Lt. Col. Channon employed other considerations as well: yogic exercises, chanting, and earsplitting noises to disarm and disorient a battlefield enemy. A particularly unusual practice was to use combined psychic force by staring at goats with a projected result to have these goats explode from within. The First Air Battalion designated this effort “Project Jedi Knights,” a reference not lost on sci-fi Star Wars enthusiasts.  As fantastic as this may sound to us today, we need only to look a few years earlier to the CIA’s enormously successful Remote Viewing program of targeted psychological surveillance.  

As author Jon Ronson notes in “THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS,” “In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the U.S. Army. Defying all known accepted military practice -- and indeed, the laws of physics -- they believed that a soldier could adopt a cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls, and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren`t joking. What`s more, they`re back and fighting the War on Terror. With firsthand access to the leading players in the story, Ronson traces the evolution of these bizarre activities over the past three decades and shows how they are alive today within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and in postwar Iraq. Why are they blasting Iraqi prisoners of war with the theme tune to Barney the Purple Dinosaur? Why have 100 debleated goats been secretly placed inside the Special Forces Command Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina?