Attack of the psychic soldiers: "The Men Who Stare At Goats" by Jon Ronson. Simon & Schuster, $24.
Review: >Jon Ronson's "The Men Who Stare at Goats" is quite funny, until suddenly it isn't. And that's a problem. Ronson, a British humorist who in an earlier book, "Them," cozied up to American extremists (including a Ku Klux Klan leader) for material, now investigates the American military's foray into paranormal warfare. In 1981, Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine III, the Army's head of intelligence, commanded a Black Op unit of soldiers who were required to transform themselves into psychic spies. Stubblebine himself repeatedly tried to walk through walls. The resultant bruises advertised his failure. Meanwhile, the Army Special Forces was working its own angle at Fort Bragg, N.C., where "supersoldiers" strained to telepathically drop one of the debleated goats there. It's said one man succeeded. Ronson tries to chase him to ground while tracking how, post-Vietnam, the dispirited military intelligence grasped for the ultimate weapons: the means to view enemy installations from afar, and invasive mind infiltration. It sounds wacky, and is amusingly so - until Ronson presents chillingly suggestive evidence that derivative techniques, refined to be far more menacing, are being employed in the current war on terror. It's unfortunate that he's not quite reporter enough to nail the story down. Instead, he leaves us a book of "believe it or nots."< (by Sherryl Connelly)
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posted by johannes,
Monday, April 04, 2005
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