The Men Who Stare At Goats is a hilarious new film starring George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey. Unfortunately, the true story it's based on is no laughing matter, especially if you happen to be a de-bleated goat housed in the U.S. Army's top secret Goat Lab or a guest of our government at Guantnamo Bay or Abu Ghraib.
The screenplay for the movie is woven around cold, hard -- and quite frankly bizarre -- facts uncovered by British author, journalist and documentarian Jon Ronson during his investigation into the U.S. Army's all too real paranormal activities, which he chronicled in a book first published in 2005. Though fictionalized, the script features whole chunks of dialog lifted directly from actual interviews Ronson conducted for the book with high ranking army officials and those who were trained by them as psychic spies.
Major General Albert Stubblebine III, who in the early '80s headed up the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command, a joint Army and N.S.A. clearing house responsible for gathering and disseminating intelligence, was one of the military's highest ranking proponents of supernatural techniques. Stubblebine, who was frequently frustrated by his lack of aptitude in the walking through walls department, was eventually forced out, but his dream of creating a superpowered army to defend the world's greatest superpower lived on thanks to the work of a Lieutenant Colonel called Jim Channon.
Disillusioned by what he'd seen and experienced in Vietnam, Channon had wanted to find a better, less lethal way of engaging in war. In 1977 he persuaded the Pentagon to fund a two year fact finding mission. During this time he visited numerous establishments that claimed to offer methods for enhancing human potential (including one in Big Sur that did this with naked hot tub encounter sessions). Upon his return, Channon wrote a blueprint for the next generation of soldier, or "warrior monks" as he called them, in a document entitled The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual.
The report detailed his ideas for the military application of a variety of new age techniques including telepathy, remote viewing, hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming, and the use of music and subliminal sounds to alter mood. Channon's hippified vision of how to go about war, which included the use of special "sparkly eyes" greetings to disarm the enemy, was intended to create positive change. However many of the more tangible mind-bending techniques that Channon outlined were ultimately subverted by the military and used for torture and psychological warfare.
One of the army's more laughable attempts at co-opting Channon's ideas for darker purposes was their program to create telepathic assassins. The soldiers selected to hone their psychic powers in this way practiced their skills on a covert goat herd based at Fort Bragg that had been de-bleated to avoid rousing the suspicions of the local branch of the ASPCA. Though killing with a stare proved to be a somewhat challenging task, legend has it that a man named Guy Savelli did actually down a goat. But when Ronson caught up with Savelli, a civilian who was initially contracted by Special Forces to teach the mind over body martial art Kun Tao, the only proof of his skills he was able to offer was a somewhat dubious DIY hamster snuff video.
However, disturbing images leaked from inside Abu Ghraib and news reports of interrogation tactics used in Iraq and at Guantnamo Bay, involving loud music and fit-inducing strobe light inflicted over excessive periods of time, indicate that other psi ops methods, originally presented in a far different light by the likes of Stubblebine and Channon, have caused very real harm. Highly experimental mind-targeted tactics have also been deployed in a shockingly disorganized, cavalier and ad-hoc manner during various domestic sieges including the ill-fated 51-day stand off at Waco which resulted in 76 deaths. And it's not just terrorists and religious extremists that are a casualty of our rogue psychological warfare, which has caused a crisis of conscience at home that has over-shadowed the Bush presidency and threatens even that of Obama's.
SuicideGirls caught up with Ronson by phone to find out more.
Nicole Powers: In your previous book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, you covered a wide range of wack jobs of various religious and political persuasions. British fruitloops seem to be mostly confined to disseminating their ideas by standing on boxes and shouting at Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park, but what's so scary about American nutcases is that some of them are actually high up in the military and government and are running one of the country's two major political parties. How would you compare and contrast nutters on either side of the Atlantic?
Jon Ronson: I remember asking this CIA guy called Ray Hyman why there's so much nuttiness within the highest places of the CIA and military intelligence in America, and his answer to me was, "Because people are basically nuts, which means you're going to get a lot of nuttiness outside of the CIA and a lot of nuttiness inside the CIA." And that's the conclusion I've come to, that we're just mad, and our madness is what rules the world.
NP: But there's something about America and crackpots that means they can rise higher in the ranks of power.
JR: That is odd isn't it? That it happens in such high places in America. And it's true, in Goats I had a look to see if I could see anything like that happening in the British military and I couldn't at all. The only place I found that level of extreme out of the box thinking was in the American military.
What's really interesting is there's a bit in the book where General Stubblebine has tried and failed to walk through this wall, and has had all these spoon bending parties, and his fellow chiefs of staff get really worried about him and want to force him out. But it turns out they're not worried about him because they think he's irrational and they're rationalists, which is what I would have assumed, they're trying to force him out because they're all fundamentalist Christians and he has possibly been infiltrated by Satan. That was kind of the moral battle that was playing out at the top of the United States Intelligence Service - like wizards throwing thunderbolts at each other. And that's uniquely American I think.
NP: The prevalence of religion does add to the nuttiness out here.
JR: Yeah. It certainly does. Because when we get deeply religious people in positions of political power in [the U.K.] they tend to underplay it. For instance there's that famous line of Alistair Campbell's. [Campbell held the equivalent post to that of the White House's Press Secretary at No. 10 Downing Street from 1997 to 2003 and was Tony Blair's spokesperson.] When Tony Blair was asked if he prayed with George Bush, Alistair Campbell's answer was, "We don't do religion," whereas in America you really do do religion. So it did make me laugh that that was the intellectual battle going on at that moment in American military history: Is General Stubblebine Satanic? Rather than has he just gone crazy?
NP: In your book you portray the army as an organization still recovering from Vietnam, with much of the top brass suffering from PTSD. And you allude to a level of self-selection in today's voluntary army when you talk about how past research done at the end of World War II concluded that only around 15 to 20 percent of American infantry men shot to kill during battle, and that 98 percent of those that did were deeply traumatized by it and the remaining 2 percent were classified as "aggressive psychopathic personalities."
JR: Absolutely.
NP: There really is this sense that the lunatics have taken over the asylum, which also happens to be the most well armed institution in the world. It's a little worrying.
JR: Well, yes. That statistic by the way brings up a really interesting sub-point, which is what the American military tried to do is try and create psychopathy in ordinary people. That's the reason why American soldiers, and soldiers all over the world, are better at killing now than they were during the Second World War -- their trainers have taught them how to be psychopathic. They're not actual psychopaths, because I think you're born a psychopath, but they train to dehumanize somebody so they become psychopathic militaries.
But you don't just find it in the military; I think you find it in the medical services [with] doctors. It's almost like good psychopaths. Brain surgeons are very good at thinking of the people they're operating on as just slabs of meat, and it actually makes them better doctors. I think that's kind of interesting. It's sort of a positive point in a way.
NP: What's also incredible about your book is the number of dots it connects. You go from The Branch Davidian siege at Waco, to the Heaven's Gate suicide pact in San Diego, to the 9/11 hijackers, to torture tactics used at Abu Ghraib. Even though The First Earth Batallion was such a small unit, it's had a massive reach and an inordinate level of influence even after it's demise.
JR: Yes, I think so. Certainly what the First Earth Battalion stands for, and the idea that the way ideas permeate throughout the military is in this way. I mean I'm not saying that what happened to the Branch Davidians at Waco was [brought about by] First Battalion ideas, but I think what definitely is the case is, you can see this historically with America, whenever they've got the opportunity, they've got a bunch of people surrounded, what they do is treat those people like guinea pigs. The Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, the Branch Davidians at Waco, and then the prisoners at Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib were treated like guinea pigs and I think that's inexcusable.
The kind of interrogation techniques that were being employed at those places were esoteric experimental techniques. I think there is something fascinating and chilling about that mentality. It's like we've got a bunch of people surrounded, let's try out all the crazy shit that's been floating about in think tanks for years. It's extraordinary really.
NP: As you speculate in your book, do you actually believe that Gitmo was just "Experimental Lab Mark 1" for the army's Psi Ops - essentially an extension of Project ARTICHOKE which tested out new torture techniques on "expendables" back in 1950s.
JR: I really believe that. I think one contribution that my book has is to look at the military in this way. I agree. I think Abu Ghraib [was used in this way] too. I am a bit of a conspiracy theorist when it comes to the Abu Ghraib photographs. I don't think what you are witnessing in those Abu Ghraib photographs is just random hick cruelty, which is basically what people would like us to believe. I think there was something a lot more organized and a lot more thought out going on there.
NP: If those Lynndie England photos were Psi Ops "products" that were meant for viewing by Iraqi POWs / enemy combatants only, if they were staged for propaganda purposes it certainly explains Obama's subsequent behavior and why he's refused to prosecute those responsible for war crimes.
JR: And indeed, I think I'm right in saying, release all the material as well. Aren't there a huge number of extra photographs that still haven't been seen? [Obama] said he was going to show them, and then he didn't.
NP: Reading that chapter in your book made Obama's actions make sense for the first time.
JR: Yes, I think so.
NP: One of the things that people have latched onto in the book is how the army used the music of Barney and Friends for torture. Music from Metallica, Avril Lavigne, Celine Dion, and an unnamed all-girl Fleetwood Mac covers band also made the cut and has been used for nefarious purposes. You allude to the fact that this information may have been deliberately brought to light, perhaps to take the focus of less palatable techniques such as waterboarding.
JR: Yes. I really believe that to be the case. I think what happened was Psi Ops saw an opportunity. I don't think you need to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that is true. Just today by coincidence I saw that original Newsweek article that first broke the Barney story back in 2003. I think that Psi Ops could see that Newsweek wanted it to be a funny story, the idea of musical torture, and they just jumped on it as a possibility because when you've got a funny, slapstick story about torture that's so enjoyable nobody's going to want to try and find a darker story about torture.
I think Psi Ops seized on that opportunity and did a bit of psi ops on all of us. Everybody thought the Barney story was funny at the time, and it was only when Abu Ghraib happened a few months later -- I think there was about six months between the Barney story coming out and the Abu Ghraib story coming out -- and for those six months American Psi Ops had completely won. Torture was funny and poor old groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were trying to convince people that actually torture wasn't quite as funny as everybody thought it was. But then nobody wanted to hear that because everybody wanted to have a good laugh.
It was only when you were confronted with the full horror of the Abu Ghraib photographs that the torture stopped being funny. It was a brilliant Psi Ops success that they had there, and the movie does go into that. There's a nice, sort of dark ending which reflects that.
NP: Do you get a sense that you've hit the bottom of the rabbit hole, or, to shamelessly mix metaphors, that you've only hit the tip of the iceberg with this book? I mean in one chapter an army guy even talks about how units showed up at Abu Ghraib that even he didn't know existed. I mean what's a clandestine, all-Mormon unit from Utah doing at Abu Ghraib for god's sake?
JR: [laughs] There were Brits there as well. Absolutely.
I think what I did in the book, I definitely got further. I mean the tip of the iceberg was the psychic spies, that was declassified in 1995, and I think I did manage to go further down the iceberg. Undoubtedly most of the stuff in this book is stuff that hadn't been revealed before, the goat staring, all that kind of stuff. But what I don't know is what's happened since I finished writing the book in 2003/2004. I assume there's a whole bunch of stuff still going on. I've no doubt that there is.
NP: With all the publicity surrounding the book and film, have more people crawled out of the woodwork to talk? Have you discovered anything else relating to this subject since?
JR: Nothing major. I've had a few people say to me they saw this stuff going on and I got it right, but I haven't had any fabulous new chapters come my way. If I'm being completely honest, a few people in the past week or two have emailed me to say "you don't know how far this goes, it goes a lot further than this," but I haven't got back to them, partly because I've been unbelievably busy promoting the movie, and partly because I'm always slightly worried when I get emails like that that the people are just nuts. I've been burnt a few times getting back to somebody and just finding out that they're mentally ill and it's nothing to do with reality. But I've kept the emails so I might go back to them.
NP: In your book there's speculation that the First Earth Battalion was the more public of perhaps two psychic units, and that it was disbanded so the military could accurately state that it had ceased the psychic activities of the First Earth Battalion while secretly pursuing similar ideas with another more covert unit. Do you think that's the case?
JR: I don't think that's true. I think that was a psychic who thought that being a secret psychic spy for the U.S. military must be so cool, and then he becomes one and realizes that it's not that cool, it's a bit crap. So he starts thinking, "Well we must be the crap psychics and there's really brilliant psychics somewhere else." That's human nature.
It's a bit like, I went to Puerto Rico to watch them filming the movie, and I think it's going to be the most exciting thing in the whole world. In fact, it's just hard work. It's just people working. So I'm thinking there must be another movie set somewhere else where they're all being fed grapes by virgins. There's probably no film set in the world where that happens. If that's happening anywhere it's happening in the SuicideGirls's offices.
NP: Did you actually pick up any new abilities, any sparkly eye or invisibility techniques from all the experts you interviewed for the book.
JR: None. Absolutely none. I tried staring at my cat Monty and it didn't fall over.
NP: Well I'm kind of glad about that.
JR: So am I because I really like my cat. I was really dancing with danger actually -- or I would have been had there been any possibility that anybody could kill anything with a stare.
NP: And you can reassure readers that no hamsters were killed in the making of this book?
JR: I can absolutely assure you because the hamster death video that I saw definitely culminates with the hamster getting up and brushing itself down. Your readers needn't worry about that.
NP: Our Animal Rights group will be reassured by that I'm sure.
Photo: Jon Ronson, pictured right, on the set of The Men Who Stare At Goats in search of virgins to feed him grapes.
The Men Who Stare At Goats movie opens in theaters nationwide this Friday, November 6. The book, The Men Who Stare At Goats, is available from Amazon.com and all fine booksellers. For more information on Jon Ronson go to JonRonson.com.
The screenplay for the movie is woven around cold, hard -- and quite frankly bizarre -- facts uncovered by British author, journalist and documentarian Jon Ronson during his investigation into the U.S. Army's all too real paranormal activities, which he chronicled in a book first published in 2005. Though fictionalized, the script features whole chunks of dialog lifted directly from actual interviews Ronson conducted for the book with high ranking army officials and those who were trained by them as psychic spies.
Major General Albert Stubblebine III, who in the early '80s headed up the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command, a joint Army and N.S.A. clearing house responsible for gathering and disseminating intelligence, was one of the military's highest ranking proponents of supernatural techniques. Stubblebine, who was frequently frustrated by his lack of aptitude in the walking through walls department, was eventually forced out, but his dream of creating a superpowered army to defend the world's greatest superpower lived on thanks to the work of a Lieutenant Colonel called Jim Channon.
Disillusioned by what he'd seen and experienced in Vietnam, Channon had wanted to find a better, less lethal way of engaging in war. In 1977 he persuaded the Pentagon to fund a two year fact finding mission. During this time he visited numerous establishments that claimed to offer methods for enhancing human potential (including one in Big Sur that did this with naked hot tub encounter sessions). Upon his return, Channon wrote a blueprint for the next generation of soldier, or "warrior monks" as he called them, in a document entitled The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual.
The report detailed his ideas for the military application of a variety of new age techniques including telepathy, remote viewing, hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming, and the use of music and subliminal sounds to alter mood. Channon's hippified vision of how to go about war, which included the use of special "sparkly eyes" greetings to disarm the enemy, was intended to create positive change. However many of the more tangible mind-bending techniques that Channon outlined were ultimately subverted by the military and used for torture and psychological warfare.
One of the army's more laughable attempts at co-opting Channon's ideas for darker purposes was their program to create telepathic assassins. The soldiers selected to hone their psychic powers in this way practiced their skills on a covert goat herd based at Fort Bragg that had been de-bleated to avoid rousing the suspicions of the local branch of the ASPCA. Though killing with a stare proved to be a somewhat challenging task, legend has it that a man named Guy Savelli did actually down a goat. But when Ronson caught up with Savelli, a civilian who was initially contracted by Special Forces to teach the mind over body martial art Kun Tao, the only proof of his skills he was able to offer was a somewhat dubious DIY hamster snuff video.
However, disturbing images leaked from inside Abu Ghraib and news reports of interrogation tactics used in Iraq and at Guantnamo Bay, involving loud music and fit-inducing strobe light inflicted over excessive periods of time, indicate that other psi ops methods, originally presented in a far different light by the likes of Stubblebine and Channon, have caused very real harm. Highly experimental mind-targeted tactics have also been deployed in a shockingly disorganized, cavalier and ad-hoc manner during various domestic sieges including the ill-fated 51-day stand off at Waco which resulted in 76 deaths. And it's not just terrorists and religious extremists that are a casualty of our rogue psychological warfare, which has caused a crisis of conscience at home that has over-shadowed the Bush presidency and threatens even that of Obama's.
SuicideGirls caught up with Ronson by phone to find out more.
Nicole Powers: In your previous book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, you covered a wide range of wack jobs of various religious and political persuasions. British fruitloops seem to be mostly confined to disseminating their ideas by standing on boxes and shouting at Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park, but what's so scary about American nutcases is that some of them are actually high up in the military and government and are running one of the country's two major political parties. How would you compare and contrast nutters on either side of the Atlantic?
Jon Ronson: I remember asking this CIA guy called Ray Hyman why there's so much nuttiness within the highest places of the CIA and military intelligence in America, and his answer to me was, "Because people are basically nuts, which means you're going to get a lot of nuttiness outside of the CIA and a lot of nuttiness inside the CIA." And that's the conclusion I've come to, that we're just mad, and our madness is what rules the world.
NP: But there's something about America and crackpots that means they can rise higher in the ranks of power.
JR: That is odd isn't it? That it happens in such high places in America. And it's true, in Goats I had a look to see if I could see anything like that happening in the British military and I couldn't at all. The only place I found that level of extreme out of the box thinking was in the American military.
What's really interesting is there's a bit in the book where General Stubblebine has tried and failed to walk through this wall, and has had all these spoon bending parties, and his fellow chiefs of staff get really worried about him and want to force him out. But it turns out they're not worried about him because they think he's irrational and they're rationalists, which is what I would have assumed, they're trying to force him out because they're all fundamentalist Christians and he has possibly been infiltrated by Satan. That was kind of the moral battle that was playing out at the top of the United States Intelligence Service - like wizards throwing thunderbolts at each other. And that's uniquely American I think.
NP: The prevalence of religion does add to the nuttiness out here.
JR: Yeah. It certainly does. Because when we get deeply religious people in positions of political power in [the U.K.] they tend to underplay it. For instance there's that famous line of Alistair Campbell's. [Campbell held the equivalent post to that of the White House's Press Secretary at No. 10 Downing Street from 1997 to 2003 and was Tony Blair's spokesperson.] When Tony Blair was asked if he prayed with George Bush, Alistair Campbell's answer was, "We don't do religion," whereas in America you really do do religion. So it did make me laugh that that was the intellectual battle going on at that moment in American military history: Is General Stubblebine Satanic? Rather than has he just gone crazy?
NP: In your book you portray the army as an organization still recovering from Vietnam, with much of the top brass suffering from PTSD. And you allude to a level of self-selection in today's voluntary army when you talk about how past research done at the end of World War II concluded that only around 15 to 20 percent of American infantry men shot to kill during battle, and that 98 percent of those that did were deeply traumatized by it and the remaining 2 percent were classified as "aggressive psychopathic personalities."
JR: Absolutely.
NP: There really is this sense that the lunatics have taken over the asylum, which also happens to be the most well armed institution in the world. It's a little worrying.
JR: Well, yes. That statistic by the way brings up a really interesting sub-point, which is what the American military tried to do is try and create psychopathy in ordinary people. That's the reason why American soldiers, and soldiers all over the world, are better at killing now than they were during the Second World War -- their trainers have taught them how to be psychopathic. They're not actual psychopaths, because I think you're born a psychopath, but they train to dehumanize somebody so they become psychopathic militaries.
But you don't just find it in the military; I think you find it in the medical services [with] doctors. It's almost like good psychopaths. Brain surgeons are very good at thinking of the people they're operating on as just slabs of meat, and it actually makes them better doctors. I think that's kind of interesting. It's sort of a positive point in a way.
NP: What's also incredible about your book is the number of dots it connects. You go from The Branch Davidian siege at Waco, to the Heaven's Gate suicide pact in San Diego, to the 9/11 hijackers, to torture tactics used at Abu Ghraib. Even though The First Earth Batallion was such a small unit, it's had a massive reach and an inordinate level of influence even after it's demise.
JR: Yes, I think so. Certainly what the First Earth Battalion stands for, and the idea that the way ideas permeate throughout the military is in this way. I mean I'm not saying that what happened to the Branch Davidians at Waco was [brought about by] First Battalion ideas, but I think what definitely is the case is, you can see this historically with America, whenever they've got the opportunity, they've got a bunch of people surrounded, what they do is treat those people like guinea pigs. The Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, the Branch Davidians at Waco, and then the prisoners at Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib were treated like guinea pigs and I think that's inexcusable.
The kind of interrogation techniques that were being employed at those places were esoteric experimental techniques. I think there is something fascinating and chilling about that mentality. It's like we've got a bunch of people surrounded, let's try out all the crazy shit that's been floating about in think tanks for years. It's extraordinary really.
NP: As you speculate in your book, do you actually believe that Gitmo was just "Experimental Lab Mark 1" for the army's Psi Ops - essentially an extension of Project ARTICHOKE which tested out new torture techniques on "expendables" back in 1950s.
JR: I really believe that. I think one contribution that my book has is to look at the military in this way. I agree. I think Abu Ghraib [was used in this way] too. I am a bit of a conspiracy theorist when it comes to the Abu Ghraib photographs. I don't think what you are witnessing in those Abu Ghraib photographs is just random hick cruelty, which is basically what people would like us to believe. I think there was something a lot more organized and a lot more thought out going on there.
NP: If those Lynndie England photos were Psi Ops "products" that were meant for viewing by Iraqi POWs / enemy combatants only, if they were staged for propaganda purposes it certainly explains Obama's subsequent behavior and why he's refused to prosecute those responsible for war crimes.
JR: And indeed, I think I'm right in saying, release all the material as well. Aren't there a huge number of extra photographs that still haven't been seen? [Obama] said he was going to show them, and then he didn't.
NP: Reading that chapter in your book made Obama's actions make sense for the first time.
JR: Yes, I think so.
NP: One of the things that people have latched onto in the book is how the army used the music of Barney and Friends for torture. Music from Metallica, Avril Lavigne, Celine Dion, and an unnamed all-girl Fleetwood Mac covers band also made the cut and has been used for nefarious purposes. You allude to the fact that this information may have been deliberately brought to light, perhaps to take the focus of less palatable techniques such as waterboarding.
JR: Yes. I really believe that to be the case. I think what happened was Psi Ops saw an opportunity. I don't think you need to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that is true. Just today by coincidence I saw that original Newsweek article that first broke the Barney story back in 2003. I think that Psi Ops could see that Newsweek wanted it to be a funny story, the idea of musical torture, and they just jumped on it as a possibility because when you've got a funny, slapstick story about torture that's so enjoyable nobody's going to want to try and find a darker story about torture.
I think Psi Ops seized on that opportunity and did a bit of psi ops on all of us. Everybody thought the Barney story was funny at the time, and it was only when Abu Ghraib happened a few months later -- I think there was about six months between the Barney story coming out and the Abu Ghraib story coming out -- and for those six months American Psi Ops had completely won. Torture was funny and poor old groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were trying to convince people that actually torture wasn't quite as funny as everybody thought it was. But then nobody wanted to hear that because everybody wanted to have a good laugh.
It was only when you were confronted with the full horror of the Abu Ghraib photographs that the torture stopped being funny. It was a brilliant Psi Ops success that they had there, and the movie does go into that. There's a nice, sort of dark ending which reflects that.
NP: Do you get a sense that you've hit the bottom of the rabbit hole, or, to shamelessly mix metaphors, that you've only hit the tip of the iceberg with this book? I mean in one chapter an army guy even talks about how units showed up at Abu Ghraib that even he didn't know existed. I mean what's a clandestine, all-Mormon unit from Utah doing at Abu Ghraib for god's sake?
JR: [laughs] There were Brits there as well. Absolutely.
I think what I did in the book, I definitely got further. I mean the tip of the iceberg was the psychic spies, that was declassified in 1995, and I think I did manage to go further down the iceberg. Undoubtedly most of the stuff in this book is stuff that hadn't been revealed before, the goat staring, all that kind of stuff. But what I don't know is what's happened since I finished writing the book in 2003/2004. I assume there's a whole bunch of stuff still going on. I've no doubt that there is.
NP: With all the publicity surrounding the book and film, have more people crawled out of the woodwork to talk? Have you discovered anything else relating to this subject since?
JR: Nothing major. I've had a few people say to me they saw this stuff going on and I got it right, but I haven't had any fabulous new chapters come my way. If I'm being completely honest, a few people in the past week or two have emailed me to say "you don't know how far this goes, it goes a lot further than this," but I haven't got back to them, partly because I've been unbelievably busy promoting the movie, and partly because I'm always slightly worried when I get emails like that that the people are just nuts. I've been burnt a few times getting back to somebody and just finding out that they're mentally ill and it's nothing to do with reality. But I've kept the emails so I might go back to them.
NP: In your book there's speculation that the First Earth Battalion was the more public of perhaps two psychic units, and that it was disbanded so the military could accurately state that it had ceased the psychic activities of the First Earth Battalion while secretly pursuing similar ideas with another more covert unit. Do you think that's the case?
JR: I don't think that's true. I think that was a psychic who thought that being a secret psychic spy for the U.S. military must be so cool, and then he becomes one and realizes that it's not that cool, it's a bit crap. So he starts thinking, "Well we must be the crap psychics and there's really brilliant psychics somewhere else." That's human nature.
It's a bit like, I went to Puerto Rico to watch them filming the movie, and I think it's going to be the most exciting thing in the whole world. In fact, it's just hard work. It's just people working. So I'm thinking there must be another movie set somewhere else where they're all being fed grapes by virgins. There's probably no film set in the world where that happens. If that's happening anywhere it's happening in the SuicideGirls's offices.
NP: Did you actually pick up any new abilities, any sparkly eye or invisibility techniques from all the experts you interviewed for the book.
JR: None. Absolutely none. I tried staring at my cat Monty and it didn't fall over.
NP: Well I'm kind of glad about that.
JR: So am I because I really like my cat. I was really dancing with danger actually -- or I would have been had there been any possibility that anybody could kill anything with a stare.
NP: And you can reassure readers that no hamsters were killed in the making of this book?
JR: I can absolutely assure you because the hamster death video that I saw definitely culminates with the hamster getting up and brushing itself down. Your readers needn't worry about that.
NP: Our Animal Rights group will be reassured by that I'm sure.
Photo: Jon Ronson, pictured right, on the set of The Men Who Stare At Goats in search of virgins to feed him grapes.
The Men Who Stare At Goats movie opens in theaters nationwide this Friday, November 6. The book, The Men Who Stare At Goats, is available from Amazon.com and all fine booksellers. For more information on Jon Ronson go to JonRonson.com.
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
raphaelgeist:
Great interview, thanks. I remember Jon from when he did a column in the Guardian. The film sounds great.
lalou:
What a bizarre story line and interview intro......