Good read!

I've been wanting to read 'The Men Who Stare at Goats' for ages, mainly because i love the title and also because i really enjoy Jon Ronson's work.

This is my second Ronson book after 'The Psychopath Test' and I feel that it is a bit weaker. The book is part research, part speculation and part conspiracy theory. There is also a lot of funny, goofy and outright ridiculous stories such as military people trying to walk through walls, killing goats by staring at them or psychics trying to predict future terrorist attacks. The narrative goes everywhere from the psychic experiments in the army in the 1970s to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and to Project MK Ultra.

The book is pretty much based on interviews with four people: Lieutenant Jim Channon the author of the First Earth Battalion Operations Manual, the martial arts instructor Guy Savelli, military intelligence general Albert Stubblebine and Eric Olson, the son of chemist Frank Olson who died in mysterious circumstances as part of a CIA related incident. Other people are mentioned but these are the main ones.

All in all the book is quite funny and an enjoyable read but jumps around quite a bit. It feels like there are about 3-4 different narratives thrown in together and the connections between them are strenuous at best. It's probably deserves 2 stars but I bumped to 3 stars due to the quirkiness.

3.5 stars

Some interesting and in some cases harrowing stories, but Ronson’s usual desire for the big claim – the grand wild narrative – leads to some pretty bold assertions that really aren’t supported.

Taken with a pinch of salt and on a case by case basis, it’s still worthwhile.

One of the poorest books I've ever met.
Tons of crazy and clumsy (even idiotical...) characters, a teased tepid action, an awkward sense of humor, I've felt punished reading it.
After reading garbage like this one, ecologists should take a stand in order to defend the forests...

Ronson was always ahead of the curve investigating topics before they became mainstream. Extremism, conspiracy theories, military overreach, among others. It's good to be reminded of what journalism used to be like.

Brilliantly entertaining, shockingly insightful, and incredibly real.
I had to reaffirm multiple times throughout reading this book that it was in fact a non-fictional, investigate piece and not a parody.
There are moments so surreal that I laughed out loud, then the realization sets in that this is: at the very least testimony of high ranking US military staff, at the very most the tip of the iceberg for a very real and *very* strange faction within the US military.

I think a lot of that can be put down to Ronson's writing. His pacing and conversational presentation is masterfully done - this is truly an exemplar piece of long-form journalism. The subject matter helps to keep the ride page turningly entertaining however Ronson has excellently taken his years of source material into an incredibly digestible, informative and completely eye-opening format. He knows perfectly how to build up a comedic punchline with pure, bizarre fact or how to shock you with the sudden reality of certain practices that happen right under our noses.

This may be nearly 2 decades old now but some of its more brutal depictions still feel very unavoidably horrific.
What does it mean for the US military of today? Under the current leadership have strange yet somewhat wholesome philosophies and methodologies been abstracted and twisted further into vile, inhumane practices? I would love to know.
The Men Who Stare At Goats 2, Jon Ronson? Anyone?

I think this book actually is very funny, with a lot of 'maybe it's true, or maybe not so true' interesting information and details in it.

The book also points out how easily it can be for us to fall under the control of powerful suggestions, mind-control and other shit. People, be alerted!

added thoughts after re-reading@14/01/2015

I still think the author has a healthy sense of humor and the story is funny, but once the author starts telling us how music can be used to torture war-prisoners and terrorism-suspects, and how the army/government would assassinate people/eyewitnesses in order silence them...things really become very un-funny. *shivers*

re-reading@25/08/2018: I still really enjoy this book very much!!! And...just look at this trailer!!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC2Tz...

Jon Ronson takes us on a wide-ranging look at the U.S. military's various dalliances with the paranormal: from remote viewing to cloudbusting to subliminal messaging to... yes, trying to stop the hearts of goats by staring at them. I first listened to this as an audiobook, because Ronson's delivery is entertaining and dryly comedic. His voice also imbues his journalistic questions with a plaintive, beseeching cast that one might not perceive while reading. However, when I went to write a review, I realized that I couldn't explain how these various stories were connected, and I wanted to embed them more indelibly in my head anyway, so I re-read the physical book.

The narrative is structured around a wild cast of characters that Ronson manages to corner: mostly former but also current members of the U.S. military and intelligence. There's a pattern: Ronson gets someone to share freely until they hit some wall of "I shouldn't be telling you this" or accidentally share something they didn't want to tell him. He'll then press, perhaps squeeze another detail or two, and hopefully catch the name of someone else involved that he can similarly pursue. The person who starts him on this journey is the unlikely (and yet, irritatingly likely) Uri Geller. You may remember him as a famous [and fake] spoon bender, who had bragged in various outlets about aiding the U.S. military as a psychic spy in the early 70s. When Ronson presses him in 2001, soon after 9/11, Geller admits that he's been "reactivated" by someone named Ron.

When Ronson talks to Major General Albert Stubblebine III (the guy who tried to walk through a wall as depicted by George Clooney in the film adaptation) about this, Stubblebine simply admits, "Yeah, I know Ron", and laments that psychic spies should keep their damn mouths shut. We never get to the bottom of who Ron is, but Stubblebine mentions Mike Echanis, supposedly the guy who can stop a goat's heart by staring alone, and who was also behind the ubiquitous "Be all that you can be" recruitment jingle. Ronson can't talk to Echanis because he's dead, likely from being run over by a jeep in a display of bravado.

He does find Jim Channon, a retired Lieutenant Colonel who founded the "First Earth Battalion", a group tasked after Vietnam with finding non-lethal ways to win over enemies and usher forth a hippie's vision of world peace and unity. The group produced an illustrated operations manual that taught such techniques as "sparkly eyes" for disarming others with a gaze, and mystifying enemies with noises and holograms. Its super soldiers would be vegetarians, sense plant auras, walk through walls, bend metal with their minds, and walk on fire. This vibe clashed as much as you might imagine with military culture, but the program's efforts would yield wide-ranging and unexpected effects.

Another source for Ronson is the well-connected Col. John Alexander. He wouldn't answer about Ron, but denied that Echanis was the goat-starer: he said that honor went to Guy Savelli. Ronson tracks down Savelli, who is teaching martial arts and dance in a strip mall. He agrees to having killed the goat, but his only evidence is a VHS tape of him momentarily disorienting a hamster. Supposedly the other tape of a hamster dying is too intense to show. So much of this reminded me of tests of the paranormal I've participated in: the reality never quite matching up to the bold claims. In a similar story, one vaunted soldier is rumored to have psychically drawn a key to a long-bolted door. Ronson finds out that the soldier actually just picked the lock, but didn't want to ruin a good story. As far as I can tell, that's the real common thread in all these tales: the eternal motif of people buying into hype. These just happen to be military people, so their beliefs shape life-and-death situations... and world events.

For example, Stuart Heller, another top "First Earth Battalion Guy", unknowingly trained two of the 9/11 hijackers. Military psychic and remote viewer Ed Dames went on Art Bell's show to make drastic claims about cataclysmic events (none of which, thankfully, came true). One of his students, Courtney Brown, also appeared on Coast to Coast and promoted a doctored image of a Saturn-like object accompanying the Hale-Bopp comet, warning of an alien intelligence that inhabited it. Little did he know this hoax would inspire 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult to kill themselves in anticipation of ascending to join the object.

"PsyOps" also played a significant role in the Iraq war, especially when it came to interrogation techniques. Most of us remember the news story about Barney the Dinosaur's "I Love You" song being played on loop as a form of torture. Another major news item, the horrendous photos of U.S. soldiers sexually abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib, is revealed here to have been directed by PsyOps folks "higher up", and was not just the result of bored soldiers getting their jollies. Similarly, devout Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo were smeared with the menstrual blood of prostitutes, or exposed to subliminal sounds accompanying a playlist of contemporary music. This last piece of information becomes a real mystery for Ronson, who has a really hard time getting anyone to be specific about whether subliminal audio messages were used (let alone how they would work). This also played out in world events, with the siege at Waco featuring blasted music inspired by PsyOps and the work of a Russian experimenter named Igor Smirnov, who was recruited to transmit the "voice of God" directly into David Koresh's head. This last plan was scrapped, but Charlton Heston would have played God. All of this was quite dark, often disastrous, and a far cry from the hippie-like intentions of the First Earth Battalion.

The U.S.'s experiments with torture and undue influence had a darker antecedent: MK-ULTRA. The stuff of conspiracy theories (but actually true), MK-ULTRA (and its torture-focused sister project, Artichoke) was a 1953-1963 program that sought to create super soldiers (à la The Manchurian Candidate) and to exert mind control and elicit forced confessions. MK-ULTRA experimented with drugs, and the program's director Sidney Gottlieb even recruited magician John Mulholland to teach his agents how to slip substances into peoples' drinks and food. This happened to one of the agency's own agents, Frank Olson, who was unknowingly given LSD in 1953 (that's right, we have the CIA to thank for introducing LSD to the U.S.) in order to extract a confession. He knew too much about Project Artichoke and was threatening to tell the press: he was killed soon thereafter. The cover-up involved in this murder became the obsession of his son, Eric Olson. Ronson connects with Eric and tells his story in the order it was revealed to him. I was very impressed by the concise and cohesive delivery of this complicated take, having read much about it elsewhere. For an incredibly thorough treatment, read Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer, and for a tediously drawn-out documentary telling, see Wormwood on Netflix.

Reading The Men Who Stare at Goats drove me to finally watch the 2009 star-studded film adaptation. It's fine, but not a replacement for the book. It doesn't share any of the interesting real-world connections, though it preserves fun elements such as walking through walls, cloudbusting, goat-staring, "sparkly eyes", and even a menacing plastic weapon called "the predator", through characters loosely based on the ones in the book following a newly invented plot line. One particularly fun nod is the mention of a "real-life Obi-Wan Kenobi" (Ed Dames is called this in the book) by Ewan McGregor, who had recently played Obi-Wan in the Star Wars prequels.

The book is a worthwhile read, full of humor and fascinating stories-behind-the-stories I'll be telling at many cocktail parties to come.

The subject matter of this book is fascinating. It explores the US military's research into decidedly strange fighting and reconaissance techniques: psychic warfare (as in, soldiers using psychic powers to stop the enemy in its tracks), remote viewing, you name it. It starts out fairly lighthearted: look at what happens when you give some whackadoos in the government money to try to walk through walls! There's a serious side to it, though; out of some of the same minds that came up with the more out-there techniques of psychic warfare, came some of the psychological techniques that are being used to manipulate and torture prisoners and insurgent populations.

The execution leaves something to be desired. For one, Ronson is aware that there is both an amusing and a serious side to his research, and points this out from time to time, but Ronson does not work to somehow make these two aspects of the stories he tells play off each other, or to reconcile these two aspects of the subject matter. Instead, the tone of the book is simply wildly uneven, sometimes switching from dead serious to satirical and jokey in the same page or two. The book is also quite rambling, and the overall impression is that it's a series of journalistic articles he wrote, which he then strung together into a book. It just struck me as lazy writing. Still interesting, though.

This fell a little flat for me. Despite Jon Ronson's writing being approachable and not without humour, despite here him investigating an apparently interesting subject and putting in a lot of research, despite having enjoyed two other books of his about psychopathy and social media shaming, this was a bit disappointing.

I put this down to the subject, not the author. A book about the US military/authorities attempts to harness psychology in terms of warfare and covert operations etc. did 'on paper' sound interesting to me. However I am not that concerned about conspiracies, about the morality or immorality of authority, and I don't waste much effort assuming there are things being hidden from me by those in power. A lot of the aspects of what is discussed here just sound utterly misguided and stupid when examined, and in the end it all came over like the author wrote a book about a small number of people who for a time believed crackpot theories. A bit like someone telling you about this thing they once heard from a bloke down the pub...

I hardly ever read non-fiction, I don't know why. I often enjoy non-fiction more than fiction. Maybe it's because I *write* fiction myself. I do occasionally read history books, but rarely cover to cover. This one is an exception: but it's not just history, it's also investigative journalism of the highest calibre.

This astonishing book tells the recent history of US Military psychic warfare, a very shady area that overlaps with PsyOps (psychological warfare), Black Ops (secret assassination squads, etc), MK-ULTRA (hallucinogenic warfare), The First Earth Battalion (using peace and mysticism as weapons) and other kinds of unorthodox military strategies. Most of Ronson's book is mind boggling. Attempts to walk through walls, to stare goats to death and to extract information from detainees by playing Fleetwood Mac albums are just some of the ideas actually practised by Special Forces in a bizarre attempt to gain an advantage for the US war machine.

What a nutty, nutty read. The first few chapter were sooo good. Then it kinda trailed off into this "CIA kill people and lie about things." I understand that "this is not a funny book and it not meant to be so let's have some chapters that tells you why you shouldn't find this kind of lunacy funny." Still. Very good and wacky and everything else.