The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/David Morehouse.md

created	updated	title	aliases	category	tags	summary	born	location	relations
2026-05-15	2026-10-05	David Morehouse	David Morehouse David A. Morehouse Dave Morehouse Major David Morehouse Dr. David Morehouse	Psychics & Remote Viewers	Person RemoteViewer Military Author Stargate SunStreak PsiTech CourtMartial PsychicWarrior	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.	1954-01-01	Southern California	type with end role fn employed_by U.S. Army 1995-01 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 1 type with role fn employed_by United States Army Intelligence Support Activity briefly a member before joining the remote viewing unit, according to Schnabel 1 type with start end role fn participant_in Sun Streak 1988 1990 viewer at Fort Meade from the summer of 1988; moved to INSCOM's Team Six in 1990 2 type with start role fn founded Psi Tech 1990 vice president under president Ed Dames 5 type with start role fn subject_of Army Criminal Investigation Command 1994 investigated with INSCOM and the Defense Investigative Service after a complaint at Fort Bragg in early 1994 7 type with start role fn contractor_to St. Martin's Press 1995 author of Psychic Warrior, published November 1996 13 type with start role fn contractor_to Sandra Martin 1993 literary agent 5 type with start role fn founded Remote Viewing Technologies 1997 president; firm that trains police and civilians in remote viewing 9

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

Before the unit

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

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

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

The unit and Psi Tech

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), a Baltimore unit that Dames described to Schnabel as a "strategic deception" unit with an anti-narcotics role coordinating with United States Southern Command in Panama; Morehouse then worked at the United States Army Human Resources Command, attended the United States Army 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 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

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

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, the Army Criminal Investigation Command 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."⁷⁸

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'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) 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) 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) 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, 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.⁹¹⁶

Footnotes

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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. ↩︎

10. Morehouse, David, "Biography," davidmorehouse.com, https://davidmorehouse.com/about/. ↩︎

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. ↩︎