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10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/David Morehouse.md
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---
created: 2026-05-15
updated: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-10-05
title: David Morehouse
aliases:
- David Morehouse
- David A. Morehouse
category: "Military"
- Dave Morehouse
- Major David Morehouse
- Dr. David Morehouse
category: "Psychics & Remote Viewers"
tags:
- Person
- RemoteViewer
- Military
- PSI
- Author
- Stargate
- CRV
- 1980s
- 1990s
summary: "David Morehouse was a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who joined the Fort Meade remote viewing unit after a 1987 head wound in Jordan, faced a court-martial, and published Psychic Warrior (1996)."
- SunStreak
- PsiTech
- CourtMartial
- PsychicWarrior
summary: "Army infantry officer who joined the Fort Meade remote viewing unit as a captain in 1988, resigned a major's commission in 1994 in lieu of court-martial at Fort Bragg, and published Psychic Warrior in 1996."
born: 1954-01-01
location: "Virginia"
location: "Southern California"
relations:
- type: employed_by
with: "[[U.S. Army]]"
end: 1995-01
role: "infantry officer, Ranger company commander, captain then major; resigned in lieu of court-martial with an other than honorable discharge, dated November 1994 by Morehouse's biography and January 1995 by Schnabel"
fn: 1
- type: employed_by
with: "[[United States Army Intelligence Support Activity]]"
role: "briefly a member before joining the remote viewing unit, according to Schnabel"
fn: 1
- type: participant_in
with: "[[Sun Streak]]"
start: 1988
end: 1990
role: "viewer at Fort Meade from the summer of 1988; moved to INSCOM's Team Six in 1990"
fn: 2
- type: founded
with: "[[Psi Tech]]"
start: 1990
role: "vice president under president Ed Dames"
fn: 5
- type: subject_of
with: "[[Army Criminal Investigation Command]]"
start: 1994
role: "investigated with INSCOM and the Defense Investigative Service after a complaint at Fort Bragg in early 1994"
fn: 7
- type: contractor_to
with: "[[St. Martin's Press]]"
start: 1995
role: "author of Psychic Warrior, published November 1996"
fn: 13
- type: contractor_to
with: "[[Sandra Martin]]"
start: 1993
role: "literary agent"
fn: 5
- type: founded
with: "[[Remote Viewing Technologies]]"
start: 1997
role: "president; firm that trains police and civilians in remote viewing"
fn: 9
---
David Morehouse was a [[U.S. Army]] Lieutenant Colonel and Ranger-qualified airborne officer who joined the classified remote viewing unit at [[Fort Meade]], [[Maryland]], in the later phase of the program during the late 1980s. Unlike most of the unit's earlier members, who were intelligence specialists or photo-interpreters, Morehouse was a combat arms officer whose path to the program began with an unusual incident: in 1987, while participating in a combined training exercise in [[Jordan]], he was struck in the helmet by a stray round fired by Jordanian soldiers. He survived without serious physical injury but subsequently reported vivid visions and altered states that led him to seek assignment to the remote viewing unit.[^1]
David A. Morehouse was a [[U.S. Army]] infantry officer, a Ranger company commander and briefly a member of the [[United States Army Intelligence Support Activity]], who joined the remote viewing unit at [[Fort Meade]] in the summer of 1988 as a captain and left the Army as a major, by resignation in lieu of court-martial, between November 1994 and January 1995. He wrote *Psychic Warrior: Inside the CIA's Stargate Program: The True Story of a Soldier's Espionage and Awakening* ([[St. Martin's Press]], 1996).[^1]
### Remote Viewing Training and Service
### Before the unit
Morehouse underwent [[Coordinate Remote Viewing]] (CRV) training and served in the unit during the [[Stargate Project|Sun Streak]] and STAR GATE phases. He was one of the viewers working with a more formal administrative structure than the unit's early years, when the program was operating under [[Defense Intelligence Agency]] sponsorship through the [[Cognitive Sciences Laboratory]] direction of [[Edwin May]].
[[Jim Schnabel]]'s article "The Truth About Dave Morehouse and *Psychic Warrior*" of November 7, 1996, which he wrote after an *[[Esquire]]* piece commissioned in 1994 was killed, reported that Morehouse grew up in [[Carlsbad, California]], attended [[Brigham Young University]] on an Army ROTC scholarship, converted to [[Mormonism]] to marry and graduated in 1979 as a second lieutenant. As a first lieutenant in [[Panama]] he was aide-de-camp to Brigadier General [[Kenneth Leuer]], commander of the [[193d Infantry Brigade]], whose efficiency report called him "the most outstanding lieutenant I know" and "destined to wear stars." By 1986 Morehouse was a captain commanding a Ranger company, and in late 1987 he joined the Army's Intelligence Support Activity. According to Schnabel he learned of the DIA's remote viewing program, which was labeled DT-S within the agency and code-named [[Sun Streak]], from Colonel [[Dennis Kowal]], an Army psychologist, and applied. [[Paul H. Smith]], who was evaluating applicants and like Morehouse was a Mormon, thought him a good candidate. Kowal testified, in the record of the Fort Bragg court-martial proceedings Schnabel quotes, that Morehouse "demonstrated three factors: A great deal of intelligence, a good ability to imagine, and a very creative mind," which he said "account for 75 percent of the variance in selecting people who are successful."[^2]
His service in the unit was complicated by personal conduct issues. Fellow viewer [[Lyn Buchanan]] and others in the unit noticed Morehouse operating a construction business on the side while on active duty and observed what they characterized as erratic behavior. A formal military investigation led to a court-martial proceeding. The case attracted some attention because of its connection to the remote viewing program; [[Angela Dellafiora]] served as a witness in the proceeding. Morehouse received a discharge that was later characterized as a general discharge under honorable conditions after plea arrangements.[^1]
In the book Schnabel published in 1997, Morehouse arrived at Fort Meade in the summer of 1988 at the age of thirty-four, a captain who had never seen combat, "intelligent, a smooth talker," with a career on a fast track; he had no history of psychic experiences but a casual interest in the paranormal, and after arriving he trained with Smith, [[Ed Dames]] and [[Lyn Buchanan]].[^2]
### Psychic Warrior and Public Career
In *Psychic Warrior*, Morehouse reported that a stray machine gun round struck his helmet during a training exercise in [[Jordan]] in 1987, after which he had visions and out-of-body experiences; *[[Kirkus Reviews]]* summarized the book as telling that a psychologist he consulted steered him into a "hush-hush project funded by the CIA." Schnabel wrote that his former colleagues in the unit remembered his story about the Jordan incident but said he had told them the bullet impact had only given him a headache, and that he never mentioned any prior paranormal experience to them.[^3] [[John B. Alexander]] wrote in a 1996 review that "in 1988 then-Captain David Morehouse joined the Sun Streak program where he remained for a relatively short period of time," that his assignment "was based on psychic experiences he claimed to have after being struck in the head by a stray bullet in a foreign training exercise," and that in the book Morehouse "states that he encountered an angel that became his personal guide for the years to come."[^4]
In 1996, Morehouse published *[[Psychic Warrior]]: Inside the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]]'s Stargate Program, the True Story of a Soldier's Espionage and Awakening* ([[St. Martin's Press]]), which became the first commercially successful account by a former Fort Meade program participant. The book combined Morehouse's account of his remote viewing training and operational sessions with a spiritual awakening narrative centered on his Jordan head wound experience and its aftereffects.
### The unit and Psi Tech
The reception among former unit colleagues was largely negative. [[Joe McMoneagle]], who had participated in the program from its earliest days, was particularly critical, arguing that Morehouse had embellished both his experiences and his role in the program and that the book's sensationalized framing undermined the program's legitimate history. The book was also criticized for exaggerating the CIA connection - the unit was primarily an Army program under DIA sponsorship, not a CIA operation.
Schnabel wrote that as the unit's operations declined, Morehouse spent his time on a small home-improvement business, House Tech, that he already ran on the side, came in late and left early, and eventually appeared at the office one or two days a week. Lyn Buchanan told Schnabel that Morehouse "was taking a lot of time off to do his own work" and "would get in late, and leave early," and Smith said "I remember many times when Dave would have been useful and he wasn't there." He left the unit in mid-1990. He joined Dames briefly at [[Team Six (INSCOM)|Team Six]], a [[Baltimore]] unit that Dames described to Schnabel as a "strategic deception" unit with an anti-narcotics role coordinating with [[United States Southern Command|Southern Command]] in Panama; Morehouse then worked at the [[United States Army Human Resources Command|Army Personnel Command]], attended the [[United States Army Command and General Staff College|Command and General Staff College]] at [[Fort Leavenworth]] in 1992 and 1993, and in 1993 became executive officer of an airborne battalion of the [[82nd Airborne Division]] at Fort Bragg. The two formed [[Psi Tech]], a firm meant to use moonlighting remote viewers (Morehouse, Smith, [[Mel Riley]], Buchanan and others) as a private psychic investigation team, with the retired General [[Albert Stubblebine]] as chairman of the board for a time; Schnabel wrote that its clients were scarce and on the New Age fringe, that Dames and Morehouse became preoccupied with extraterrestrial matters, and that they went into the New Mexico desert to look for alien bases that remote viewing had suggested.[^5] An undated memorandum in the CIA's Star Gate files, headed "Will the Real [[C.B. Scott Jones|Scott Jones]] Please Stand Up?," records: "Edward A. Dames serves as President of Psi Tech, and David A. Morehouse is Vice President. They are based in [[Jessup, Maryland]], but there are rumors that they are planning to move to [[New Mexico]]."[^6]
Despite these criticisms, *Psychic Warrior* introduced the Fort Meade program to a large popular audience and helped establish the commercial remote viewing training market that emerged after STAR GATE's 1995 declassification. Morehouse subsequently built a civilian career offering remote viewing training seminars.[^1]
Schnabel wrote that Morehouse had been discussing the unit with the investigative journalist [[Dale Van Atta]] since 1989, and that when Dames, through [[Ingo Swann]]'s literary agent [[Sandra Martin]], planned a book on remote viewing, Morehouse was invited to take part. The book was handed to [[Jim Marrs]], who sold a proposal to [[Harmony Books]] for a $100,000 advance split three ways; Morehouse, still in uniform as a training officer with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, learned of the deal over a field telephone during exercises and, in Schnabel's account, used his share to lease a Mercedes. Through Martin he began negotiating with [[NBC]] for a television movie.[^5]
An undated memorandum in the CIA's Star Gate files, headed "Will the Real [[C.B. Scott Jones|Scott Jones]] Please Stand Up?," records: "[[Ed Dames|Edward A. Dames]] serves as President of [[Psi Tech]], and David A. Morehouse is Vice President. They are based in [[Jessup, Maryland]], but there are rumors that they are planning to move to [[New Mexico]]." No other legible mention of him appears in the released collection.[^2]
### Fort Bragg, 1994
According to Schnabel, in early 1994 an irate girlfriend filed a complaint, first to a chaplain and then to military prosecutors at Fort Bragg, and Morehouse was charged with adultery, sodomy, communicating a threat, larceny of an Army computer (which Schnabel's article says he had borrowed from Fort Leavenworth and lent to her), and above all conduct unbecoming an officer. Schnabel described the case in 1996 as one that "boiled down to a jilted girlfriend, and an officer who did a good job at work but had a habit of overmanipulating people" and quoted Dames saying so at the time. The woman was the wife of an enlisted man who had been Morehouse's driver and who had sought counseling from Morehouse for his marital problems. In testimony for the court-martial she quoted Morehouse as urging her to "live close to the flame." In her first statements, Schnabel wrote, she said that Morehouse had bragged of his classified work, had claimed he could psychically spy on her, and had told her of the book he was writing with Dames; the mention of the book deal set off investigations of Morehouse by [[United States Army Intelligence and Security Command|INSCOM]], the [[Army Criminal Investigation Command|Army Criminal Investigation Division]] and the [[Defense Investigative Service]].[^7]
In April 1994, a few days after Fort Bragg authorities decided to send him to a full court-martial, Schnabel wrote, Morehouse checked into [[Walter Reed Army Medical Center]] in Washington; he gave the impression of visions of angels, depression and suicidal thoughts, and his lawyers contended that remote viewing had destabilized him and left him no longer competent to stand trial. Schnabel, who said he visited Morehouse there briefly in May 1994, wrote that Morehouse and Martin began to tell friends that shadowy government operatives were harassing them, that a Pentagon operative had tried to intimidate Martin on the New York subway, and that when Morehouse left the hospital, months later, the defense strategy was that the court-martial would become an investigation of the classified remote viewing program. Schnabel reported that as Morehouse's lawyers requested special clearances and sought to interview former participants, the Army classified the proceedings and tried to keep them from reaching trial, and that "within a few months" Fort Bragg authorities struck a deal: "In lieu of a trial," Morehouse resigned with an "other than honorable" discharge that left him neither pension nor benefits and officially separated in January 1995, after which he went to work for Martin in New York. In the 1996 article Schnabel placed the offer "around Christmas" 1994 and wrote that Morehouse became a vice president of Martin's production company, then called Para View. He named as the source of the courtroom testimony he quoted "the 700-page record of U.S. v. Morehouse, available by FOIA request from the XVIII Airborne Corps at Ft. Bragg, NC."[^7][^8]
Morehouse's own biography, as quoted in a local newspaper in 2001, gives the sequence differently: in July 1992 he became second in command of a battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division, in August 1993 he was one of three majors responsible for 13,000 paratroopers, "six months into this assignment, court martial charges were filed against him for his plans to write 'Psychic Warrior,'" and in November 1994, "with his career military father by his side, he resigned his commission and was given an 'other than honorable' discharge after 18 years."[^9] Morehouse's own web site, in its present form, states that he was assigned from 1987 to 1991 to special access programs of INSCOM and the Defense Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Science and Technology; that he "resigned his commission in 1995 after his decision to write Psychic Warrior resulted in unfounded charges being filed against him"; and that he "later challenged the allegations made against him in 1993, and was successful in having his discharge upgraded to fully honorable, after proving to the Army discharge review board, a panel of five Colonels, that the allegations against him were baseless, without merit, and devoid of credible evidence." It gives his residence as Southern California.[^10]
Schnabel listed as his sources for the legal proceedings Morehouse's lawyer [[Barry Steinberg]], Martin, Dames, the seven-hundred-page case file of the investigation and court-martial at Fort Bragg and a heavily redacted set of INSCOM investigation documents, both obtainable under the Freedom of Information Act. Alexander also pointed readers of his review to a Fort Bragg records custodian for a transcript he said ran between 700 and 900 pages.[^11]
[[Edwin May]], writing from the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory on September 21, 1995, described the sequence from the program's side: Marrs "was initially writing a book about Psi-Tech and Ed Dames," encountered "Dave Moorehouse, who claimed that the RV-training he received while a member of the Ft. Meade unit 'caused' him to suffer extreme mental distress. (I know that Al and Angela had to provide testimony with regard to this case.)" He wrote that Marrs "decided to focus his book on Morrehouse" and that Dames "obtained a court injunction against Marrs claiming a violation of some agreement they had"; that a book and media agent was "thought to be romantically involved with Moorhouse" and was pushing the ABC piece; and that the *20/20* producers "could not put a whole piece together about Moorehouse," had seen the Schnabel tape, and wanted to interview Major General [[Edmund Thompson]]. The broadcast, scheduled for September 29, was on hold.[^12] The memorandum gives only first names; the unit's viewers then included [[Angela Dellafiora]], and Schnabel names a DIA specialist, [[Al Garfield]], as branch chief from 1993.
### Psychic Warrior
Schnabel wrote that after two rewrites the Marrs book was ready in the summer of 1995 and [[ABC News|ABC]]'s *[[20/20]]* filmed a segment on Morehouse for September; he wrote that Dames complained, after seeing the Marrs draft, that it was heavily fictionalized and focused too much on Morehouse, and that Harmony cancelled it; Morehouse began his own book and, by the fall of 1995, sold it to St. Martin's Press. Schnabel, citing a *[[Variety (magazine)|Variety]]* report of 1995, wrote that in early November 1995 Morehouse and a new agent pitched the story to film studios, that several bid including [[Oliver Stone]], and that [[Interscope Communications]] agreed to pay $300,000 plus another half million or so when a film was made; he also wrote that Morehouse was working on a screenplay and on a Saturday-morning children's cartoon show for [[Hanna-Barbera]].[^13]
*Psychic Warrior* appeared on November 15, 1996 in the United States, with a London edition from [[Michael Joseph (publisher)|Michael Joseph]] the same year. *Kirkus Reviews* called it "the whiny testament of a former US Army officer who, after a stint of inner-space spying for covert agencies, turned on his erstwhile masters in a belated burst of moral outrage and was effectively cashiered." The reviewer for *[[Lobster (magazine)|Lobster]]* magazine wrote that Morehouse "portrays himself as a would-be whistle-blower, appalled by US deception over the [[Lockerbie bombing]] and the [[Gulf War]] (both of which he remote viewed, of course)," and that "its accuracy has been challenged by others connected to the RV unit who have claimed that in writing a 'pop' version, Morehouse has conflated the abilities and experiences of several members of the unit into his own."[^14]
Alexander's review, published on the Psi Tech web site ([[RemoteViewer.org]] states that Alexander had originally sat on Psi Tech's board of directors), stated that Morehouse, "now Major Morehouse was allowed to resign, with a less than honorable discharge, for the good of the Army in lieu of the court marshal," that he "totally glosses over the nature and seriousness of the allegations that include, assault, communicating a threat, sodomy, adultery (with his enlisted driver's wife among several others), larceny, and multiple conduct unbecoming charges," that "Additional charges were pending at the time of his discharge," and that "In Psychic Warrior Morehouse blames everybody except himself for his problems." Alexander wrote that the book alleged "Government attempts against the lives of him and his family, suppression of information he derived about the nature of [[Gulf War syndrome|Gulf War Syndrome]], and use of psychic techniques to influence or kill adversaries," and concluded: "There is abject disregard for truth. Do not buy this book."[^15] Schnabel wrote in 1996, as reproduced by RemoteViewer.org, that "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," and called "the cynical falsehood that the DIA was using remote viewers to monitor US troops' chemical weapons exposure in the Gulf War" one of the passages reflecting "the Hollywood version of reality." RemoteViewer.org also reproduced a statement of Smith, in 1999, criticizing Morehouse's doctorate from LaSalle as obtainable by mailing in transcripts, a short paper and a fee, and another, in 2000, that "there are very good reasons why he is odd-man-out in the RV community." In a 1997 interview reproduced there, Morehouse said Alexander had met Dames in Santa Fe and "has no friends in the remote-viewing community."[^16]
### Later work
In 1997, according to the same biography, Morehouse formed Remote Viewing Technologies, "a company to train police officers in remote viewing," and by 2001 he was lecturing, as in a Veterans Day seminar at the Veterans Memorial Building in [[Pleasanton, California]], on "Homeland Defense: What You Should Know and Do"; the announcement listed him as author of *Psychic Warrior*, *Nonlethal Weapons: War Without Death* and *The Deceivers*, and described him as a former Army major who had "served with a controversial intelligence collection unit under the [[Defense Intelligence Agency]]." RemoteViewer.org stated in 2002 that he lived in Sweden and trained students in extended and coordinate remote viewing through the company.[^9][^16]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies.* Dell, 1997. Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis.* Little, Brown and Company, 2017. Morehouse, David. *Psychic Warrior: Inside the CIA's Stargate Program, the True Story of a Soldier's Espionage and Awakening.* St. Martin's Press, 1996.
[^2]: "Will the Real Scott Jones Please Stand Up?," undated memorandum, CIA-RDP96-00792R000400300004-7. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies*, Dell, 1997, chapters on Morehouse; Morehouse, David, *Psychic Warrior: Inside the CIA's Stargate Program: The True Story of a Soldier's Espionage and Awakening*, St. Martin's Press, 1996; "Psychic spy speaks on homeland defense," *Pleasanton Weekly*, November 2, 2001, https://www.pleasantonweekly.com/morgue/2001/2001_11_02.psychic2.html.
[^2]: Schnabel, Jim, "The Truth About Dave Morehouse and Psychic Warrior (Part 1 of 2)," November 7, 1996, https://web.archive.org/web/2010/http://psitech.tripod.com/schnabel.html (testimony quoted by Schnabel from the record of U.S. v. Morehouse); Schnabel, *Remote Viewers*, Dell, 1997, chapter on the unit in the late 1980s.
[^3]: Kirkus Reviews, review of *Psychic Warrior* by David Morehouse, November 15, 1996, https://kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-morehouse/psychic-warrior; Schnabel, *Remote Viewers*, Dell, 1997, footnote in the chapter on Dames and Morehouse.
[^4]: Alexander, John B., "Review of Psychic Warrior by David Morehouse, St. Martin's Press," 1996, as published at https://www.stunned.org/spook/spook/www.psitech.net/morehouse.htm (mirror of the Psi Tech web site).
[^5]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers*, Dell, 1997, chapters on the unit's decline, Dames's activities and the Marrs project.
[^6]: "Will the Real Scott Jones Please Stand Up?," undated memorandum, CIA-RDP96-00792R000400300004-7, read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00792r000400300004-7.
[^7]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers*, Dell, 1997, chapter on the end of the program, with footnote on the woman's testimony.
[^8]: Schnabel, Jim, "The Truth About Dave Morehouse and Psychic Warrior (Part 1 of 2)," November 7, 1996, and "(Part 2)," originally hosted at psitech.tripod.com, read in the Wayback Machine capture of January 12, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/2010/http://psitech.tripod.com/schnabel.html and https://web.archive.org/web/2010/http://psitech.tripod.com/schnabel2.html.
[^9]: "Psychic spy speaks on homeland defense," *Pleasanton Weekly*, November 2, 2001, https://www.pleasantonweekly.com/morgue/2001/2001_11_02.psychic2.html, quoting Morehouse's web site. Sole source for the passages so cited, apart from the dates in Schnabel's account.
[^10]: Morehouse, David, "Biography," davidmorehouse.com, https://davidmorehouse.com/about/. Sole source for the passages so cited.
[^11]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers*, Dell, 1997, acknowledgments and source notes; Alexander, "Review of Psychic Warrior," https://www.stunned.org/spook/spook/www.psitech.net/morehouse.htm.
[^12]: May, Edwin, Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, "Re: Publicity and things," September 21, 1995, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100030077-1, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00791r000100030077-1.
[^13]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers*, Dell, 1997, chapter on the end of the program and source notes (citing Fleming 1995 for the film deal).
[^14]: Kirkus Reviews, review of *Psychic Warrior*, November 15, 1996; "Remote Viewers, and, Psychic Warrior," *Lobster* magazine, https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/?p=7663.
[^15]: Alexander, "Review of Psychic Warrior," https://www.stunned.org/spook/spook/www.psitech.net/morehouse.htm.
[^16]: RemoteViewer.org, "David Morehouse," 2002, reproducing statements of Jim Schnabel (1996), Paul H. Smith (1999 and 2000) and David Morehouse (1997), https://www.geocities.ws/remoteviewerorg/remoteviewing/morehouse.htm. The page is a compilation whose original publication details for each statement are not given.

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10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Tom McNear.md
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---
created: 2026-05-15
updated: 2026-09-22
title: Tom McNear
aliases:
- Tom McNear
- Thomas McNear
- Thomas M. McNear
- Captain Tom McNear
- CPT McNear
- Tom Nance
category: "Military"
tags:
- Person
- RemoteViewer
- Military
- PSI
- ArmyIntelligence
- Counterintelligence
- Stargate
- 1980s
summary: "U.S. Army military intelligence captain who became one of the first two soldiers trained by Ingo Swann in Coordinate Remote Viewing in 1981 and authored the 1985 DoD CRV manual declassified in 2000."
- CenterLane
- CRV
summary: "Army military intelligence captain trained by Ingo Swann in Coordinate Remote Viewing from 1982, who wrote the February 1985 CRV working paper and later served in counterintelligence until retirement as a lieutenant colonel in 1997."
location: "Fort Meade, Maryland"
relations:
- type: employed_by
with: "[[United States Army Intelligence and Security Command]]"
start: 1981
end: 1985
role: "captain, military intelligence; project officer in the Grill Flame and Center Lane office at Fort Meade"
fn: 2
- type: participant_in
with: "[[Coordinate Remote Viewing]]"
start: 1982-07
end: 1984-05
role: "first Army trainee of Ingo Swann's CRV course at SRI, through Stage VI, with a Stage VII phonetics series"
fn: 4
- type: reported_to
with: "[[Brian Buzby]]"
start: 1983-08
end: 1985
role: "project officer in the Center Lane office under Lieutenant Colonel Buzby"
fn: 9
- type: employed_by
with: "[[U.S. Army]]"
end: 1997
role: "counterintelligence and counterespionage officer; retired in uniform in 1997 as a lieutenant colonel, then a civilian intelligence officer until 2019"
fn: 1
created: 2026-05-15
updated: 2026-10-05
---
Tom McNear was a Captain in military intelligence and one of the two original [[Ingo Swann]] trainees in [[Coordinate Remote Viewing|CRV]], starting in 1981. He immediately showed considerable talent in remote viewing, though his training progressed slowly[^1].
Thomas M. McNear was a captain of military intelligence who became, with [[Rob Cowart]], one of the first two soldiers trained by [[Ingo Swann]] in [[Coordinate Remote Viewing]] (CRV). The [[Omega Institute]] describes him as a retired lieutenant colonel who served in the Army's remote viewing program from 1981 to 1985, the first member of the program personally trained by Swann in CRV and the only member Swann trained through what the biography calls Stage VII (phonetics).[^1]
It took McNear two and a half years to reach Stage Six of CRV, the level where viewers learn to remote view a target and then create a three-dimensional model of it out of clay. His clay models were so accurate in both concept and scale that photographs of them, alongside pictures of the target, were used in [[National Security Council]] briefings[^1].
### Assignment
By the end of his training, which included all seven stages, McNear had become so proficient at identifying training targets that Ingo Swann confided in colleagues that McNear was "better than me"[^1].
Army documents give his name as "THOMAS M. McNEAR, CPT, MI, Project Officer." A memorandum of March 16, 1982 on the purchase of maps, signed by him, is addressed within the human intelligence office of [[United States Army Intelligence and Security Command]] (INSCOM). On April 5, 1982, when [[Doug Olin]] of the [[Office of Management and Budget]] was briefed on [[Grill Flame]] at Building T-2561 at [[Fort Meade]], the memorandum of the briefing lists, as an item of the agenda, "Presentation of completed but unevaluated projects (CPT's Cowart and McNear)"; Olin was classed in it as "an honest skeptic."[^2] In the writer [[Jim Schnabel]]'s account, Captains Rob Cowart and "Tom Nance," fresh from the advanced intelligence course at [[Fort Huachuca]], joined the unit in early 1982 and began traveling to [[Stanford Research Institute|SRI]] every few weeks for Swann's training; the Omega Institute's biography renders the same passage of Schnabel's book as concerning "Tom (McNear)," and the working paper of 1985 discussed below contains a Stage Six model and a Stage Seven session on [[Tulum]].[^3]
Despite his proficiency, McNear did not want to remain part of the viewer unit at [[Fort Meade]]. He cited the program's inconsistent funding and the deaths of two members from cancer, as well as the medical retirement of his fellow trainee and friend, [[Rob Cowart]], due to cancer. He also noted that he had become very withdrawn and introverted. McNear requested a transfer, which the [[U.S. Army]] granted, and he went on to build a successful career in Army intelligence[^1].
### Training, 1982 to 1984
In 1985, the [[Department of Defense]] published a forty-one-page how-to manual, "Coordinate Remote Viewing, Stages I–VI and Beyond." The author of this manual, declassified in 2000, was Tom McNear[^1].
The Army's chronology records that in July 1982 Grill Flame personnel "begin training at SRI-International in the new Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) method." The first of McNear's own reports on that training is cited as a trip report of July 6 to 22, 1982 on Stages One through Three. A memorandum he wrote on March 24, 1983 reports a TDY to SRI from March 7 to 15, 1983 to learn Stage Three, in which the viewer produces aesthetic impact statements, sketches, "trackers" and movement at the site, and a second memorandum dated April 18, 1983 reports the second two-week period, from April 4 to 15, with lectures on refined ideograms and on "bilocation," the viewer's simultaneous perception at the site and in the viewing room, with a "Bilo Break" called when the viewer was too deep in the signal or too analytical. He wrote that a new student had been introduced in that period, "a female civilian employee (GS-9) of NSA," that "there were numerous problems with her selection as a trainee that were overlooked by NSA," and that her presence cut into Swann's time with him. Schnabel names the [[National Security Agency]] trainees as [[Debbie Norfeld]] and her monitor [[Richard Henderson]] and wrote that the agency withdrew when it learned their office had not authorized their participation.[^4]
The released CIA collection on the program carries no legible mention of McNear.[^2]
A third trip report records Stage Three training at SRI, [[Menlo Park, California|Menlo Park]], from August 21 to September 2, 1983, with a transition to Stage Four planned and a quarrel between [[Hal Puthoff]] and Swann over the end-of-year reports and the renewal of Swann's contract for fiscal 1984. On September 27 and 28, 1983 he traveled by [[Amtrak]] to [[New York City]] to inspect SRI's facilities there for Swann's work, which he found "less than desirable," and on the telephone told Puthoff that SRI's people "who understand the requirements of our contracts" should fly to New York "with check-book in hand to rent suitable space."[^5] During July and August 1983 he was the point of contact, at extension 2656, on the forms changing the contracting officer's representative for SRI contract DAKF27-83-C-0018, first from Lieutenant Colonel [[Robert Jachim]] to [[Frederick Atwater]] effective July 11 and then from Atwater to Lieutenant Colonel [[Brian Buzby]] effective August 17.[^6] On October 3, 1983 the list of personnel assigned to the Security Systems Planning Division of the [[902d Military Intelligence Group]] named Buzby, Smith, McNear, Atwater and [[Joe McMoneagle]].[^7]
On April 13, 1984 the INSCOM commander, Major General [[Albert Stubblebine]], toured the Center Lane buildings and "spent approximately 10 minutes in a one-to-one session with CPT McNear behind closed doors."[^8] On April 24, 1984 Buzby wrote to Puthoff that "upon completion of Stage IV training by Tom McNear" under the contract he had not received the written evaluations of the trainee's progress after each two-week session or the final report within 30 days of each stage, and he asked about the status of research on Stage V and about "the trainee currently in Stage VI with regard to Stage V."[^9]
In May 1984, Schnabel wrote, near the close of his formal training, Swann put McNear through a valedictory series of sessions that were bound into a red folder and shown to Army and [[Defense Intelligence Agency|DIA]] officials. Schnabel listed among the targets [[Grand Coulee Dam]], drawn accurately and modeled in white clay, with an SRI photographer later sent to photograph the dam from the same angle; a site in [[Tulsa, Oklahoma|Tulsa]] that McNear took by Stage Four for a university and named as [[Oral Roberts University]]; [[Bunker Hill Monument]]; [[Grant's Tomb]]; and a ruin in [[Mexico]] for which, in Stage Seven phonics, he produced "Tuh," "too," "luh," "loo," and the name "Tulum." Schnabel noted that Swann gave constant feedback during such sessions and apparently was not blinded to the targets. He wrote that Swann considered McNear his true protégé, "the formal prototype for the CRV-trained military remote viewer," with training begun in late 1982 that would not end until Swann's contract with INSCOM expired two years later.[^10]
A DIA memorandum of April 23, 1985, signed by Buzby, states that SRI-International's training of three source personnel by its subcontractor ended in December 1984 "upon completion of the training contract" and that in-house training modeled on Swann's procedure, with its progressive multi-stage acquisition process, took over in January 1985.[^11]
The Omega Institute biography adds that McNear was a member of Swann's five-person team that on June 15, 1984 remote viewed the planet [[Mars]]. A transcript in the CIA collection headed "Mars Exploration, May 22, 1984" records a monitor and a subject, the subject not named, given a sealed envelope reading "The planet Mars. Time of interest approximately 1 million years B.C." and the geographic coordinates "40.89 degrees north, 9.55 degrees west"; the subject reported "a pyramid or pyramid form" and "very large people," "very tall...thin."[^12] [[Annie Jacobsen]] reported that McNear needed two and a half years to reach Stage Six, the stage in which the viewer builds a three-dimensional clay model of the target; that photographs of his models beside pictures of the targets were used in briefings of the [[National Security Council]]; and that Swann told colleagues McNear was "better than me."[^13]
### The 1985 working paper
"Coordinate Remote Viewing, Stages I-VI and Beyond," dated February 1985 and marked as a working paper with "Project Officer" and the name withheld, runs to eleven chapters and a glossary. It is written in the first person. Its introduction says it provides "the basics that have been learned in the past three years of training" and that CRV "must be learned by doing." Its sample session, a Stage I to Stage VII sequence, ends with ideograms and phonetic sounds ("tooloo," "the site is the Mayan Temple at Tolum") and a photograph of the Stage VI model, captioned as the Tulum ruins in Mexico. A Stage V example used the site of [[Grant's Farm]] outside [[St. Louis]].[^14]
Its tenth chapter, headed "Future Stages," is presented as "the personal thoughts of the writer," the product of "the last three and one-half years of training." It proposes Stage VII "Analytics," the ability to make yes/no decisions without analytical overlay, developed by Swann; Stage VIII "Phonetics/Sonics," with the example of "Carribah," produced when tasked against [[Kariba Dam]]; Stage IX "Telepathic Signals," in two phases, receiving and transmitting; Stage X "Remote Action," or psychokinesis, with phases of interaction with objects at the site and teleportation of things from and to it; and Stage XI "Altering the Dimensionality at the Site," in which time at the site "could be frozen, moved forward, or moved back." The writer says: "I realize these concepts are difficult to grasp and impossible to believe, but, they are a natural flow of the signal." The conclusions state: "After four years of training I know the CRV training program is a usable program for instructing personnel to RV."[^14] Jacobsen reported that a forty-one-page [[Department of Defense|Defense Department]] how-to manual of 1985 with this title was by McNear and was declassified in 2000.[^13]
### Departure and later career
McNear did not wish to remain at Fort Meade. In Jacobsen's account he cited the program's inconsistent funding, the deaths of two members from cancer, and the medical retirement for cancer of Cowart, his fellow trainee and friend; he said he had become very withdrawn; and the Army granted his transfer. Schnabel wrote that "Nance" was gone by the end of 1985, that he left "to get back to ordinary life," that his marriage and Army career had suffered from the remote viewing work, and that he took a post overseas; Schnabel also recorded that, after Nance's divorce, he and Swann traveled together to the [[Yucatan Peninsula|Yucatan]], where Nance visited Tulum and experienced "a certain strange thrill that told him he had already been there."[^15] Shortly afterward, Schnabel wrote, a viewer in the unit circulated memoranda about "the loss of their comrade, Tom," in the context of the hostility General [[William Odom|Odom]] directed at the unit.[^15]
The Omega Institute states that McNear continued in counterintelligence and counterespionage and "was the leader of a team that neutralized eight persons committing espionage against the United States," retired from uniformed service in 1997, served as a civilian intelligence officer until 2019, "culminating in 45 years of service," and holds a master's degree in counseling psychology from [[Saint Mary's University]] in [[San Antonio, Texas|San Antonio]].[^1]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis*. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.
[^2]: The archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection, about 13,000 items under the identifiers cia-rdp96-*, searched by title and OCR text.
[^1]: Omega Institute, "Thomas (Tom) McNear," teacher biography, https://www.eomega.org/workshops/teachers/thomas-tom-mcnear.
[^2]: McNear, Thomas M., "Purchasing of Maps," memorandum for the record, March 16, 1982, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200060026-6, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001200060026-6; "Briefing for Mr. Doug Olin," memorandum for the record, April 12, 1982, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100270001-1, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001100270001-1. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
[^3]: Schnabel, Jim, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies*, Dell, 1997, chapters on the arrival of Nance and Cowart and on Swann's training program; Omega Institute, "Thomas (Tom) McNear," quoting Schnabel.
[^4]: McNear, Thomas M., "CRV Stage Three Training," March 24, 1983, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200220006-0, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001200220006-0; McNear, Thomas M., "CRV Stage Three Training," April 18, 1983, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200220005-1, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001200220005-1; "List of Events from September 1977 to January 1986," CIA-RDP96-00788R001100020001-8, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001100020001-8; Schnabel, *Remote Viewers*, Dell, 1997. The trip report of July 6 to 22, 1982 is cited in both 1983 memoranda.
[^5]: McNear, Thomas M., "Trip Report 21 Aug-2 Sep 83," October 5, 1983, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200220002-4, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001200220002-4; McNear, Thomas M., "Trip Report 27-28 Sep 83," October 5, 1983, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200220001-5, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001200220001-5.
[^6]: Jachim, Robert J., "Redesignation of COR," July 13, 1983, CIA-RDP96-00788R001500120013-0, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001500120013-0; DIO Contracting Division reply, July 22, 1983, CIA-RDP96-00788R001500120012-1; McNear, Thomas M., "Redesignation of COR," August 8, 1983, CIA-RDP96-00788R001500120011-2, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001500120011-2; McNear, Thomas M., "Redesignation of COR," August 17, 1983, CIA-RDP96-00788R001500120010-3, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001500120010-3; Buzby, Brian, "CENTER LANE TDY/Leave Schedule 6-16 Sep 83," August 31, 1983, CIA-RDP96-00788R001600520010-8.
[^7]: INSCOM, "Personnel Assignments," October 3, 1983, CIA-RDP96-00788R001700300005-7, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001700300005-7.
[^8]: "Visit by CG, INSCOM 13 Apr 84," memorandum for record, April 16, 1984, CIA-RDP96-00788R001700220008-3, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001700220008-3.
[^9]: Buzby, Brian, letter to Dr. Harold E. Puthoff, "Contract Requirements," April 24, 1984, CIA-RDP96-00788R001500120028-4, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001500120028-4.
[^10]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers*, Dell, 1997, chapter on Swann's training program, including its footnotes on Swann's feedback to Nance.
[^11]: Buzby, Brian, "SUN STREAK Training Report," memorandum for Dr. Vorona, April 23, 1985, with the "Training Report, First Quarter 1985," CIA-RDP96-00789R002100160001-1, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00789r002100160001-1.
[^12]: Omega Institute, "Thomas (Tom) McNear"; "Mars Exploration, May 22, 1984," transcript, CIA-RDP96-00788R001900760001-9, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001900760001-9.
[^13]: Jacobsen, Annie, *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis*, Little, Brown and Company, 2017.
[^14]: "Coordinate Remote Viewing: Stages I-VI and Beyond," working paper, February 1985, CIA-RDP96-00788R001000400001-7, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00788r001000400001-7.
[^15]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers*, Dell, 1997, chapters on Swann's training program and on the unit's decline; Jacobsen, *Phenomena*, 2017.