Finished The Men Who Stare at Goats on Wednesday

A little bit ago, I read and enjoyed Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures with Extremists in which he interviews and follows around conspiracy theorists and other weirdos. So I decided to give his more recent book, The Men Who Stare at Goats a try. I wasn't disappointed. In this work, Ronson investigates many of the oddball parapsychology projects that the U.S. military and government undertook from the 70s through the 90s. Then he goes on to write about how many of these projects are indeed still be going on under the guise of the War on Terror.

Many of these projects involved such flights of fancy as mind control, the use of LSD to see if it could aid in mind control, use of subliminal messages, use of ultra and sub-sonic frequencies to try to cause pain and discomfort to the enemy, and the title of the book, where "psychic warriors" attempt to explode the hearts of goats just by staring at them and concentrating. One of Ronson's interviewees claims he was successful in killing a goat this way. Of course, none of these used proper scientific or ethical protocols.

As usual, Ronson writes with great wit and clarity. The book is funny, but disturbing. It's hard to imagine that we, the "good guys," are spending money on projects that not only are ethically dubious, but have no basis in science and no chance of working. In what we usually consider to be one of the most steely-eyed and results oriented segments of the nation, our military, it seems that superstition still has a very strong foothold.