I just finished reading Jon Ronson's latest non-fiction book The Men Who Stare At Goats and it was brilliant, absurd, scary, deeply freaky, and lol funny. The cover of the book says it's a story "about what happened when a small group of men–highly placed within the United State military, the government, and the intelligence services–began believing in very strange things." Some of those odd beliefs include: psychic spying (aka "remote viewing"), Jedi powers, subliminal sound weapons, and the ability to kill an animal just by looking at it (hence the title). As demonstrated in his previous book, "Them: Adventures with Extremists," Ronson has an amazing talent for seeking out individuals on the fringes of reason and enchanting the reader with their (truthful?) tales of high weirdness. Forget any questionable conspiracy theories about the US military–the truth is far stranger. From the dust jacket:
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.
