But the system that funded them? That took a silly goat manual and turned it into a torture manual? That is the real horror.
But then the goat got up. It had fainted. The same thing happened again. And again. They realized: the goat was tiring of the bright studio lights. It wasn't psychic murder; it was animal exhaustion. The Men Who Stare At Goats
In the pantheon of bizarre military history, few chapters are as simultaneously hilarious and deeply unsettling as the one chronicled in Jon Ronson’s 2004 book, The Men Who Stare at Goats . For most people, the title conjures the image of Ewan McGregor and George Clooney in the 2009 Coen-brothers-esque comedy: a rag-tag group of Jedi warriors in desert fatigues trying to kill a goat with their minds. But the system that funded them
The infamous goat-staring experiment took place at Fort Bragg. The protocol was rudimentary: A soldier would sit in a room staring at a monitor. A goat was in another building, wired with a bio-feedback machine. The soldier’s job was to "stop the goat's heart." But then the goat got up
The most famous member of this group was a retired Vietnam War intelligence officer named Major General Albert Stubblebine. Stubblebine was the head of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). He was in charge of 14,000 spies and analysts. And he was convinced he had a problem: his physical body kept getting in the way.
When asked why he kept it up, Stubblebine told Ronson: "Because I knew it was possible. The atoms are mostly empty space. I just had to convince my atoms to slip through the gaps in their atoms."
For weeks, nothing happened. The goat just chewed cud. Then, one day, the goat collapsed. The monitors showed a massive spike in stress, followed by a sudden flatline. The soldier stared; the goat fell.