This was a really fast and good read. I found out about Jon Ronson from his BBC radio series, which is a bit like This American Life, only British. In fact, I think I heard an excerpt of his show on This American Life. He's really funny, and he researches fascinating stories, a bit like Nick Broomfield.

So I expected this book to be good and fun. It was, though a little less so than I thought it would be. I think maybe part of Ronson's strength is his voice and his sort of ironic affect when he talks, which he tries to convey in his writing too, but he doesn't completely succeed.

At any rate, it's a fascinating read in which he chases down many of the bizarre conspiracy theories and new age myths, which the U.S. military apparently believed in and worked on, or still does, at various times and places. The book veers from "oh weren't they so silly back in the 70s" territory to the "ohmigod scary stuff in Abu Graib" kind of area, and it covers everything from MK-ULTRA to army brass trying to walk through walls and turn the military into a spreader of peace and love.

Over all, we never get definitive proof of anything supernatural or paranormal, just lots of former and current spies and soldiers and consultants who *believe* in this stuff and are dedicated to convincing Ronson of its reality. He is hilariously skeptical, but also profoundly disturbed at the more real-world, spooky spinoff tactics that are actually being used, such as audio torture technology in Guantanamo. He manages to convey the disturbed feeling to the reader, while also being entertaining. I'm sure the movie is even more entertaining.

Every year a friend of my roommate comes here from Canada to attend a bookseller's convention downtown and every year he brings the two of us books from his store in Manitoba. One of them this year was Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Even though I'd seen the movie, I hadn't known there was a book behind it nor that its author, Jon Ronson, had also authored the book on political extremism that Mike Miley had had me read a couple of years ago while visiting him in California. Like Them: Adventure with Extremists, The Men Who Star at Goats skirts serious issues with humor and irony. Like the former, this recent book is an historical account, not of its ostensible subject, bur of the author's own investigation.

The subject of this book is PsychOps, the substantially black-budget governmental experiments with mind control and psychological warfare which extend back as far as the early CIA in the fifties and which continue today, most notably in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ronson's particular foci are the persons and events featured in the much truncated movie based on this book, events going back to the seventies, and on U.S. Army PsychOps in Iraq at the time of composition. The book begins with silliness, with attempts to walk through solid objects and to become invisible, but ends with the very serious business of contemporary torture and mass-manipulation practices. In between there is considerable discussion of actual remote viewing studies, of subliminal attitude adjustment techniques, of crowd control methods, of the governmentally sanctioned murder of an Army/CIA agent in the mid-fifties, of the mass murder of the families in Waco in the nineties and of the dubiously sophisticated torture techniques employed by the United States in Iraq and Cuba. While often funny, Ronson does occasionally reflect upon the material he uncovers with earnest intention, particularly as regards how the enormity of many governmental practices is concealed even when it is revealed.

Having read many books about the subjects Ronson covers, I found little that I didn't already know. Yet in some cases Ronson, who conducted many interviews of principals, comes up with details I'd not seen previously published.

This book is strongly recommended as an easy-to-read introduction to the topics discussed. I finished the thing in two sittings and could have finished it in one, finding it actually much more "entertaining" than the motion picture and, while equally funny, much more provocative.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is a 'mockumentry' claiming to expose the exploits of the American Government's attempts to ultilize psyhic phenomenon to further their war efforts.

The book is journalist/biography style with the author making contact with numerous military figures all somehow linked to 'psy-ops'. Rather than covering a coherent story format this book reads as a series of gags and irony ridden tales of the military's attempts to train their own X-men.

Ronson crafts a bizarre conspiracy, linking 'psy-ops' to the Abu Gharib prison photos, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Vietnam. And while I respect his quircky semi-intellectual humour, I couldn't help but consider Ronson's book mildly insensitive. Certainly I realise that I'm not meant to take these ideas seriously, but I can't help feeling Ronson has had some half-baked ideas that are propped up by adding a bit of real life tragedy.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is a good airplane, or bus stop read, but without a real central story, and lacking real depth it might be better spending your time reading Bad Science or The Daily What for the same level of material, with some genuine learning involved.

Wry, ironic writing, and hilarious antics make this book a good read. It claims to be non-fiction, but for the most part (Iraqi war excluded) I treat it with a grain of salt--makes it funnier anyways.

Written with Ronson's trademark dry wit and exhibiting his wonderfully wry sense of humor, "The Men Who Stare at Goats" starts off rather light and humorous. Yet as each page turns, the rabbit hole gets deeper and steeper and the story becomes crazier and crazier, until it reaches a truly frightening crescendo.

This is seriously insane.

4⭐

I debated between a 4 star and 5 star because this might be my least favorite of Ronson's books so I wanted to differentiate a little... But it was still really good and I didn't have heart to give him 4 stars. I love his writing style and the way he injects his thoughts/points of view into crazy story lines.

"The Men Who Stare at Goat" is a story about the nooks and crannies of reality that the minds of military and service agents go to harm another man. It is dread to think what else military bases, laboratories and and other military places hide.

This is a book with a promising beginning, but unfortunately the later the worse. I almost gave up reading however the middle fragments about the prison in Guantanamo and later about soliciting the subliminal message saved me from doing so.

For me, the book is quite incoherent, not to say chaotic.

Ronson investigates the US military intelligence community’s forays into extrasensory perception (ESP) and mind control. Those who’ve seen the movie loosely based on this book will be aware of the quirky-humorous tone it takes. (If the title wasn’t enough to convey that the author was aiming for quirky humor.) Ronson’s style, favoring punchy simple sentences, offers a kind of deadpan delivery that supports the tone of the book.

That said, the book also has a sad edge as it can be seen as a commentary on military officers who came back from the war in Vietnam damaged and grasping at straws as to how to prevent history from repeating itself. It’s as if what these men experienced made some eager to believe because they so wanted to believe they could win with the mind and avoid the carnage of war.

While the book’s sixteen chapters are not divided by the author, they can be roughly divided into three parts. The first is the pursuit of ESP starting in the late 1970’s. This includes remote viewing and the titular psychokinesis (i.e. starring goats to death.)

The middle section is the resurgence of these esoteric approaches in the late 90’s and, especially, after 9-11 (also speaking to how dire blows to the psyche lead to wild approaches.) Much of this section is about mind control rather than ESP. One may remember the news story of the “I Love You, You Love Me” song from Barney [i.e. the purple dinosaur] being played over and over again to break terror suspects. The question remaining unanswered is whether there was anything else going on besides torture by Barney song (i.e. subliminal messages or sonic / ultrasonic frequencies [as used in non-lethal weapon technology.])

The latter section deals with the famous case of a scientist who jumped from a hotel room window to his death. It was later admitted that the scientist had been the unwitting victim of hallucinogen experimentation as part of the famed MKUltra project, and his death was written off as a trip gone bad. Ronson presents the story of the scientist’s son, a man who firmly believes that the story copped to was neither the full story nor the true story.

This book is interesting and entertaining, despite the fact that many of the questions that Ronson sets out to answer remain unanswered and probably always will. While the author got several key people to talk to him, the projects discussed are highly classified and the possibility of disinformation is ever-present.

Ronson manages to walk a fine line throughout the book. He presents all this quirky and bizarre activity in a way that neither comes across as mocking nor even particularly skeptical. (His punchy delivery does hint at this intention on occasion.) He lets the reader do the mocking and be the skeptic. At times he comes across as a believer. That is, while many of the happenings of the book reflect bat-shit crazy behavior / decisions, he suggests that all but the most hardened skeptics would believe that some of the people involved had inexplicable gifts.

I’d recommend this book. If you’re interested in government sponsored esoteric activities like psi and mind control and related scandals / conspiracies, you’ll find it fascinating. On the other hand, even if you’re not, it’s still an entertaining read that provides a sort of commentary on the effects of war on the psyche.

Some of you may have put up with me raving about Ronson's earlier book, "Them: Adventures with Extremists", in which he basically said, "hey, all these conspiracy theorists say that a cabal of Jews are running the world. I'm Jewish, why am I not in on this? I'll tag along and see if they can show me."

Ronson's master technique is the "give 'em enough rope and they'll hang themselves" interview. However, regardless of how abhorrent or just plain loony his subject, he remains objective, giving them the same benefit of the doubt he would with any other (saner) subject. It's a rare writer who can, as a Jew writing an article on the head of the American KKK, remain unbiased in his reporting, confident that there's no need for snide asides or pointing out to his readers how messed up the fellow's world-view is. Those types can do that all by themselves.

In his most recent book, he begins with Major General Stubblebine, who in 1984 went to Fort Bragg to convince Special Forces commanders to try to train their men to walk through walls, levitate, and otherwise employ psychic powers to gain an advantage in the Cold War. As you might imagine, his idea was not warmly received.

But, contrary to what we might have hoped, this was not because they had disdain for spending our tax dollars on psychic training. It was, sadly, because they had already begun their own psychic training program, and were annoyed at an outsider coming in to try to start one. Their program involved, among other things, trying to kill with mental powers.

There is, supposedly, a building in Fort Bragg which contains a large number of goats. It was originally filled with dogs, and they would be shot in the leg, and the soldier would have to patch up the wound (to practice field dressing of serious wounds). However, most guys like dogs, and it is apparently less common to bond with a goat, so now it's goats. They have, allegedly, been de-bleated. And, at least sometimes, Special Forces soldiers who are attempting psychic training try to kill them with their mind.

This gives us an explanation of the title of the book.

From chapter to chapter, Ronson follows the trail of psychic projects, or ones which involve other topics that (if they came from anywhere except the military) sound somewhat New-Agey. At one point he hears that he is now on the Department of Homeland Security's list of suspected Al Qaeda associates, because he's going around asking so many questions. He witnesses former or current U.S. military officers fail to kill a hamster with their mind, fail to make a cloud disappear, and hears how the person reputed to have killed a goat with his mind did not, in fact, do such a thing. In the military, as with anything else, the closer you get to a supposed feat of psychic powers, the less impressive it is.

The story goes from loopy (if grimly so) to disturbing, as he begins hearing about innovative techniques used at Guantanamo and Iraq, to attempt to break prisoners by blasting them with the Barney song, or flashing lights, or making them repeat arbitrary sequences of numbers. There are some theories behind why these techniques might work to make a prisoner cooperate, but most of them are largely unsupported by any evidence that they in fact do work.

He interviews a soldier who was stationed in Abu Ghraib, who asserts that Lynndie England was essentially stupid enough to do what she was told, and that everything happening there had the explicit sanction of higher ranks. He interviews (much to his regret, I think) Pete Basso at Camp Pendleton, who demonstrates to him (actually, on him) many ways in which a small yellow blob of plastic can be used to hurt someone. At this point, one is wondering where this story is going, if anywhere.

And the unifying theme, of course, is this: stupidity with government power. After 9/11, there were portions of the military and the intelligence establishment who had sanction to try, basically, anything. They were not required to demonstrate that their techniques would work, and even ideas which had already been tried (and failed) in the Cold War, such as mind reading and levitation, were given money to burn.

The final chapters of "The Men Who Stare At Goats" concern MK-ULTRA, the worst PR disaster for American intelligence prior to Abu Ghraib. It was an attempt at mind control, using (perhaps among many other things) LSD. There is no evidence that it was ever successful, unless the type of thought control you're after is to drive someone crazy.

There was a point in this book when I was thinking something like: "this is too stupid to be true". But really, the longer one thinks about it, the more sense it makes. The worst thing about the strategies of the Rumsfeld/Cheney/GWBush crowd is not that they were mean, or even that they were undemocratic and immoral. It is that they were unwilling to face up to the facts when something (like, say, torture) doesn't produce results. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo did not stop thousands of American lives from being lost to insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. This did not led to their closure, at least not during that administration. It gives new layers of meaning to the fact, long known, that Cheney would refer derisively to critics as members of "the reality based community".

Examining such depressing subject matters without losing your reader is a difficult task. Ronson is able to pull it off, lightening the mood without making light of the topic. The most difficult task for anyone trying to bring popular attention to government misdeeds on this level, is the fact that few people want to know that their own government is so misguided. Like Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, Jon Ronson is able to use enough gallows humor to keep us watching, without obscuring the fact that when our government decides that they can override reality with a mental effort, they are unlikely to be hindered by such lesser obstacles as morality or the rule of law.

3.5 / 5 stars.

I enjoyed this. It was chaotic, confusing and an interesting read! I learnt a lot from this book so I'm glad it was a book club choice or else I would never have picked it up.

Interesting reading but with some pretty grim happenings at times

during the cold war the cia was engaged in some strange strange shit -- psychic spies and remote viewings and lots more: agents staring at goats all day long trying to make their hearts explode (some of the higher ups claim to have seen it happen), agents (with badly scuffed noses and foreheads) trying to walk through walls, dosing people with lsd, playing music with subliminal messages, entering the bad guy's lair while cradling a baby lamb in one's arms as a means to overpower the enemy with symbols of pure kindness & goodness... but this was all dropped in the 90s and then - surprise! - picked up again in our War on Terror. uh-huh. where do you think naked pyramids and forced listenings to the theme song from Barney comes from? the marriage of cold war psyops and blackops with a sprinkling of 70s new age nuttiness. gotta love it. a fascinating book.