A secret unit called the First Earth Battalion was established by the US Army during the Cold War to determine if soldiers could become invisible, walk through walls, and stare at goats until the animals keeled over from a heart attack.
"Animals!" General Albert Stubblebine III said while explaining his psychic training plans to US Special Forces commanders in 1983. "Stopping the hearts of animals. Bursting the hearts of animals!”
The General’s outburst was met with stony silence. Stubblebine feared he’d gone too far. A year later, he retired early, convinced his bleating had come to nothing.
If looks could kill
It was an embarrassing moment; one Stubblebine was trying to forget when he was interviewed by Jonathan Ronson, author of The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004). Stubblebine recalled stumbling through the meeting and admitted he’d never accomplished his other psychic goals either, including walking through walls: "I simply kept bumping my nose... If you really want to know, it's a disappointment. Same with the levitation."
What the General didn’t know was that America’s Green Berets were deadly serious about testing his goat idea. Just a few hundred yards down the road from where the Special Forces brass gathered that day, the US was housing 100 de-bleated goats - animals who could open and close their mouths without emitting a sound. The top-secret goats, forever sworn to silence, were used by the Green Berets in battle training exercises. If Americans could somehow learn to stare goats into the ground, they might be able to do the same with enemy forces.
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A secret unit called the First Earth Battalion was established by the US Army during the Cold War to determine if soldiers could become invisible, walk through walls, and stare at goats until the animals keeled over from a heart attack.
"Animals!" General Albert Stubblebine III said while explaining his psychic training plans to US Special Forces commanders in 1983. "Stopping the hearts of animals. Bursting the hearts of animals!”
The General’s outburst was met with stony silence. Stubblebine feared he’d gone too far. A year later, he retired early, convinced his bleating had come to nothing.
If looks could kill
It was an embarrassing moment; one Stubblebine was trying to forget when he was interviewed by Jonathan Ronson, author of The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004). Stubblebine recalled stumbling through the meeting and admitted he’d never accomplished his other psychic goals either, including walking through walls: "I simply kept bumping my nose... If you really want to know, it's a disappointment. Same with the levitation."
What the General didn’t know was that America’s Green Berets were deadly serious about testing his goat idea. Just a few hundred yards down the road from where the Special Forces brass gathered that day, the US was housing 100 de-bleated goats - animals who could open and close their mouths without emitting a sound. The top-secret goats, forever sworn to silence, were used by the Green Berets in battle training exercises. If Americans could somehow learn to stare goats into the ground, they might be able to do the same with enemy forces.
Ronson had been tipped off about the goat story by Uri Geller, master spoon bender, supposed Mossad agent, and part-time CIA psychic.
It seems General Stubblebine commanded a secret military psychic spying unit from 1981 to 1984 - basically six soldiers in a condemned building in Fort Meade, a Black Op that didn't officially exist.
By the mid-1980s, however, Special Forces had undertaken a secret initiative to create 'super soldiers' - officers with superpowers who could walk into a room and be instantly aware of every detail, according to Glenn Wheaton Sergeant First Class, US Army and a retired military intelligence professional.
Special Forces didn’t stop there, however. There were levels beyond ‘superpowers’ including heightened intuition and invisibility (although merely remaining unseen was acceptable) and, of course, there were the goat experiments. At least one intelligence officer had stopped a goat’s heart in a deadly stare-off at the military’s secret ‘Goat Lab’, Wheaton told Ronson.
The US has a rich history of psychic spying
Developing psychic powers
Additional top-secret psychic experiments had been going on for decades in the US. In 1952, Dr. J.B. Rhine conducted the Army’s ESP tests. In the 1970s, the CIA and NSA worked with researchers to test psychic abilities, hoping to create a perfect spy who could wander the world in their mind without leaving the room.
Geller’s psychic skills were also tested for eight days in 1973 as part of the CIA’s Stargate program which investigated how to weaponize psychic powers, according to declassified CIA documents.
A BBC documentary, The Secret Life of Uri Geller, suggests CIA and Mossad spies tapped his ‘paranormal’ skills for decades, including during a mission to release 100 hostages trapped in Uganda’s Entebbe airport in 1976. It was during his time working in US intelligence that Geller stumbled across the men who stared at goats.
Green Berets used goats for battlefield training
The Goat Lab
‘The Goat Lab’ was part of the Special Warfare Center and School at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, where Green Berets shot goats in the leg and learned how to treat wounds, deal with trauma cases, and address other types of battlefield injuries.
The progression to ‘goat staring’ was inspired by US Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon, author of the First Earth Battalion Field Manual, who encouraged aspiring super soldiers to embrace their psychic powers.
Channon, a Vietnam war vet, envisioned an Army full of 'Warrior Monks' who had the presence, service, and dedication of a monk, and the absolute skill and precision of a warrior.
So who was the vaunted goat stalker, the soldier able to drop a goat with a steely stare?
Step forward Guy Savelli, a civilian martial artist and spiritual healer brought in to train US Special Forces in the ‘80s. Savelli claimed that not only could he stare down a goat, but he’d also killed his hamster by staring at it for three days (although taped evidence indicated the hamster was still running around afterward).
While Savelli also claimed he’d killed a goat during a government-controlled experiment, he admitted the wrong goat had died - number 17 instead of number 16 - because he was having trouble concentrating. Savelli couldn’t verify that claim either, however. The videotape Savelli offered to Ronson as ‘proof’ involved a different experiment where no animals died.
"That was the extent of the empirical evidence of goat killing,” Michael Shermer, author and editor of Skeptic magazine said. “And as someone who has spent decades in the same fruitless pursuit of phantom goats, I conclude that the evidence for the paranormal in general doesn't get much better than this.”
After traveling the world conducting interviews with psychic spies and spymasters, what does the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats make of it all?
“I believe all of the historical stuff about them trying all of this out definitely happened. I’ve seen enough documentation to know they really were trying to kill goats just by staring at them,” Ronson said. “I know these experiments happened but what I don’t believe is that any of them worked.”
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