the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

DUBIOUS NOTIONS 123
If Only They’d Recruited Dionne Warwick
Though newspaper and magazine journalists had uncovered bits
and pieces of the government’s paranormal research over the years, it
wasn’t until November 1995 that ABC News Nightline revealed the lengths
to which the government had gone in its failed effort. Host Ted Koppel’s
opening teaser—“Psychic spies: cold war whimsy or secret weapon?”—
gave a none- too-subtle hint of the derision that many in Washington (and
elsewhere) felt. Democratic senator Tom Harkin of Iowa ridiculed it as
“the Pentagon’s Psychic Friends” program, a mocking comparison to the
pay- per- minute telephone fortune-tellers touted in late- night television
infomercials hosted by singer Dionne Warwick.
Yet the media and political elite’s view didn’t necessarily refl ect
that of the public at large, which seemed to be more fascinated than outraged
to discover a real government program that seemed like something
out of The X-Files, the paranormal detective TV series that in the mid-
1990s was at the peak of its popularity. (Nearly three out of fi ve Americans
believe in extrasensory perception, according to a 2002 CBS News
poll.) While the mainstream media took a lighthearted approach to its
coverage, the psychic spy story caught fire on what was then the media
frontier—discussion groups and pages on the still-new medium of the
World Wide Web, and the late-night talk radio program hosted by Art
Bell, a mysterious figure who broadcast from a trailer in the southwestern
desert. Bell’s insomniac audience was fascinated with conspiracy theories
about secret government involvement in paranormal phenomena, and remote
viewing fit the bill perfectly. Edward Dames, a retired army major
who had been involved in the military psychic intelligence effort, became
a frequent guest on Bell’s show.
Some former government psychics took the demise of the program
hard. In a 1996 interview with Psychology Today, for example, one former
government remote viewer described the experience of using extrasensory
perception as a “morphine flow” that the brain learns to crave. Even