Remote Viewing Memories
Remote Viewing Memories is a found-footage documentary that tells the story of Ed Dames, one of the world's leading experts on remote viewing (a psychic method of transcending space and time). Through archival interviews, infomercials and other media we follow Ed as he leaves the military in the late 80's and attempts to find success marketing his remote viewing techniques to the private sector.
2018, 23’38
About The Film
I first became aware of Psi-Tech (and remote viewing in general) while in production on my previous film No Needle, Just A Haystack. A key part of making that film required me to purchase many, many infomercials and self-help VHS tapes and I ended up obtaining something called "Psi-Tech: The Impossible Challenge." I knew by its titles alone that this tape was going to be special, and I started doing research into what PSi-Tech actually did.
The website listed on the tape was still active and it appeared that the tape itself was on YouTube. Watching it, I was initially disappointed at how brief it Mostly it was excerpts from a TV documentary about psychics and a few statements from Joni Dourif and Dane Spotts. The fact that PSi-Tech was a psychic training organization was interesting, but the tape itself was fairly lackluster (at this point I was still mostly interested in using it as B-Roll in No Needle). So the tape sat on top of my VHS pile, unwatched.
After doing a lot of research I realized there was an amazing backstory of love, loss and betrayal that was even more interesting than the powers Ed claimed he had. And with so much archival footage readily available, I quickly realized I had more than enough material to tell the story.
I tried, unsuccessfully, to get in contact with the the subjects of the film early in process to see if anyone would be interested in being interviewed, but now realized I didn't need any new footage to complete the film. Several months later I was digitizing a bunch of material and decided I should digitize the Psi-Tech tape too, incase I had missed something. Immediately I noticed that there was a lot more material on this tape than what I had seen online - and that Dane Spotts hadn't always been the owner / main guru of PSi-Tech. This tape featured hours of interviews with Ed Dames that had been removed from the version online.
What struck me most was how unedited these interviews were - Dames' rambles on endlessly. It felt like I had stumbled upon raw footage, not a finished product.
As I sat at my desk using the internet for research, I eventually came to appreciate how similar what I was doing was to Dames' remote viewing technique. Both involve sitting and thinking, with the objective of gaining information. And in this context I think Dames unwittingly understood what made the internet so important in the years following him forming PSi-Tech - people like having easy access to information.
One odd I thing I came across while researching the film was that the director of a lot of Psi-Tech’s training videos was William Gazecki - who just a few years prior to working with Ed had been nominated for the Oscar for best feature documentary for Waco: The Rules Of Engagement.
I have no idea if this was a passion project for Gazecki or if it was a work for hire gig (according to court transcripts, Gazecki had trouble getting paid for the production so I'm guessing it's the latter), but it the fact that he was working for Dames just a few years after being nominated seems like a testament to how little weight an Oscar for a documentary feature carried back then.