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.
In 1979, a strange rumor began circulating among enlisted men at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. A Special Forces officer, it was said, had attempted to kill a goat using only the power of his stare. The goat survived. The officer got a headache. And the U.S. Army quietly shelved a million-dollar program. The Men Who Stare At Goats
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 . That program was the real-life inspiration for the