Although I normally enjoy Ronson's writing, this was just too foolish and vapid to enjoy. Stupid men and idiotic stories.

Eugh, it was wasted hours of my life that I'm not getting back again!

Off to the community library!

This is the craziest non fiction I've ever read in a while.

I mean, crazy!

Normally, the title is click bait and the book itself is fairly staid. Here the book is title++. Every sentence in the book makes you double take and check if its facts being relayed or someone being satirical.

It's facts.

And it's so much fun in a "wtf" kind of way.

Strange, weird subculture of the US military wanting to adopt paranormal techniques in the eighties and even as late as 2000s during the so called war on terror.

Staring to kill goats. Stare to disperse clouds. Subliminal music. Walking through walls. It's got them all.

Never a dull moment. And scary that the world's largest and most powerful army is filled not just with psychopaths (which we know) but people who are just cray-cray like this.

The book itself is 3 for me because there is no coherent plot of progression of any kind. Just a series of uncoverings and perspectives. So it starts to feel repetitive and I felt overdosed with the wtf-ness after a while.

Jon Ronson looks at army intelligence experiments in psychic phenomena. One of these experiments, refered to in the title, was to try to kill goats by concentrating on them, real hard. Ironically, much of this stuff had its origins in the army's post-Vietnam funk, when esprit de corps was at its lowest ebb. A young colonel convinced his chain of command to allow him to study hippy philosophy as a potentially new ethic for a revived Army. All that came of this was a field manual for something called the "First Earth Battalion," which emphasized peace and love, empathy and psychology, over force; it also incorporated the new age psychic and therapeutic practices which had entered the popular culture of the 60s and 70s.

While top commanders took a pass, a few people, mainly in intelligence and special operations circles, were fascinated. This interest was indirectly given a boost by George Lucas. Some of the soldiers and veterans Ronson spoke with likened themselves to Jedis.

Like a lot of Ronson's work, this book uses humor to draw the reader into some serious areas. The general who practices walking through walls (with predictable results) is amusing. Military interrogators, playing the Barney theme song ("I love you, you love me...") to Iraqi detainees is surreal. It's funny, but things get subtly and progressively disturbing, until we find ourselves in Abu Ghraib, and suddenly it's not funny at all. Ronson relates how the hippy-dippy approach to winning hearts and minds evolved into an emphasis on interrogation and brainwashing, using loud music, subliminal messages, psychological humiliation, psychotropic drugs, and far, far worse.

One might ask, if a self-described British humor journalist can ferret out this stuff, why can't the big-time, serious journalists do it, too? Granted, some of Ronson's story is wide open to interpretation. Some of it is just beyond bizarre, and in that may lie the answer to the question. Reporting on intelligence and national security matters is difficult. Legitimate intelligence is not conducted in the open, and so-called black ops, even less so. Plus, there are laws governing the dissemination of classified material. Yet, some of the awfulness of Abu Ghraib was photographed by the perpetrators and splashed all over the media; some of the unpleasantness at the detention center at Guantanimo has been hinted at. It makes a sensation, and then goes away.

Part of the difficulty in reporting this is the problem of defining torture. Are stress positions torture? Loud music? Solitary confinement? The fact that we use these techniques to train our own special forces soldiers further complicates the question. Also, given the past actions of some captives, it's sometimes tempting to deny pity for them. It's relatively easy to label as torture the infliction of pain and write about it. But what about a feeling of hopelessness arising from not knowing whether one will ever be released? That's harder to convey in a soundbite.

Ronson brings up a particularly insightful point when he states that, when confronted with challenging revelations, we fit it into what we already know (or think we know); what doesn't fit, we discard. We all do it to some extent, and journalists are no exception. Many of the journalists I have known are a little lazy in their jobs (like many of us), and would prefer to go for the easy cliche than anything challenging a preconceived worldview.

Ronson points out that we already accept the concept that the CIA does nasty things, that war brings out the worst in some people. We "know" this because we've already read Tom Clancy and John LeCarre. We are appalled by the idea of torture, but we've seen it on 24 with that hunky Jack Bauer, so it doesn't appall us that much. This demonstrates that a story will be subsequently shaped by the way in which it is first spun. Also, when reporters found out that the Barney song was part of the supposed torture, it all seemed too funny to be taken seriously. We like the idea of terrorists being subjected to the purple dinosaur; after all, our kids have made us sit through it.

Just when I thought the world can't get any weirder, this book comes along and proves me wrong.

I told myself I wouldn’t start a new book until I finished the three or four piled by my bed. I picked this up from the library in the afternoon, and at 6pm thought I’d crack it for just a few pages. It’s now almost midnight and I’m going to be very tired tomorrow, but it’s the best book I’ve read in a long time, the first I’ve finished in one sitting in years, and I have no regrets. Now I have to find everything else by Jon Ronson. Maybe I’ll be very tired for a while.

Summary: one hundred de-bleated goats, a hamster, lots of extremely dark military experimentation, the Iraq war, an omnipotent hippy manifesto and… I don’t know. How this book was even published is beyond me. Distressing and bizarre and brilliant.

OMG this is totally NOT what I expected. Is it even true? It is amazing and in places seriously disturbing and sometimes horrifying. And the book seriously leans on the horrifying. On the level of some of the worst conspiracy theories, only real. Is it real? No way to tell. But the author claims that it is.
I was lucky to listen to this on audio, narrated by the author himself. His narration is remarkable. He presents everything in this unassuming, unaffected way, with a sad smile throughout. It is up to the reader then to run around screaming.

What a fucking crazy book! I've never seen the movie, I can't even see how it could be made into one unless it was a fake documentary.

It's basically about a lot of really weird supernatural shit the American military has at least tested out the possibilities of, and a lot of other really funny stuff like esoteric martial arts. Considering the super useful things that have come from the military that would have looked like pure magic 100 years ago (GPS is the first thing that springs to mind), it's hard to categorically say they are insane, but every fiber of me thinks they are insane. Staring at people to blow up their hearts, remote viewing, walking through walls, becoming invisible, subliminal frequencies, etc etc etc. The book kind of looks at two times, the cold war and the war on terror, there really wasn't a lot going on in the world in the ten years that separated those two things.

I don't know anything about the author, but he has an absolutely hilarious, dry way of describing some of his encounters with these people. The scene where some aggro soldier is trying to explain to him how to use his deadly new plastic tool he calls "The Predator" is slapstick.

An odd little thing, it seems like the chapters were written kind of far apart in time. There's group of guys who are so Black Ops that they aren't official and don't have their own coffee, and this is described twice in the book about 40 pages apart in almost the same sentences. Anyway, that has nothing to do with how awesome and fun this book was.

If these are the kind of guys responsible for maintaining the American bubble and world stability, haha, we are doomed!

Absolutely fascinating and chilling at the same time. An interesting look into military intelligence and how far the mind can be pushed to win a war on terror. In between the shocks and sadness, you’ll be suprised with laughter.

This has been on my “someday I will get around to it” to-read list for almost 20 years, and I’m really not sure why. It was strange and disturbing, and I am now even more worried about the world we live in than I was before I read it. Also, the audiobook was read by the author himself and he just seemed gleeful about all this weird shit. I think I’ll go back to books about plagues and mosquitoes killing mankind instead.

Classic Ronson style. This was a facinating dive into the militarys attempt to employ the use of psychic powers in the Iraq war. Bizzare and amazing in its scope, I did find it a bit rambling and perhaps overextended. But then again, the man is investigating a highly classified sect of govt. sanctioned psychic warrior-priests. That’s hardly going to adhere to a linear plot.

I really thought I was going to like this book more than I did. This book was certainly interesting, with it focusing on various experiments by the US Government to adapt New Age or Paranormal tactics into their repertoire. I found the first section quite entertaining, but lost interest as the book neared a close. The book jumps around from subject to subject, with connections being very vague and uses a lot of testimony that seems very, very questionable. The book proposes a lot of questions that it never solves, and I’m not really sure what I can accept as truthful or likely by the end of all of it. Most the enjoyment/horror here comes from all of the wild characters Ronson interviews.

I listened to the audio version narrated by Jon Ronson. Towards the very end, his narration lost its charm on me. (Jon Ronson is also a pretty funny name.)

Another Jon Ronson offering that opens your mind to the darker depths of what those with power will do.

Whilst he makes a similar comment himself in this book; learning about the depraved events the government have been involved in over the years, has become increasingly desensitised by its frequency.