Journeys of a Psychic Army Spy

Trained by the U.S. military in the art of mentalist warfare, a clandestine intelligence agent travels the world and unlocks state secrets, all without leaving his desk chair.

Illustrations by Onsmith

On the morning of May 15, 1987, Paul H. Smith, a robust thirty-four year old captain in the U.S. Army’s Psychic Espionage Unit, Center Lane (later known as Stargate), lay down in an all-gray room in Fort Meade, Maryland, and relaxed his mind by listening to music. Twenty minutes later, in a different gray room, he listened as his colleague, Ed Dames, recited a series of random numbers that represented a military target. Within minutes, he was no longer seeing the walls or the table or Dames. He was now somewhere else.

“I perceived a large metal object, like a warship at night in a large body of water,” he says. “I saw an aircraft that dropped a metal object that started flying. I heard noises like clanging sounds and people screaming, and I saw smoke and fire and water. It was very chaotic.”

For about an hour, Smith drifted in a reality that was beyond normal comprehension, seeing flashes of images, hearing snippets of sounds and feeling the terror of an event th…