Preparing for a meeting with Ed Dames would panic the most rational person. He's a retired U.S. Army major and former secret military psychic spy, affectionately called Dr. Doom for his predictions of Earth's future devastation. He's made himself a frequent guest on the incredibly popular Art Bell radio show. On the show he comes off as a shadowy figure, steeped in a Jedi world of mind-reading spooks, rarely giving direct answers but always hinting that the end of the world is just around the corner.

"Is he going to know what I am thinking?" I keep asking myself.

There are masses of web pages devoted to him. Some, like www.remoteview.org and www.strangehaze.com, describe him using the words "arrogant," "angry" and "crazy."

I couldn't sleep for three nights before meeting this guy. But, what an opportunity I would have missed if I had surrendered to my fears.

By Tuesday afternoon when we are scheduled to meet, I am running on E and chock full of nervousness. Standing outside the Kahului Starbucks waiting for Dames to arrive, with just a vague idea of what he might look like from a picture on the Internet, I see a short, blonde-haired man walking back to his old white Jeep Cherokee.

"That could be him," I say to myself. But in a blue Aloha shirt and sandals, the man looks more like a windsurfer than a retired Army Major and for a second I lose the thought. Then he locks his car and heads in my direction.

"Jaime?" he asks.

I nod, still nervous, knowing he can sense my uneasiness despite my trying to mask it.

"Hi, I'm Ed Dames," he says with a smile and a firm handshake.

"Thanks for agreeing to meet with me, Major Dames," I reply coolly.

"The pleasure is mine," he says, opening the door. "Shall we get something to drink?"

We make our way quickly to the cashier, me following in his very fast footsteps. His interaction with the young woman behind the counter is friendly and polite. We grab our drinks and decide on a table.

"I usually don't do interviews with people from smaller papers," Dames says as he pulls out a chair for me to sit down. "But because you're from my home, I am glad to do it."

He makes himself comfortable in the single beam of sun radiating through the cafe window. We're not far into the conversation when I realize that, at about 5 feet 5 inches with stark white-blonde hair, sky blue eyes, contagious laughter and eloquent soft speech, Dames seems less of a threat than a newborn infant, even after his explanation that sometime in the next 10 years a series of solar flares, which he has coined Killshot, will hit Earth and cause millions of casualties.

"In terms of responsibility, [Killshot] eclipses everything else, including finding Osama Bin Laden and pinpointing nuclear terrorism," Dames says, shifting his gaze from the passerby outside to my eyes. "I've been at the very top of the military hierarchy and I am very highly decorated and I know what the military can and can't do, and they can't do this."

Then his voice gets even softer as he leans across the table.

"They are going to fail and millions of people are going to lose their lives."

I sipped my Frappacino. He opted for black coffee.

From Coast to Coast with Art Bell, May 31, 1996, posted on www.mindcontrolforums.com:

Art Bell: What about the climate, you know, arguably the hurricane season and now the tornado season have been horrible! I mean absolutely horrible.

Ed Dames: Yeah, we're looking at--uh, before our study, we did not realize how delicately balanced the earth's environment was, we assumed that it could re-establish homeostasis or equilibrium quite easily after drastic changes but that was not true. I was amazed at how delicately balanced the planet was, um, the ecosphere. The geophysics.

Bell: Right.

Dames: And, uh, looks like the atmosphere is degrading, very rapidly, at timelines that we thought were out in the decades and now within a decade... Jet stream moves about 300 mph, but it will produce cat--chaotic effects, among those probably, uh, microbursts and other things, it'll pick up a lot of dust, there'll be a lot of dust and very dark skies. The vicissitudes of these weather changes will preclude growing crops the way we have ever grown them before. Either you grow them underground, or in very solid buildings, or in hermetically sealed units-

Bell: How... how... how close to this are we?

Dames: ... I'd say we're looking at about four to six years between where the stuff really hits the fan...

Aside from being known for these predictions of Earth's demise, the 54-year-old Wailea resident and free-diver is regarded by many as the world's foremost remote viewing instructor.

First developed by a man named Ingo Swann under military guidance in the 1970s for the purpose of psychic spying, remote viewing is systematic clairvoyance--a technique that teaches the unconscious to communicate with the conscious to gain information on an otherwise inaccessible target, in the past, present or future. In his book Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies, Jim Schnabel recounts how remote viewers led the military to find Soviet submarines, missing downed U.S. aircraft and complete interior descriptions of Soviet military research facilities.

"Once you learn remote viewing, you can never look at the world the same way because you know that you can know anything," Dames tells me. "There aren't any secrets."

Dames says that it's through the use and perfection of these remote viewing techniques he learned in the military that he can see impending catastrophes. But he also claims that remote viewing can save future generations of the human race.

"There's a big thing coming and we need to be armed," Dames warns me again. "We can't do what we've been doing."

For more than 20 years, Dames has been teaching adults around the world how to remote view. One of his most recent workshops was held at the Maui Coast Hotel in Kihei on May 15 and 16. But Dames says he's found that adults are a "lost cause" and is now shifting his teaching to kids.

"My generation, your parents' generation, we've made all this," he says gesturing outside to the hustle and bustle. "And we're going down. We haven't evolved at all, that's bullshit. I'm only concerned with the children now, because if we want to change the world, we have to change the education. Teaching remote viewing to children allows them to see the truth. You're not dealing with a closed mind like you are when you teach an adult."

Whoa, I tell him, this sounds like a Pinky and the Brain scheme to take over the world.

"What I'm telling you is, this generation of kids are the ones who will have to re-build the planet," he says. "Remote viewing may be a Pandora's box, but my gut feeling is that it's a good thing to live in a world without secrets."

From Coast to Coast with Art Bell, Jun. 14, 1996, posted on www.mindcontrolforums.com:

Bell: Well, let me tell you a little story about Gordon Cooper, the astronaut. He said that he was at um, Edwards Air Force Base when a military film team was filming something or another... and they were out on a flight line, and they saw a craft come down, three legs extend, the damn thing landed on the ground, they kept rolling, they had film of it, this is, this is Gordon Cooper now, and they started moving toward this craft, it rose into the air, the three landing uh, um, wheels or whatever it was extended into the craft and it just shot straight up. Well, they had all this on film, they sent it to Washington, according to Cooper, where it disappeared for all time.

Dames: Well, that sounds like one of ours. We, we had, we've had things like that for many years. Why do you think the uh, the really, we retired the Air Force SR-71, what do you think we replaced that with? We've been testing little objects like that with tripod landing gears for quite a while. What aliens use are something very, very different, Art, and uh, it doesn't look like that-

Bell: Good point, and after all, it did come down at Edwards, which is an Air Force Base.

Dames: That's correct.

One of the secrets Dames says he's trying to reveal is the reason for the 1979 Washington state disappearance of 12-year-old Christina White. With the help of eight volunteer remote viewers he has trained--"they can run rings around the best psychics in the world," Dames tells me--he will travel to Washington this July in an attempt to recover the remains of the missing girl who, like most missing girls her age, is suspected of being abducted, raped and murdered.

"We used our techniques to find her remains, and now we have to go in and physically find them on the ground," Dames says. "At this point, she is just missing and there is no evidence to prove she is anything other than missing. We are going to have to do that before we can go after the murderer."

This is the sixth missing case Dames says he and his team have tackled. He says they have had about a 40 percent success rate. At first joking that it's because of his blond hair, Dames then attributes it to law enforcement's inability to find evidence on the ground linking the murderer to the victim.

"Even if we can pinpoint her murderer, which we have done in another case in Oregon, unless there's evidence, they walk," he says with disappointment. "And because they are usually serial killers, they'll do it again."

Dames says he has received renowned fame in Japan for tackling the same kind of missing children cases and for assisting Japanese law enforcement with organized crime. He says a television network there is funding his work.

"In my cases in Japan, where most of my successes occur," he tells me as if it were an unconceivable idea, "I'm a well known TV star and I solve missing children cases and a lot of organized crime cases. There, they are a very receptive environment and a very supportive environment. I get a lot of support from the police, the media and the parents. I don't find that in America--on the mainland."

But the American mainstream seems to be latching on to the idea of remote viewing. Dames says he will be going on the road with Oprah soon and has been asked to do a 60 Minutes interview.

"The remote viewing thing is about to go boom," Dames says, his eyes widening when he says the last word. "I always knew it would around this time, and it's right on schedule."

Even Tom Cruise has latched on to the remote viewing frenzy Dames began. Cruise produced the upcoming thriller Suspect Zero, scheduled to hit theaters Aug. 27. The film centers on an FBI remote viewer hunting for a serial killer. Dames worked as technical adviser, helped edit the screenplay and even secured a bit part.

Three guesses on what he ended up playing.

"I was supposed to just be a technical adviser but then they say 'we want you to play yourself,'" Dames tells me with disbelief. "But I tell them I'm not an actor and they say, 'Well, we're gonna give you some classes tonight.' So I did this and I have a cameo role as an FBI remote viewing instructor, and well, they give you a big screen credit. They didn't have to do that, but it was very nice of them and the whole thing was a lot of fun.

"I'm not gonna give up my day job," he says, "but it was a lot of fun."

By the end of our two-hour meeting, there were two things I just had to know: What was it like living with the weight of the world on your shoulders, and where will Ed Dames be when Killshot hits?

"There is a lot of dark in the world, but there is also a lot of light," he says in response to the first question. "I have more than I ever wanted out of life so I try to give something back. You can't give back to God, that's not possible, so I try to give back to other people. It feels good to help other people. And at the end of everyday, and this is no lie, I stand in front of the mirror and I ask myself, 'Did you do the best you could do?' and as long as the answer is yes, I am okay."

As for the day Killshot hits...

"Hapa's [nightclub] would probably be a good place to be," he says as we make our way to the door.

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