http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/111609a.html consortiumnews.com Facts Behind 'Men Who Stare at Goats' By Lisa Pease November 16, 2009 Can people really influence the physical world with thought alone? And   if so, dare we use that power for evil, instead of good? Or will the   effort come back to haunt us? That is the quandary posed by the film “The Men Who Stare at Goats,”   and, even more so, by the book of the same name that inspired the film. First, run — do not walk, do not pass Go — to the theater to see “The   Men Who Stare at Goats.” Films that are both hilarious and   intelligent, provocative yet madcap, are hard to come by. And because this film teaches us, in a wildly entertaining manner,   about recent military and intelligence history, I have a feeling   certain people will work hard to rush this movie right back out of the   theaters. So see it before showings of it, like some of the characters   in the film, disappear. The film presents a largely fictitious story _base_d on all-too-real   projects and programs conducted by various agencies of the government.   Very little of it is literally true, yet many of the stranger events   in the film happened in a manner similar to the one portrayed. The film presents a story of a journalist, played by Ewan McGregor who   – to prove his manliness to his ex-wife – finds a way into Iraq to   cover the war there by hitching a ride with military man Lyn Cassidy,   played by George Clooney. Clooney claims to be on a military assignment. But Clooney’s mission   turns out to have been self-assigned, due to a vision. He felt a former mentor, a man who brought New Age religion to the   post-Vietnam Army and helped spawn a wave of activity that   unfortunately led to the “dark side” of new and improved ways to   torture people and turn their minds to putty, had called him   psychically. Cassidy doesn’t know his mission, but trusts he’ll figure   it out when he arrives. That through-line is entirely fictional. Journalist Jon Ronson, on   whose book of the same name the film is loosely _base_d, did not go to   Iraq. George Clooney’s character is a composite. The character that   Kevin Spacey plays is the nearly entirely fictitious. And yet, there really was a man who stared a goat to death, or so it   appears. There really was a project within the Army, called Project   Jedi, to create soldiers with superpowers. There really is a device   called the “Predator” which looks like a toy yet can be used to   inflict incredible pain. And there really was a man similar to the character portrayed by Jeff   Bridges. His real name is Jim Channon. Walking Through Walls The film opens with a Major General trying to walk through a wall.   According to Jon Ronson, the source of this incident was a real life   Major General himself, Albert Stubblebine III. We are, after all, simply a collection of atoms, and atoms are more   space than mass. Why shouldn’t our mind have the power to rearrange,   temporarily, those spaces to allow us to pass through walls? But theory is not reality, and Stubblebine, for all his faith and   concentration, did indeed smash nose-first into his office wall in   1983. You should know that, from 1981 to 1984, General Stubblebine was   the head of the U.S. Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, with   authority over some 16,000 enlisted personnel. In that position, General Stubblebine inherited control of some of the   Army’s “remote viewers,” defined as people with the purported ability   to gather information about a distant or unseen target using   paranormal means or extra-sensory perception. According to one of the most highly regarded one of them, Joseph   Moneagle, the remote viewers served clients in the CIA, DIA, Secret   Service, Naval Intelligence Command, the NSA, the National Security   Council, the FBI, the ATF, and the DEA, among others. Despite the ever-present “giggle factor,” clearly, something of value   was being produced, or at least some influential officials in the U.S.   intelligence agencies must have thought so. General Stubblebine became so convinced of man’s psychic nature that   he appealed to the Special Forces program leaders at Fort Bragg to   pursue programs in psychic healing (for teams without access to   medical facilities). His suggestion was met with silence. How about investigating the probability that time was simply another   axis in space and that we should be able to travel through space in   past and future time as easily as we traveled through space in the   present time. More silence. The General then suggested that soldiers could be trained to burst   hearts with thought, and suggested experimenting on animals. While overtly the Special Forces evinced no interest in General   Stubblebine’s suggestions, they did, indeed, have a set of 300 goats   in a shed just a few yards away that had been de-bleated, to keep   their presence on the _base_ covert. At “goat lab,” the goats were de-bleated, apparently to hide their   presence from the local ASPCA, as the goats were shot up and then   surgically repaired there as part of a medical training program. And   the lab really was originally called “dog lab”, but people became too   attached to the dogs. For whatever reason, people do not seem to form emotional attachments   as easily to goats, hence their grisly fate. And, most amazingly of   all, a man at Fort Bragg really did, it appears, eventually succeed in   mentally downing a goat. Hamster’s Death In the film, one of the character shows the journalist a film   documenting his staring his own hamster not quite to death. That   incident actually happened. Guy Savelli showed Ronson a film of   himself stunning, but not killing, his pet hamster. And, as in the film, the reason Savelli says he didn’t show the tape   of him actually killing the hamster was because his wife wasn’t sure   how Ronson would react to seeing him kill a real animal. Savelli also appears in the character of Lyn Cassidy, played by   Clooney. According to Savelli, who really does run a dance studio, he   did down a goat in this manner. He made one goat collapse by thinking   strongly about it, and apparently killed another, goat #17 (out of 30)   by accident while trying to kill goat #16 on purpose. Or so Savelli claims. Col. John Alexander has countered with the   story, sent to me and others by e-mail, that Savelli downed the goat   with a karate chop, not psychically. However, given Col. Alexander’s   background with covert operations, it’s also possible that Col.   Alexander is either telling the truth as he heard it, which may not be   the truth, or he is putting out a cover story to muddy the waters. Not one but several people told Ronson that a man had killed a goat   simply by willing it to die. So either a group was running an   operation against Ronson (or people in the military) to convince him   (or them) that goats were killed by mental power, or it really   happened. I’m not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe the   former, so I am stuck contemplating the latter. Whatever the truth about the goats, it’s no secret that Jim Channon   (“Bill Django” in the film, portrayed by Jeff Bridges) really did   envision a New Age-type army of warriors who used their powers for   peace. Channon noted that in Vietnam, most of the soldiers were   essentially good people who were not eager to kill another human being. Could this humanitarian instinct be repurposed into a new kind of   weapon? In the wake of America’s utter failure in Vietnam, the military   establishment genuinely considered alternative solutions to   traditional warfare, and gave Jim time and money to explore other   avenues for conquering the enemy. Channon sat naked in hot tubs, took seminars at the Esalen Institute,   experienced Reichian rebirthing, and talked to a man who composed   subliminal message CDs to help people lose weight and find inner   peace. (Ronson wrote that an evangelical church in America found its   donations tripled after it blasted its congregation with subliminal   sounds during the hymns.) After these explorations, Jim wrote a confidential paper to his   superiors in the Army that opened with this line: “The U.S. Army   doesn’t really have any serious alternative than to be wonderful.” Jim’s document was his “First Earth Battalion Operations Manual.” His   recommendations included approaching enemy combatants with soldiers   holding symbols of peace, like baby lambs in their arms, of greeting   people with “sparkly eyes,” and hugging the enemy. Channon was also the one who came up with the Army’s most successful   recruiting slogan of all time: “Be all that you can be.” ‘Warrior Monks’ Channon proposed a set of “Warrior Monks” who had conquered personal   lust, and designed his program to weed out sheer mercenaries. But   Channon’s suggestions were not all peaceful. Channon also proposed the   use of nonlethal weapons. Or maybe that was the influence of the document’s co-author, the   aforementioned Col. John Alexander. One of Col. Alexander’s “nonlethal” inventions was “sticky foam,”   designed to literally freeze the enemy in its tracks. This foam was   featured in a recent incarnation of “The Incredible Hulk,” the latest   Dan Brown novel The Lost Symbol, and America’s 1995 military   engagement in Somalia. Unlike the fictional application in the Hulk film, when the foam was   used in the real world to create a barrier between food and a rioting   crowd, the crowd simply waited for the foam to harden and then climbed   over it. The foam had also been used in an attempt to subdue violent prisoners   before they were moved to a new facility, however, as Ronson reported,   the practice was discontinued because the prison authorities found it   impossible to move the prisoners once the foam had solidified (begging   the question of what happened to the prisoners unlucky enough to be   the first test subjects). The foam was taken to Iraq for use on the expected Weapons of Mass   Destruction, which were, of course, never found. Another nonlethal weapon Channon/Alexander suggested was the blasting   of combatants with “discordant sounds” designed to disorient, confuse,   and sicken. This technique was used at Waco, where the FBI blasted the Branch   Davidians with discordant rock music, the sound of dentist drills,   Buddhist chants (a move protested by the Dalai Lama), dying rabbit   noises, and other strange noises that served no obvious purpose, but   which may have carried subliminal sounds. The FBI even tried to hire Dr. Igor Smirnov, who had, at the behest of   the Soviet government, blasted subliminal messages to Soviet troops en   route to Afghanistan in the 1970s telling them, “Do not get drunk   before battle.” The FBI wanted to know if Smirnov could put the “voice   of God,” directly into the mind of David Koresh. God was to be played by — and I’m not making this up — Charlton   Heston. Dr. Smirnov said it was possible, but when the FBI also wanted   him to sign something effectively taking responsibility should the   Branch Davidians end up killing themselves, Dr. Smirnoff refused to   participate. Sleep Deprivation Yet some of these theories have been put into practice, often in   sinister ways. For instance, repeated playing of songs over and over,   sometimes accompanied by flashing lights, is a method of torture that   was used in Iraq. The media laughed when it was revealed that one of the songs used to   torture captured Iraqis was the “I Love You” song from the popular   icon of children, the purple dinosaur named Barney. The media totally   avoided the far more serious fact that music, especially when played   in ways that cause serious sleep deprivation, can be horrific   instruments of torture. Songs can even, as another children’s show composer learned, provably   reduce knowledge. Ronson talked to Christopher Cerf, the longtime   composer for the beloved children’s show Sesame Street. Cerf told how   the Sesame Street team includes education researchers who test the   results of his work to see if it really helps children learn. In one case, a song he wrote provably helped kids unlearn something   they already knew. “So I figure if I have the power to suck information out of people’s   brains by writing these songs, maybe that’s something that could be   useful to the CIA for brainwashing techniques,” Cerf told Ronson. I find it profoundly disconcerting that a man tasked with writing   music to help educate children on a popular PBS show could also be   interested in helping the CIA brainwash people. Ronson’s book suggests that some of the torture methods used in the   recent wars were more similar to the infamous Nazi experiments that   tested human limits than any intelligence-gathering exercise, the   standard excuse for this war crime. Both the CIA and the military have sought to control minds — from   within and from without — for years. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the CIA conducted numerous mind-control   experiments designed in some cases to break down people’s defenses so   they would tell the truth when captured and designed in other cases to   produce operational amnesia so that the truth could never be extracted   if the agent was captured. (One wonders if the fact that these goals   were mutually exclusive seemed to bother anyone.)   The CIA experimented with drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation,   flashing lights, sleep deprivation, and other torturous techniques,   sometimes in “terminal” experiments. CIA scientists tried to completely control people’s behavior. They   discussed fragmenting minds through trauma and then rebuilding the   fragmented parts into multiple personalities that could be separately   programmed, so that personality A would not know what personality B   was doing even though both personalities shared the same body. Mind Over Matter In the late 1960s and early 1970s, studies proliferated showing that   the mind was not something simply to be broken and/or reprogrammed,   but could be used, by specially talented people, to influence the   world in a physical way. The best-selling 1973 book Supernature, by Lyall Watson, described,   among many other examples, a Soviet experiment in which a woman was   captured on film using nothing but the power of her mind to separate a   yolk from an egg after it had been broken into a saline solution in a   container six feet in front of her. In America, at the Stanford Research Institute, scientists Russell   Targ and Hal Puthoff used films of such Soviet experiments, along with   other data, to convince the CIA to invest in their studies of psychic   research. The program evolved into both remote influencing and remote   viewing experiments. The program showed conclusively that some people really do seem to   have an ability to learn things they have no direct way of knowing.   But since the results were never 100 percent accurate nor 100 percent   reproducible on demand, the program was eventually phased out, only to   resurface later from time to time under the auspices of agencies that   included, among others, the Army, the CIA, the Air Force, and NASA. One of these programs was exposed rather dramatically in 1995 on   national television when Ed Dames, a remote viewer from these   programs, discussed his work. One of the remote viewers speculated to   Ronson that perhaps the program was exposed to publicize its   “cancellation” while deeper, blacker operations continued. Most people react to the thought of man being able to use psychic   power (whether for good or evil) in one of two unfortunate ways: they   either discount it entirely, or believe it uncritically. The truth, it   appears, is likely somewhere between those extremes. Whatever the truth, this “technology” of remote viewing and remote   influencing, such as it is, has moved into the private sector. Most of   the people involved in these programs have started their own private   enterprises, selling their psychic services and offering training   programs, at a price, of course. It’s ironic that, at the same time this film has come to the fore, Dan   Brown’s latest novel also takes on the topic of the power of thought.   One of his characters describes how thoughts may actually have   discernible, if beyond miniscule, mass, and that if enough people   share the same thought, that thought attains somewhat of a critical   mass, enabling it to exert a kind of gravity over other thoughts. When you couple that with the research that shows most people appear   to have at least some psychic ability, whether they realize it or not,   perhaps we all have the power to pull this country out of its “means   justify the ends” mindset regarding torture and to move our national   mindset onto a path that enables us to more gracefully cohabitate this   planet with others. Now that’s a thought worth contemplating, with whatever power we have.   Then perhaps we could, like Clooney’s character in the “The Men Who   Stare At Goats,” experience a much needed redemption from our past. Lisa Pease is a historian and writer who specializes in the mysteries   of the John F. Kennedy era. She is also a movie buff. To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment   about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address   and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to   us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and   publishing stories like the one you just read, clickhere. 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