The men who stare at goats
A journalist tells intertwined anecdotes about US military forays into New Age and paranormal methods of war.
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What Hacker News says
- >This guy who wrote about subversive cat women and robot cities and weapons made from angry psychic weasels and mind control sex between people who are literally floating naked inside a chamber of flames – he had also codified the U.S. military’s approach to psyops at the dawn of the Cold War? Really??
That part is not super surprising. There was a ton of para-psychological, New Age woo-woo happening within military circles of the 60s, 70s, 80s. Men who stare at Goats is a fun book that delves into some of the really bizarre psychological experiments the US military ran and a lot of pop culture draws from that intersection, Metal Gear Solid for example. There was a thing called the "Human Potential Movement" that originated in 60s hippie circles that somehow made it's way to the military as well and influenced some apparent programs trying to create superior soldiers.
It's pretty hilarious and a little bit concerning that these ideas were sometimes as popular within these institutions as they were in the conspiracy theories about them.
- I hope you've taken the time to read The Men Who Stare At Goats, which is definitely solidly in the "tax dollars went where?!" genre.
- To be fair, supernatural beliefs are fairly common amongst olderish veterans of the IC/DoD because those agencies spent/spend billions and billions of dollars a year on programs for things like that (mind reading, controlling the physical world with your brain, remote viewing, binaural beats, etc). The popular movie The Men Who Stare At Goats was based on a non-fiction book/documentary, which is unbelievably crazier than the Hollywood version.
- I have read Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman, but long enough ago that I don't remember much of it - handstanding while drinking water to see if swallowing was gravity driven, misdirecting ants by moving their trails around, offering women drinks at bars only if they agreed to sleep with him up-front, learning 'consequentamente' in Portuguese because the Spanish classes were full, fixing radios by thinking (and then swapping valves around), eating chocolate cake for every cafe desert so he never had to think about it again, meeting a safecracker, et al. But no memory of sensory deprivation tanks or trying to go to war.
> "those thought controlling are a thousand miles away in the protected confines of solitude, not hiding behind a bush a dozen feet away."
Have you read Jon Ronson's book The Men Who Stare At Goats[1]? An account of the US army's paranormal investigations. It is non-fiction but reads like Catch-22.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats
- Psychic spies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
"The Men Who Stare At Goats" is a delightful book that was made into a film about the subject.
More practically, bouncing bomb: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouncing_bomb
- The actual target of a PSY-OP can be hard to ascertain, as they are fundamentally deceptions. One mustn't assume other countries are necessarily intended targets.
There is no reason to believe there was ever any expectation that ESP would work for spying, or that any actual effort was undertaken to try. However, a great deal of work went into convincing Americans that it had been attempted. Ultimately, that work has to be seen as the actual point of the operation. There is no clear indication of the purpose of the operation.
Jon Ronson's (terrifying) book, "Men Who Stare at Goats", explored the history of the operation and the group that perpetrated it. He made clear that it is not just historical, but an ongoing operation, a successful attack on the American public.
Ronald Reagan's Star Wars "Strategic Defense Initiative" could very easily have been primarily a PSY-OP against the USSR. A great deal of money was spent with very little direct result, but the USSR military went apeshit over it and crashed their whole economy. (Disclosure: I flew to a semiconductor conference in Hungary in 1987, on SDI money via AFNOR, with a stopover in East Berlin.)
