More than 40 people filled the James A. Gilmartin Community Room at Hamburg Area High School on Thursday, Nov. 6 for the Hamburg Area Historical Society meeting. This month’s meeting featured Tilden Twp. resident Dale E. Graff speaking about his military and intelligence activities as a civilian physicist with the Department of Defense.
Tuesday is “Veteran’s Day. It gives us an opportunity to acknowledge the contributions of the men and women in the armed services,” began Graff at the meeting. “Now, I have not been in the military, I am a civilian. But 30 years of my professional career was with a military organization.”
Graff’s program, entitled “Beyond Boundaries: Shadow Wars and Stargate,” began with him explaining that there would be two parts to the night, the conventional and the unconventional. He began with the conventional.
Beginning in 1964, Graff was tasked with assessing and writing reports on Soviet Union aircrafts and missiles. He would have to use reverse engineer work from satellite photos and data to decipher what was in the shadows. At one point his tasks included updating a huge database and getting information out to the pilots as soon as possible. Part of that was putting together a comprehensive briefing that illustrated all the air force tactics so that pilots could be prepared.
One of his missions while at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii which dealt with aircraft flight path analysis had an indirect link with CMSG Richard Etchberger’s mission in Laos.
“Our main objective was that airplanes go up there and then they got back safely,” said Graff.
After Graff went to the Defense Intelligence Agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., he received an assignment that involved going to Moscow, USSR. He believes that he was one of the names on a very short list for this assignment since he never quite fit into the city life and preferred to be out in the country when he had time.
“This was part of a clandestine CIA-State Department task to find the bugs, and I don’t mean roaches, in the new Soviet US Embassy,” he explained. “Now, anytime you’re connected with the CIA, you have to have a cover. I was going in as part of the Seabees. There were five of us.”
As part of a construction crew that was helping to supervise the building of the embassy, Graff and the four others worked for four months at night x-raying the floors square inch by square inch to find bugs. Graff showed a photo of a sketch of the various bugs that were found during this mission and the embassy was eventually knocked down and a new one built.
The second part of Graff’s program was on the unconventional track which included Extrasensory perception (ESP) and remote viewing.
“In the intelligence community there are opportunities to include unconventional theories,” he explained.
After experiencing something that Graff sensed was impossible, but happened, he began researching ESP which led to initiating the Stargate project which was the government program for research and application of the mental ability referred to as remote viewing, an aspect of ESP.
The project assisted in locating a missing airplane that was found around the area predicted which was 80 miles from the search area, locating hostage Brigadier General James L. Dozier which involved being correct on the description of his location including being in a tent and a lighthouse, and locating fugitive Charles Frank Jordan. These were just three of the cases.
After 25 years the program was shut down. Graff did publish two books on the topic and was interviewed for a documentary on the Stargate Project which was run in an article earlier this year.
“It’s now 20 years after Stargate and I really ask myself ‘Was the program worthwhile? Did I devote a good chunk of my professional career to some fantasy or was this really worthwhile?'” he explained. Though he has wrestled with the question, he believes it was worthwhile.
At the end of the program, Graff asked for all veterans to stand and they received applause from the audience. He also asked that they contact him as he is interested in hearing their stories and is in favor of preserving our past for our future.
