The Men Who Stare at Goats

British journalist Jon Ronson investigates a hidden thread running through the U.S. military: a decades-long fascination with paranormal warfare that began with idealistic intentions after Vietnam and eventually mutated into disturbing interrogation practices during the War on Terror.

The book opens in the summer of 1983, when Major General Albert Stubblebine III, the U.S. Army's chief of intelligence, repeatedly attempted to walk through his office wall, reasoning that both he and the wall are made mostly of atoms and empty space. He failed every time. Convinced that such abilities would one day become standard intelligence tools, Stubblebine flew to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to pitch paranormal ideas to Special Forces commanders, including psychic healing and stopping animals' hearts by staring at them. The commanders received him with chilly indifference, and Stubblebine took early retirement in 1984. Ronson reveals a crucial fact unknown to the general: Special Forces actually considered his ideas excellent and secretly maintained about a hundred de-bleated goats in a shed just yards from the meeting.

Ronson's investigation begins in October 2001, when he meets Uri Geller, the celebrity psychic, in London. Geller claims he has been reactivated as a psychic spy but will say only that a man named Ron recruited him. This lead takes Ronson to former military psychic spies and eventually to retired Sergeant First Class Glenn Wheaton in Hawaii, who reveals Project Jedi, a secret Special Forces initiative to create supersoldiers with escalating powers culminating in the ability to stop a goat's heart by staring at it. Multiple veterans of the program give Ronson the same name as the inspiration behind these ideas: Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon.

Ronson visits Channon on his vast Hawaiian estate and finds a man nothing like a stereotypical military officer. Channon recounts his traumatic first day in combat in Vietnam, after which he concluded that soldiers are instinctively kindhearted and not natural killers, consistent with research by military historian General S. L. A. Marshall showing that most World War II infantrymen did not shoot to kill. In 1977, Channon convinced the Pentagon to fund a two-year tour of 150 new-age organizations across California. In 1979, he produced the confidential First Earth Battalion Operations Manual, proposing radical changes to military life: Soldiers would carry baby lambs, greet enemies with automatic hugs, broadcast peaceful music, practice meditation, and develop powers including walking through walls. He presented these ideas at Fort Knox to commanders still crushed by Vietnam. They were deeply moved and appointed him commander of the First Earth Battalion, his proposed experimental unit. Rather than lead it literally, Channon wanted his ideas to "float out there and take root wherever fate decreed" (50), embedding themselves so soldiers would act on them without knowing their origins.

Ronson traces how Colonel John Alexander implemented Channon's ideas, developing nonlethal weapons and recruiting Dr. Jim Hardt, a brain-training specialist, to work with Special Forces soldiers in the Jedi Warrior program using an alpha-wave machine. During sessions, Hardt telepathically detected a colonel who had suppressed joy for 20 years since college and later broke down recounting trauma from the 1968 Tet Offensive. When Ronson asks about goat staring, Alexander corrects an earlier source: The man who killed a goat by staring was not Michael Echanis but a civilian martial arts instructor named Guy Savelli.

Ronson visits Savelli at his studio in suburban Cleveland. Savelli confirms he stared down a goat at Fort Bragg, entering a meditative state and visualizing St. Michael the Archangel thrusting a sword through the animal. After 15 minutes the goat collapsed, though it later recovered. The next day, pressured to kill, Savelli could not concentrate; goat number 17, not his chosen number 16, dropped dead. At the visit's end, Savelli reveals why his family has been anxious: After 9/11, strangers from Muslim countries contacted him about his abilities, and Special Forces instructed him to treat Ronson as a potential al-Qaeda operative.

After the CIA closed the psychic unit in 1995, Major Ed Dames, one of Stubblebine's former psychic spies, began appearing on the Art Bell radio show making sensational predictions. Prudence Calabrese, a former trailer park manager and belly dancer turned aspiring remote viewer, trained under one of Dames's civilian students and psychically determined that a Saturn-shaped object near the Hale-Bopp comet was an alien vehicle. In March 1997, Heaven's Gate leader Marshall Applewhite and 38 members of his cult committed mass suicide, believing the companion object would carry them to a higher plane of existence. Their website included a link to Art Bell's site.

Ronson turns to the War on Terror. In May 2003, a journalist embedded with PsyOps (Psychological Operations) in the Iraqi town of al-Qā'im discovered that detainees were held in shipping containers, subjected to flashing lights and music including Metallica and the Barney the Purple Dinosaur theme on continuous loops. Ronson confirms with Channon that the use of music in interrogation is a legacy of the First Earth Battalion. Channon is initially thrilled but grows uneasy when pressed on the torturous applications. After the Abu Ghraib photographs emerged in 2004, showing soldiers humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners, Private Lynndie England's lawyers argued she acted under orders from military intelligence. Commander Sid Heal of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department suggests the music-and-strobe combination may exploit the Bucha Effect, a phenomenon in which strobing light interferes with brain waves to cause disorientation. Heal warns Ronson he has stumbled into dangerous territory.

Ronson interviews Jamal al-Harith, a British former Guantanamo detainee, who describes being subjected to industrial noises and a ghetto blaster at normal volume playing Matchbox Twenty, the same album played in the Iraqi shipping containers. This coincidence convinces Ronson that a deliberate program lies behind the music choices. Pursuing subliminal sound technologies, he discovers a 1992 U.S. patent for a "Silent Subliminal Presentation System" capable of silently inducing emotional states. He also learns that during the 1993 Waco siege, the FBI consulted Russian scientist Dr. Igor Smirnov about using subliminal messaging to put the voice of God into cult leader David Koresh's head. The plan collapsed when Smirnov refused to accept liability if the Branch Davidians committed suicide.

Ronson connects these experiments to MK-ULTRA, the CIA's Cold War mind-control program, through the story of Eric Olson. Eric's father, Frank Olson, a CIA scientist, fell from a tenth-floor hotel window in New York in 1953. In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission revealed that an unnamed army scientist had been unwittingly dosed with LSD as part of MK-ULTRA; Eric recognized his father. Decades of investigation led Eric to conclude that Frank was murdered: He had worked for Artichoke, a brutal CIA interrogation program, witnessed its horrors in Europe, and tried to resign. A pathologist who later exhumed the body found skull damage consistent with a blow rather than a fall.

Ronson reflects that Channon's ideas, born from Vietnam-era trauma, resonated with depressed military leaders but were eventually weaponized to "shatter people rather than heal them" (243). In the book's final sections, Ronson reports that General Pete Schoomaker, appointed army chief of staff in 2003, has been meeting privately with Channon. An anonymous source reveals that Special Forces are training in remote viewing, a technique for psychically perceiving distant targets, to locate enemies in the field. Skip Atwater, Stubblebine's former psychic headhunter, confirms that while the CIA can truthfully say the old program has been closed, that is "not the whole truth" (247). Guy Savelli reports that Fort Bragg wants to deploy him as leader of a Warrior Monk unit in Iraq, using staring techniques not to kill but to confuse prisoners into surrendering information. Savelli promises to tell Special Forces about Ronson and invite him along. After the disclosure, Savelli stops returning Ronson's calls.