In the pantheon of bizarre military history, few chapters are as simultaneously hilarious and deeply unsettling as the one chronicled in Jon Ronson’s 2004 book, The Men Who Stare at Goats . For most people, the title conjures the image of Ewan McGregor and George Clooney in the 2009 Coen-brothers-esque comedy: a rag-tag group of Jedi warriors in desert fatigues trying to kill a goat with their minds.
This wasn't a sci-fi novel. It was a formal military briefing. To the astonishment of rational officers, the Army brass didn't laugh Channon out of the Pentagon. They funded it. The unit was known as the "Remote Viewing" program, later codenamed Project Stargate , based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
But the system that funded them? That took a silly goat manual and turned it into a torture manual? That is the real horror.