by Jim Schnabel
November 7, 1996
from
MindControlForums Website
Jim
Schnabel is the author of the book
Remote Viewers: the Secret History
of America’s Psychic Spies, and was the
originator and narrator of the British Channel Four
documentary The Real X-Files, recently broadcast
in the U.S. on the Discovery Channel.
Schnabel was commissioned to write a piece on
Dave Morehouse for Esquire in 1994, when Morehouse
began to claim that remote viewing and Army harassment
had landed him in Walter Reed.
Schnabel discovered a different story. However, the
piece was not what Esquire’s editor wanted, and it was
killed. Schnabel decided to write this, as a
once-for-all statement, after receiving queries from
other journalists about Morehouse. |
The Truth About Dave Morehouse and
Psychic Warrior
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 counselling 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.
Morehouse 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.
The Truth About Dave Morehouse and
Psychic Warrior
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.
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