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Jon Ronson

The Men Who Stare At Goats Paperback – Unabridged, 5 Jan. 2012

by Jon Ronson (Author)

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In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known 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.

They were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. What's more, they're back and fighting George Bush's War on Terror. Often funny, sometimes chilling and always thought-provoking, journalist Jon Ronson's Sunday Times bestseller The Men Who Stare at Goats is a story so unbelievable it has to be true.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Picador
Publication date

5 Jan. 2012
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

13 x 1.7 x 19.7 cm
ISBN-10

0330375482
ISBN-13

978-0330375481
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From the Publisher

jon ronson, the men who stare at goats, the psychopath test, picador, non fiction

Product description

Review

Not only a narcotic road trip through the wackier reaches of Bush’s war effort, but also an unmissable account of the insanity that has lately been done in our names., Observer

Funny and gravely serious, what emerges is a world shrouded in secrecy, mystery and wackiness, where Warrior Monks and psychic spies battle it out for military thinking. Mind-blowing stuff., Metro

About the Author

Jon Ronson is an award-winning writer and documentary maker. He is the author of many bestselling books, including Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie, Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries, The Psychopath Test, The Men Who Stare at Goats and Them: Adventures with Extremists. His first fictional screenplay, Frank, co-written with Peter Straughan, starred Michael Fassbender. He lives in London and New York City.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador; Reprints edition (5 Jan. 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0330375482
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0330375481
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13 x 1.7 x 19.7 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 104,260 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 311 in Self-Help & Psychology Humour
- 364 in Social Psychology (Books)
- 462 in Journalistic Writing

Customer reviews:
4.2 2,215 ratings

About the author

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Jon Ronson

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Jon Ronson is an award-winning writer and documentary maker. He is the author of many bestselling books, including Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie, Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries, The Psychopath Test, The Men Who Stare at Goats and Them: Adventures with Extremists. His first fictional screenplay, Frank, co-written with Peter Straughan, starred Michael Fassbender. He lives in London and New York City.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5

2,215 global ratings

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Monkeyboy

Interesting read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 August 2023

Verified Purchase

I like Jon’s stuff, the psychopath test is a great and frightening read, this is the same, you could be fooled into thinking it’s fiction as this would never happen, nope it’s all real, film version is good but you need to read the book first.

Helpful

N. Clarke

Terrifying, and prescient

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 November 2013

Verified Purchase

Jon Ronson's treatise on psychic spying has been somewhat diluted by its fictional film version, which conflates and dilutes many of the characters and episodes that feature in his original book. What is common to both, however, is the sense of unworldliness that possessed the US Government after 9/11 and the sheer weirdness of the solutions that were sought in order to overcome that challenge. It's just a pity that Ronson, as a talented outsider, can't really construct a linear narrative exposing the darker spin-offs of this weird science; the first half of the book is compelling but the second half consists of conspiracy theories that are only loosely related to the US psychic warfare programme. It is not his fault; a lot of this stuff would be buried far beyond the reach of an ordinary journalist, and the military machine being what it is, the endless buffer of bureaucracy will ensure that the real story is buried for many more years.

Ronson's attempts to patch together an evolutionary history of the "First Earth Battalion" put him at loggerheads with some of the strangest and most egotistical characters that have ever graced the pages of military history: far from being tight-lipped about their "powers" they seem to be on a partial ego trip and delight in drip-feeding tit-bits to journalists. Feted by gun-lobbyists and conspiracy theorists alike, it is scarcely credible that a standing army could have given some of these crackpots the time of day. Yet, damaged by its experiences in Vietnam and crushed by its failure to achieve a decisive victory in the "war on terror", US military policy has taken a number of disturbing turns that are the real source of worry here, beyond the comic opera of spoon-bending parties, goat abuse, and telepathy. Thanks to Ronson's work future generations will look back on these events as the consequences of doctrinal failure, rather than a scientific attempt to evolve military strategy beyond its current limits, which have proven to be all too fallible.

6 people found this helpful

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Green Man Music

Covert Unintelligence

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 October 2011

Verified Purchase

In Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men: A Journey into Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs the USA's various intelligence agencies were seen to be so competitive with each other that agencies deliberately spread disinformation on covert operations between and about each other to give another agency the headache of dealing with the public and the conspiracy theorists.

Into the fray comes one of The Guardian's journalists Jon Ronson and his look at covert "black ops" operations from another angle; that of the Remote Viewers and psychic spies once hired and/or trained by intelligence agencies for a range of covert tasks.

Towards the beginning of the book some of these ideas are treated light-heartedly. such as Black Ops staff trying to bend spoons psychically, or using their Remote Viewing skills to try and pinpoint the location of the Loch Ness Monster. Surely nothing could come of their alternative ideas such as playing music to an enemy instead of bombing them, or having them sealed into blocks of sticky foam instead of shooting at them?

Through a series of face to face interviews, email and other correspondence, Ronson meets and investigates some of the strange-but-true characters who were the major players in the United States' post-'Nam Black Ops field, from the General who kept trying to walk through walls via the inspirational New Age gurus hired by the military to the Martial Arts experts who could allegedly stop animals' hearts (the eponymous goats - but also hamsters, too) just by looking at them.

But emerging from the combination of funny-ha-ha and funny-peculiar characters, situations and bizarre budget-wasting operations of the Black Ops teams, a sinister narrative emerges towards the end of the book. Some of the people involved in the original Black Ops teams are recognising some of their ideas now being used out on the field - from the sticky foam (completely useless) to the use of random sounds and music in psychological warfare, some of the "alternative hippy warfare" tactics they mooted in the aftermath of the bloodbath that was Vietnam have found their way into modern interrogation chambers and conflict zones of today, from Waco to Iraq and Afghanistan - and they're far from harmless.

As always Jon Ronson writes clearly and lucidly, and in this volume also includes a bibliography of sources. (And I much preferred the book to the film.

3 people found this helpful

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J. Sweetman

The Scary Thing is that it might be TRUE

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 August 2014

Verified Purchase

This book is a likeable romp through the world of secret services, conspiracies and military research with a psychic and psychological, if not occasionally psychotic, bias. It is well written and features a number of larger than life characters. As a reader you have to decide whether they are completely barmy, slightly deranged, the victims of bizarre experiments and whatever. The twist in the book is that quite a lot of the ideas have come home to roost in the war on terror which shows that inhumanity can take any number of interesting forms. I quite enjoyed it but wasn't convinced by a lot of the evidence.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Jacqui Bell

I tried!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 December 2014

Verified Purchase

“In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice – and indeed, the laws of physics – they believed that a soldier could adopt the 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. ‘The men who stare at goats’ reveals extraordinary – and very nutty – national secrets at the core of George W Bush’s War on Terror”.

This is another of the books I read whilst on holiday earlier this year. I’m not sure what to say about this book other than, I tried, I really did but I didn’t get it! I’m not sure what I expected, but I found it hard going and struggled to find it funny. Maybe I missed the point? I have Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test on my “to read shelf”, I’m hoping for better things from that.

One person found this helpful

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