Good read!

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

"The Men Who Stare at Goats",
"Wow! This proves the old saying that truth is stranger (and much weirder) than fiction.No one could make up this stuff about a secret military section devoted to psychic phenomena and new age beliefs.
I thought the military generals and other wackos and weirdos would at least be identified under false names, but internet searches shows articles and photos on the ones I googled.
I would give the book at least 5 stars for some of the material brought to light, but cannot give it more than 1 star for writing style, organization and cohesion. At times he seemed to be adding things only remotely connected to the subject in order to fill out what would have been an excellent magazine exposure into a full length book. I found myself alternating between laughter and horror at some of the things these men were attempting to do."

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.

Jon Ronson takes us on a wide-ranging look at the U.S. military's various dalliances with the paranormal: from remote viewing to cloudbusting to subliminal messaging to... yes, trying to stop the hearts of goats by staring at them. I first listened to this as an audiobook, because Ronson's delivery is entertaining and dryly comedic. His voice also imbues his journalistic questions with a plaintive, beseeching cast that one might not perceive while reading. However, when I went to write a review, I realized that I couldn't explain how these various stories were connected, and I wanted to embed them more indelibly in my head anyway, so I re-read the physical book.

The narrative is structured around a wild cast of characters that Ronson manages to corner: mostly former but also current members of the U.S. military and intelligence. There's a pattern: Ronson gets someone to share freely until they hit some wall of "I shouldn't be telling you this" or accidentally share something they didn't want to tell him. He'll then press, perhaps squeeze another detail or two, and hopefully catch the name of someone else involved that he can similarly pursue. The person who starts him on this journey is the unlikely (and yet, irritatingly likely) Uri Geller. You may remember him as a famous [and fake] spoon bender, who had bragged in various outlets about aiding the U.S. military as a psychic spy in the early 70s. When Ronson presses him in 2001, soon after 9/11, Geller admits that he's been "reactivated" by someone named Ron.

When Ronson talks to Major General Albert Stubblebine III (the guy who tried to walk through a wall as depicted by George Clooney in the film adaptation) about this, Stubblebine simply admits, "Yeah, I know Ron", and laments that psychic spies should keep their damn mouths shut. We never get to the bottom of who Ron is, but Stubblebine mentions Mike Echanis, supposedly the guy who can stop a goat's heart by staring alone, and who was also behind the ubiquitous "Be all that you can be" recruitment jingle. Ronson can't talk to Echanis because he's dead, likely from being run over by a jeep in a display of bravado.

He does find Jim Channon, a retired Lieutenant Colonel who founded the "First Earth Battalion", a group tasked after Vietnam with finding non-lethal ways to win over enemies and usher forth a hippie's vision of world peace and unity. The group produced an illustrated operations manual that taught such techniques as "sparkly eyes" for disarming others with a gaze, and mystifying enemies with noises and holograms. Its super soldiers would be vegetarians, sense plant auras, walk through walls, bend metal with their minds, and walk on fire. This vibe clashed as much as you might imagine with military culture, but the program's efforts would yield wide-ranging and unexpected effects.

Another source for Ronson is the well-connected Col. John Alexander. He wouldn't answer about Ron, but denied that Echanis was the goat-starer: he said that honor went to Guy Savelli. Ronson tracks down Savelli, who is teaching martial arts and dance in a strip mall. He agrees to having killed the goat, but his only evidence is a VHS tape of him momentarily disorienting a hamster. Supposedly the other tape of a hamster dying is too intense to show. So much of this reminded me of tests of the paranormal I've participated in: the reality never quite matching up to the bold claims. In a similar story, one vaunted soldier is rumored to have psychically drawn a key to a long-bolted door. Ronson finds out that the soldier actually just picked the lock, but didn't want to ruin a good story. As far as I can tell, that's the real common thread in all these tales: the eternal motif of people buying into hype. These just happen to be military people, so their beliefs shape life-and-death situations... and world events.

For example, Stuart Heller, another top "First Earth Battalion Guy", unknowingly trained two of the 9/11 hijackers. Military psychic and remote viewer Ed Dames went on Art Bell's show to make drastic claims about cataclysmic events (none of which, thankfully, came true). One of his students, Courtney Brown, also appeared on Coast to Coast and promoted a doctored image of a Saturn-like object accompanying the Hale-Bopp comet, warning of an alien intelligence that inhabited it. Little did he know this hoax would inspire 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult to kill themselves in anticipation of ascending to join the object.

"PsyOps" also played a significant role in the Iraq war, especially when it came to interrogation techniques. Most of us remember the news story about Barney the Dinosaur's "I Love You" song being played on loop as a form of torture. Another major news item, the horrendous photos of U.S. soldiers sexually abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib, is revealed here to have been directed by PsyOps folks "higher up", and was not just the result of bored soldiers getting their jollies. Similarly, devout Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo were smeared with the menstrual blood of prostitutes, or exposed to subliminal sounds accompanying a playlist of contemporary music. This last piece of information becomes a real mystery for Ronson, who has a really hard time getting anyone to be specific about whether subliminal audio messages were used (let alone how they would work). This also played out in world events, with the siege at Waco featuring blasted music inspired by PsyOps and the work of a Russian experimenter named Igor Smirnov, who was recruited to transmit the "voice of God" directly into David Koresh's head. This last plan was scrapped, but Charlton Heston would have played God. All of this was quite dark, often disastrous, and a far cry from the hippie-like intentions of the First Earth Battalion.

The U.S.'s experiments with torture and undue influence had a darker antecedent: MK-ULTRA. The stuff of conspiracy theories (but actually true), MK-ULTRA (and its torture-focused sister project, Artichoke) was a 1953-1963 program that sought to create super soldiers (à la The Manchurian Candidate) and to exert mind control and elicit forced confessions. MK-ULTRA experimented with drugs, and the program's director Sidney Gottlieb even recruited magician John Mulholland to teach his agents how to slip substances into peoples' drinks and food. This happened to one of the agency's own agents, Frank Olson, who was unknowingly given LSD in 1953 (that's right, we have the CIA to thank for introducing LSD to the U.S.) in order to extract a confession. He knew too much about Project Artichoke and was threatening to tell the press: he was killed soon thereafter. The cover-up involved in this murder became the obsession of his son, Eric Olson. Ronson connects with Eric and tells his story in the order it was revealed to him. I was very impressed by the concise and cohesive delivery of this complicated take, having read much about it elsewhere. For an incredibly thorough treatment, read Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer, and for a tediously drawn-out documentary telling, see Wormwood on Netflix.

Reading The Men Who Stare at Goats drove me to finally watch the 2009 star-studded film adaptation. It's fine, but not a replacement for the book. It doesn't share any of the interesting real-world connections, though it preserves fun elements such as walking through walls, cloudbusting, goat-staring, "sparkly eyes", and even a menacing plastic weapon called "the predator", through characters loosely based on the ones in the book following a newly invented plot line. One particularly fun nod is the mention of a "real-life Obi-Wan Kenobi" (Ed Dames is called this in the book) by Ewan McGregor, who had recently played Obi-Wan in the Star Wars prequels.

The book is a worthwhile read, full of humor and fascinating stories-behind-the-stories I'll be telling at many cocktail parties to come.

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.

I hardly ever read non-fiction, I don't know why. I often enjoy non-fiction more than fiction. Maybe it's because I *write* fiction myself. I do occasionally read history books, but rarely cover to cover. This one is an exception: but it's not just history, it's also investigative journalism of the highest calibre.

This astonishing book tells the recent history of US Military psychic warfare, a very shady area that overlaps with PsyOps (psychological warfare), Black Ops (secret assassination squads, etc), MK-ULTRA (hallucinogenic warfare), The First Earth Battalion (using peace and mysticism as weapons) and other kinds of unorthodox military strategies. Most of Ronson's book is mind boggling. Attempts to walk through walls, to stare goats to death and to extract information from detainees by playing Fleetwood Mac albums are just some of the ideas actually practised by Special Forces in a bizarre attempt to gain an advantage for the US war machine.

another gripping book by Jon Ronson, in which he shows that the people running the show, this time the american military, are just as dangerous and unbalanced as their supposed opponents

There's a wasp in your house—surely I'm not the only one who uses hidden powers to direct the wasp back out through the open window!

I know, I know. Most of you just ask politely, please wasp, please go away.

This book is jocular and serious. It is a little astonishing to realize the range of opinions held within a vast organization such as the U.S. military, but that is surely a strength. Or it can be.

Having grown up on sensational tales of ESP experiments "Behind the Iron Curtain!" and then, later, the "remote viewing" practices in the U.S., this book did not seem all that fantastic. And yet it does have a surreal aura, a feeling of life in an alternate universe.

Three stars because while interesting, and at times fascinating, I wanted a little more.

It's hard to know what to say about this book as it's a light-hearted, somewhat mocking look at the various nefarious schemes of the American Military, or at least of some of the specialised recherche departments of Intelligence. However, the subject is deadly serious and what seems funny on the surface - bombarding Iraqi prisoners with an endless loop of the Barney song, 14,000 renditions over three days - really isn't when you consider that this 'information' was probably released deliberately so the media could do a nice, feel-good, hahaha piece and be put off delving deeper, at least for a while.

It's an interesting, perhaps even necessary, book for all Americans, and citizens of its allies and satellite countries, who want to know of the less-obvious methods used in the defence of the US and free world. We all know about military offensives, about assassinations and torture, both always denied, but really though, what do we know about psychological warfare?

It seems to have developed from the original barmy colonel whose thought-process went something like this: this wall is primarily composed of atoms, and atoms are primarily composed of space. I am primarily composed of atoms, and therefore I should be able to walk right through that wall if I only have the right frame of mind. Result: bruised nose and the development of a new Intelligence unit for the US Military and a new way to divert tax dollars into the hands of the less-than-mentally competent who had such seniority no one could question one or their methods. Including staring at goats.

It's a fast read, well-written in a journalistic style with plenty of moments when you'll want to look up from the book and share what you've just read with anyone around.

Rewritten 24 July, 2016 on rereading Them: Adventures with Extremists

Dijelom zabavna, dijelom dosadna, dijelom zanimljiva, dijelom skroz bizarna. A zbog činjenice da je pisana prema istinitom događaju ne znam je li mi cijela priča više smiješna ili zastrašujuća. :/

Bizarre and brilliant!

This book is an exemplary work in investigative journalism, and the amount and quality of painstaking research done by Ronson is outstanding. The central theme is the unconventional and unbelievable methods, including but not limited to, psychic spying, thought manipulation and invisibility for use in the military intelligence.

At times, you get a feeling that you're reading a war thriller novel with a touch of science fiction, only to wonder at last that all these attempts have been real, and the people mentioned are not just characters, but committed officers.

Ronson is so deft with the spellbinding narrative that the suspense he creates with every chapter compels you to turn the pages. He slowly lifts the veils, and leaves a part uncovered only to be revealed in the later pages where it fits logically, especially in the Eric Olson story.

Although the narrative of unearthing some of the chilling secrets of the US military moves back and forth, from 1950s to 2000s, from Cold War to the American debacle in Vietnam to the War on Terror, Ronson manages to maintain a logical structure.

The only thing that stops me from giving this a full 5 stars is that in the middle, there were too many names coming up too fast creating a little bit of mix-up.

Overall, this is a great work to get an insight into those ambitious minds who seriously and literally believed - 'Be all you can be'.