The Men Who Stare At Goats ~upd~
Cassady claimed he could walk through walls. “But only the cheap ones,” he admitted. “Drywall. Particleboard. Anything with a stud, forget it.” His specialty, however, was goats.
Features a heavyweight cast including George Clooney , Ewan McGregor , Jeff Bridges , and Kevin Spacey . 🎭 Meet the "Jedi" Warriors
That is the real legacy of The Men Who Stare At Goats . It is a story about the American military industrial complex looking in the mirror and seeing a wizard. It is about the intersection of violence and mysticism, and the desperate, lonely attempt to find a way to fight without hurting.
The goat, Gerald, outlived the program by eleven years. Died of boredom. That’s not a metaphor. He literally stopped chewing.
Based on Jim Channon, the creator of the actual First Earth Battalion manual. Kevin Spacey The Men Who Stare At Goats
Unlike the solemnity of Apocalypse Now or the visceral realism of Black Hawk Down , The Men Who Stare at Goats employs slapstick and deadpan irony to interrogate real-world military programs. The film follows Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a cuckolded small-town reporter, who stumbles upon Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a former “Jedi Warrior” from a secret U.S. Army unit trained in paranormal warfare. Their journey into the Iraqi desert becomes a picaresque tour through the forgotten history of New Age military thinking. The paper posits that the film’s primary thesis is that the war on terror—and indeed all late-stage U.S. interventions—are less rational geopolitical maneuvers than they are exercises in self-hypnosis and hallucinated reality.
As commanding general of the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), he was the highest-ranking proponent of these ideas. He reportedly spent his time researching how to walk through walls, believing it was a matter of manipulating molecular structures.
To the astonishment of rational officers, the Army brass didn't laugh Channon out of the Pentagon. They funded it. The unit was known as the "Remote Viewing" program, later codenamed Project Stargate , based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
The purpose was to see if a psychic, or "remote viewer," could cause a heart attack or death in a living creature without physical contact. The experiments were a failure—the goats did not die from being stared at 0.5.5 . However, the pursuit of this capability highlights the extreme lengths some in the military were willing to go to gain an "unseen" advantage. 4. The 2009 Film Adaptation Cassady claimed he could walk through walls
Despite its middling reception from critics, the film remains a fascinating artifact of pre-2010s "truth is stranger than fiction" filmmaking. Jon Ronson himself estimated that the film is "about 70 percent true," acknowledging that Hollywood had to add a coherent narrative structure to a story that, in reality, featured a lot of people staring into space hoping for visions.
The title conjures up an image of military men engaged in a bizarre standoff with animals. While that image is partially accurate, it is also a gateway into a much larger investigation of the US Army's attempts to employ paranormal, psychic abilities as a weapon.
Key proponents of this, including the characterLyn Cassady (based on real-life figures like Guy Savelli), claimed they were trained to: Become invisible. Read minds. Kill goats simply by staring at them. 2. "Staring at Goats" - The Reality
The rationale behind the experiments was simple yet extreme: if a soldier could focus their mind intensely enough, could they disrupt the biological functions of another living being? Special forces soldiers were tasked with staring at de-vocalized goats kept in a hidden enclosure on the base. Particleboard
As the Humvee roared away, Ray felt a cold pit in his stomach. "We're going to Iraq?"
The Paranoid Absurdity of Modern Warfare: Deconstructing The Men Who Stare at Goats
Despite the comedic framing, the legacy of these programs is deeply tied to real-world military tactics. The psychological operations (PSYOP) developed during this era paved the way for modern non-lethal weapons, crowd-control technologies, and sophisticated information warfare. The Modern Legacy of Military Mind Control
Skeptics argue that the CIA's experiments were either deliberately deceptive or based on flawed assumptions about human psychology and cognition. They point out that the agency's own assessments of remote viewing were often skeptical and critical.
If you are looking for the original research, you can read more in Jon Ronson's original reporting .