Goats — The Men Who Stare At

That program was the real-life inspiration for the 2004 book The Men Who Stare at Goats by journalist Jon Ronson, and the 2009 film starring George Clooney. But unlike the surreal comedy of the movie, the true story is a bizarre and troubling chapter in military history—one that blends New Age mysticism, psychological warfare, and the kind of earnest, dangerous optimism that only the Cold War could produce.

Channon’s vision was a “warrior monk” who could dissolve enemy weapons with a thought, walk through walls, project light from his eyes, and, yes, stop a goat’s heart by staring at it. The manual was filled with earnest, hand-drawn diagrams of “mind-body bridging” and “energy pulse detection.” It sounds like a parody, but the Army took it seriously enough to fund an entire unit: the U.S. Army’s , later nicknamed the “Jedi Knights” by insiders. The Men Who Stare At Goats

The program’s true failure wasn’t the goats—it was the men. Several of the officers suffered severe psychological breakdowns. One, a lieutenant colonel, became convinced he could pass through walls and died while trying to demonstrate it in front of his family, running headfirst into a concrete barrier. The unit was quietly disbanded in the early 1980s, its records scattered. That program was the real-life inspiration for the

It began in the 1970s at Fort Bragg’s 1st Special Forces Command. A handful of officers, frustrated by the brutality of conventional warfare, sought a purer way to fight. They were influenced by a fringe figure named Major General Albert Stubblebine, a man who claimed to have successfully walked through his own office wall (he ran into it, gave up, and later admitted it didn’t work). Stubblebine was a devotee of a former disc jockey and mystic named Jim Channon, who wrote a utopian—and deeply strange—handbook called The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual . The manual was filled with earnest, hand-drawn diagrams