Henry Hagnäs

Book review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

“The Men Who Stare at Goats” is written by Jon Ronson and currently being turned into a movie, soon to be released, starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/). The book is said to be a true story but it feels more like a “Based on a True Story”-movie. Annoying in the way that you don’t know if some parts are modified or exaggareted and what parts have not been told.

The story is that within the US Armed Forces there has been extensive experimenting with different weird and unplausible methods based on paranormal or new age thinking. Remote viewing, killing with your mind and all sorts of things. This in itself shouldn’t be surprising and researching into different modalities, however unlikely, is understandable. What seems tragic, as suggested by the book, is that some of these thoughts and experiments would have found new life under the War on Terror and the Bush-regime. Torture by music, possibly using subliminal messages in interogations etc. Even some of the Abu Ghraib-torture would be based on psychological warfare that was first discovered while doing cooky experiements after the Vietnam War.

The book, however, makes this connection very strenuously - based on the earlier research done and what has trickled out through the media aswell as suggestions by some clearly paranoid or delusional people. That is, in fact, my main annoyance with the book - it gives alot of space for some clearly delusional people to tell their story, a story that they have been making alot of money on by telling it to weak-minded people. According to the book, the remote viewing-experiments for instance gave rise to the charlatans that have since made alot of money pretending to be able to remote-view. The “Heaven’s Gate”-suicides are supposed to, again - according to the book, be connected to remote viewers who said that they could see/sense the aliens on the Hale-Bopp comet.

So I guess that is why the book is so annoying and not even funny to me, while the writer clearly isn’t a believer in the nonsense he has to give too many delusional people space in the book to make it work. The fact that the book isn’t much fun to read almost gives it a credibility it would’ve lacked if it had been made more interesting… Sad but true..

The book is, however, only around 250 pages and a quick read so if you want to read to book after you seen the movie that’s fine, you won’t loose too much of your life to it. If you live around Turku you can come get it from me, I won’t be reading it again :). Not recommending it though.