The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  Guy mimed the action of St. Michael violently thrusting his sword downward into a goat.

  “...Through the goat and …”

  Guy smacked his hands together.

  “ … Knocking it down to the ground. Inside of me I couldn’t even breathe. I was going …”

  Guy mimed struggling for breath.

  “And you believe it,” he said. “You believe it. And after about fifteen minutes I said, ‘Lenny, you better go see. I don’t know for sure.’”

  Lenny from Special Forces disappeared into the room where the goat was. He came back and announced, with surprise and solemnity, “The goat is down.”

  “And that was it?” I asked.

  “That was it,” said Guy. “It lay there for a while, and then it got up again.”

  “Is that the end of the story?” I asked.

  “No,” said Guy sadly. “I wish it was. But the next day they wanted me to do it again. But this time they wanted me to kill the goat. They said, ‘Kill the goat!’”

  He fell silent, as if to say, See what I had to deal with?

  “Why kill the goat?” I asked.

  “Military people,” sighed Guy. “I guess they thought you could … whatever …”

  “Okay,” I said.

  So on day three a new experiment was devised. Guy told Special Forces to round up thirty goats.

  “Thirty goats,” he told them. “Put numbers on them. I’ll pick a number. I’ll drop the goat.”

  On this occasion, Special Forces stationed armed guards all around the Goat Lab perimeter. There had been no such security the day before, presumably because they hadn’t really imagined that a goat would topple. But this time, Guy told me, the mood was far more somber. Thirty goats, all with numbers strapped to their backs, were herded inside. Guy randomly chose number 16. And he began.

  But this time, he said, he just couldn’t concentrate. Whenever he pictured himself walking into the arms of the Lord, his meditation was disrupted by the memory of a Special Forces soldier yelling “Kill the goat” at him. He got as far as picturing St. Michael the Archangel, but just as he was about to thrust his sword downward, the cry of “Kill the goat” again interrupted the psychic path between Guy and the animal.

  “I was just so pissed off,” Guy said. “Anyway, when Lenny went next door to look it turned out that number seventeen had dropped dead.”

  “Collateral damage?” I said.

  “Right,” said Guy.

  And that, he said, was the end of his story.

  Except for one last thing. Ten years later, Guy said, three Special Forces soldiers covertly traveled to Cleveland from Fort Bragg, having heard on the grapevine that Guy had once successfully stared a goat to death on their base. They wanted to know if the rumor was true. They wanted to see it for themselves. They wanted Guy to kill a goat for them.

  But Guy said no. He had killed enough goats for one lifetime. He was beginning to feel the dark forces of karma descend upon him. So he offered them a compromise. He would teach the soldiers how to do it for themselves. So the Special Forces men arranged to meet Guy at the office of a local veterinarian who had agreed to provide a goat and an ECG machine.

  “You brought a veterinarian into this?” I asked, surprised.

  “Yeah, the guy was a friend of mine,” said Guy.

  “And he provided the goat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about the Hippocratic oath?” I asked.

  “What?” said Guy, a little crossly.

  “I’m just surprised that a civilian veterinary surgeon would provide a healthy goat so some soldiers could try to stare it to death.”

  But Guy shrugged and said I didn’t have to take his word for it and he put a cassette into his VCR and pressed Play.

  And I saw that it was true. A strange tableau flickered onto the screen, the opening scene of a goat snuff movie. A goat was strapped to an ECG machine. The veterinarian was nowhere to be seen, but the office was clearly a vet’s office, with certificates on the wall and various animal medical-type implements scattered around. Two soldiers in combat fatigues sat on plastic chairs taking notes. The goat bleated. The soldiers continued to take notes. The goat bleated again. The ECG machine bleeped. The soldiers took more notes. Guy nudged me in the ribs.

  “Ha!” he said. “Dear me!” He chuckled. “This isn’t even the best part yet.”

  “Is somebody staring at the goat?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That guy.”

  “Which one?” I asked. “That one or that one?”

  “Neither,” said Guy. “That one.”

  Guy pointed to a corner of the screen at something I hadn’t noticed—the shoe of a third man, just off camera.

  For another ten minutes the bleating, bleeping, and note taking continued on the VCR.

  “Am I going to see some kind of physical response on the goat’s part?” I asked Guy.

  “It’s happening now!” said Guy. “Look at the machine. The heart rate was around the midsixties. Now it’s dropped to fifty-five.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  The video ended. Guy turned off the TV. He seemed a little annoyed at my disappointed tone of voice.

  “Let me get this completely clear,” I said. “What I just saw was level one.”

  “Right,” said Guy. “The goat was attached to the life force of the man off screen.”

  “And if you carry that further,” I said, “to level two, the goat will drop, or fall, or topple over, or tumble.”

  “Yes,” said Guy.

  “So the hamster was level two?” I asked.

  “Right,” said Guy.

  “And if you go even further than that, the goat or the hamster will die.”

  “Yes.” Guy paused. “But level one is high!” he said. “Hey! Level one is high!”

  “Does it hurt to be the recipient of level one?” I asked.

  “No,” said Guy.

  “Guy,” I said recklessly, “will you stare at me?”

  There was a silence.

  “Not this time,” said Guy softly. “When you come back I will. This time, my wife said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘You don’t know this person.’ Which is true. She said, ‘Don’t do anything this time.’ She said I have too much trust in everybody. And I do. I do, I do.”

  My day with the Savellis was over, so I thanked them and got ready to leave. It was then that Guy gently tapped my shoulder and said, “There’s something you should know.”

  “Mmm?” I said.

  And he told me.

  And then it all made sense—the profound sigh I had heard down the phone when I’d first called Guy, the shock on everyone’s face when I saw the snapshot of the goat being karate chopped to death in a frozen field, Bradley’s constant filming of me. Guy told me everything, and when he finished explaining, I said, “Oh my God.”

  Guy nodded.

  “Bloody hell,” I said. “Really?”

  “Really,” said Guy.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  5. HOMELAND SECURITY

  Six years before Major General Albert Stubblebine III failed to walk through his office wall in Arlington, Virginia, his office didn’t exist. There was no INSCOM—the army’s Intelligence and Security Command. There were just military intelligence units scattered haphazardly around the world. It was—according to the author Richard Koster, who served with the 470th Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment in Panama during the pre-Stubblebine days—chaos.

  “In the late 1950s,” Koster told me when I phoned him to ask about life in military intelligence before Stubblebine, “there were frantic calls from commander to commander. ‘We need to greatly expand military intelligence. We want you to release X number of officers. We need a colonel, three majors, six captains, and fifteen lieutenants to be immediately reassigned to military intelligence.’ So what do you do if you get a call like that? You think, Ha! Let’s give them all our bindlestiffs and stumblebums. So they did. And that’s who went to a
rmy intelligence, more or less globally.”

  “What was it like in Panama before General Stub-blebine?” I asked him.

  “This was not a tight ship,” he said. “We had a riot one year here in Panama City. My colonel came running up to me. ‘Where is this riot?’ I said, ‘It’s right in front of the Legislative Palace.’ He said, ‘Where’s that?’ I said, ‘Go to the Tivoli Hotel. You’ll see it out the balcony.’ He looked at me like I was Einstein because I had this … knowledge.”

  In the late 1970s a brigadier general named William Royla was given the job of tidying up the whole mess. He was to form a kind of CIA for the army; it would be called INSCOM. And in 1981 General Stubblebine, who had been deeply moved by Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion Operations Manual and was filled with the conviction that America, the great superpower, needed to be defended by people who actually had superpowers, was appointed its commander.

  Stubblebine was a West Point man with a master’s degree in chemical engineering from Columbia. He learned about the First Earth Battalion when he was stationed at the Army’s Intelligence School in Arizona. It was his friend and subordinate, Colonel John Alexander, the inventor of Sticky Foam, who first drew his attention to it.

  Now, General Stubblebine was determined to turn his sixteen thousand troops into a new army, an army of soldiers who could bend metal with their minds and pass through objects and consequently never have to go through the chaotic trauma of a war like Vietnam again. Who would want to mess with an army like that?

  Plus, Stubblebine’s tenure as commander of military intelligence coincided with huge slashes in his budget. These were the post-Vietnam “draw down” days, and the Pentagon wanted their soldiers to achieve more with less money. Learning how to walk through walls was an ambitious but inexpensive enterprise.

  And so it was that Jim Channon’s madcap vision, triggered by his postcombat depression, found its way into the highest levels of the United States military.

  Twenty years later, in room 403 of the Tarrytown Hilton, in a suburb of New York City, just as General Stubblebine had finished describing his failed attempts to walk through his wall, he glanced out the window.

  “A cloud,” he said.

  The three of us—the general, his second wife, Rima, and I—rose from our chairs.

  “Jesus, Jon, I don’t know,” said the general. “I’ve never done one that big.”

  All day we had been waiting for the right sort of cloud to come along, a cumulus, in fact, so he could show me that he could burst it just by staring at it. Of all his powers this was, he said, the easiest to demonstrate.

  “Anyone can see it,” he had promised me, “and anyone can do it.”

  “Right in the notch, way over where the pine trees are,” said Rima. “Do that one.”

  “Let me see,” said the general.

  He stood very still and began to stare up at the sky.

  “Are you trying to burst that one over there?” I asked. “Isn’t it too far away?”

  General Stubblebine looked at me as if I were nuts.

  “They’re all far away,” he said.

  “Over there!” said Rima.

  I darted my eyes back and forth across the sky, trying to work out which cloud the general was trying to burst.

  “It’s gone!” said Rima.

  “The cloud,” confirmed the general, “appears to have gone.”

  We sat back down. Then the general said he wasn’t sure. The clouds had been moving so fast, he said, it wasn’t possible to conclude 100 percent that he had caused the disappearance. It might have been just meteorology.

  “Hard to tell,” he said, “who was doing what to whom.”

  Sometimes on long car journeys, he said, Rima would drive and he would make the clouds go away, and if it was a puffy cloud alone in a blue sky, it was unequivocal. He would stare: the cloud would burst. But this wasn’t one of those moments.

  In 1983, two years into his tenure as the commander of military intelligence, General Stubblebine’s pursuit of an indisputable miracle became an urgent one. He needed something to satisfy his commanding officers in the Pentagon, and he needed it fast, because his job was in jeopardy.

  General Stubblebine was confounded by his continual failure to walk through his wall. What was wrong with him that he couldn’t do it? Perhaps there was simply too much in his in-box to give it the required level of concentration. General Manuel Noriega, principally, was causing him significant trouble in Panama. Noriega had been on the U.S. intelligence payroll since the 1970s—since CIA director George H. W. Bush had authorized his recruitment—but now he was out of control.

  General Stubblebine’s CIA counterparts had been using Panama’s network of hidden airstrips to transport guns to the Contras in Nicaragua. Once the weapons had been delivered, the planes returned to Panama to refuel for their journey back to the United States. Noriega seized the opportunity to fill them with cocaine. And so it was that the CIA became implicated in Noriega’s cocaine racket. This awkward alliance was making both sides paranoid, and when General Stub-blebine visited Panama, he discovered to his fury that Noriega had his hotel room bugged.

  It was at this point that the battle between the two generals—Noriega and Stubblebine—shifted into the supernatural. Noriega took to tying black ribbons around his ankles and placing little scraps of paper in his shoes with names written on them to protect him against spells cast by his enemies. He was possibly walking around Panama City with the word Stubblebine secreted inside his shoe at the very moment that the general was trying to walk through his wall. How could General Stubblebine concentrate on passing through objects with that sort of craziness going on around him?

  General Stubblebine countered by setting his psychic spies on Noriega. This was the Fort Meade team, who worked out of a condemned clapboard building down a wooded track in Maryland and who, as a result of not officially existing, had no coffee budget, a fact that they had come to resent. They were also going stir-crazy. Their offices were claustrophobic, and many of them didn’t much like one another to begin with. One, a major named Ed Dames, had taken to psychic spying on the Loch Ness monster during the fallow months, when there wasn’t much official military psychic work. He determined that it was a dinosaur’s ghost. This finding irritated some of the others, who considered it unscientific and frankly implausible. Another psychic spy, David Morehouse, was soon to check himself into a psychiatric hospital as a result of an excess of psychic spying.

  They couldn’t get their back door open. It had been locked and painted shut dozens of times over the years. Nobody knew where the key was. During one particularly hot day they began almost to faint in there, and so the talk got around to whether they should kick the door open and get a breeze going through.

  “We can’t,” said Lyn Buchanan. “We don’t exist. If we kick it open, nobody will come and fix it.”

  (It was Lyn Buchanan who recounted this story to me, when I met him in the summer of 2003 at a hotel in Las Vegas.)

  “Leave it to me,” said psychic spy Joe McMoneagle. He disappeared and returned twenty minutes later with a detailed and psychically divined sketch of the missing key. Joe McMoneagle then drove into town to a local locksmith, got the key made from the sketch, returned to the unit, unlocked the back door, and pried through the paint.

  “Oh, Joe’s good,” said Lyn Buchanan. “Joe is very good.”

  I visited Joe McMoneagle a few months later. He lives in Virginia now. I mentioned Lyn Buchanan’s story about the key. After I told him what Lyn had said, Joe smiled somewhat guiltily.

  “I, uh, actually picked the lock,” he admitted.

  He explained that Lyn had seemed so bedazzled, and it had given the flagging morale of the psychic spies such a boost, that he hadn’t had the heart to inform them of the fact that the door was opened using nonpsychic means.

  Working conditions at Fort Meade were so grim that a conspiracy theory began to flourish within its condemned walls. There th
ey were, hitherto ordinary soldiers who had been handpicked and initiated into a fabulously secret military psychic elite, which turned out to be utterly humdrum. Lyn Buchanan and some of his colleagues had consequently come to believe that there must be another secret psychic unit, even more deeply embedded, and presumably with more glamorous offices than theirs.

  “I got to think that we were there in order to be caught,” Lyn said when I met him in Las Vegas.

  Lyn is a soft-eyed, folksy-looking man who—for all the dismal working conditions—sees his time in the old unit as the happiest days of his life.

  “What do you mean, ‘there to be caught’?” I asked him.

  “You know,” said Lyn. “If the National Enquirer ever got wind of it, the army could have said to them, ‘Yes, we do have a secret psychic unit. Here they are.’”

  Hang the psychics out to dry—postulated Lyn with some bitterness—so that the other psychics, whoever they were, would be left in peace to continue their even more secret work.

  So in the summer of 1983, when General Stubblebine asked the team to divine in which room of a particular villa in Panama City Noriega was staying, and what Noriega was thinking about while he was there, they sprang into action, delighted for some distraction.

  General Stubblebine simultaneously ordered a team of nonpsychic spies to rent an apartment down the road from Noriega’s villa. The timing was critical. The moment the Fort Meade psychics delivered their divinations, General Stub-blebine phoned the nonpsychics in Panama and ordered them to climb over the wall, get inside the villa, and plant bugs in Noriega’s rooms. Unfortunately, two of Noriega’s guard dogs were alerted during the covert raid, and the nonpsychics were chased back over the wall.

  General Noriega responded to this assault by placing a huge amulet around his neck and driving to a nearby beach where his personal sorcerer, a Brazilian named Ivan Trilha, erected an illuminated cross to ward off American intelligence operatives.

  General Stubblebine had his adversaries at home too. His superior officer, General John Adams Wickham, the army’s chief of staff, was not a fan of the paranormal. General Stub-blebine had attempted to captivate him at a high-level black-tie party in a Washington hotel by producing from his tuxedo pocket a piece of bent cutlery, but General Wickham recoiled, horrified.