Very strange indeed!!! Probably the least favourite of all the Jon Ronson books I've read so far but stand alone, it's great.
Adventures into the world of the downright weird and strange american government.

Since the first time I read The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, I didn't really like the way Jon narrated his story. It felt like he's just a journalist, which he is actually, but his story somewhat felt scattered. And I honestly didn't really like, or care, about the topic. I'm a fool for wasting my precious weekend by reading this book just because my friend gave me the hard copy. A light read indeed, but yeah I could use my 3 hours reading something worth my time.

This book worked hard to earn, decisively, its crop of zero stars.

It is about what supposedly happens when new age super-abilities (flying, invisibility, the power to stop a goat's heart by staring at it...) meet the oh-so-impressive military mind.

Since the military exists to destroy people and property, guess what they experiment with in attempts to gain these powers and apply them?

Alledgedly.

All kinds of names, dates, people and conversational bits are used to 'verify' the wildly gyrating content of the book. As with all new age material, though, nothing at all is verified. Not only that, but I resent the author's ham-fisted attempts to tantalize the reader with scraps of information followed by a quick "I can't tell you any more." Completely and obviously manipulative.

The greatest mystery here is that this type of idiotic garbage ever got made into a movie. I hear it bombed and that just feels so very, very right.

I'd write more about the book, but I'm absolutely convinced they're monitoring my goodreads account...

Jon Ronson is one of my favorite writers so it was about time I got to the book that put him in the public eye. This one grew on me once his investigation grew outside the army then it became fascinating. The biggest take away for me was there are some real morons in the army and you see the paranoia of people in the intelligence services--when you sow the seeds of doubt in others, you doubt everything around you.

This book goes back and forth from hilarious to horrifying more often than Rosemary's Baby. Except that it's all true. This really touches on so many of my main interests, I don't even know where to begin. Basically, all the weird shit that just seems like fiction in a Pynchon novel turns out to be based in reality and this book does a better job of digging it all up, while being more well-researched, well-written and less sensational than any book about the US military's psychic engagements ever could be. Suffice it to say, I definitely want to re-watch the film.

Some stuff makes, actually, way too much sense for such a lightweight and lighthearted volume:
Q:
‘People have been so brainwashed by fiction… so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy thing, they think, ‘We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.’ Actually, we know nothing of this. There’s no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is like an immunization against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don’t know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they’re not cynical at all.’ (c)

The rest is better than a lot of sci-fi stuff!
I laughed my head off. Totally hilarious account of psychic escapades that either happened or didn't (but got dreamed up by a mass of people anyway!). Entertaining as Remote Viewing of 'goat-related military activity'!

Q:
The covert nature of the goats was helped by the fact that they had been de-bleated; they were just standing there, their mouths opening and closing, with no bleat coming out. Many of them also had their legs in plaster.
This is the story of those goats. (c)
Q:
Goat Lab, which exists to this day, is secret. (c)
Q:
Some of them were in there, trying to be psychic, from 1978 until 1995. (c) Okay, I can't help wondering how they distinguished between goats that died from all the stress from being debleated, plastered up and having all the creepy dudes staring at them for hours at a time?
Or, as the author put it: Q:
Perhaps the master sergeant had been staring at a particularly sickly goat? (c)

Q:
Defying all known accepted military practice—and indeed, the laws of physics—they believed that a soldier could adopt a cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls, and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. (c)
Q:
General Stubblebine is confounded by his continual failure to walk through his wall. (c)
Q:
‘Physicists go nuts when I say this!’ (c)
Q:
You have access to animals, right?’
‘Uh,’ say Special Forces. ‘Not really…’ (c)
Q:
Some nights in Arlington, Virginia, after the general’s first wife Geraldine had gone to bed, he would lie down on his living-room carpet and try to levitate. (c)
Q:
I just haven’t figured out how my space can fit through that space. I simply kept bumping my nose…. Same with the levitation.’ (c)
Q:
The way I saw it, the truth lay in one of four possible scenarios:
It just never happened.
A couple of crazy renegades in the higher levels of the US intelligence community had brought in Uri Geller.
US intelligence is the repository of incredible secrets, which are kept from us for our own good; one of those secrets is that Uri Geller has psychic powers, which were harnessed during the Cold War. They just hoped he wouldn’t go around telling everybody.
The US intelligence community was, back then, essentially nuts through and through. (c)
Q:
For all our cynicism, we apparently still invested the intelligence services with some qualities of rigour and scientific methodology. (c)
Q:
‘What’s a Jedi Warrior?’ I asked.
‘You’re looking at one,’ said Glenn. (c)
Q:
One such power was the ability to walk into a room and instantly be aware of every detail; that was level one.
‘What was the level above that?’ I asked.
‘Level two,’ he said. ‘Intuition. Is there some way we can develop you so you make correct decisions? Somebody runs up to you and says, ‘There’s a fork in the road. Do we turn left or do we turn right?’ And you go’—Glenn snapped his fingers—‘We go right!’
‘What was the level above that?’ I asked.
‘Invisibility,’ said Glenn. (c)
Q:
‘By understanding the linkage between observation and reality, you learn to dance with invisibility,’ said Glenn. ‘If you’re not observed, you are invisible. You only exist if someone sees you.’ (c)
Q:
The goats weren’t covertly herded into these buildings just so the Jedi Warriors could stare at them. (c)
Q:
Additionally, several thousand goats are currently being transformed—on a US air force base—into a weird kind of goat⁄spider hybrid. ‘ (c) I hope they aren't. Or I'm getting huge nightmares.
Q:
‘Glenn,’ I said, ‘are goats being stared at once again post-September 11?’ (c)
Q:
Maybe they simply wanted the glory for themselves in the event that staring an enemy to death became a tool in the US military arsenal … (c)
Q:
Is this the kind of idea that people routinely have in those circles? (c)
Q:
‘If you have to be by a wall with horizontal brickwork, don’t stand vertically,’ he’d tell his Green Beret trainees. ‘In a tree, try to look like a tree. In open spaces, fold up like a rock. Between buildings, look like a connecting pipe. If you need to pass along a featureless white wall, use a reversible piece of cloth. Hold up a white square in front of you as you move. Think black. That is the nothingness.’ (c)
Q:
Who would have believed that the soldier who helped inspire the jingle had such a fabulous idea of what ‘All You Can Be’ might include? (c)
Q:
The conclusion—in the words of Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman of the Killology Research Group—was: ‘there is something about continuous, inescapable combat which will drive 98 per cent of all men insane, and the other 2 per cent were crazy when they got there’.) (c)
Q:
It got so paranoid that UFO speakers would start by asking all the government spies to stand up and identify themselves. (c)
Q:
The first line read, ‘The US army doesn’t really have any serious alternative than to be wonderful.’
A disclaimer at the bottom read, ‘[This] does not comprise an official position by the military as of now.’
This was Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion Operations Manual. …
In Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion, the new battlefield uniform would include pouches for ginseng regulators, divining tools, foodstuffs to enhance night vision and a loudspeaker that would automatically emit ‘indigenous music and words of peace’.
Soldiers would carry with them into hostile countries ‘symbolic animals’ such as baby lambs. These would be cradled in the soldiers’ arms. The soldiers would learn to greet people with ‘sparkly eyes’. Then they would gently place the lambs on the ground and give the enemy ‘an automatic hug’. (c)
Q:
… fall in love with everyone, sense plant auras, organize a tree plant with kids, attain the power to pass through objects such as walls, bend metal with their minds, walk on fire, calculate faster than a computer, stop their own hearts with no ill effects, see into the future, have out-of-body experiences, live off nature for twenty days, be 90%+ a vegetarian, have the ability to massage and cleanse the colon, stop using mindless cliches, stay out alone at night, and be able to hear and see other people’s thoughts.
Now all Jim had to do was sell these ideas to the military. (c)
Q:
Nowadays he does for corporations what he did for the army: he makes their employees believe they can walk through walls and change the world, and he does it by making those things sound ordinary. (c)
Q:
‘First of all, they wouldn’t call it a meditation retreat, because retreat is a no-no word in the army. So it was called a meditation encampment. And it was hugely unsuccessful.’ (c)
Q:
Then there are the Race-Specific Stink Bomb and the Chameleon Camouflage Suit, neither of which has got off the ground yet, because nobody can work out how to invent them. (c)
Q:
‘We’re great friends. We used to have metal-bending parties together.’ (c)
Q:
‘Last week I killed my hamster.’
‘Just by staring at it?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ confirmed Guy. ...
‘So you knew it was a healthy hamster,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Guy.
‘And then you started staring,’ I said.
‘Three days,’ sighed Guy.
‘You must hate hamsters,’ I said. …
Guy jumped in his car and went off to find his home video of the hamster
being stared to death. (c)
Q:
‘get those Martian ships under NATO command. Get those Martians in through
the proper immigration processes.’ (c)
Q:
‘Our most effective products are the ones which link an unfulfilled need on their part with a desired behaviour on our part,’ he said.
There was a silence.
‘And weapons of mass destruction were not used on American forces,’ the specialist added, ‘so this leaflet may very well have been effective.’
‘Do you really…?’ I started. ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. (c)
Q:
Then Pete turned the music up loud and told me a secret, which I couldn’t hear a word of, so he turned the music back down and told me it again. (c)
Q:
This man seemed to have verified one of the world’s most enduring and least plausible conspiracy theories. For me, the idea that the government would surreptitiously zap heads with subliminal sounds and remotely alter moods was on a par with the idea that they were concealing UFOs in military hangars and transforming themselves into twelve-foot lizards. This conspiracy theory has persisted because it contains all the crucial ingredients—the hidden hand of big government teaming up with Machiavellian scientists to take over our minds like body snatchers. …
There is a very strong chance, given the history of the goat staring and the wall walking and so on, that they blasted Jamal with silent sounds and it just didn’t work.(c)
Q:
Midway through the siege—in the middle of March 1993—the sounds of Tibetan Buddhist chants, screeching bagpipes, crying seagulls, helicopter rotor blades, dentist drills, sirens, dying rabbits, a train and Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’ began to blast into the church. It was the FBI, in this instance, who did the blasting. There were seventy-nine members of David Koresh’s congregation in there, including twenty- five children (twenty-seven if you count the unborn ones). Some of the parishioners put cotton wool in their ears, a luxury that was later unavailable to Jamal at Guantanamo and the prisoners inside the shipping containers in al-Qa’im. Others apparently tried to enjoy it by ironically pretending it was a disco. …
Clive Doyle is one of the very few survivors of the fire that ended the
siege. … ‘Sometimes,’ said Clive Doyle, ‘I think that the FBI were just like idiots, and it was just chaos out there.’
(с)
Q:
The CIA also told the Olsons that in 1953 they created an MK-ULTRA brothel in New York City, where they spiked the customers’ drinks with LSD. They placed an agent called George White behind a one-way mirror where he moulded, and passed up the chain of command, little models made out of pipe cleaners. The models represented the sexual positions considered, by the observant George White, to be the most effective in releasing a flow of information.
When George White left the CIA his letter of resignation read, in part, ‘I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun…Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?’ (c)
Q:
What a brilliant cover story, he thought. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what’s the best rock to hide something under? It’s the rock called failure. (c)
Q:
Not even the most imaginative conspiracy theorist has ever thought to invent a scenario in which a crack team of Special Forces soldiers and major generals secretly try to walk through their walls and stare goats to death. (с)

Jon Ronson is a bloody mad man willing to research the most interesting topics. He will go from telling a Grand Wizard of the KKK to the head of intelligence for US Army to shove it up his jacksy. Throughout this book I once again realized why I became a social worker and not a soldier. I do not deal well with pain or super jocks who like to wrassle to prove their virility. I'm more like a nebbishy nerd who would rather read than inflict PSYOPS, physical torture and kill people in the name of freedom. However I would like to get down on the Jedi Warrior program. I am pretty sure I could cloud burst and drop goats with my mind already and growing up taking mail order ninja classes I have mastered invisibility.

Another great read from Ronson about weird people doing weird stuff.

Yet another fantastic piece from Jon Ronson. Manages to be clever and accurate while also painting very real pictures of these actual people, showing them not as caricatures but as human beings. Plus much of it is just a shit-load of fun. I love wild, spooky stuff, and it’s crazy to think that the government and military are or have at one time been sanctioned and expected to explore that. The book is definitely tinged with poignancy too, particularly when discussing how some of these “fun”, buck-wild ideas are being used to hurt people (or at the very least, were at the time of this book’s writing). But while Ronson acknowledges this with genuine care and gravitas, he manages to keep most of the book quite light-hearted. For sure a recommend! (I also recommend the movie, if you haven’t seen it hahaha)

I'm a confirmed Jon Ronson fan. Somehow I'd not got round to reading The Men Who Stare at Goats until now.

It's slightly less coherent than his best work but still contains Jon's customary knack of uncovering stories which hold up a mirror to just how bizarre life on planet Earth can be. Jon insists all that this book contains is true, and frankly it's too bizarre to be invented.

By way of example, early on we meet Major General Albert Stubblebine III in Arlington, Virginia, who is convinced he can walk through walls despite repeated failure, and a secret unit in which psyops soldiers stare at goats with the aim of killing them.

If that sounds improbable, wait until you read about Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon who, post Vietnam, set up the First Earth Battalion whose soldiers, it was proposed, would greet people with sparkly eyes and give the enemy an automatic hug. Jon Ronson draws a line from this idealism to the techniques employed at Guantanamo Bay, and the torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

It's depressing, jaw dropping, sporadically funny, and plain bizarre.

3/5

Though I've marked this book as Read, I have to confess I read less than half of The Men Who Stare at Goats, as I found it both repetitive and tedious. I enjoyed The Psychopath Test by the same author and I know many readers have also enjoyed The Men Who Stare at Goats, but the book is obviously an acquired taste. The perceived stupidity of elements within the American armed forces, particularly their willingness to embrace bizarre beliefs such as being able to kill animals, including goats by staring at them may indeed be a mildly amusing subject, but the topic is relentlessly pursued page after page, as the author meets and interviews various parties involved in these practices. Boredom soon turns to apathy as the book progresses with yet more of the same, well at least it did for me anyway.

I had this book on my radar because of a review I saw soon after it came out, long before they made the movie. But I saw the movie before I got around to buying the book. I like the movie a lot; it makes me laugh.
[later] I felt compelled to do some research while reading this book. I looked at Jim Channon's and Lyn Buchanan's websites; got Google pages full of results for "remote viewing", "PsyOps", and other terms and people; and saw that Amazon sells copies of Lyn Buchanan's and Joe McMoneagle's books, as well as what's supposed to be a printout of Jim Channon's "First Earth Battalion" report to the Army.
Any good idea can possibly be warped into something dangerous. There are always people within any large group who are willing to try anything, so I believe that people within the government and the military have considered an idea like remote viewing for their arsenals. I know how certain sounds I consider unpleasant affect me, so I believe that prisoners have been subjected to sounds or music. But there are a lot of things that no one can prove or disprove in the book. Channon, Buchanan, and others may be sincere...or they may be crazy...or they may be con artists. While there is a weird fascination factor to reading the stories of people far out in left field, we can't know if they're true; and many of the folks featured in the book are downright shifty. There are people who believe in remote viewing even though none of the visions they, or people they know, have had ever came true. There is no proof that anyone ever stared a goat--or even a hamster--to death. It's like any other matter of faith--it requires faith, because you can't prove it.
While Ronson's attempt to tie certain events to Channon's "FEB" writings is interesting, I think he spent too many pages on the mystery of what happened to Eric Olson's father. Ronson certainly showed how Eric's life had been taken over by the mystery; but the teenage bike trip story and some of the rest of it seemed more like a tangent. The end of the book sort of fizzles out.
About the movie: Consider the movie "inspired by" the book. Certain parts of the book--mostly the funnier incidents--were incorporated into the movie's plot. People's names were changed in some way; people's actions and attributes were blended to create movie characters; and events were created to further the plot. Ronson never got to tag along with anyone on a trip to Iraq and never engaged in any daring escape attempts.