By far the strangest non-fiction book I've ever read. I'm telling myself that it's made up, becuase I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around it otherwise.

This is an investigation into some of the weird things the US military have tried to use for interrogation and espionage. It includes subliminal messaging, psychic spying, blasting children's music, and of course, staring goats to death. I saw the movie years ago, but don't really remember it. I enjoyed So You've Been Publicly Shamed, so thought I'd give Ronson another go. This book was well written and fairly interesting, but the topic didn't interest me particularly.

I usually like Jon Ronson books but this one didn’t quite hit the spot.
It felt very strange and disjointed, but also quite amusing?
3*

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.

I have no idea why I like this guy so much.

I started this book because I knew of the film which was based on it. Nothing could have prepared me for the world that I entered when I started the audiobook. Think about the craziest ideas you got when you were drunk or high (like why doesn’t sheep’s wool behave like a wool sweater when wet, and shrink while they’re wearing it) and you're not even going to come close to the First Earth Battalion and the Human Potential Movement. However, in contrast to your wool thought experiment, these guys actually received funding to find out why. And this guy just goes on doing his journalistic duty to report what people like Jim Channon say they did, then he finds corroborating evidence and gathers more and more testimonies which all point to the same story. If there weren’t people swearing by these things, this would have probably made one of the worst cold war themed science fiction plots.

And Jon Ronson goes about collecting everything, getting people to trust him and tell him their stories, writing down everything and questioning almost nothing with what I would attempt to characterize as utter serenity. I mean I would have been less mesmerized if you told me the story of the end times and how the four horsemen are coming. But this guy’s writing makes him look like he had already gone through the end times a dozen times over and what he’s reporting in this book is just a normal thing. A de-bleated goat being stared to death in a fort Bragg barn feels like just a normal day’s reporting, something like the stock markets going up and down on a Monday morning.

So yeah, I’m now a Jon Ronson fan. And I think I’ll check out every one of his books from now on. So stay tuned for more fanboy stuff.

"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.

Interesting stories but didn’t quite hold together as a cohesive whole.

Como ferviente fan de Ron Jonson la cantidad de estrellas estaba puesta antes de comenzarlo, pero eso no quita a la misma calidad del libro.

Se notan los años de diferencia, este libro lo noto mas tosco en el tema del lenguaje, pero es divertido verlo desde ese punto y ver como a cambiado a lo largo del tiempo.

El libro en si es fascinante, mucho mas al saber de cuanta credibilidad cuenta Jonson, aquí lo mas importante es la forma en que se muestra que la linea entre la locura y la consideración es casi imperceptible en altas esferas, como lo es el área militar, personas que tienen literalmente nuestras vidas en sus manos, y que simplemente deciden poner recursos para que hombres hagan explotar cabras con su mente. y quizás esto no es lo peor, ya que si bien puede verse chistoso por un lado, puede volverse muy peligroso y dar lugar a situaciones horribles sin ningún tipo de castigo.

La irracionalidad y el manto de misterio que ni siquiera al final de libro es levantado, nos da a conocer el alcance de estas situaciones y solo nos deja especular hasta donde llego todo eso.

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)

I first heard about this book back before the movie was announced. I have always had a slight, very cynical, interest in the paranormal/supernatural/mystic bullshit. So when I was told about this book I had to read it. Just for the title alone. It took a long time, always seemed to fall to the bottom of the pile, but finally I read it.

It was not quite what I was expecting but it wasn't bad. The fact that the US military and intelligence organisations (and most likely a lot of other countries, possibly including my own) have been doing serious tests and investigations into this for decades was astounding. So many of the things in the book I just have to laugh it but I can believe the government would try it.

It was an interesting read and now I'm curious to see how they made a movie out of it.

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?

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.