Pentagon’s crown jewels, but information about ISA and Team Six was relatively sensitive. The Pentagon would quite reasonably have wanted to know how much, if anything, Morehouse was giving away about these programs.

On the other hand, surveillance in such cases would probably be undetectable, and the idea that counterintelligence officials would actually advertise their presence or engage in harassment of the sort Morehouse and Martin described is just laughable.

The only effect of that harassment would be to make Morehouse’s story seem sexier, giving it the paranoid twist of the X-Files genre, and boosting sales accordingly. To me, the most obvious explanation is that Morehouse made it all up.

Could Sandra Martin also have been a party to this tale-telling? Well, from what I know of her, having briefly been one of her client authors, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that she had. Besides, Martin, as the reader may have guessed, was by this time a little more than just Morehouse’s agent. Like her more nubile predecessor down south, she was in love with the wily major.

What Debbie Morehouse’s role was, I don’t know. Perhaps she was a completely innocent victim. Perhaps she did receive harassing packages in the mail, and did believe that they had been sent by government operatives.

When I telephoned her in late September 1994, to ask for an interview, she seemed to think that her phone was tapped and that dark forces were at work all around her:

My attorney approached me about you, okay? Now, where he got the information, I don’t know. He’s well connected, he knows a lot of people. How I got information about you-- And we were told not to speak to you. So, that’s all I can say. But I can tell you from personal experience, you’ve only scraped the surface. You have no idea what’s going on. (I’ve only scraped the surface regarding the history of remote viewing, or just your husband’s case?) The history of remote viewing, and the connections. (Okay . . .) So just watch your back as you dig deeper. (Should I expect physical violence, or what?) I’m not going to say over the phone. And it won’t be from me.

The summer of 1994 passed, and Morehouse went from Walter Reed back down to North Carolina. The wrangling of lawyers and prosecutors continued. Deals came and went.

There was to be an NBC Movie of the Week, based on the Morehouse story. For some reason it was cancelled. Martin claimed to me that it was because of pressure on NBC from the DIA. 60 Minutes, increasingly in search of tabloidesque stories about government conspiracies, also prepared to film a piece on Morehouse. Then for some reason, late that summer, they lost interest.

Around Christmas, Morehouse’s fortunes suddenly rose. The Army, as it often did in these cases, caved in, and offered Morehouse a way out. In lieu of a court-martial, he could merely agree to be discharged under "other than honorable" conditions, with no pension or medical benefits. He signed the requisite paperwork and separated from the Army in January 1995. He went to work as a vice president at Sandra Martin’s production company -- now called Para View-- in New York.

After two long rewrites, Jim Marrs’ book was finally put into shape in the summer of 1995, and Harmony prepared to publish it. All Morehouse had to do was sit back and wait for the royalties to come in. ABC’s 20/20 came along, and filmed a segment on him, and he discussed remote viewing’s harmful effects, and all the mental damage he said had been suffered by those in the program. 20/20 planned to air the segment in September, when the book was launched. According to what Morehouse told me that August, he also had appearances lined up on the Larry King Show and Good Morning America.

Then Ed Dames took a look at a typescript of the Jim Marrs book. He hit the ceiling. The book, in his opinion, was all about Morehouse, who had only been briefly part of the remote-viewing program, and in its last and worst years. Moreover the book was heavily fictionalized, "a screenplay." There was no way Dames was going to give the green light to a story like that.

Some time in July or August 1995, Harmony decided they had had enough. They cancelled the book. The 20/20 segment never aired.

But Morehouse wasn’t about to give up. He started working on his own book, which he titled Comes the Watcher. By October, Sandra Martin had sold Morehouse’s proposal for the book to St. Martin’s Press. Somewhere around this time, Morehouse decided to split with Martin. He found a new agent, California-based Peter Donaldson.

In November, the two men began pitching the Morehouse story to Hollywood. They made eighteen pitches over several days, and eventually got some offers. Oliver Stone narrowly lost out in the bidding to Interscope Communications, who according to Variety paid Morehouse $300,000, as an advance against "high six figures" if the film got made.

Comes the Watcher is now out in bookstores, under the breath-stealing title Psychic Warrior: Inside the CIA’s Stargate program: The true story of a soldier’s espionage and awakening.

I have skimmed the book, as well as a similar draft typescript which Ed Dames obtained (through his own Hollywood connections, presumably) and circulated last summer. The book begins with Morehouse, guided by another remote viewer (Ed Dames has been airbrushed out of the story), psychically visiting a friend who died in a helicopter crash.

The anecdote, along with its description of remote viewing as a kind of vivid virtual reality game, is fictional, but it contains a grain of truth: A similar helicopter crash was targeted by Fort Meade remote viewers in the late 1970s. Morehouse presumably heard about the story and decided to make it his own.

Psychic Warrior moves on to a discussion of an accident in Jordan in the mid 1980s, when Morehouse was hit in his helmet by a bullet from a careless Jordanian. At DT-S, Morehouse told colleagues about the incident, but mentioned that it had only given him a headache afterwards. In Psychic Warrior, the incident has been transformed into a turning point in Morehouse’s life. The trauma from the bullet, we are now told, destabilized his brain and caused him to have a variety of psychic and transcendental experiences, including meetings with an angel. Ultimately, Morehouse claims, this led him to DT-S.

This story also is evidently fictional, but once again, it contains a grain of someone else’s truth. It appears to be an attempt to mimic the story of remote viewer Joe McMoneagle, who really was hospitalized, and really did report transcendental episodes, after a near-death experience while in the Army in Europe in the 1970s.

Morehouse, who was not shy about discussing his life experiences with others at DT-S, never mentioned any prior paranormal episodes to his colleagues there. Indeed, according to Angela Connor’s testimony at Fort Bragg, Morehouse expressed pride at having learned to be a psychic at DT-S, rather than having been born or otherwise made that way.

Former colleagues will also be surprised to read that Morehouse was asked to "remote influence," detrimentally, Saddam Hussein and other bad guys. The history of this fabrication is particularly interesting. According to former remote viewer Mel Riley, the remote influencing claim does not even appear in the Dave Morehouse story that was written (by Jim Marrs, with Morehouse hovering over his shoulder) before the summer of 1995. Then in June 1995, while driving home from a filming session with 20/20, another remote viewer "confided" to Morehouse that, though he had never told anyone before, he had been secretly asked to try remote-influencing a key foreign leader around 1990.

Morehouse was fascinated by the story. I have never thought this other remote viewer to be a liar, but I checked his story about remote influencing with a half-dozen sources in a position to know, all of whom told me that it was just bullshit. In any case, Morehouse apparently thought it was a good enough story to insert into his new version of events in Psychic Warrior -- despite the fact that he had left DT-S by the time Iraq invaded Kuwait.

One of the earliest claims Morehouse has made, and certainly the central claim in his book, is that remote viewing helped to destabilize his mind. There is much more than a grain of truth in that, for remote viewing, like any altered-state regime (e.g., meditation), can, when overdone, bring about a susceptibility to spontaneous altered states. In other words, if you deliberately go into a trance for four hours a day, five days a week, pretty soon you’ll go into trances without wanting to.

And it may be that the demons -- or angels -- you have lurking in your subconscious will rise to haunt you.

But I’m far from being convinced that Morehouse suffered any real damage. For one thing, no one seemed to notice any problems when he was at DT-S, or even immediately afterward, at Team Six. The senior officer who was with him at Team Six told me:

"If he actually engaged in [remote viewing], it didn’t become evident in his psychological being, if you will, at the time I knew him. I would not have considered him unstable or unbalanced."

Morehouse also suggests in his book that others in the program were "hospitalized" with psychiatric problems. As far as I have been able to discover, this is another dramatic invention. There was one case in the early 1980s of a high-strung Army lieutenant who suffered a brief psychotic episode while trying to have an "out of body experience" -- but he was not part of the remote-viewing program, and he also apparently had a history of psychiatric problems that made altered-state games inadvisable.

Morehouse is the only member of the remote-viewing program ever to have been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, and in his case, there are good reasons to believe that he was, in Mel Riley’s words, "playing crazy."

To tag every piece of fiction in the Morehouse book would mean commenting on virtually every page. Indeed, both Mel Riley and Lyn Buchanan remember Morehouse telling them that they were not to worry, the whole thing was going to be a novel anyway.

Or perhaps, as Ed Dames says, a screenplay, for there is lengthy screenplayish dialogue throughout, and the entire thing seems calculated to push all the New Age and X-Files conspiracy buttons in the Hollywood version of reality, from the repeated appearance of an angel to the cynical falsehood that the DIA was using remote viewers to monitor US troops’ chemical weapons exposure in the Gulf War -- an exposure that Morehouse says they wanted to "cover up" to avoid a scandal over "Gulf War Syndrome." No wonder Oliver Stone loved this one.

Morehouse evidently hopes that readers of all kinds will love the book, for he has tried to blend traditional "male" adventure elements with more "feminine" relationship themes. Morehouse’s relationship with Angela Connor gets little mention, however. In fact, in the early draft of Psychic Warrior, obtained last spring by Ed Dames, Morehouse is in denial about the whole thing.

But the detailed lines of dialogue are recalled so clearly by Morehouse that we must presume he had a tape recorder with him at the time:

"I called the prosecutor’s office to see what was going on [says Morehouse’s Army defense counsel]. From your tone I figured something had to have originated from there." He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, looking at some notes he’d scribbled on a pad when he talked to [the] prosecutor I had met in the Chief’s office. "Are you aware of what’s happening, Major Morehouse?"

I shook my head no, I found it difficult even to focus on him.

"Well, you were told what the allegations are. It appears that someone (he told me the name of a civilian woman I knew from around the base), has sworn a complaint against you. Do you know her?" "Yes I know her. What is her complaint against me and why would she be doing this?" "Well I certainly have no idea at present as to why she would be doing this, but her complaint is provided in a deposition where she states that you verbally threatened her with physical violence.

 

She also claims that you were sexually involved with her for a period of several months, I believe three." "Yes, I knew her and I did take her to dinner twice. I assure you that I never slept with her, and I never stayed with her overnight." "Okay. Do you know of any reason why she might be making these allegations?" "No." "Okay. What about the larceny charge? The prosecutor has alleged that you stole an Army computer and gave it to this woman." "As a friend, I gave her a computer for her work.

 

The computer I gave her was an old Commodore PC10-2. It’s worthless, and after discussing it with my wife, we decided that we didn’t need it anymore and we agreed to help her out. She’s even talked to my wife on the phone. There was nothing between us, ever. I don’t understand this at all."

Well, perhaps the tape recorder wasn’t working right that day, for at some later date (perhaps realizing that the court martial files were available to the public by FOIA request) Morehouse decided to revise his recollections about his non-relationship with Angela Connor.

Thus we read on page 203 of the final draft of Psychic Warrior:

"I called the prosecutor’s office to see what was going on," [my defense lawyer] said. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, looking at his notes. "Are you aware of what’s happening, Major Morehouse?" I shook my head. I found it difficult even to focus on him.

"Well, you were told what the allegations are. It appears that someone" -- he named a civilian woman I knew from around the base -- "has sworn a complaint against you. Do you know her?"

"Yes. What is her complaint against me, and why would she be doing this?"

"Well, I certainly don’t know why, but her complaint is that you verbally threatened her with physical violence. She also claims that you were sexually involved with her for three months."

"I knew her. In fact, you could say we had a relationship of sorts. I’ve spent the last four years of my life alone. Sometimes you just want to talk to another person, you know, someone who doesn’t have to shave his face."

He laughed. "I poured my heart out to this woman. She was a good listener, too -- kind and caring." I shook my head disbelievingly . . .

As I sifted back and forth through all this garbage the other day, with a borrowed copy of Psychic Warrior, the final thing to catch my eye was Morehouse’s dedication:

"to my darling wife Debbie, whose love has nourished and sustained me for longer than I can remember. We are together eternally."

I have no doubt that Americans will buy that, in droves, not only at bookstores but in cinemas. Word on the street is that Sylvester Stallone wants to do the movie. People are talking about a budget of $70 million. I can already see Stallone’s head trembling with paranormal effort as he tries to psychically scramble the mind of Saddam Hussein or some unlucky cocaine cartel boss. Perhaps blood will run from Stallone’s nose, or his ears. And the audience will gape up at the screen, feeding themselves with popcorn, and somewhere Morehouse will be laughing, all the way to the bank.

The last I heard, Morehouse was working on a Saturday morning kids’ cartoon series, featuring superheroes with paranormal abilities who fight for world peace.

 

Part 2

AN AMERICAN HERO

In civilian life, what Morehouse had allegedly done was not even legally punishable. Angela Connor would have had to declare Morehouse a rake and a liar, and leave it at that.

But under the military code, Angela’s accusations had to be taken seriously. "Fraternization" between the ranks was discouraged anyway, but an officer definitely could not play around with the wife of an enlisted man, especially not one under his command. To do so would not just be ungentlemanly; it would be an abuse of the trust placed in him as an officer and a leader.

The Fort Bragg prosecutors made the charges sound fearsome: adultery, sodomy, communicating a threat, conduct unbecoming an officer, and larceny (regarding a computer that Morehouse had "borrowed" from Fort Leavenworth and then loaned to Angela). All in all, however, it wasn’t such a high stakes case. It boiled down to a jilted girlfriend, and an officer who did a good job at work but had a habit of overmanipulating people and couldn’t keep his pants zipped. ("He’s got too many -- what is it? X genes or something?" Ed Dames told me at the time.)

But there was more. In one of her first statements to prosecutors, Angela Connor mentioned the expos on remote viewing that Morehouse was working on with Dames. One of the prosecutors wrote in the margin of the transcript: "What book? Find out." The apparent possibility that Morehouse was about to disclose -- or had already disclosed -- information about a classified program led to further investigations of Morehouse by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, Army counterintelligence, and the Defense Investigative Service. Morehouse was now in deep trouble.

He responded, one could say, with the creativity and energy he had always shown. In April 1994, a few days after the Army decided to send his case to a full court martial, Morehouse checked in to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. He told doctors he was talking to angels. His lawyers soon suggested he was no longer competent to stand trial. They said the Pentagon’s remote viewing program had unhinged their client. They asked the judge for special clearances, to look through the files of DT-S and its predecessors.

The impending court martial of Dave Morehouse, it was now clear, would not be about Morehouse’s sordid and rather petty misconduct; it would instead be a three ring circus of allegations and bizarre revelations about the politically embarrassing remote viewing program.

And Morehouse would be transformed from a sleazy villain into a victim and celebrity.
 

While the Army tried to decide what to do next, Morehouse began to claim to friends that he was the target of some kind of secret harassment campaign by shadowy government operatives.

Letters and packages were sent to his wife, he said. Some of the packages contained tape-recordings of conversations he had held with Jim Marrs, or Sandra Martin. Morehouse saw people following him.

Later, in Psychic Warrior, he would even claim that his car tires were slashed and that the government tried to kill his family by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Astonishingly, even Sandra Martin joined in with these claims. She told me that a strange man had taken her picture while she sat at a cafe outside her office in midtown Manhattan. She told me that another strange man had growled at her on the subway to "stop representing Dave."

Now, I can believe that a legitimate counterintelligence investigation would include wiretapping, and possibly even physical surveillance. The remote viewing program was not exactly one of the Pentagon’s crown jewels, but information about ISA and Team Six was relatively sensitive. The Pentagon would quite reasonably have wanted to know how much, if anything, Morehouse was giving away about these programs.

On the other hand, surveillance in such cases would probably be undetectable, and the idea that counterintelligence officials would actually advertise their presence or engage in harassment of the sort Morehouse and Martin described is just laughable. The only effect of that harassment would be to make Morehouse’s story seem sexier, giving it the paranoid twist of the X-Files genre, and boosting sales accordingly. To me, the most obvious explanation is that Morehouse made it all up.

Could Sandra Martin also have been a party to this tale-telling? Well, from what I know of her, having briefly been one of her client authors, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that she had. Besides, Martin, as the reader may have guessed, was by this time a little more than just Morehouse’s agent. Like her more nubile predecessor down south, she was in love with the wily major.

What Debbie Morehouse’s role was, I don’t know. Perhaps she was a completely innocent victim. Perhaps she did receive harassing packages in the mail, and did believe that they had been sent by government operatives.

When I telephoned her in late September 1994, to ask for an interview, she seemed to think that her phone was tapped and that dark forces were at work all around her:

My attorney approached me about you, okay? Now, where he got the information, I don’t know. He’s well connected, he knows a lot of people. How I got information about you-- And we were told not to speak to you. So, that’s all I can say. But I can tell you from personal experience, you’ve only scraped the surface. You have no idea what’s going on.
(I’ve only scraped the surface regarding the history of remote viewing, or just your husband’s case?)

The history of remote viewing, and the connections.

(Okay . . .)

So just watch your back as you dig deeper.

(Should I expect physical violence, or what?)

I’m not going to say over the phone. And it won’t be from me.

The summer of 1994 passed, and Morehouse went from Walter Reed back down to North Carolina.

The wrangling of lawyers and prosecutors continued. Deals came and went. There was to be an NBC Movie of the Week, based on the Morehouse story. For some reason it was cancelled. Martin claimed to me that it was because of pressure on NBC from the DIA. 60 Minutes, increasingly in search of tabloidesque stories about government conspiracies, also prepared to film a piece on Morehouse. Then for some reason, late that summer, they lost interest.

Around Christmas, Morehouse’s fortunes suddenly rose. The Army, as it often did in these cases, caved in, and offered Morehouse a way out. In lieu of a court-martial, he could merely agree to be discharged under "other than honorable" conditions, with no pension or medical benefits. He signed the requisite paperwork and separated from the Army in January 1995. He went to work as a vice president at Sandra Martin’s production company -- now called Para View-- in New York.

After two long rewrites, Jim Marrs’ book was finally put into shape in the summer of 1995, and Harmony prepared to publish it. All Morehouse had to do was sit back and wait for the royalties to come in. ABC’s 20/20 came along, and filmed a segment on him, and he discussed remote viewing’s harmful effects, and all the mental damage he said had been suffered by those in the program. 20/20 planned to air the segment in September, when the book was launched. According to what Morehouse told me that August, he also had appearances lined up on the Larry King Show and Good Morning America.

Then Ed Dames took a look at a typescript of the Jim Marrs book. He hit the ceiling. The book, in his opinion, was all about Morehouse, who had only been briefly part of the remote-viewing program, and in its last and worst years. Moreover the book was heavily fictionalized, "a screenplay." There was no way Dames was going to give the green light to a story like that.

Some time in July or August 1995, Harmony decided they had had enough. They cancelled the book. The 20/20 segment never aired.

But Morehouse wasn’t about to give up. He started working on his own book, which he titled Comes the Watcher. By October, Sandra Martin had sold Morehouse’s proposal for the book to St. Martin’s Press. Somewhere around this time, Morehouse decided to split with Martin. He found a new agent, California-based Peter Donaldson. In November, the two men began pitching the Morehouse story to Hollywood. They made eighteen pitches over several days, and eventually got some offers.

Oliver Stone narrowly lost out in the bidding to Interscope Communications, who according to Variety paid Morehouse $300,000, as an advance against "high six figures" if the film got made.
 

Comes the Watcher is now out in bookstores, under the breath-stealing title Psychic Warrior: Inside the CIA’s Stargate program: The true story of a soldier’s espionage and awakening.

I have skimmed the book, as well as a similar draft typescript which Ed Dames obtained (through his own Hollywood connections, presumably) and circulated last summer. The book begins with Morehouse, guided by another remote viewer (Ed Dames has been airbrushed out of the story), psychically visiting a friend who died in a helicopter crash. The anecdote, along with its description of remote viewing as a kind of vivid virtual reality game, is fictional, but it contains a grain of truth: A similar helicopter crash was targeted by Fort Meade remote viewers in the late 1970s. Morehouse presumably heard about the story and decided to make it his own.

Psychic Warrior moves on to a discussion of an accident in Jordan in the mid 1980s, when Morehouse was hit in his helmet by a bullet from a careless Jordanian. At DT-S, Morehouse told colleagues about the incident, but mentioned that it had only given him a headache afterwards. In Psychic Warrior, the incident has been transformed into a turning point in Morehouse’s life. The trauma from the bullet, we are now told, destabilized his brain and caused him to have a variety of psychic and transcendental experiences, including meetings with an angel. Ultimately, Morehouse claims, this led him to DT-S.

This story also is evidently fictional, but once again, it contains a grain of someone else’s truth. It appears to be an attempt to mimic the story of remote viewer Joe McMoneagle, who really was hospitalized, and really did report transcendental episodes, after a near-death experience while in the Army in Europe in the 1970s.

Morehouse, who was not shy about discussing his life experiences with others at DT-S, never mentioned any prior paranormal episodes to his colleagues there. Indeed, according to Angela Connor’s testimony at Fort Bragg, Morehouse expressed pride at having learned to be a psychic at DT-S, rather than having been born or otherwise made that way.

Former colleagues will also be surprised to read that Morehouse was asked to "remote influence," detrimentally, Saddam Hussein and other bad guys. The history of this fabrication is particularly interesting. According to former remote viewer Mel Riley, the remote influencing claim does not even appear in the Dave Morehouse story that was written (by Jim Marrs, with Morehouse hovering over his shoulder) before the summer of 1995. Then in June 1995, while driving home from a filming session with 20/20, another remote viewer "confided" to Morehouse that, though he had never told anyone before, he had been secretly asked to try remote-influencing a key foreign leader around 1990.

Morehouse was fascinated by the story. I have never thought this other remote viewer to be a liar, but I checked his story about remote influencing with a half-dozen sources in a position to know, all of whom told me that it was just bullshit. In any case, Morehouse apparently thought it was a good enough story to insert into his new version of events in Psychic Warrior -- despite the fact that he had left DT-S by the time Iraq invaded Kuwait.

One of the earliest claims Morehouse has made, and certainly the central claim in his book, is that remote viewing helped to destabilize his mind. There is much more than a grain of truth in that, for remote viewing, like any altered-state regime (e.g., meditation), can, when overdone, bring about a susceptibility to spontaneous altered states. In other words, if you deliberately go into a trance for four hours a day, five days a week, pretty soon you’ll go into trances without wanting to. And it may be that the demons -- or angels -- you have lurking in your subconscious will rise to haunt you.

But I’m far from being convinced that Morehouse suffered any real damage. For one thing, no one seemed to notice any problems when he was at DT-S, or even immediately afterward, at Team Six. The senior officer who was with him at Team Six told me: "If he actually engaged in [remote viewing], it didn’t become evident in his psychological being, if you will, at the time I knew him. I would not have considered him unstable or unbalanced."

Morehouse also suggests in his book that others in the program were "hospitalized" with psychiatric problems. As far as I have been able to discover, this is another dramatic invention.

There was one case in the early 1980s of a high-strung Army lieutenant who suffered a brief psychotic episode while trying to have an "out of body experience" -- but he was not part of the remote-viewing program, and he also apparently had a history of psychiatric problems that made altered-state games inadvisable. Morehouse is the only member of the remote-viewing program ever to have been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, and in his case, there are good reasons to believe that he was, in Mel Riley’s words, "playing crazy."

To tag every piece of fiction in the Morehouse book would mean commenting on virtually every page. Indeed, both Mel Riley and Lyn Buchanan remember Morehouse telling them that they were not to worry, the whole thing was going to be a novel anyway.

Or perhaps, as Ed Dames says, a screenplay, for there is lengthy screenplayish dialogue throughout, and the entire thing seems calculated to push all the New Age and X-Files conspiracy buttons in the Hollywood version of reality, from the repeated appearance of an angel to the cynical falsehood that the DIA was using remote viewers to monitor US troops’ chemical weapons exposure in the Gulf War -- an exposure that Morehouse says they wanted to "cover up" to avoid a scandal over "Gulf War Syndrome." No wonder Oliver Stone loved this one.

Morehouse evidently hopes that readers of all kinds will love the book, for he has tried to blend traditional "male" adventure elements with more "feminine" relationship themes. Morehouse’s relationship with Angela Connor gets little mention, however. In fact, in the early draft of Psychic Warrior, obtained last spring by Ed Dames, Morehouse is in denial about the whole thing.

But the detailed lines of dialogue are recalled so clearly by Morehouse that we must presume he had a tape recorder with him at the time:

"I called the prosecutor’s office to see what was going on [says Morehouse’s Army defense counsel]. From your tone I figured something had to have originated from there." He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, looking at some notes he’d scribbled on a pad when he talked to [the] prosecutor I had met in the Chief’s office. "Are you aware of what’s happening, Major Morehouse?"

I shook my head no, I found it difficult even to focus on him.

"Well, you were told what the allegations are. It appears that someone (he told me the name of a civilian woman I knew from around the base), has sworn a complaint against you. Do you know her?"

"Yes I know her. What is her complaint against me and why would she be doing this?"

"Well I certainly have no idea at present as to why she would be doing this, but her complaint is provided in a deposition where she states that you verbally threatened her with physical violence. She also claims that you were sexually involved with her for a period of several months, I believe three."

"Yes, I knew her and I did take her to dinner twice. I assure you that I never slept with her, and I never stayed with her overnight."

"Okay. Do you know of any reason why she might be making these allegations?"

"No."

"Okay. What about the larceny charge? The prosecutor has alleged that you stole an Army computer and gave it to this woman."

"As a friend, I gave her a computer for her work. The computer I gave her was an old Commodore PC10-2. It’s worthless, and after discussing it with my wife, we decided that we didn’t need it anymore and we agreed to help her out. She’s even talked to my wife on the phone. There was nothing between us, ever. I don’t understand this at all."

Well, perhaps the tape recorder wasn’t working right that day, for at some later date (perhaps realizing that the court martial files were available to the public by FOIA request) Morehouse decided to revise his recollections about his non-relationship with Angela Connor.

Thus we read on page 203 of the final draft of Psychic Warrior:

"I called the prosecutor’s office to see what was going on," [my defense lawyer] said. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, looking at his notes. "Are you aware of what’s happening, Major Morehouse?"
I shook my head. I found it difficult even to focus on him.

"Well, you were told what the allegations are. It appears that someone" -- he named a civilian woman I knew from around the base -- "has sworn a complaint against you. Do you know her?"

"Yes. What is her complaint against me, and why would she be doing this?"

"Well, I certainly don’t know why, but her complaint is that you verbally threatened her with physical violence. She also claims that you were sexually involved with her for three months."

"I knew her. In fact, you could say we had a relationship of sorts. I’ve spent the last four years of my life alone. Sometimes you just want to talk to another person, you know, someone who doesn’t have to shave his face."

He laughed.

"I poured my heart out to this woman. She was a good listener, too -- kind and caring." I shook my head disbelievingly . . .

 

 

As I sifted back and forth through all this garbage the other day, with a borrowed copy of Psychic Warrior, the final thing to catch my eye was Morehouse’s dedication:

"to my darling wife Debbie, whose love has nourished and sustained me for longer than I can remember. We are together eternally."

I have no doubt that Americans will buy that, in droves, not only at bookstores but in cinemas. Word on the street is that Sylvester Stallone wants to do the movie. People are talking about a budget of $70 million. I can already see Stallone’s head trembling with paranormal effort as he tries to psychically scramble the mind of Saddam Hussein or some unlucky cocaine cartel boss.

Perhaps blood will run from Stallone’s nose, or his ears. And the audience will gape up at the screen, feeding themselves with popcorn, and somewhere Morehouse will be laughing, all the way to the bank.

The last I heard, Morehouse was working on a Saturday morning kids’ cartoon series, featuring superheroes with paranormal abilities who fight for world peace.