Scare CrazyThe Scotsman, Nov 13, 2004
JON RONSON AND I ARE WALKING DOWN a grimy Soho street, deep in conversation about mind-control. It’s a subject that lends itself to nuttiness, but the author of Them: Adventures with Extremists, who gatecrashed the sacred owl-burning ceremony at the exclusive American club, Bohemian Grove, challenged the Bildenberg Group and befriended the Ku Klux Klan, has an uncanny ability to discern the method within other people’s madness. In his latest book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, which accompanies the Channel 4 series (Sunday, 8pm), his target is the American military.
Ronson began his journey into the US army’s heart of cerebral darkness in London, where he got a tip from Uri Geller - the psychic famed for bending spoons on TV in the 1970s. "Under Clinton, the nuttiness was at the fringes but
the dynamic changed when the Bushes got into power and it felt like the nuttiness was now at the core of things," Ronson tells me at his Soho club. "So I started asking around and then I heard about remote viewers and psychic spies and, right here on the roof terrace in this building, Uri Geller told me that he’d been ‘re-activated’."
I ask why the US military might have brought Geller back in from the cold. The simple answer is that Geller once belonged to an unofficial unit of psychic spies, formed in the 1970s to read the future and conduct experiments into the supernatural for the US military. Geller’s tip led Ronson to Glenn Wheaton, a retired sergeant and former Special Forces psychic spy who confirmed that the military funded this unofficial unit. There was more to the psychics, however, than trying to "remotely access" Soviet weapons plans or predict China’s next move.
They were looking at new forms of warfare, including walking through walls, adopting a cloak of invisibility, even stopping an animal’s heartbeat by staring at it.
Wheaton told Ronson about a
"goat lab" where the staring took place and this led him to General Stubblebine III, the army’s chief of intelligence in the 1980s. The General is a big fan of Geller and in Ronson’s documentary lays out a whole trayful of twisted cutlery as evidence of his faith. Stubblebine, says Ronson, was so convinced about these ideas that he spent several weeks trying to conjure up a mental state that would enable him to walk through walls. He never succeeded, but became a powerful advocate of New Age thought.
http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=1310082004