The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  Prudence Calabrese was in the room. All seemed to have been forgiven regarding the Heaven’s Gate mass suicides, because the FBI telephoned Prudence in late September 2001 and asked her to let them know as soon as she had any visions of future terrorist attacks.

  Prudence did indeed have a vision, she told me, a truly awful vision. She FedExed the details of her vision to the FBI. They thanked her and have been requesting more psychic information ever since, she said.

  “What was the vision?” I asked her.

  There was a short silence.

  “Put it this way,” she said. “London is an area of high concern. It’s certainly an area we’ve looked at and there’s reason to be concerned if you live in London.”

  “I live in London,” I said.

  Prudence tried to change the subject, but I wouldn’t let her.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Two-thirty in the morning!” she snapped. Then she laughed and turned serious. “Really, we’re not at liberty to give any more information on this.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell me?” I asked.

  “We know enough to be certain that something is going to happen,” she said, “and we know enough to know the general vicinity in which something will happen.”

  “A landmark?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Prudence.

  “A Houses of Parliament–type landmark?” I asked.

  “I’m not going to tell you,” she said.

  “Surely not Buckingham Palace,” I said, shocked.

  It was at this point that my interrogation of Prudence finally cracked her.

  “It’s London Zoo,” she said.

  London Zoo was about to be hit by a dirty bomb, she said, one so powerful it would knock over the nearby BT Tower.

  “How do you know this?” I asked, visibly upset.

  “The elephants,” she said.

  The elephants were screaming in agony in her psychic vision, Prudence explained. The pain of the London Zoo elephants was the most intense and powerful image she had received. Prudence had gathered a team of fourteen psychic employees, based in Carlsbad, near San Diego. All fourteen of them, she said, had felt the pain of the elephants.

  When I returned home to the United Kingdom I discovered to my relief that the London Zoo elephants had, some months prior to Prudence’s psychic vision, all been moved to the Whipsnade Wild Animal Park, in rural Bedfordshire, about thirty miles north of London. How could the elephants be collateral damage in a London Zoo dirty bomb if there weren’t any elephants left at London Zoo?

  I have wondered whether Tom Ridge’s Department of Homeland Security has ever issued a nonspecific warning of a future terrorist attack based on intelligence provided by a psychic. I spent a few weeks trying to find out whether they had, but my calls got me nowhere and I gave up and the psychics drifted from my mind.

  I hadn’t spent much time thinking about the psychics until I received the telephone call out of the blue and the man on the other end said he had a secret to reveal as long as I promised to protect his identity.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Do you know about remote viewing?” he said.

  “The psychic spies?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “There’s a lot of interest in it again.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  I told him about Ed and Angela and Prudence and Uri and the mysterious Ron.

  “I don’t suppose you know who Ron is?” I asked him.

  “I’m not talking about those remote viewers,” he said. “They’ve got some new guys in, and they’re using remote viewing in a very different way.”

  “Mmm?” I said.

  “They’re taking remote viewing out of the office,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “They’re taking remote viewing out—of—the—office.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said.

  I had no idea what he was telling me but it didn’t sound like a particularly good secret.

  “Do you understand?” he said, exasperated. “Remote viewing is no longer office based.”

  “Uh,” I said.

  I think he was beginning to suspect he had picked the wrong journalist to reveal his secret to.

  “I’m sorry that I’m not savvy enough to understand what you are cryptically telling me,” I said.

  “What do you know about the history of remote viewing?” he asked, slowly.

  “I know it was office based,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “And it is no longer so?” I said, my eyes narrowing.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said. “If it’s no longer office based then …”

  He paused. He had two choices. He could either continue to reveal the secret enigmatically—which was a method that was clearly annoying both of us a little—or he could just come right out and tell me. And so he did.

  “Psychic assassins,” he announced. “Cool, eh? They’re teaching the Special Op assassins, the Fort Bragg guys who go out into the field to track down and assassinate terrorists, how to be psychic. They used to rely on hard intelligence, but things are changing. Intelligence is so often flawed. So instead they’re going back to the power of the mind.”

  “How does it work?” I asked.

  “We drop a Special Op guy in a jungle or a desert or at a border,” he said. “We know the target is a few miles away but we don’t know exactly where. What do we do? Wait for the spy planes? Wait for an interrogator to crack a prisoner? Sure, we do these things, but now we can augment all that with the power of the mind.”

  “So the assassins,” I said, “while waiting for hard intelligence, psychically envisage the location of their targets and start tracking straightaway?”

  “Sure,” he said. “The mind is making a very big comeback down at Fort Bragg.”

  July 15, 2004

  I hear from Guy Savelli. He sounds excited and I assume there has finally been some movement on his looming al-Qaeda paranormal sting operation. The last time I spoke to Guy he was being deluged with calls from young martial arts enthusiasts based in axis-of-evil countries who wanted to learn how to kill goats just by staring at them. Ever since then Guy has been waiting for the go-ahead to start teaching the terrorists the stare while acting as a spy on behalf of the intelligence services, but it is yet to come.

  I presume he is calling to tell me the latest news on this, but, he says, something else, something incredible, has happened. He has received a telephone call from Fort Bragg. Can he get down there “right away” to demonstrate his powers to a new commanding general who “sees the spiritual side”?

  “I’m going this weekend,” he says.

  “Are you taking an animal with you?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says. “They want me to bring an animal.”

  “A goat?” I ask.

  “My resources are limited,” says Guy.

  “A hamster?” I ask.

  “All I can tell you,” said Guy, “is that there will be some kind of animal involvement.”

  “Are we talking about a small animal, cheap to purchase?” I ask.

  “Correct,” confirms Guy.

  “A hamster,” I say.

  A silence.

  “Yes,” says Guy. “I am taking a hamster out there and I’m going to blow their minds with it.”

  I hear Guy’s wife say something to him on the other end of the phone.

  “That’s them on the other line now,” says Guy, urgently. “I’ll call you back.”

  “Guy!” I shout after him. “Ask them if I can come too!”

  July 19, 2004

  I haven’t heard from Guy in four days. I e-mail him to ask if there has been any movement and he finally calls back.

  “Everything seems to be coming together,” he says.

  “Have you been to Fort Bragg with a hamster yet?”

  “It’s more than that,” says Guy. “They’re trying to get what I’m doing
classified. They’re trying to get me into a deeper military position.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “They want me to actually go with them some places. Some Middle Eastern places.”

  I ask Guy to tell me more, and he does.

  After Jim Channon produced his First Earth Battalion Operations Manual his commanders invited him to create a real-life Warrior Monk unit, traveling the world with their supernatural powers. As I have explained earlier, Jim turned the offer down because he was rational enough to realize that walking through walls and so on were good ideas on paper, but weren’t, necessarily, achievable skills in real life.

  But now, Guy says, this is exactly what they want him to do. They want him to lead a Warrior Monk unit into Iraq.

  “What sort of powers will you be equipped with?” I ask.

  “Hopefully quite a few,” says Guy, “because we’ll have to go in without weapons.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because it’s the peaceful and gentle way,” says Guy. “These are good, kind men. They know they’ve been doing it all wrong in Iraq. Remember: the guys in the Abu Ghraib photographs trained at Fort Bragg. And they screwed up big. They know this crap can’t go on anymore. So now they’ve asked me to come down.”

  “And teach them how to stare people to death?” I ask.

  “No,” says Guy. “This is different now. This is such a revolutionary idea, it’ll change the way they treat those prisoners. Think of what you can do just by staring. You can confuse people to the point where they don’t know what the hell they’re looking at, and they’ll give you all sorts of information.”

  Guy says he hasn’t yet told Special Forces that he’s keeping me informed of all developments.

  “Won’t they be furious?” I ask him.

  “Nah,” says Guy. “This is the kind and the gentle way. They’ll want people to know about this.”

  “Next time you go to Fort Bragg with a hamster,” I say, “can I come?”

  “I’ll ask them,” says Guy, “when the time is right.”

  July 23, 2004

  Guy calls. He has been to Fort Bragg with a hamster.

  “I’ll tell you, Jon,” he says. “The Special Forces guys came into the meeting in a pretty hostile frame of mind and they left like little kids. They’re frustrated. They’re afraid. They know they’re senselessly screwing up in Iraq. And they know that their only alternative is me. Thought projection is really sinking in with these guys. They definitely, one hundred percent, want to go back to the old ways.”

  “So you’re going to Iraq?” I ask.

  “Looks that way,” says Guy.

  “When?” I ask.

  “We have a limited time before we leave,” says Guy.

  “Have you told them yet that you’re telling me everything?” I ask.

  “Nah,” says Guy. “But they’ll be fine with it. I’m sure you’ll be able to come with me next time. It’ll be great PR for them. And there’s another reason why I know they’ll want you on board. If the enemy knows we have this power it’ll scare the shit out of them.”

  Guy pauses.

  “I’m going to tell them all about you tomorrow,” he says.

  July 28, 2004

  I phone Guy Savelli repeatedly today, as I have done all week, but still to no avail. He doesn’t call me back.

  July 29, 2004

  I leave more messages on Guy’s answerphone. Can he just let me know if he has told them about me, and if so, what was their reaction?

  I don’t hear from Guy.

  I presume the news went down badly.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

  I would like to thank everyone who allowed me to interview them for this story, especially Jim Channon, General Stub-blebine, Guy Savelli, and Eric Olson. I harassed Jim so frequently over the past two years—for facts, dates, copies of his manual, reminiscences, verifications of names and places, and so on—that at one point he e-mailed me to say, exhaustedly: “Why do I feel like the copy boy on my own show?” But he always provided the information I asked for.

  Jim allowed me to reproduce a drawing from the First Earth Battalion Operations Manual, and I thank him for that too.

  Although nothing much has been written before about the First Earth Battalion, Mind Wars, by Ron McRae (St. Martin’s Press, 1984), has a few useful pages on Jim, a paragraph or two of which I have appropriated.

  Thanks to Tony Frewin (of Lobster magazine and the Kubrick estate) for giving me his copy of Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies, by Jim Schnabel (Dell, 1997). This book gave me invaluable background information for chapters 5 and 6, as did Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (Fourth Estate, 2004), and my conversations with Skip Atwater and Joe McMoneagle, the two leading players in the Fort Meade psychic spying unit.

  Thanks to John Le Carré, who told me to read In the Time of Tyrants: Panama: 1968–1990, by Richard M. Koster and Guillermo Sánchez (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991). All anyone needs to know about Panama and military intelligence is contained within that book.

  Prudence Calabrese’s moving and funny memoir Intentions: The Intergalactic Bathroom Enlightenment Guide (Imprint, 2002) helped me to retell the story of her roller-coaster adult life, and I recommend it. Well, the memoir parts I recommend unreservedly, the alien-in-the-bathroom parts I recommend reservedly.

  Thanks to Kathryn Fitzgerald Shramek for allowing me to reproduce her late husband’s photograph of the Hale-Bopp comet and the “companion” object.

  It was a pleasure to watch the brilliant documentaries Waco: Rules of Engagement and Waco: A New Revelation again. Thanks to the producer, Mike McNulty, for sending them to me. The excerpts from the FBI negotiation tapes I quote in chapter 12 are lifted from these superb films.

  I pieced together the story of Frank and Eric Olson primarily through my many conversations with Eric, but some paragraphs have been taken from his friend Michael Ignatieff’s New York Times article, “What Did the C.I.A. Do to Eric Olson’s Father? (April 1, 2001); “The Sphinx and the Spy: The Clandestine World of John Mulholland,” by Michael Edwards (Genii, April 2001); and from Eric’s own painstakingly researched web site, www.frankolsonproject.org. Ignatieff’s piece was particularly helpful.

  Eric allowed me to reproduce two of his photographs, and I thank him for that. I have been unable to locate Ed Streeky, the copyright holder of the third photograph, the one that appeared in People magazine in 1975 and shows the family back at home after meeting President Ford.

  My information about Artichoke came from Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain’s Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond (Pan, 1985).

  Thanks also, as always, to Fenton Bailey, Rebecca Cotton, Lindy Taylor, Tanya Cohen, and Moira Nobel at World of Wonder, and the extremely patient Peter Dale at Channel 4. I couldn’t have asked for kinder supporters within the channel than Peter and Tim Gardam, the now retired director of programs, and his successor, Kevin Lygo.

  Ursula Doyle, my editor at Picador in London, and Geoff Kloske, my editor at Simon & Schuster in New York, were typically brilliant, as were Adam Humphries, Andrew Kidd, Camilla Elworthy, Stephanie Sweeney, Sarah Castleton, and Richard Evans at Picador, and Derek Johns at A.P. Watt.

  Most of all I’d like to thank Andy Willsmore, David Barker, and especially John Sergeant, to whom this book is dedicated. John’s research and guidance can be found in every page of this book.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JON RONSON is the award-winning author of Them: Adventures with Extremists and a documentary filmmaker. He lives in London.

 

 

 
-o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share