Pod Insights Conspiracy Theories The Psychic Search for the Ark of the Covenant About this episode In 1988, a covert team operating within the Defense Intelligence Agency sought out the legendary Ark of the Covenant. Only, their search didn’t take them out in the field, Indiana Jones-style. Project Sun Streak sought out the lost relic using Remote Viewing – the reported ability to transmit one’s consciousness elsewhere. According to declassified documents… it seems like they may have located it. But how reliable are these reports? And why was the US government funding the search, anyway?
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Transcript 0:06 Speaker 00 5 de diciembre de 1988 y un equipo top secreto operando dentro de un espejo dentro de la agencia de inteligencia de defensa está en la búsqueda. En algún lugar en el mundo, profundo, bajo la tierra. Puede que hayan solo iniciado en la ubicación de un artefacto perdido. El legendario Arco de la Covenia. Ahora, las historias sobre el arco varían en sus detalles, pero aquí están las bases. El Antiguo Testamento dice que Dios ordenó a Moisés para construir esta caja sagrada. Le dio especificaciones exactas: acacia de hierro, plástico en oro, dos y medio cubitos de largo,
0:47 Speaker 00 así que un poco más de tres y medio pies, y dos estatuas de cerobos dorados alrededor. El Arco de la Covenia continúa sirviendo a algunos propósitos divinos, incluyendo la alojamiento de los Diez Comandos y, bueno, si sabes que el raíz es un arco perdido, también puede tener propiedades que calentan el rostro si cae en las manos equivocadas. Dependiendo de lo que creas, el Arco de la Covenia desapareció hace 2000 años o nunca existió en absoluto. Ese es uno de los misterios que este equipo espía tratar de resolver. El otro, si o no la vista remota es real. La partida de búsqueda trabaja bajo el proyecto Sunstreak
1:32 Speaker 00 y la persona que busca el arco ahora no está fuera en el campo. Están sentados en un recliner dentro de un edificio de oficina en Fort Meade, en Maryland. Físicamente, no van a ningún lado. Psíquicamente, están iluminando su consciencia a la mitad por el mundo. Así es como están tratando de encontrar este relique perdido. Y según los archivos desclasificados de ese día, parece que lo han encontrado en realidad. Las notas de esa sesión de vista remota y tantas más se han liberado al público 12 años después. No solo revelan la búsqueda del Arco de la Covenia,
2:14 Speaker 00 también cuentan una historia mucho mayor que es casi demasiado bizarra para ser creído.
2:21 Speaker 00 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 bases. 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, at the conspiracy pod. 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 Petivity.
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4:59 Speaker 00 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.
5:41 Speaker 00 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 5th, 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.
6:26 Speaker 00 He once trained to be a remote viewer under Ingo Swan, 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.
7:10 Speaker 00 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 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.
7:53 Speaker 00 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 Viewer32 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.
8:35 Speaker 00 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.
9:18 Speaker 00 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.
10:03 Speaker 00 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 someplace with many rooms, and it's guarded.
10:44 Speaker 00 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.
11:25 Speaker 00 If someone else were to pry the lid off, they would be destroyed.
11:32 Speaker 00 It 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 words: 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.
12:17 Speaker 00 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 gonna 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.
13:02 Speaker 00 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
13:46 Speaker 00 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 this.
14:31 Speaker 00 Why on earth were we looking for the Ark of the Covenant in the first place?
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15:40 Speaker 00 If you're 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.
15:52 Speaker 00 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
16:36 Speaker 00 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 Ananerba, 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 Extracentric Perception, including mind-reading and psychokinesis. Years later, the US and the Soviet Union are sifting through all of these papers. And while
17:21 Speaker 00 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 on to 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
18:00 Speaker 00 that maybe the Nazis were on to 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.
18:21 Speaker 00 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, and 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 US intelligence report concludes that,
19:05 Speaker 00 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 Swan. And that is more or less how we start down the path to Project Sunstreak. Step one: Epsom on Nazi diaries.
19:50 Speaker 00 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 code names over the years. There's Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, and Center Lane.
20:17 Speaker 00 Not bad name wise, but eventually they zero in on remote viewing. It's a relatively cheap operation, just a few people and 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.
21:01 Speaker 00 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, quote, "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.
21:41 Speaker 00 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 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 007 squared, they'd be 0049.
22:20 Speaker 00 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 of 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 Yuri 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.
23:02 Speaker 00 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.
23:48 Speaker 00 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.
24:11 Speaker 00 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.
24:53 Speaker 00 There are a lot of parts to RAPT, but one thing it involves is guided meditation led by Robert Monroe, the Casanova of the astral plane. Okay, cool. Meditation is great. Oh, but they ask 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.
25:36 Speaker 00 You might already know his name because later he goes on to become a guest of the Alex Jones Show and was a 9/11 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.
26:18 Speaker 00 Takes a year and a half for the program to be reestablished. 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.
27:00 Speaker 00 He's straightforward, a little sarcastic, and 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 as 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,
27:42 Speaker 00 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 De La 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
28:27 Speaker 00 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 "sound less mystical and more scientific." And that's why they use words like "remote viewing" or "psychoenergetics." They intentionally use and even invent vocabulary that sounds "technical."
29:10 Speaker 00 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 Lesman is not an easy guy to impress. He was a Special Forces soldier in Vietnam. His likes include talking about Vietnam.
29:54 Speaker 00 His dislikes include anything vaguely occult. As far as their sensibilities go, Angela and Gene could not be a worse match. I'm sure Gene 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. Gene 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
30:38 Speaker 00 and browned landmass, a general feeling of roundness, curving."
30:46 Speaker 00 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. 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
31:31 Speaker 00 structure nearby, and 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 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.
32:14 Speaker 00 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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34:00 Speaker 00 Paul Smith settles into a darkened room at Fort Meade. Before he can jump into remote viewing, Paul, like his coworkers, 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? Now, second, Paul writes out a list of everything that's bothering him to clear his head, which, uh, well, 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.
34:41 Speaker 00 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.
35:24 Speaker 00 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.
36:07 Speaker 00 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.
36:52 Speaker 00 One could argue, well, of course, they couldn't put much stock into a premonition, but it's not an isolated event. Angela De La 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.
37:33 Speaker 00 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.
37:47 Speaker 00 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's taking seriously? Why spend all this time and money? Why run Project Sunstreak at all?
38:30 Speaker 00 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.
39:15 Speaker 00 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.
39:45 Speaker 00 Now, 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 Hayes in Alaska, South America, and even on Titan, as in one of Saturn’s moons.
40:30 Speaker 00 Look, Ed is 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
41:14 Speaker 00 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 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.
41:40 Speaker 00 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 De La Fiora, she is still out there doing her psychic thing.
42:20 Speaker 00 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, "Phenomenon," author Annie Jacobson points out that the end of Stargate is not the end of government experiments with psychoenergetics.
43:04 Speaker 00 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? It sounds like psychic research. And there are others, and there are probably programs running today. Now, did remote viewer 32 find the Ark of the Covenant in 1988?
43:46 Speaker 00 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 @TheConspiracyPod.
44:30 Speaker 00 If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Our sources for today's episode include a bunch of declassified files, as well as Annie Jacobson's book, "Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. 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 Mickey Taylor, edited by Justin Sales, fact-checked by Sophie Kemp, and engineered, video-edited, and sound-designed by Alex Button.
45:15 Speaker 00 I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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45:56 Speaker 03 Streaming October 30th on Paramount+.
45:59 Speaker 06 I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you.
46:04 Speaker 03 You're having a midlife crisis.
46:06 Speaker 06 I'm not ready for that.
46:07 Speaker 07 He's back.
46:08 Speaker 06 I'm older. I'm wiser.
46:12 Speaker 07 And sharper than ever.
46:13 Speaker 06 Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything.
46:21 Speaker 07 Dexter: Resurrection. New season October 30 on the Paramount Plus Premium Plan.
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