The Men Who Stare at Goats

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.

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.

When I first started The Men Who Stare at Goats, I thought for sure that it was a military satire, much like Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse-Five. After running into a few facts that sounded oddly familiar, I looked into this title. To my great surprise, this is a nonfiction book of weird investigative journalism.

The information that Ronson digs up while investigating the strange things the US Military has tried are nothing short of fascinating. The presentation, however, came off as stilted and flat. Facts are cobbled together and never really come together as a whole story. The narration has a subdued style that is humorous in a monotonic sort of way. His delivery is strange and will definitely not work for everybody.

If you're curious about what all those de-bleated goats and the guys staring at them are doing in the middle of North Carolina, this read ought to answer some of your questions.

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.

Very good book about psychic spies in the U.S. military. I happen to know one of the remote viewers mentioned in the book, and he's the real deal. He just blew me away with his ability.

4 Stars = It gave me much food for thought.

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.

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.

So here's my problem with this book. The author manages to string together a long series of random tidbits in what appears to be a coherent manner, but ultimately there was no point to anything we as readers have learned. "Hey everyone, look at all of the weird things our armed forces experimented with during the war on terror! They played a Barney song over and over! They played a Sesame Street song and the composer tried to sue for royalties! Maybe the CIA killed someone once or maybe they gave them LSD in an experiment and they lost their shit."

It's all sort of fascinating in its premise (did the secretary of the armed services really believe that he could walk through walls? can you really kill gerbils with your impure thoughts?) , but when I was done reading I wasn't sure what the point was. Sometimes the author is praising the idea of alternative battle methods. Sometimes he's mocking. Sometimes he's indifferent as a reporter. Sometimes he is actively goading people into delivering absurd information.

It was entertaining, but by and large it didn't really deliver on its promise as an absurdly entertaining collection of information with a defined message of some sort.

This is the first one of his books I wasn't super into; maybe because it's TOO weird for me, maybe just because I just moved country and I didn't pay close enough attention. Oh well!