The Men Who Stare At Goats

Stubblebine famously attempted to use his mind to walk through a wall. Not metaphorically. He took a running start at the partition wall in his Pentagon office, trying to phase his molecules through the drywall. He did this repeatedly, ultimately giving himself a bloody nose and a bruised ego.

But Stubblebine was no fool. He was a decorated combat veteran. He simply believed that the Soviet Union was light years ahead of the US in "psychotronics." Rumors abounded that the KGB had trained thousands of psychic spies. If the Reds were reading the President's mind, Stubblebine reasoned, the US needed its own battalion of super-soldiers. The Men Who Stare At Goats

For the uninitiated, The Men Who Stare At Goats might sound like a quirky film starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor, or a bizarre book by journalist Jon Ronson. But as the screenwriter William Goldman once said about fairy tales, the truest words are often the funniest. The reality behind the keyword is a strange, decade-spanning rabbit hole that leads to remote military bases, aging New Age hippies in uniform, psychic spies, and a secret war fought not with bullets, but with the power of the mind. Stubblebine famously attempted to use his mind to

So the next time you see a soldier staring too intently at nothing, or a general meditating in his office, remember the goats of Fort Bragg. Remember that for a brief, shining, terrifying moment in the 1980s, the United States Army genuinely believed that if you squinted hard enough, you could kill a goat with your mind. He did this repeatedly, ultimately giving himself a

But Stubblebine had a problem. He was bored. He felt that conventional intelligence—satellites, informants, wiretaps—was missing the bigger picture. He had become obsessed with the potential of the human mind. He had read extensively about Eastern mysticism, about Taoism, about the martial art of Aikido. He became convinced that the laws of physics were merely suggestions.

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 scientific answer is no. There is zero peer-reviewed evidence that a human can stop a goat’s heart with a stare. Humans cannot phase through walls. The government’s own evaluation of remote viewing found it to be unreliable and useless for espionage.

The soldiers, who had been trained in bio-feedback and meditation, would sit a few feet away. They would focus on their own heart rate, slow it down, and then project that stillness onto the goat. The goal was to create a "resonant frequency" that would cause the goat’s heart to fibrillate and stop.