The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  It was a normal, slightly dilapidated wooden house on a middle-class leafy street, and the leaves were swirling around so violently I had to switch on my windshield wipers.

  I parked the car and walked up his drive, shielding myself against the gale. I was feeling quite nervous. I knocked. The whole thing happened so fast I can’t even describe the person who opened the door. I have an impression of a craggy-looking man in his seventies, his white hair blowing in the wind.

  I said, “I’m really sorry to just turn up at your house. If you remember we—”

  He said, “I hope the wind doesn’t blow you over on your journey back to your car.”

  And then he closed the door on me.

  I walked back down his drive. And then I heard his voice again. I turned around. He was shouting something through a crack in his door. He was shouting, “I hope the wind doesn’t blow you away.”

  I smiled uneasily.

  “You’d better take care,” he shouted.

  13. SOME ILLUSTRATIONS

  The shipping container behind the disused railway station in al-Qā’im, Iraq, in which the “I Love You” song from Barney the Purple Dinosaur was played through a loudspeaker to detainees.

  In late June 2004 I sent an e-mail to Jim Channon and everyone else I had met during my two-and-a-half-year journey who might have some inside knowledge about the current use of the kinds of psychological interrogation techniques that had first been suggested in Jim’s manual. I wrote:

  Dear———

  I hope you are well.

  I was talking with one of the British Guantanamo detainees (innocent—he was released) and he told me a very strange story. He said at one point during the interrogations the MI officers left him in a room—for hours and hours—with a ghetto blaster. They played him a series of CDs—Fleetwood Mac, Kris Kristofferson, etc. They didn’t blast them at him. They just played them at normal volume. Now, as this man is Western, I’m sure they weren’t trying to freak him out by introducing him to Western music. Which leads me to think …

  … Frequencies? Subliminal messages?

  What’s your view on this? Do you know any time when frequencies or subliminal sounds have been used by the U.S. military for sure?

  With best wishes,

  Jon Ronson

  I received three replies straightaway:

  COMMANDER SID HEAL (the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department nonlethals expert who told me about the Bucha Effect): Most interesting, but I haven’t a clue. I know that subliminal messages can be incorporated and that they have a powerful influence. There are laws prohibiting it in the U.S., but I’m not aware of any uses like you describe. I would imagine, however, that it would be classified and no one without a “need to know” would be aware anyway. If it were frequencies, it would probably need to be in the audible range or they wouldn’t need to mask them with other sounds.

  SKIP ATWATER: (General Stubblebine’s former psychic spying headhunter): You can bet this activity was purposeful. If you can get anybody to talk to you about this, it would be interesting to know the “success rate” of this technique.

  JIM CHANNON: Strikes me the story you tell is just plain kindness (which still exists).

  I couldn’t decide if Jim was being delighfully naive, infuriatingly naive, or sophisticatedly evasive. (Major Ed Dames, the mysterious Art Bell psychic-unit whistleblower and a neighbor of Jim’s, had once described him to me in an unexpected way. He’d said, “Don’t be taken in by Jim’s hippie demeanor. Jim isn’t airy at all. He’s like the local warlord. He runs that part of Hawaii. Jim is a very shrewd man.”)

  Then Colonel John Alexander responded to my e-mail. Colonel Alexander remains the army’s leading pioneer of nonlethal technologies, a role he created for himself in part after reading and being inspired by Jim’s manual.

  COLONEL ALEXANDER: Re your assertion he was innocent. If so, how did he get captured in Afghanistan? Don’t think there were many British tourists who happened to be traveling there when our forces arrived. Or maybe he was a cultural anthropologist studying the progressive social order of the Taliban as part of his doctoral dissertation and was just mistakenly detained from his education. Perhaps if you believe this man’s story you’d also be interested in buying a bridge from me? As for the music, I have no idea what that might be about. Guess hard rockers might take that as cruel and unusual punishment and want to report it to Amnesty International as proof of torture.

  Jokes about the use of music in interrogation didn’t seem that funny anymore—not to me, and I doubt they did to him either. Colonel Alexander has spent a lifetime in the world of plausible deniability and I think he’s got to the stage where he just trots these things out. Colonel Alexander has just returned from four months in Afghanistan advising the army on something he wouldn’t talk about.

  I e-mailed him back:

  Is there anything you can tell me about the use of subliminal sounds and frequencies in the military’s arsenal? If anyone alive today is equipped to answer that question, surely you are.

  His response arrived instantly. He said my assertion that the U.S. army would ever entertain the possibility of using subliminal sounds or frequencies “just doesn’t make sense.”

  Which was strange.

  I dug out an interview I’d conducted with the colonel the preceding summer. I hadn’t been that interested in acoustic weapons at that point—I was trying to find out about Sticky Foam and goat staring—but the conversation had, I now remembered, briefly touched on them.

  “Has the army ever blasted anyone with subliminal sounds?” I had asked him.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  “What’s a ‘psycho-correction’ device?” I asked him.

  “I have no idea,” he said. “It has no basis in reality.”

  “What are silent sounds?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” he said. “It sounds like an oxymoron to me.”

  He gave me a hard look, which seemed to suggest that I was masquerading as a journalist but was, in fact, a dangerous and irrational conspiracy nut.

  “What’s your name again?” he said.

  I felt myself blush. I was suddenly finding Colonel Alexander quite frightening. Jim Channon has a page in his manual dedicated to the facial expression a Warrior Monk should adopt when meeting an enemy or a stranger for the first time. “A consistent, subtle and haunting smile,” Jim wrote. “A deep and unblinking look indicating the real person is home and comfortable with all. A quiet and calm stare indicating a willingness to be open.” Colonel Alexander was now giving me what I can only describe as a haunting and unblinking stare.

  I told him my name again.

  He said, “Pixie dust.”

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “This is not something that has been brought up or addressed, and we have covered the waterfront of nonlethal technologies,” he said. “We are not warping people’s brains or monitoring people or da da da da da. It’s just nonsense.”

  “I’m confused,” I said. “I don’t know much about this subject but I’m sure I’ve seen your name linked with something called a ‘psycho-correction device.’”

  “It makes no sense,” he said. He looked baffled. Then he said that yes, he had sat in on meetings where this sort of thing was discussed, but there was no evidence that machines like this would ever work. “How would you do that [blast someone with silent sounds] without it affecting us? Anybody who’s out there would hear it.”

  “Earplugs?” I said.

  “Oh, come on,” he said.

  “Of course,” I said. “You’re right.”

  And then the conversation had moved on to the subject of staring goats to death—“In a scientifically controlled environment,” said Colonel Alexander—and that’s when he told me that the man who achieved this feat was not Michael Echanis but Guy Savelli.

  How could you blast someone with silent sounds “without it affecting us?”

  This struck me at the tim
e as an unassailable argument, and one that cut through all the paranoid theories circulating on the Internet about mind-control machines putting voices into people’s heads. Of course it couldn’t work. In fact, it was a relief to believe Colonel Alexander because it made me feel sensible again, and not the nut his look had suggested I was. Now we were once again two sensible people—a colonel and a journalist—discussing rational things in a sagacious manner.

  The thing is, I now realized, if silent sounds had been used against Jamal inside an interrogation room at Guantanamo Bay, there was a clue in Jamal’s account, a clue that suggested that military intelligence had craftily solved the vexing problem highlighted by Colonel Alexander.

  “He put the CD in,” Jamal had said, “and he left the room.”

  Next, I dug out the recently leaked military report titled Non-Lethal Weapons: Terms and References. There were a total of twenty-one acoustic weapons listed, in various stages of development, including the Infrasound (“Very low-frequency sound which can travel long distances and easily penetrate most buildings and vehicles ... biophysical effects: nausea, loss of bowels, disorientation, vomiting, potential internal organ damage or death may occur. Superior to ultra-sound …”).

  And then the last but one entry—the Psycho-Correction Device, which “involves influencing subjects visually or aurally with embedded subliminal messages.”

  I turned to the front page. And there it was. The coauthor of this document was Colonel John Alexander.

  And so our e-mails continued.

  I asked for the colonel’s permission to include in this book his views on the Guantanamo story, and he replied:

  Not sure what you mean by the Guantanamo story. My take on this whole thing is much bigger. IMHO [in my humble opinion] World War X is on, and it is religious. We are now faced with a problem of how to handle prisoners caught in a war that never ends. Nobody has asked that before. The traditional response (over millennia) is to kill them or put them into slavery. Tough to do in today’s environment.

  It seemed obvious to me what his alternative was, knowing what I did about his area of expertise. If you couldn’t kill your adversaries, or keep them imprisoned forever, there was surely only one option left in the Colonel Alexander canon: You change their minds.

  The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual had encouraged the development of devices that could “direct energy into crowds.” History seems to show that whenever there is a great American crisis—the War on Terror, the trauma of Vietnam and its aftermath, the Cold War—its military intelligence is drawn to the idea of thought control. They come up with all manner of harebrained schemes to try out, and they all sound funny until the schemes are actually implemented.

  I e-mailed Colonel Alexander to ask if he was indeed advocating the use of some kind of mind-control machine and he replied, somewhat ruefully, and a little guardedly: “If we do go to scrambling minds, then the whole mind-control conspiracy issues arise.”

  What he meant was, MK-ULTRA.

  It was really just about the worst PR the U.S. intelligence services had ever suffered, certainly until the Abu Ghraib photographs came along in 2004. Jim Channon might have pretty much single-handedly invented the idea of the army thinking outside the box (as one of his admirers had once told me), but the CIA had been there before him.

  Everyone was still bruised over MK-ULTRA.

  14. THE 1953 HOUSE

  There is a house in Frederick, Maryland, that has barely been touched since 1953. It looks like an exhibit in a down-at-heels museum of the Cold War. All that brightly colored Formica and the kitschy kitchen ornaments—breezy symbols of 1950s American optimism—haven’t stood the test of time.

  Eric Olson’s house—and Eric would be the first to admit this—could do with some redecoration.

  Eric was born there, but he never liked Frederick and he never liked the house. He got out as quickly as he could after high school and ended up in Ohio and India and New York and Massachusetts, back in Frederick and Stockholm and California, but in 1993 he thought he would just crash out for a few months, and then ten years passed, during which time he hasn’t decorated for three reasons:

  1. He hasn’t any money.

  2. His mind is on other things.

  3. And, really, his life ground to a shuddering halt on November 28, 1953, and if your living environment is meant to reflect your inner life, Eric’s house does the job. It is an inescapable reminder of the moment Eric’s life froze. Eric says that if he ever forgets “why I’m doing this,” he just needs to look around his house, and 1953 comes flooding back to him.

  Eric says 1953 was probably the most significant year in modern history. He says we’re all stuck in 1953, in a sense, because the events of that year have a continual and overwhelming impact on our lives. He rattled through a list of key events that occurred in 1953. Everest was conquered. James Watson and Francis Crick published, in Nature magazine, their famous paper mapping the double helix structure of DNA. Elvis first visited a recording studio, and Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” gave the world rock and roll, and, subsequently, the teenager. President Truman announced that the United States had developed a hydrogen bomb. The polio vaccine was created, as was the color TV. And Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, gave a talk to his Princeton alumni group in which he said, “Mind warfare is the great battlefield of the Cold War, and we have to do whatever it takes to win this.”

  On the night of November 28, 1953, Eric went to bed, as normal, a happy nine-year-old child. The family home had been built three years earlier, and his father, Frank, was still putting the finishing touches to it, but now he was in New York on business. Eric’s mother, Alice, was sleeping down the hall. His little brother, Nils, and his sister, Lisa, were in the next room.

  And then, somewhere around dawn, Eric was woken up.

  “It was a very dim November predawn,” Eric said.

  Eric was woken up by his mother and taken down the hall, still wearing his pajamas, toward the living room—the same room where the two of us now sat, on the same sofas.

  Eric turned the corner to see the family doctor sitting there.

  “And,” Eric said, “also, there were these two …” Eric searched for a moment for the right word to describe the others. He said, “There were these two … men … there also.”

  The news that the men delivered was that Eric’s father was dead.

  “What are you talking about?” Eric asked them, crossly.

  “He had an accident,” said one of the men, “and the accident was that he fell or jumped out of a window.”

  “Excuse me?” said Eric. “He did what?”

  “He fell or jumped out of a window in New York.”

  “What does that look like?” asked Eric.

  This question was greeted with silence. Eric looked over at his mother and saw that she was frozen and empty-eyed.

  “How do you fall out of a window?” said Eric. “What does that mean? Why would he do that? What do you mean: fell or jumped?”

  “We don’t know if he fell,” said one of the men. “He might have fallen. He might have jumped.”

  “Did he dive?” asked Eric.

  “Anyhow,” said one of the men, “it was an accident.”

  “Was he standing on a ledge and he jumped?” asked Eric.

  “It was a work-related accident,” said one of the men.

  “Excuse me?” said Eric. “He fell out a window and that’s work related? What?”

  Eric turned to his mother.

  “Um,” he said. “What is his work again?”

  Eric believed his father was a civilian scientist, working with chemicals at the nearby Fort Detrick military base.

  Eric said to me, “It very quickly became an incredibly rancorous issue in the family because I was always the kid saying, ‘Excuse me, where did he go? Tell me this story again.’ And my mother very quickly adopted the stance, ‘Look, I’ve told you this story a thousand times.’ And I woul
d say, ‘Yeah, but I don’t get it.’”

  Eric’s mother had created—from the same scant facts offered to Eric—this scenario: Frank Olson was in New York. He was staying on the tenth floor of the Statler Hotel, now the Pennsylvania Hotel, across the road from Madison Square Garden, in midtown Manhattan. He had a bad dream. He woke up confused, and headed in the dark toward the bathroom. He became disorientated and fell out of the window.

  It was 2:00 A.M.

  Eric and his little brother, Nils, told their school friends that their father had died of a “fatal nervous breakdown” although they had no idea what that meant.

  Fort Detrick was what glued the town together. All their friends’ fathers worked at the base. The Olsons still got invited to neighborhood picnics and other community events, but there didn’t seem any reason for them to be there anymore.

  When Eric was sixteen, he and Nils, then twelve, decided to cycle from the end of their driveway to San Francisco. Even at that young age, Eric saw the 2,415-mile journey as a metaphor. He wanted to immerse himself in unknown American terrain, the mysterious America that had, for some impenetrable reason, taken his father away from him. He and Nils would “reach the goal”—San Francisco—“by small continuous increments of motion along a single strand.” This was in Eric’s mind a test run for another goal he would one day reach in an equally fastidious way: the solution to the mystery of what happened to his father in that hotel room in New York at 2:00 A.M.