Jon Ronson: the Men Who Stare at Goats

When facts are so preposterous they seem like bad fiction, it's hard to know what, or who, to believe. The Men Who Stare at Goats blithely reports of things too ridiculous for words, such as the improbably named General Albert Stubblebine III's valiant attempt to walk through the wall of his office.

That the general hurts his nose is of little consequence because, in his mind, "the ability to pass through objects will one day be a common tool in the intelligence-gathering arsenal".

Or there's the ludicrous Goat Lab at Fort Bragg, where super-soldiers tried to stop the hearts of de-bleated goats just by looking at them.

Jon Ronson specialises in this sort of nonsense, as attested by his previous book — Them: Adventures with Extremists, a series of interviews with weirdos. Now he's among the whackos infesting the American military. His quest: to interview the guy who apparently really did stare-down a goat.

Along the way Ronson encounters more improbable types — such as the psychic spies, including Uri Geller, used for "remote sensing" the enemy.

Central to the story is Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon, who, after the ignominy of Vietnam, went on a fact-finding tour of the personal growth movement in California in the late 70s. His mission: to make the Army more cunning.

Channon's two-year odyssey produces something called The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual, which has soldiers learning "to greet people with 'sparkly eyes"'. And to walk into conquered countries carrying symbolic animals, such as lambs, which they would lay at the enemy's feet. Yeah, right.

Ronson plays the semi-detached observer, feigning empathy as all good journalists do, to deliver in deadpan prose an almost plausible logic to the madness — plus some droll humour. But at times he strains to connect the dots that link this lunacy to the real world.

Renegade psychic spies go public on the radio, and tell of their psychic viewing of the Comet Hale-Bopp's "companion object". They sense it has a series of tunnels on the inside but miss a crucial point — the widely circulated companion object photograph was hoax. The slip, says Ronson, has disastrous results for the Heaven's Gate cult, who committed group suicide so they could hitch a ride.

Then there are the experiments with subliminal sounds, taken up by PsyOps and possibly used in an attempt to dislodge the Davidians at the Waco Texas siege.

Sounds are also used — with unknown results — on Iraqi prisoners, who are subjected to repeated playing of Metallica's Enter Sandman and the I Love You song made famous by the children's show character Barney the purple dinosaur.

Torture for sure. But in Ronson's view it's an example of the teachings of The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual being used by the dark side. Preposterous? Maybe. But as a recent history writ small, Goats gives an insight into the American military intelligence psyche that's also strangely convincing.

* Chris Barton is a Herald writer

Published by: Picador
Price: $34.95