The Men Who Stare At Goats Jun 2026

But it is also a story about human hope. Jim Channon, the real man, died in 2017. Until the end, he carried his "First Earth Battalion" manual with him. He truly believed that the next generation of soldiers could be trained to be peaceful, empathetic, psychic guardians. He believed that the goat was a stepping stone to a world without war.

The result was a design document so bizarre, so wildly optimistic, and so utterly un-military that it was initially laughed out of the Pentagon. It was called The Men Who Stare At Goats

But the story didn’t end there. In 2003, Jon Ronson discovered that some of the same techniques had resurfaced at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay. Interrogators were using “soft kill” methods: sensory deprivation, sleep adjustment, and disorienting New Age-style rituals. The men who stared at goats hadn’t gone away. They had just changed uniforms. But it is also a story about human hope

: Ronson traces the origins of these New Age military programs from the late 1970s and 1980s, revealing how they were influenced by the 1960s counterculture. He truly believed that the next generation of