In 1979, a strange rumor began circulating among enlisted men at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. A Special Forces officer, it was said, had attempted to kill a goat using only the power of his stare. The goat survived. The officer got a headache. And the U.S. Army quietly shelved a million-dollar program.
For nearly a decade, a small group of soldiers trained in techniques lifted straight from the 1970s human potential movement: meditation, biofeedback, lucid dreaming, and “remote viewing” (the CIA’s attempt to spy on Soviet bases using psychics). One sergeant, Glenn Wheaton, told Ronson that he spent months trying to kill a goat with his mind. “You stare at the goat,” he explained, “and you visualize a pink cloud coming out of your eyes. The goat would just drop.” He never succeeded. But others claimed they did. The truth is murkier: some goats may have been killed by conventional means, then staged as psychic victories. The Men Who Stare At Goats
Channon’s vision was a “warrior monk” who could dissolve enemy weapons with a thought, walk through walls, project light from his eyes, and, yes, stop a goat’s heart by staring at it. The manual was filled with earnest, hand-drawn diagrams of “mind-body bridging” and “energy pulse detection.” It sounds like a parody, but the Army took it seriously enough to fund an entire unit: the U.S. Army’s , later nicknamed the “Jedi Knights” by insiders. In 1979, a strange rumor began circulating among