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Audible sample Sample
The Men Who Stare at Goats Media Tie-In Edition, Kindle Edition
Bizarre military history: In 1979, a crack commando unit was established by the most gifted minds within the U.S. Army. Defying all known laws of physics and accepted military practice, they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls, and—perhaps most chillingly—kill goats just by staring at them. They were the First Earth Battalion, entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries. And they really weren’t joking. What’s more, they’re back—and they’re fighting the War on Terror.
An uproarious exploration of American military paranoia: With investigations ranging from the mysterious “Goat Lab,” to Uri Geller’s covert psychic work with the CIA, to the increasingly bizarre role played by a succession of U.S. presidents, this might just be the funniest, most unsettling book you will ever read—if only because it is all true and is still happening today.
- ISBN-13978-1439181775
- EditionMedia Tie-In
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateJune 28, 2011
- LanguageEnglish
- File size1670 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Ronson's finely written book strikes a perfect balance between curiosity, incredulity, and humor. His characters are each more bizarre than the last, and Ronson does a wonderful job of depicting the colorful quirks they reveal in their often-comical meetings. Through a charming guile, he manages to elicit many strange and amazing revelations. Ronson meets a general who is frustrated in his frequent attempts to walk through walls. One source says the U.S. military has deployed psychic assassins to the Middle East to hunt down Al Qaeda suspects. Entertaining and disturbing. --Alex Roslin
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Review
-- "The Boston Globe"
"Ronson sets his book up beautifully. It moves with wry precise agility from crackpot to crackpot in its search for the essence of this early New Age creativity.... "
-- Janet Maslin, "The New York Times"
From the Publisher
1. Goat/Hamster Thought-Death Experiments.
Description: Special Forces soldiers stare, heart of goat/hamster eventually explodes.
Success Rate: One dead goat, one dead hamster (experiments conducted inside 'Goat Lab' at Fort Bragg, North Carolina).
Operational Use: Military Intelligence currently considering staring at detainees at Abu Ghraib (not to kill them, just to freak them out).
2. Bee-Attracting Theremone.
Description: Special theremone to be sprayed on the enemy before bees are released to attack them.
Success Rate: Still in proposal stage.
Operational Use: Enemies will get stung.
3. Walking Through Walls.
Description: Soldier learns to walk through wall. Secret experiments conducted at US Army Intelligence headquarters, Arlington, Virginia.
Success Rate: None. Soldiers kept bumping their noses.
Operational Use: Who would want to screw with an army that could do that?
4. Blasting the enemy with the theme tune to Barney The Purple Dinosaur
Description: Detainee placed inside steel shipping container. Barney song is repeatedly blasted.
Success Rate: Hard to quantify.
Operational Use: This interrogation technique is designed to hit detainee on a "psycho-spiritual dimension". Currently being deployed in Iraq.
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
This is a true story. It is the summer of 1983. Major General Albert Stubblebine III is sitting behind his desk in Arlington, Virginia, and he is staring at his wall, upon which hang his numerous military awards. They detail a long and distinguished career. He is the United States Army's chief of intelligence, with sixteen thousand soldiers under his command. He controls the army's signals intelligence, their photographic and technical intelligence, their numerous covert counterintelligence units, and their secret military spying units, which are scattered throughout the world. He would be in charge of the prisoner-of-war interrogations too, except this is 1983, and the war is cold, not hot.
He looks past his awards to the wall itself. There is something he feels he needs to do even though the thought of it frightens him. He thinks about the choice he has to make. He can stay in his office or he can go into the next office. That is his choice. And he has made it.
He is going into the next office.
General Stubblebine looks a lot like Lee Marvin. In fact, it is widely rumored throughout military intelligence that he is Lee Marvin's identical twin. His face is craggy and unusually still, like an aerial photograph of some mountainous terrain taken from one of his spy planes. His eyes, forever darting around and full of kindness, seem to do the work for his whole face.
In fact he is not related to Lee Marvin at all. He likes the rumor because mystique can be beneficial to a career in intelligence. His job is to assess the intelligence gathered by his soldiers and pass his evaluations on to the deputy director of the CIA and the chief of staff for the army, who in turn pass it up to the White House. He commands soldiers in Panama, Japan, Hawaii, and across Europe. His responsibilities being what they are, he knows he ought to have his own man at his side in case anything goes wrong during his journey into the next office.
Even so, he doesn't call for his assistant, Command Sergeant George Howell. This is something he feels he must do alone.
Am I ready? he thinks. Yes, I am ready.
He stands up, moves out from behind his desk, and begins to walk.
I mean, he thinks, what is the atom mostly made up of anyway? Space!
He quickens his pace.
What am I mostly made up of? he thinks. Atoms!
He is almost at a jog now.
What is the wall mostly made up of? he thinks. Atoms! All I have to do is merge the spaces. The wall is an illusion. What is destiny? Am I destined to stay in this room? Ha, no!
Then General Stubblebine bangs his nose hard on the wall of his office.
Damn, he thinks.
General Stubblebine is confounded by his continual failure to walk through his wall. What's wrong with him that he can't do it? Maybe there is simply too much in his in-tray for him to give it the requisite level of concentration. There is no doubt in his mind that the ability to pass through objects will one day be a common tool in the intelligence-gathering arsenal. And when that happens, well, is it too naive to believe it would herald the dawning of a world without war? Who would want to screw around with an army that could do that? General Stubblebine, like many of his contemporaries, is still extremely bruised by his memories of Vietnam.
These powers are attainable, so the only question is, by whom? Who in the military is already geared toward this kind of thing? Which section of the army is trained to operate at the peak of their physical and mental capabilities?
And then the answer comes to him.
Special Forces!
This is why, in the late summer of 1983, General Stubblebine flies down to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina.
Fort Bragg is vast -- a town guarded by armed soldiers, with a mall, a cinema, restaurants, golf courses, hotels, swimming pools, riding stables, and accommodations for forty-five thousand soldiers and their families. The general drives past these places on his way to the Special Forces Command Center. This is not the kind of thing you take into the mess hall. This is for Special Forces and nobody else. Still, he's afraid. What is he about to unleash?
In the Special Forces Command Center, the general decides to start soft. "I'm coming down here with an idea," he begins.
The Special Forces commanders nod.
"If you have a unit operating outside the protection of mainline units, what happens if somebody gets hurt?" he says. "What happens if somebody gets wounded? How do you deal with that?"
He surveys the blank faces around the room.
"Psychic healing!" he says.
There is a silence.
"This is what we're talking about," says the general, pointing to his head. "If you use your mind to heal, you can probably come out with your whole team alive and intact. You won't have to leave anyone behind." He pauses, then adds, "Protect the unit structure by hands-off and hands-on healing!"
The Special Forces commanders don't look particularly interested in psychic healing.
"Okay," says General Stubblebine. The reception he's getting is really quite chilly. "Wouldn't it be a neat idea if you could teach somebody to do this?"
General Stubblebine rifles through his bag and produces, with a flourish, bent cutlery.
"What if you could do this?" says General Stubblebine. "Would you be interested?"
There is a silence.
General Stubblebine finds himself beginning to stammer a little. They're looking at me as if I'm nuts, he thinks. I am not presenting this correctly.
He glances anxiously at the clock.
"Let's talk about time!" he says. "What would happen if time is not an instant? What if time has an X-axis, a Y-axis, and a Z-axis? What if time is not a point but a space? At any particular time we can be anywhere in that space! Is the space confined to the ceiling of this room, or is the space twenty million miles?" The general laughs. "Physicists go nuts when I say this!"
Silence. He tries again.
"Animals!" says General Stubblebine.
The Special Forces commanders glance at one another.
"Stopping the hearts of animals," he continues. "Bursting the hearts of animals. This is the idea I'm coming in with. You have access to animals, right?"
"Uh," say Special Forces. "Not really..."
General Stubblebine's trip to Fort Bragg was a disaster. It still makes him blush to recall it. He ended up taking early retirement in 1984. Now, the official history of army intelligence, as outlined in their press pack, basically skips the Stubblebine years, 1981-84, almost as if they didn't exist.
In fact, everything you have read so far has for the past two decades been a military intelligence secret. General Stubblebine's doomed attempt to walk through his wall and his seemingly futile journey to Fort Bragg remained undisclosed right up until the moment that he told me about them in room 403 of the Tarrytown Hilton, just north of New York City, on a cold winter's day two years into the War on Terror.
"To tell you the truth, Jon," he said, "I've pretty much blocked the rest of the conversation I had with Special Forces out of my head. Whoa, yeah. I've scrubbed it from my mind! I walked away. I left with my tail between my legs."
He paused, and looked at the wall.
"You know," he said, "I really thought they were great ideas. I still do. I just haven't figured out how my space can fit through that space. I simply kept bumping my nose. I couldn't...No. Couldn't is the wrong word. I never got myself to the right state of mind." He sighed. "If you really want to know, it's a disappointment. Same with the levitation."
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.
"And I failed totally. I could not get my fat ass off the ground, excuse my language. But I still think they were great ideas. And do you know why?"
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you cannot afford to get stale in the intelligence world," he said. "You cannot afford to miss something. You don't believe that? Take a look at terrorists who went to flying schools to learn how to take off but not how to land. And where did that information get lost? You cannot afford to miss something when you're talking about the intelligence world."
There was something about the general's trip to Fort Bragg that neither of us knew the day we met. It was a piece of information that would soon lead me into what must be among the most whacked-out corners of George W. Bush's War on Terror.
What the general didn't know -- what Special Forces kept secret from him -- was that they actually considered his ideas to be excellent ones. Furthermore, as he proposed his clandestine animal-heart-bursting program and they told him that they didn't have access to animals, they were concealing the fact that there were a hundred goats in a shed just a few yards down the road.
The existence of these hundred goats was known only to a select few Special Forces insiders. 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 bandaged in plaster.
This is the story of those goats.
Copyright © 2004 by Jon Ronson
From AudioFile
Product details
- ASIN : B00570B6TM
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster; Media Tie-In edition (June 28, 2011)
- Publication date : June 28, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 1670 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 274 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #128,845 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #16 in Occult Parapsychology
- #43 in Media Studies (Kindle Store)
- #63 in Intelligence & Espionage (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Jon Ronson is an award-winning writer and documentary maker. He is the author of many bestselling books, including Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie, Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries, The Psychopath Test, The Men Who Stare at Goats and Them: Adventures with Extremists. His first fictional screenplay, Frank, co-written with Peter Straughan, starred Michael Fassbender. He lives in London and New York City.
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I chose a book that seemed interesting, so I would want to finish it and still learn something from it. The book is called I chose is The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson. The book is a good read and kept me at the edge of my seat, for I bought the audiobook rather than the hard copy and the narrator does an amazing job at reading the book for you. I had watched the film when it came out, but after reading the book I found out that it was completely different than the book. There were some parts I had to reread because it transitions badly on some chapters, but overall it was a good book.
This book starts off saying that it is a true story, but I don’t know if I believe that or not. This book is about how the journalist, Jon Ronson, stumbles on the information about how the military and physiological worlds unite. He meets a series of men who tell him, in exact detail, how there are military psychic spies and how they have developed powers to do, what seems to be, impossible things. Chapter one beings in 1983 with General Stubblebine imagining running through the wall but of course fails to do so. Stubblebine is the chief of the secret military spying units and after banning his nose against the wall he thinks he passing through objects, such as walls, could be useful in the future and that is how the men staring actual goats begins. Jon goes on a series of interviews to find the men who started the group of men who were training to become psychic soldiers. He flies around the world to find as much information as he can, to make the story begin. He interviews men such as Guy Savelli, martial arts teacher who claims to have the Death Touch and to be able to kill goats by staring them to death. He interviews General Albert Stubblebine, who apparently believes, that walking through walls and levitation are possible if one is in the right mindset. He also interviews a man who believes his brother, Frank Olson, was murdered over fears he would reveal it to the press. At last he finds Jim Channon a cornel in the United States army, who wrote the “First Earth Battalion”. Jim is the one who started training men to obtain psychic powers; the manual he wrote explains how to pacify with the enemy with indigenous music with subliminal messages, positive energy, or discordant sound. Goats are used in the military more and more, he says. The goats are de-bleated so they will make no sound. He explains how the goats got to the military base and what they are essentially used for, but he wants more and he goes on the journey to find out more for himself and experience and record all of this in his book.
The book in itself is really good and interesting. I found humor in it to be really dark and twisted, but funny nonetheless. Jon Ronson knows that there is both and amusing and serious side to his research, and he lets the readers know when he is trying to be funny and when it is time to get down to business. Ronson has a way of making the reader become engaged and fully interested with what he writes about. Although, I do not know if to believe that the story is true. Maybe Ronson was having a dream or a vision of some sort, which led him to believe that those things did happen or that he has a really good imagination. He could have just researched all the information and made up a few names to tie up with what his research said. He sounds really convincing and at times I feel like the United States as a government does have a lot of secrets and will not disclose them, but I believe they do not disclose them for the Americans security. Ronson depicts the United States military operation in a way that, I can assume, only men high up in the military would be able to. He says things that are in a way disturbing, such as the soldiers who are being tortured with the song with subliminal messages. I imagine the United Sates military would have to do anything and everything to defend and defeat the enemy, but is the United States military really capable of all the things Ronson writes about? I had always put myself in the mindset that and army was suppose to help even those who were trying to hurt them, but now I think that that is what the government made me believe. Ronson clearly has a problem with George W. Bush and is not afraid to make that known to his readers. He blames the War on Terror on the president and, I feel that, he wants him to admit what he did. He thinks all of the War on Terror is a hoax and that the United States military is corrupt. The de-bleated goats are kind of a symbol to me in this book. The goats represent the soldiers who cannot speak of their psychic powers because they have been manipulated to keep their mouths shut.
I recommend this book if you are looking for a great non-fiction book. Ronson is a really good author and makes you see the side of things that maybe we should be looking at too. He supports his arguments with evidence that seems legit. He goes on a bizarre journey to find answers to the questions many have, but only he was willing to find out the answers. He uses the humor to engage the reader and keeps the reader hooked for the entire book. I would not recommend this book if you believe that there is nothing wrong with the United Sates government or any other government for that matter. I would also not recommend this book if you do not like to hear bad things being spoken about the former president George W. Bush. Overall I give the book a 5 out of 5 stars.
Mind you, Ronson knows exactly what he's doing by presenting the book as "hilarious" - it starts out completely absurd, with the high-minded hippy ideals of a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran presented to a beleaguered military under siege. Jim Channon, seeking solace in the emerging human potential movement in California, struck a chord with the top brass, and the repercussions are still felt today.
But instead of being used as a positive force for peace, the military twisted it into a force of evil. Ronson ties it all together: September 11, Heaven's Gate, sticky foam, Abu-Grahib, Waco, Art Bell, Projects STARGATE, MKULTRA, and ARTICHOKE, and yes, Barney. Goat-staring is the least of our worries.
The thread running throughout all these seemingly disconnected blips in history is that they are a new form of psychological warfare that is innocuous, ruthless, and entirely effective. The Men Who Stare at Goats would be just another conspiracy-laden anti-government diatribe if it wasn't for the fact that Ronson always takes the next step as an investigative reporter. He finds people to back up the wild claims, interviews them, and often challenges their wild theories.
The sad thing is, very few of these shadowy contacts hide their past. Almost unilaterally, Ronson calls them all out by name and they step forward, sharing a story that sheds a disconcerting light on America's human rights record. Where is the vigorous conversation, the protests, the discord over these revelations? The facts are right here before us - even photographic evidence -- but we laugh about Barney being used to torture prisoners and we shake our heads at the poor, misguided psychics. But outrage? There's no outrage. We save our vitriol for partisan debates in our own government.
Eric Olson, son of Frank Olson, a military scientist who died under mysterious circumstances while working on MKULTRA, sums it up best:
"The old story is so much fun, why would anyone want to replace it with a story that's not fun. You see...this is no longer a happy, feel-good story...People have been 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."
Have you heard? There's a movie based on this book coming out starring George Clooney.
It's a comedy.