Reviews
The Pentagon’s
psychic friends network
The Men Who Stare at Goats
by Jon Ronson
Picador, 2004
278 pages; $24
Reviewed by Michael Shermer
ALLISON WAS AN ATTRACTIVE OREGO-
nian brunette in a new ageish way,
before the new age bloomed in the
1980s. She wore all-natural fibers,
flowers in her hair, and nothing on
her feet. But what most intrigued me
in our year of distance dating were
Allison’s spiritual gifts. I knew she
could see through me metaphorical-
ly, but Allison also saw things that
she said were not allegorical: body
auras, energy chakras, spiritual enti-
ties, and light beings. One night she
closed the door and turned off the
lights in my bathroom and told me to
stare into the mirror
until my aura ap-
peared. During a drive
one evening she point-
ed out spiritual beings
dotting the landscape. I
tried to see the world
as Allison did, but I
couldn’t. I was a skeptic,
and she was a psychic.
This was the age of
paranormal prolifera-
tion. While a graduate
student in experimental
psychology, I saw on television the
Israeli psychic Uri Geller bend cutlery
and reproduce drawings using, so he
said, psychic powers alone. Since a
number of experimental psycholo-
gists had tested Geller and declared
him genuine, I began to think that
there might be something to it, even
if I couldn’t personally get with the
60 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists May/June 2005
paranormal program. But then one
night I saw the magician James “The
Amazing” Randi on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show, replicating with
magic everything Geller did. Randi
bent spoons, duplicated drawings,
levitated tables, and even performed
a psychic surgery. When asked about
Geller’s ability to pass the tests of
professional scientists, Randi ex-
plained that scientists are not trained
to detect trickery and intentional de-
ception, the very art of magic.
Randi’s right. I vividly recall a semi-
nar that Allison and I attended in
which a psychic healer shoved a 10-
inch sail needle through his arm with
no apparent pain and only a drop of
blood. Years later, and to my cha-
grin, Randi performed the same feat
with the simplest of magic.
Randi confirmed my skeptical in-
tuitions about all this
paranormal piffle, but I
always assumed that it
was the province of the
cultural fringes. Then,
in 1995, the story
broke that for the pre-
vious 25 years the U.S.
Army had invested $20
million in a highly se-
cret psychic spy pro-
gram called Star Gate
(also Grill Flame and
Scanate), a Cold War
project intended to close the “psi
gap” (the psychic equivalent of the
missile gap) between the United
States and Soviet Union. The Soviets
were training psychic spies, so we
would too. The Men Who Stare at
Goats, by British investigative jour-
nalist Jon Ronson, is the story of this
program, how it started, the bizarre
twists and turns it took, and how its
legacy carries on today. (Ronson’s
previous book, Them: Adventures
with Extremists, explored the para-
noid world of cult-mongers and con-
spiracy theorists.)
In a highly readable narrative style,
Ronson takes readers on a Looking
Glass-like tour of what U.S. Psycho-
logical Operations (PsyOps) forces
were researching: invisibility, levita-
tion, telekinesis, walking through
walls, and even killing goats just by
staring at them (the ultimate goal
was killing enemy soldiers telepathi-
cally). In one project, psychic spies
attempted to use “remote viewing”
to identify the location of missile
silos, submarines, POWs, and MIAs
from a small room in a run-down
Maryland building. If these skills
could be honed and combined, per-
haps military officials could zap re-
motely viewed enemy missiles in
their silos, or so the thinking went.
Initially, the Star Gate story re-
ceived broad media attention (includ-
ing a spot on ABC’s Nightline) and
made a few of the psychic spies, such
as Ed Dames and Joe McMoneagle,
minor celebrities. As regular guests
on Art Bell’s pro-paranormal radio
talk show, the former spies spun tales
that, had they not been documented
elsewhere, would have seemed like
the ramblings of paranoid cultists.
(There is even a connection between
Dames, Bell, and the Heaven’s Gate
cult mass suicide in 1997, in which
39 UFO devotees took a permanent
“trip” to the mother ship they be-
lieved was trailing the Hale-Bopp
comet.)
But Ronson has brought new
depth to the account by carefully
Vol. 61, No. 3, pp. 60-61
DOI: 10.2968/061003014
 tracking down leads, revealing con-
nections, and uncovering previously
undisclosed stories. For example,
Ronson convincingly connects some
of the bizarre torture techniques used
on prisoners at Cuba’s Guantanamo
Bay and at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison
with similar techniques employed
during the FBI siege of the Branch
Davidians in Waco, Texas. FBI
agents blasted the Branch Davidians
all night with such obnoxious
sounds as screaming rabbits, crying
seagulls, dentist drills, and Nancy
Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for
Walking.” The U.S. military em-
ployed the same technique on Iraqi
prisoners of war, instead using the
theme song from the PBS kids series
Barney and Friends—a tune many
parents concur does become tortur-
ous with repetition.
One of Ronson’s sources, none
other than Geller (of bent-spoon
fame), led him to Maj. Gen. Albert
Stubblebine III, who directed the psy-
chic spy network from his office in
Arlington, Virginia. Stubblebine
thought that with enough practice he
could learn to walk through walls, a
belief encouraged by Lt. Col. Jim
Channon, a Vietnam vet whose post-
war experiences at such new age
meccas as the Esalen Institute in Big
Sur, California, led him to found the
“first earth battalion” of “warrior
monks” and “Jedi knights.” These
warriors, according to Channon,
would transform the nature of war
by entering hostile lands with
“sparkly eyes,” marching to the
mantra of “Om,” and presenting the
enemy with “automatic hugs.” Disil-
lusioned by the ugly carnage of mod-
ern war, Channon envisioned a bat-
talion armory of machines that
would produce “discordant sounds”
(Nancy and Barney?) and “psycho-
electric” guns that would shoot
“positive energy” at enemy soldiers.
SCOTT ARTHUR MASEAR
Although Ronson expresses skepti-
cism throughout his narrative, he
avoids the ontological question of
whether any of these claims have any
basis in reality. That is, can anyone
“We may have set our expectations a little too high.”
levitate, turn invisible, walk through
walls, or remotely view a hidden ob-
ject? Inquiring minds (scientists)
want to know. The answer is an un-
equivocal no. Under controlled con-
ditions, remote viewers have never
succeeded in finding a hidden target
with greater accuracy than random
guessing. The occasional successes
you hear about are due either to
chance or to suspect experiment con-
ditions, like when the person who
subjectively assesses whether the re-
mote viewer’s narrative description
seems to match the target already
knows the target location and its
characteristics. When both the exper-
imenter and the remote viewer are
blinded to the target, all psychic
powers vanish.
Herein lies an important lesson
that I have learned in many years of
paranormal investigations and that
Ronson gleaned in researching his il-
luminating book: What people re-
member rarely corresponds to what
actually happened. Case in point: A
man named Guy Savelli told Ronson
that he had seen soldiers kill goats by
staring at them, and that he himself
had also done so. But as the story un-
folds we discover that Savelli is re-
calling, years later, what he remem-
bers about a particular “experiment”
with 30 numbered goats. Savelli ran-
May/June 2005 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
domly chose goat number 16 and
gave it his best death stare. But he
couldn’t concentrate that day, so he
quit the experiment, only to be told
later that goat number 17 had died.
End of story. No autopsy or explana-
tion of the cause of death. No infor-
mation about how much time had
elapsed; the conditions, like tempera-
ture, of the room into which the 30
goats had been placed; how long
they had been there, and so forth.
Since Ronson was skeptical, Savelli
triumphantly produced a videotape
of another experiment where some-
one else supposedly stopped the
heart of a goat. But the tape showed
only a goat whose heart rate dropped
from 65 to 55 beats per minute.
That was the extent of the empiri-
cal evidence of goat killing, and as
someone who has spent decades in
the same fruitless pursuit of phantom
goats, I conclude that the evidence
for the paranormal in general doesn’t
get much better than this. They shoot
horses, don’t they? 
Michael Shermer is the publisher of
Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com), a
columnist for Scientific American, and
the author of several books, including
Why People Believe Weird Things
(1997) and Science Friction: Where the
Known Meets the Unknown (2005).
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