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Carter Roy
It's December 5, 1988, and a top secret team operating within a shadowy corner of the Defense Intelligence Agency is on the hunt. Somewhere in the world, deep underground, they may have just zeroed in on the location of a long lost artifact. The legendary Ark of the Covenant. Now, stories about the Ark vary in their details, but here are the basics. The Old Testament says God commanded Moses to build this sacred box. He gave exact specifications. Acacia wood, plated in gold, two and a half cubits long, so a little over three and a half feet. And two golden cherub statues perched on top. The Ark of the Covenant goes on to serve a few divine purposes, including housing the Ten Commandments, and. Well, if you know Raiders of the Lost Ark, it may also have face melting properties if it falls into the wrong hands. Depending on what you believe, the Ark of the Covenant either vanished 2000 years ago, or it never existed at all. That's one of the mysteries this spy team is trying to solve. The other, whether or not remote viewing is real, the search party works under Project Sunstreak. And the person seeking the Ark right now is not out in the field. They're seated in a recliner inside an office building at Fort Meade in Maryland. Physically, they're not going anywhere. Psychically, they're beaming their consciousness halfway across the world. That's how they're attempting to find this lost relic. And according to the declassified files from that day, it looks like they actually find it. The notes from that remote viewing session and so many more are released to the public 12 years later. Not only do they reveal the search for the Ark of the Covenant, they also tell a much bigger story that is almost too bizarre to be believed. Psychic experiments that are so accurate they can't be written off as mere coincidence. Claims of witches, Nazis, and another search for hidden alien faces. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram heonspiracypod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay with us. This episode is brought to you by OnStar. Looking for something gripping to listen to? Tell Me what Happened is a podcast about ordinary people who are suddenly met with the unexpected. Like a van flipping, a hiker disappearing in the desert, or a man and his dog plunging through ice. Then something amazing happens. Strangers step in, making split second choices that save lives. And the best part, you hear the story straight from the people who lived it? Listen to season six of Tell Me what Happened out now. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. People tell me that my eyes light up when I am talking about painting. I'm a painter on the side. I love painting. I paint all the time. I think about painting, I talk about painting, I read about painting. I love painting. And you want somebody that passionate when they work for you? Passion and effort go hand in hand. You can tell how much someone cares by how much work they put in. And if you want to team members like that for your business, well then you need ZipRecruiter. See why for free@ziprecruiter.com theory but simply put, ZipRecruiter has what you need to find qualified candidates fast. And with their newest feature, they'll show you candidates who are most interested in your role first. You can even hear why they're interested in their own words. So you can make doubly sure you're talking with the right people. Find candidates who really want your job on ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com theory that ZipRecruiter.com theory meet your match on ZipRecruiter.
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Carter Roy
you might have read about the psychic search for the Ark of the Covenant recently. In 2025, it was all over social media and the stories still get shared today. The timing is a little curious. The search took place in 1988 and the files were declassified in 2000. Nobody knows exactly why this one event re entered the zeitgeist 25 years later. Just chalk it up to more unexplained forces I guess. But it's not hard to understand why these once top secret files continue to fascinate. And it's not just because of all the fun drawings and 80s clip art. No, it's because they tell the story of a lost treasure of sorts. A tiny covert government op and alleged Psychic powers to boot. It's like a Dan Brown novel met up with an X Files episode, only it's nonfiction. This actually happened not all that long ago. On December 5, 1988, somewhere inside Fort Meade, a trained remote viewer sinks into their chair, trying to concentrate. They are identified only as number 032. From a separate room, an operations officer watches. His name is Major Edward Dames. He once trained to be a remote viewer under Ingo Swann, the preeminent American psychic who coined the term remote viewing. Now Ed has become the teacher, passing along everything he's learned and guiding the session along. So what exactly are they trying to do here? The idea is that a viewer can sit in one place and psychically transmit their consciousness elsewhere. If all goes to plan, they should be able to travel the world unseen. In remote viewing, only the mind moves. It's like gaining the powers of teleportation and invisibility all at once. That is, if it works. See, Ed Dames and viewer32 are part of Project Sunstreak. Their mission is to collect intelligence for the Department of Defense by tapping into those psychic abilities. Sure, it might sound like a long shot, but. But just think. If the team is successful, the US Government would have an unstoppable team of psychic spies at their disposal. They could eavesdrop on anybody, anywhere, gain special access that even the most elite soldiers could only dream of. In minutes, a remote viewer could visit a faraway Russian naval base or peek inside a locked file cabinet. They would be unhampered by distance, walls, security systems, and even other psychic spies. Again, that's if it works. You wouldn't be alone in thinking this stuff is not real. But keep this in mind. There have been just enough successes to keep the project alive for years. Today is meant to be a routine training run, an exercise to keep viewer 32 mentally sharp, and a test so that Ed can determine how their skills are coming along. Here's how today's session plays out. Ed provides the viewer with a set of coordinates, longitude and latitude. The viewer, ideally has no idea where they lead. Only Ed knows. He even uses encrypted coordinates to ensure that nobody can cheat by memorizing a map. The whole point is to see if the viewer travels to the right place. During these training runs, an officer typically chooses the location of a well known landmark. Someplace that's easy to describe. The Great Pyramid of Giza, for example, or the Eiffel Tower. That way, he can judge the accuracy of what the viewer sees. You know pretty quickly whether or not a Person is looking at a 480 foot royal tomb rising out of the desert. For some reason, though, Ed isn't sticking to the norm. He throws viewer 32 a curveball. The coordinates he gives today don't lead to any obvious landmark. In fact, the target isn't a structure at all. It's an object. The Ark of the Covenant. The viewer lies back. Perhaps they close their eyes, trying to focus. They're attempting to broadcast their consciousness to the coordinates Ed gave them. And then impressions start to roll in which viewer 32 relays to Ed. Colors, shapes, people, emotions they feel, anything they sense. They report. Gray, smooth, cold, dark. The words are scribbled down into the official record. Then. Heavy, solid, hollow container. Old. I don't know for sure, but I imagine Ed growing more incredulous with each new word. It sounds like the viewer is on the right track. There's more. Viewer 32 says the container is underground. It's in some place with many rooms, and it's guarded. There are people speaking Arabic, and they sense this must be the Middle East. An image comes through. Someone makes a quick sketch. It's an object, almost like a bird, with wings outstretched. A lot like the cherub statue said to adorn the Ark of the Covenant. Ed pushes further. He instructs the viewer go to the container and open it up. Describe it as you go. But viewer 32 can't complete the task. They say it can only be opened by those who are chosen, and only at the right time. If someone else were to pry the lid off, they would be destroyed. Sounds like somebody doesn't want to get their face melted off. Smart. More words are thrown around, like spiritual, important, resurrection. Finally, the session concludes an hour and a half after it began, with these three forbidden, protected, lasting. By now it must be clear to Ed that the viewer could actually be describing their intended target, as in one of the most mysterious objects in history. People have been searching for this thing for well over a thousand years, and according to Ed's notes, it's only 10:45 in the morning. I mean, what do you even do with the rest of your day when you might have found the Ark of the Covenant before lunchtime? Oh, Ark of the Covenant. I guess I'll have a little more coffee, maybe think about what I'm going to watch tonight on Netflix. Or maybe I'll just sit here and have an existential crisis about having found the Ark of the Covenant. And now I continue on with my day. Well, the declassified report that comes out 12 years later doesn't offer any of these answers. Neither do any of the other files on Project Sunstreak or its successor, Stargate. So it's honestly hard to know what to make of this discovery. We don't know what happens next. On the one hand, you could write off remote viewing as pseudoscience, and that's totally fair. That's generally how it's regarded by the scientific community. On the other hand, there are successful operations that defy logical explanation. Yeah, the team at Sunstreak is far beyond research and development at this point. They still run training sessions because practice makes perfect. But they're already well into the operations phase. Other agencies come to them requesting data on a certain target, like a plane that went missing or political hostages. They want to check on an enemy weapon they fear might be under construction. And it's a viewer's job to try to take a look, see, you know, with their mind. It doesn't work 100% of the time. Well, not even close. Well, that is, of course, if you believe it works at all. But there's got to be some reason the government spends about $20 million and 20 plus years training psychic spies, right? Over the years, remote viewers reportedly see intel in a way that science can't fully explain. Whether it's chance or skill or something else entirely, sometimes it works. But the question I want to start with is why on earth were we looking for the Ark of the Covenant in the first place?
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Carter Roy
If you are a longtime conspiracy theories fan, you might recall we once covered the topic of remote viewing, specifically the US Government's attempts to use it in psychic warfare. But since that was 2019, well, by my calculations, factoring the pandemic, that's roughly 8 million years ago, give or take. So here's a quick refresher. In 1945, at the end of World War II, American and Soviet troops are moving through Germany. Right now, they're still allies. The Cold War is waiting on the horizon. But already there's competition as the two nations start to vacuum up everything the Nazis left behind. So the troops are moving quickly. They're not being very discerning, just kind of grabbing things supermarket sweep style as they go. Later on, both countries will realize they've gone home with the work and personal writings. And of Heinrich Himmler, one of Hitler's first followers. Himmler was commander of the SS and the architect of the Third Reich's plan to murder Jewish people. He was also really into the occult. Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi research organization with a focus on the supernatural. They sought out the island of Atlantis, the Holy Grail. They dabbled in channeling spirits, astrology, even esp, or extrasensory perception, including mind reading and psychokinesis. Years later, the US and the Soviet Union are sifting through all of these papers. And while they're lacking context, they can plainly see the Nazis were putting copious resources into, well, a bunch of pseudoscience. There is some wacky stuff in there, to put it very mildly. But they don't throw Himmler's ideas out. They hang onto them. After all, the US Is busy hiring a bunch of German scientists around this time. Even if they had ties to the Third Reich, they're willing to look the other way if it means scooping up scientists who are advanced in their fields like rocketry. I suppose they also leave room for the possibility that maybe the Nazis were onto something with all of this weird science. At any rate, the psychic research gets put on the back burner for now. But it isn't forgotten. Fast forward to the early 1970s. Now we're deep in the Cold War, and there's some troubling news. The Soviets have been researching psychoenergetics, an umbrella term for a bunch of different psychic abilities. And they appear to be making headway. There's this woman named Nina Kulagina. Reportedly, she has the power of psychokinesis. She can control physical Objects using only her mind. We're not just talking about rumors either. There is footage going around. It looks like if she concentrates hard enough, she can move random items across a table. She can even stop a frog's heart. A U.S. intelligence report concludes that while the Soviets haven't perfected psychic warfare yet, they could be well on their way. They could be putting these powers to use against their enemies like the US Within a decade. Silly or not, that's all the Defense Department needs to hear. They decide they can't let the enemy outpace us. By 1972, they're already funding experiments into psychoenergetics at Stanford Research Institute. SRI in turn, recruits well known psychics like Yuri Geller and Ingo Swann. And that is more or less how we start down the path to Project Sunstreak. Step one, abscond with Nazi diaries. Step two, get into a war of one upsmanship with the Soviets. Step three, scare each other into a race to be the first to turn psychics into spies. Project Sunstreak has a few predecessors. These research initiatives change agencies and codenames over the years. There's Gondola, Wish, Grill, Flame, and Center Lane. Not bad, name wise. But eventually they zero in on remote viewing. It's a relatively cheap operation. Just a few people in a stark gray office, minimal equipment. Pretty good bang for your buck. Because some of these remote viewing operations seem to work. A downed plane that goes missing in Africa is found. A Soviet submarine, the largest ever built, is seen by an American viewer before construction is complete. A Pentagon official kidnapped abroad is recovered from a spot matching a description provided by Project Grill Flame. You might be thinking this sounds like a bunch of bs. There has to be some other explanation. All we really know, according to a report that will come years later, is hits occur more often than chance. Meaning the experiments show enough promise to keep the gears turning. Now, among all of these declassified files on Sunstreak, we came across two annual reports. One from 1986, one from 1987. Both of them claim that personnel are enthusiastic and morale is high. In fact, the same language appears in both write ups. But I'm not so sure that's how the team really feels. Which sounds a little odd. Think about it. If remote viewing can be harnessed, it would be the most invaluable spying tool we've ever known. It would let us listen in on any. Any conversation, watch the enemy plan an attack, read their top secret memos. Remote viewers would become the rock stars of the intelligence community. They'd be 0,07 squared. They'd be 0049. Except there is some drama going on behind the scenes, and it's very possible that it plays into why we go looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Okay, so let me start a couple years before Project Sunstreak is established. Skip Atwater has overseen the remote viewing program for years. He's kind of like the heartbeat of the team. It's actually Skip's idea to stop hiring people like Uri Geller, civilians who are already psychics, and start recruiting people from inside the government. His theory is far more people than we know have psychic abilities. They just need the right training. Now, I can't speak from experience here, but I have to assume that teaching non psychic federal employees to be psychic is quite a challenge. Skip's idea has some merit to it, though. A few of the new recruits seem to find their sixth sense, some faster than others. Only problem is, those viewers get saddled with most of the work. And Skip realizes one of his best viewers is totally burned out. So he comes up with an inspired solution. He sends his viewer to the Monroe Institute. It's a new agey spot where you can explore and expand your consciousness through meditation and courses. And it's still around today. And nothing against the Monroe Institute at all. But just so you have the context, its founder is known as something of a ladies man, in a sense. Robert Monroe is married, but has claimed that he has extramarital sex all the time. Oh, just not physically on the astral plane. And yes, his wife is worried about this development. Anyway, Skip sends his team member to the Institute for a little R and R and a few psychic lessons. As an added bonus, he's just trying to be a good boss. But then another person wants to go. And another. Pretty soon, going on a retreat to the Monroe Institute is the cool new thing to do. Hey, everybody. Field trip time. The program gets too popular. It's out of Skip's hands now. A new curriculum has to be built from the ground up to accommodate everyone. It's called Rapid Acquisition Personnel Training, or RAPT R A P. T. There are a lot of parts to rapt, but one thing it involves is guided meditation led by Robert Munro, the Casanova of the Astral plane. Okay, cool. Meditation is great. Oh. But they asked participants to lie naked in their beds at a federal work retreat. At some point, the CIA is called in to perform an assessment. Their conclusion is. Yikes. They strongly suggest the army sever its ties. At this time, General Albert Stubblebine is head of Army Intelligence on a personal Level. Stubblebine is interested in parapsychology and UFOs. You might already know his name because later he goes on to become a guest of the Alex Jones show and was a 911 conspiracy theorist in the 80s. He's a big supporter of the remote viewing program and he pushes back on the CIA's conclusion. He insists they will not be severing ties with Rapt. A decision that comes back to haunt him after one officer experiences a mental health crisis while on this company retreat. Stubblebine is forced to resign and his replacement swiftly cancels the entire remote viewing program in 1984. Takes a year and a half for the program to be re established. Project Sunstreak rises from the ashes, moves under the Defense Department and gets back to work on January 31, 1986. Ready to make a fresh start with six viewers and three supervisors. A mix of old and new members. So let's meet some of them, shall we? Skip Atwater comes on board as branch chief. Now a seasoned remote viewer and trainer, he's the soul of the team. His right hand man is Edward Dames, the man who will later lead the search for the Ark of the Covenant. He's straightforward, a little sarcastic, has a shaggy surfer dude haircut. Ed used to be a viewer but has recently been promoted, which means a lot of paperwork. One of the viewers is Paul Smith. When he's recruited, Paul has a lot of experience as an intelligence officer and zero experience as a psychic. But the higher ups like him because he's artistic and honestly and this is just my own assessment, I think they look for viewers who come off is a little quirky. Paul for example, he's serious about his job and he's a practicing Mormon and an alum of Brigham Young University. But he also loves heavy metal and 80s hair bands. His favorites are AC DC and Guns N Roses. Whenever he's preparing for some remote viewing, the hallways of Fort Meade echo with his music. Helps Paul get into the right headspace. Then there's Angela Della Fiora, a brand new recruit. She's a little different from her colleagues because Angela feels she really is psychic. Before all the training, as she puts it, she has a third eye. In order to get onto the team, she bucked protocol. She went around her commanding officer to plead her case to General Stubblebine before he resigned. It's considered a huge no, no. And that's not the only reason Angela's teammates look at her a little sideways. She's also considered a little woo woo even for them. I mean, sure, everybody has been hired to be a psychic. So it's a case of the pot calling the kettle strange. But the agencies who've spent years investing in these psychic experiments have all taken pains to see sound less mystical and more scientific. That's why they use words like remote viewing or psychoenergetics. They intentionally use and even invent vocabulary that sounds technical. They're trying to legitimize their work. Then along comes Angela Della Fiora, who talks about a third eye. Claims she can channel people who speak and write through her. And when she's viewing, her voice strains and shakes. She kind of sticks out like a sore thumb, even in this department. But reportedly, she's really good at her job. When Angela sits down for her first training sessions, she wins over her monitor. Operations officer Eugene Lessman is not an easy guy to impress. He was a special Forces soldier in Vietnam. His likes include talking about Vietnam. His dislikes include anything vaguely occult. As far as their sensibilities go, Angela and Gene could not be a worse match. I'm sure Jean isn't expecting much from her that day. It usually takes viewers a while before they get any clear impressions, and even longer before they start giving accurate reads. But Angela isn't like everyone else. Jean gives her the coordinates to the dish. It's a giant radio telescope on a remote trail near Stanford University. And I'm paraphrasing here, but Angela describes her target as a large open area, A green and browned landmass, A general feeling of roundness, curving. She correctly identifies the spot as isolated but easily visible. And she even says an opening or center portion of the structure appears to be of importance, with the concept of transference of things back and forth as the prime purpose. Hater or not, Gene can't believe what he's hearing. I know because he uses a lot of exclamation marks in his notes. Angela's knocking it out of the park on her first try. It doesn't seem like beginner's luck either. A few weeks later, Skip Atwater gives her a more complicated task. She has to start at one set of coordinates and psychically find her way to another structure nearby. This skill could be useful during a real operation. Viewers won't always have the exact coordinates of what they're trying to find. Sometimes they have to psychically wander around. And once again, Angela proves she can do it. She aptly describes the home of President Ulysses s. Grant in St. Louis as a monumental structure that looks like stacked logs and is associated with. With a man in a blue uniform. And then she finds her way to the St. Louis Arch, 15 miles away, Angela is hitting all of her marks. And she's doing this much faster than most of her colleagues. When operations requests roll in from different agencies, well, it's not long before Angela gets all the best assignments. Some of the other viewers, like Paul Smith, feel the pangs of jealousy. Things get a little competitive around the office. People whisper. They call Angela a witch. Some even accuse her of cheating. They just don't know how she's pulling it off. But Paul is about to have his own major breakthrough, a psychic vision that even he can't believe. It will put him back at the top of the heap alongside Angela, but it will also damage his belief in the entire system.
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Carter Roy
Paul Smith settles into a darkened room at Fort Meade. Before he can jump into remote viewing, Paul, like his co workers, has to relax. And he does that in two ways. First up, music AC DC Ah, the soothing sounds of Brian Johnson's gravelly falsetto just lulls you right to sleep, doesn't it? Second, Paul writes out a list of everything that's bothering him to clear his head, which we'll circle back to in a moment. It's now May 15, 1987, a year and a half before an unknown viewer will attempt to find the Ark of the Covenant. Earlier, Ed Dames pulled Paul aside, told him he was needed for a session. It seemed urgent, and Paul knew better than to ask any questions. Now, as he's sitting there blocking out Everything that's going wrong outside this office, images and impressions start rolling in. An acrid smell. A large Navy ship cutting through the water. And then Paul senses some kind of action. There's a loud sound, a sense that the people nearby have been blinded. He gets a bad feeling, like he's witnessing some horrible incident. After describing what he saw, Paul goes about his routine. Yes, he'd seen something troubling, but it's all in a day's work for him. Two days later, the USS Stark is hit by Iraqi missiles in the Persian Gulf, close to the coordinates Paul had viewed. 37 crew members are dead and 21 more are injured. Paul is dumbstruck. It seems like he'd not only viewed the Stark with accuracy, he'd also predicted what would happen. And nobody did anything about it. Which is extra infuriating when he takes into account that list of worries, the one he wrote about before his session. Paul has problems at home. His marriage has fallen apart. He can't stop thinking about his kids and how the separation with his wife could affect them. He can't help but feel like maybe things would be different if he wasn't putting so much of himself into his work. But he cares about doing a good job. And he did do a good job. He viewed his target accurately and even sensed that something bad was about to happen. Yet nobody did anything. If they had, maybe they could have saved 37 lives, one could argue. Well, of course, they couldn't put much stock into a premonition, but it's not an isolated event. Angela Della Fiora had also reported information that could have saved a life. Earlier that year, a Marine Corps colonel was kidnapped in Lebanon. Angela, Paul and Ed were called in to assist with the recovery attempt. A map was presented. Angela pointed out a field near a small village where she believed the officer was being held alive. But nobody acted on her insight. The colonel turned up dead months later when another hostage was released. He confirmed the spot Angela pointed to was very close to where the officer was held before his abductors killed him. Now, I'm sure it wasn't easy to just waltz into that Lebanese village in 1987. And to be fair, Paul and Ed pinpointed different locations than Angela did. So maybe the rescue mission wasn't going to act on psychic readings. Unless all of the viewers agreed on one place. How could they know Angela was right and the others were wrong? But some of the viewers are starting to wonder, what is the point of all of this? What's the point of devoting their lives to Something nobody is taking seriously. Why spend all of this time and money? Why run Project Sunstreak at all? And that's not the only issue plaguing the department. We've mentioned how Ed Dames oversees a lot of the remote viewing. Well, some of Ed's colleagues have grown a little wary of taking part in the sessions he runs. It's not that he does a bad job, it's that he doesn't always adhere to protocol. Ed's supposed to give coordinates to landmarks. The pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, etc. Well, lately he's been coming up with his own coordinates, using his top remote viewers to hunt down places and objects that may or may not even exist. Like the Ark of the Covenant or Atlantis or hidden alien bases. It's not part of their mission. It's not sanctioned. He just personally believes in finding these targets. Ed writes about looking for proof of a supreme galactic council of aliens. His paperwork logs attempts to view the site of their galactic headquarters. Keep in mind the viewers are given encrypted coordinates. They don't know where their manager is sending them or their consciousness anyway. So a viewer might report a structure or people. And Ed is drawing up reports suggesting they have found bases and humanoid aliens. In declassified notes from 1987, he writes, so far have run into three types of entities associated with bases at various locations within the solar system. He lists Mount Haze in Alaska, South America, and even on Titan, as in one of Saturn's moons. Look, Ed's not the only person at Sunstreak with an interest in aliens or supernatural objects. And nowadays belief in UAPs isn't even all that fringe, but a taxpayer funded search for the Galactic Council of Aliens. Ed goes on to become a regular fixture on the AM radio talk show coast to coast, which we love. I really don't mean to knock Ed Dames here, but the bigger picture of the story tells us a lot about the search for the Ark of the Covenant. How credible do you find those results alongside the hunt for Atlantis and a Galactic Council headquarters on Earth? And with that context, how likely is it that anybody ever followed up on any of this psychic intel if action wasn't taken on more credible cases with less life or death stakes, like the USS Stark or the kidnapped Marine Corps Colonel? My guess is nobody from inside the US Government has followed up on the Ark either. Which also means they don't know where it is or if it exists. Despite the drama, many of those involved in Project Sunstreak look back on those years with some fondness Paul Smith stays on board for a little while longer. He later joins Ed and other colleagues who start a private company. They provide their psychic assistance for several thousand dollars a week. One of their high profile clients, the United Nations. They do that job pro bono. As for Angela Della Fiora, she is still out there doing her psychic thing. You can occasionally catch her on high profile podcasts talking about her experiences on Sunstreak. And Skip Atwater retires from the team and goes on to become president of the Monroe Institute. In 1990, Sunstreak gets a new name. You've probably heard of it, Stargate. It continues to operate until 1995. That same year the public learns of its existence and five years after that the files are declassified. In her book Phenomena, author Annie Jacobson points out that the end of Stargate is not the end of government experiments with psychoenergetics. For example, in 2014 the Office of Naval Research develops a program to investigate Spidey Sense in the field. A gut feeling, that invisible guiding hand. They stress that they are not interested in the supernatural though. Uh huh. Sounds like we're still feeling the need to legitimize psychic research by making it sound like it's not psychic research. Spidey Sense sounds like psychic research. And there are others. There are probably programs running today now. Did remote viewer 32 find the Ark of the Covenant in 1988? My spidey sense says, well, maybe not. Then again, who knows? Remote viewing research has allegedly seen more than its fair share of incredible successes. As in hard to believe. But there they are in black and white in pages and pages of declassified files. They couldn't all just be lucky guesses, right? Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram heonspiracypod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Our sources for today's episode include include a bunch of declassified files as well as Annie Jacobson's book the Secret History of the US Government's Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Until next time. Remember, the truth isn't always the best story and the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and researched by Miki Taylor, edited by Justin Sayles, fact checked by Sophie Kemp and Engineered Video edited and sound designed by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds, fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story, and when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com.
Podcast: Conspiracy Theories
Episode: The Psychic Search for the Ark of the Covenant
Host: Carter Roy (Spotify Studios)
Date: May 13, 2026
This episode explores the astonishing true story of "Project Sunstreak," a secret U.S. government program in which trained "remote viewers"—psychic operatives—allegedly attempted, in 1988, to psychically locate the legendary Ark of the Covenant. Host Carter Roy unpacks the origins, controversial results, and strange legacy of remote viewing in military intelligence, drawing from newly declassified documents, historical context, and the colorful personalities behind the psychic espionage program. The episode weaves together government secrecy, Cold War paranoia, internal intrigue, and the perpetual allure of history's greatest lost treasures.
Setting the Scene:
On December 5, 1988, inside Fort Meade, Maryland, a remote viewing operation led by Major Edward Dames and viewer "032" is underway. The target: the Ark of the Covenant, believed by some to be lost for over 2,000 years.
Remote Viewing Method:
Session Highlights:
Quote:
“It’s like a Dan Brown novel met up with an X-Files episode, only it’s nonfiction. This actually happened not all that long ago.”
— Carter Roy (05:58)
Lack of Resolution:
Historical Backdrop:
Soviet Psychic Research:
Beginning of U.S. Programs:
Project Trajectory:
Quote:
“Step one, abscond with Nazi diaries. Step two, get into a war of one-upsmanship with the Soviets. Step three, scare each other into a race to be the first to turn psychics into spies.”
— Carter Roy (24:00)
Key Personnel & Drama:
Notable Successes:
Quote:
“Paul senses some kind of action... there’s a loud sound, a sense that the people nearby have been blinded.”
— Carter Roy (35:33, describing Paul’s premonition of the Stark attack)
Internal Tensions:
Ed Dames’ Rogue Targeting:
Disillusionment & Legacy:
Program Evolution and Aftermath:
Quote:
“Spidey Sense sounds like psychic research… and there are others, probably programs running today.”
— Carter Roy (45:06)
“It’s like gaining the powers of teleportation and invisibility all at once. That is, if it works.”
— Carter Roy (07:40)
“More words are thrown around, like spiritual, important, resurrection.”
— Carter Roy (13:53)
"If remote viewing can be harnessed, it would be the most invaluable spying tool we've ever known ... they'd be 007 squared. They'd be 0049."
— Carter Roy (22:15)
"[Angela Della Fiora] is hitting all her marks. And she's doing this much faster than most of her colleagues. When operations requests roll in from different agencies, well, it's not long before Angela gets all the best assignments."
— Carter Roy (31:55)
"They just don't know how she's pulling it off. But Paul is about to have his own major breakthrough, a psychic vision that even he can't believe."
— Carter Roy (33:12)
“They couldn’t all just be lucky guesses, right?”
— Carter Roy (48:00)
This episode offers a gripping, skeptical-yet-fascinated look at the intersection of belief, secrecy, ambition, and the hunt for impossible knowledge inside the U.S. government. While the psychic search for the Ark of the Covenant remains shrouded in mystery and ultimately unresolved, the story illuminates the very real human drama behind both modern myths and the enduring attraction of conspiracy theories.
"The truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth." (Carter Roy, 47:50)