The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  He and Prudence became great friends. She ran his web site. Together they sat in Dr. Brown’s basement and psychically spied on their favorite targets, aliens and mythical beasts and so on, the same fantastical things that Ed Dames used to remote view inside the military unit.

  In July 1996, Prudence got a call from Art Bell. His millions of listeners had gone crazy for Ed Dames and were keen to hear anything related. Was Dr. Brown available to appear on his show?

  “Every day was a new adventure,” Prudence told me, “but this was the greatest adventure so far.”

  On the show, Art Bell asked Courtney Brown if he agreed with Major Dames about the “massive numbers of babies dying” and the imminent “tremendous winds on Earth.”

  COURTNEY BROWN: There definitely are climactic changes coming.

  ART BELL: Like what?

  COURTNEY BROWN: Within our children’s lifetime we will start entering a Mad Max scenario. It’s quite clear at this point that civilization has to hunker down and go into underground shelters.

  ART BELL: Underground shelters, Professor Brown?

  COURTNEY BROWN: Yes. The population comes apart. The political systems fall apart. There are roving gangs on the surface. The population basically survives in underground bunkers. And not everybody gets to go in the bunkers. Most people have to slug it out on the surface.

  ART BELL: Well, excuse me if I say holy smoke, Dr. Brown. If you knew how much what you just said sounds like what Major Dames said, I guess you’d probably start digging.

  The civilians who had trained under Ed Dames seemed to inherit their teacher’s disdain for his former colleagues. On the Art Bell show, Courtney Brown said they weren’t intellectually equipped to engage with the more profound by-products of their divinations. For instance, if the CIA asked a psychic spy to hunt for Saddam Hussein, and while psychically creeping through a Baghdad palace the spy chanced upon an extraterrestrial hiding in the shadows, he’d just keep on walking until he found the dictator. Surely, Courtney Brown suggested to Art Bell’s listeners, any psychic spy worth his salt would stop and engage with the extraterrestrial, but oh no, not the military psychics. Art Bell agreed that this seemed crazy—and talk about wasted opportunities.

  ART BELL: You did a serious professional project of Mars, didn’t you?

  COURTNEY BROWN: Well, I studied two ET species—a species called the Greys, and the Martians. Long ago, at the time when dinosaurs roamed on earth, there was an ancient Martian civilization… .

  When the Martian civilization was wiped out by some planetary cataclysm on Mars back during dinosaur times, explained Dr. Courtney Brown, “the Galactic Federation sanctioned a rescue group of Greys” to save them.

  “Many Martians were rescued,” he said.

  “Taken off planet?” asked Art Bell.

  “Yes,” said Courtney Brown. “But they are now in underground caverns back on Mars. They’re happy to have been rescued, but they’d love to have been brought to Earth instead. The problem is, they’re basically on a dead planet. They must leave. They’re between a rock and a hard place. They’ve got to leave Mars. They must come here. But this planet is populated with an aggressive, hostile human species that has movies about invasions from Mars, and the Martians themselves are terrified. The remote-viewing results on this are absolutely unequivocal.”

  Courtney Brown said that the Martians would certainly be arriving on Earth within two years. Art Bell immediately asked the question that was presumably haunting the more right-wing antiimmigration listeners among his audience:

  ART BELL: Important question. How many Martians are there?

  COURTNEY BROWN: It’s not going to cause a population problem. We’re probably talking enough to populate a reasonable city.

  ART BELL: That’s a small number, really.

  COURTNEY BROWN: You may say, what is the incentive? Why should we help them? People have actually said to me, “Forget the altruism of us having a good name in the galaxy. Why should we help anybody? We had trouble accepting Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees at the end of the Vietnam War, so why should we help Martians of all people?”

  Courtney’s answer to these Earthling isolationists: forget altruism. The Martians have a “one-hundred-and-fifty-year technological advantage over us. Imagine if somebody like Saddam Hussein says to them, ‘Hey! You want a place to land? Just come on over here.’”

  This was why, Courtney Brown stated, with some urgency in his voice, it was imperative for the United States government to seize the opportunity and “get those Martian ships under NATO command. Get those Martians in through the proper immigration processes.”

  At this point, Art Bell expressed concern that “desperate people do desperate things.” Even if the Martians were inherently peaceful, perhaps their hopeless living conditions inside the caves of Mars might render them unexpectedly and ungratefully violent when the Americans came to save them. Isn’t that essentially what had happened in Grenada and Vietnam?

  Courtney Brown assured him that he understood his concern, but that this would not happen.

  Prudence thought Courtney did brilliantly on the Art Bell show.

  “Courtney’s charisma leaped off the air waves and into your lap,” she said. “You could feel his sincerity and tenderness as he spoke his words.”

  And, as Prudence listened to the show that night, her telephone rang.

  “Pru,” said the voice. “It’s Wolfie.”

  Wolfie was, according to Prudence, the Internet nickname of a woman named Suzy (not her real name), a friend of Houston-based radio newsreader Chuck Shramek. Prudence had met Suzy and Chuck in an Internet chat room; they had exchanged e-mails but never spoken.

  “Pru,” said Suzy, “there’s something you have to see. Chuck got a picture of the Hale-Bopp comet, and there’s something next to it. I’m going to send it to you.”

  At that moment Prudence’s e-mail icon flashed. She opened the attachment to find a photograph. Chuck, Suzy said, had taken it from a telescope in his back garden. He was an amateur astronomer. Next to the Hale-Bopp comet, to the right of the frame, there seemed to be some kind of object.

  When Prudence saw this photograph, she cried.

  “The companion object,” she told me, “glowed brighter than any star.”

  In the days that followed, Prudence and Courtney Brown and Courtney’s other students began to work seriously on psychically viewing the Saturn-shaped object next to the Hale-Bopp comet.

  “And we found,” said Prudence, “that it was artificial. And it wasn’t a mistake on Chuck’s camera. It was an actual object. And it was alien in origin. It looked like a huge round metal object and it had all these dents in it. Concave indentations. And it had antennae sticking out, tubes sticking out. And it was coming right toward us! And we were so excited. Courtney Brown phoned Art Bell right away.”

  Chuck Shramek’s photograph.

  On November 14, 1996, Art Bell announced two guests on his show: Chuck Shramek and Courtney Brown.

  ART BELL: Chuck, welcome to the program.

  CHUCK SHRAMEK: Thanks, Art, great to be here.

  ART BELL: You are an amateur astronomer, right?

  CHUCK SHRAMEK: Have been since I was eight years old. Now I’m forty-six.

  ART BELL: So not such an amateur!

  CHUCK SHRAMEK: Ha ha ha!

  Chuck began to describe his photograph, how he had come to take it, how his heart had started pounding when he realized that the object—the “companion” to Hale-Bopp—wasn’t a star, because he checked his star chart and there was no star like that in the comet’s vicinity.

  CHUCK SHRAMEK: This is a big thing. And there appear to be Saturn-like rings. This is amazing.

  ART BELL: What could it be?

  CHUCK SHRAMEK: Well, I think that might be an area for Courtney to get into. I have no idea.

  ART BELL: So there you go, that’s Chuck in Houston. We’re going to ask Courtney Brown what it’s all about. Maybe he can help. I suspec
t he can.

  After the break, Courtney Brown offered the knockout—the result of his and Prudence’s and the Farsight Institute’s psychic study of Chuck Shramek’s photograph.

  ART BELL: I’ve seen the Hale-Bopp photograph and it really is odd. There’s something really big out there. I’ve no idea what it is, but whatever it is, it’s real. Well, Professor, what the hell is it?

  COURTNEY BROWN: I’m willing to tell you. Do you want me to tell you?

  ART BELL: Tell me.

  Courtney attempted to sound scientific and levelheaded but he was unable to conceal his excitement.

  COURTNEY BROWN: The information I’m about to give you is so far reaching, so incredible, you’re going to be saying, How could this be? Remember, I’m a Ph.D.

  ART BELL: Right.

  COURTNEY BROWN: This object is approximately four times the size of the planet Earth, and it’s headed our way. It apparently has tunnels in it. And it is moving by artificial means. It is under intelligent control. It’s a vehicle. And there is a message coming from it.

  ART BELL: Oh boy! There’s a message coming from it?

  COURTNEY BROWN: These beings are trying to communicate with us. This object is sentient. It is alive. It is knowing. It’s something like the obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It has hallways in it. This is good news. Our time of ignorance, our time of darkness, is coming to a close. We are entering a time of greatness. There are more of them coming!

  ART BELL: What?

  COURTNEY BROWN: My Lord... My Lord...

  ART BELL: There are more of these coming? Folks, this is not a fake War of the Worlds broadcast. This is breaking news. I feel like I have been hit by a sledgehammer.

  COURTNEY BROWN: Art, this one is real.

  There was a short silence then, and then Art Bell spoke, and his voice trembled slightly.

  ART BELL: Somehow I always felt I’d be on hand for this.

  That night, Art Bell’s web site crashed with the volume of traffic—listeners trying to log on so they could view Chuck Shramek’s photograph. Finally, in just a few months’ time—approximately mid-March 1997, in fact—the Martians were coming.

  An extraordinary thing about the Internet is how it can freeze moments in time. If you look hard enough, you can find the thoughts of some of Art Bell’s listeners that night as they typed passionately with the radio playing in the background:

  Is this really happening? Oh man, this is incredible!! On Art Bell it was announced that some astronomers are now SUDDENLY seeing a Saturn-like huge object near our Comet Hale-Bopp! It is under intelligent control and it is connected to ETs!!

  Dear Friends,

  As this incredible news is breaking I am typing wildly.

  FLASH!!! Moving toward Earth a celestial object four times the size of Earth tracking right behind Comet Hale-Bopp; a ringed sphere, self-emitting light source, surface uniformly smooth and luminescent.

  Is this the coming of the anti-Christ?

  Prudence went on Art Bell too, a few days later, to clarify her psychic findings about the Hale-Bopp companion. She and Courtney were inundated with phone calls and e-mails.

  “Thousands of e-mails,” said Prudence. “We sent out a standard response to many of them because you just can’t answer the whole world. You have to pick and choose.”

  One e-mail, among the thousands of others, seemed particularly odd to Prudence. It asked, “Will the companion raise us to the level above human?”

  Prudence stared at this e-mail for a moment, then sent the standard reply: “Thank you for your interest in the Farsight Institute. Here’s our upcoming class schedule… .”

  In a pristine white house in a very rich suburb of San Diego, California, in mid-March 1997, a former music teacher from Texas named Marshall Applewhite turned on his video camera, pointed it at himself, and said, “We’re so excited we don’t know what to do because we’re about to reenter the level above human!”

  He turned the video camera away from himself to a room full of people. They were all dressed exactly the same, in buttoned-up uniforms of their own design, like something out of Star Trek, with a patch on the arm that read HEAVEN’S GATE AWAY TEAM.

  They were all, like Marshall Applewhite, grinning.

  “Heaven’s Gate Away Team!” said Marshall Applewhite into the video camera. “That’s exactly what that means to us. We’ve been away, and now we’re going back. I’m very proud of these students of the evolutionary level above human. They’re about to leave, and they’re excited about leaving!”

  Someone from this group had posted a message on their web site. It read: “Red Alert! Hale-Bopp brings closure to Heaven’s Gate.”

  The web site also included a link to Art Bell’s site.

  Marshall Applewhite and his thirty-eight disciples went to a local restaurant for their last supper. They all ordered exactly the same thing from the menu—iced tea, salad with tomato vinaigrette dressing, turkey, and blueberry cheesecake.

  Then they returned to their communal home.

  A few nights later, as Hale-Bopp drew close enough to Earth to be seen with the naked eye, Prudence stood on the balcony of a Holiday Inn in Atlanta and arched her neck uncomfortably to see over the trees, the iron railing digging into her chest. And then she saw the comet.

  “It was so beautiful,” she said.

  “But it was by itself,” I said.

  “It was by itself,” said Prudence. “I was just standing there, trying to figure out where the companion object went, and then someone came running up the stairs.”

  Thirty-nine people had died.

  Marshall Applewhite and his thirty-eight disciples had all put on the exact same Nike sneakers. Each one put a roll of quarters in his pocket. They lay down on their bunk beds and each took a lethal cocktail of sedatives and alcohol and painkillers because they believed that doing so would get them a ride to the level above human on Prudence and Courtney’s Hale-Bopp companion object.

  “It was awful,” said Prudence. “It was …”

  She fell silent and put her head in her hands, staring off into the distance.

  “They believed they were going to join the companion object to the comet,” she said.

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “All those people,” she said.

  “Uh,” I said.

  “It’s kind of stressful to talk about,” she said.

  “I don’t really know what to say.”

  “I guess you weren’t to know that all the excitement would, uh, lead to a mass suicide,” I said.

  “You’d think that if you’re a remote viewer you should have been able to figure that out ahead of time,” said Prudence.

  Chuck Shramek—the man who took the “companion” photograph—died of cancer in 2000. He was forty-nine. After his death, a childhood friend of his named Greg Frost told UFO Magazine that Chuck had always been an inveterate prankster: “I was there on one occasion when he ran his voice through a filter that made him sound like Zontar the Warp Master while he communicated with some gullible ham-radio operators. Chuck had convinced a whole flock of them that he was a space alien from Venus.”

  My guess is that Chuck Shramek heard Ed Dames and then Courtney Brown on Art Bell and decided to play a trick on the remote viewers. So he doctored a photograph and got his friend to telephone Prudence. If this is what happened, I have no idea whether Suzy was in on the scam.

  Art Bell banned Prudence and Courtney Brown from ever again appearing on his show. Major Ed Dames is still a regular and popular guest. He is routinely introduced by Art Bell as “Major Edward A. Dames, U.S. army, retired now, a decorated military intelligence officer, an original member of the U.S. army prototype remote-viewing training program, the training and operations officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, psychic intelligence, or PSIINT collection unit… .”

  Military acronyms are truly mesmerizing.

  Ed’s most recent appearance on Art Bell at the time of this writing was in the spri
ng of 2004. He told the listeners, “Now this is important. Before everybody goes to bed, listen to this. When you see one of our space shuttles being forced to land because of a meteor shower, that is the beginning of the end. That is the harbinger. Immediately after that will begin some drastic geophysical changes in the Earth, resulting in a wobble and possibly an entire pole shift—”

  “God!” interrupted Art Bell. “There will be some who live through this, Ed? Or will no one live through it?”

  “We’re looking at a couple of billion people who are going to get crisped,” Ed replied.

  I have noticed, however, a certain irreverence creeping into Art Bell’s more recent interviews with Major Dames. Nowadays, amid the mesmerizing military acronyms, Art Bell sometimes refers to Major Dames as “Dr. Doom.”