The Men Who Stare At Goats May 2026

The story of The Men Who Stare at Goats revolves around a group of soldiers from the 1st SFOD-D who were trained in a unique approach to warfare. They were taught to use unorthodox tactics, including the use of psychic powers, such as telepathy and clairvoyance, to gather intelligence and conduct operations.

The unit was led by Colonel Charles Beckwith, who had a strong interest in the paranormal and had written a book on the subject. Beckwith believed that certain individuals possessed psychic abilities that could be harnessed for military purposes.

No figure looms larger over this story than Major General Albert Stubblebine III. In 1981, Stubblebine was a man at the peak of his career. As the commanding general of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), he presided over 17,000 soldiers, 16 military bases, and a budget in the hundreds of millions.

But Stubblebine had a problem. He was bored. He felt that conventional intelligence—satellites, informants, wiretaps—was missing the bigger picture. He had become obsessed with the potential of the human mind. He had read extensively about Eastern mysticism, about Taoism, about the martial art of Aikido. He became convinced that the laws of physics were merely suggestions.

Stubblebine famously attempted to use his mind to walk through a wall. Not metaphorically. He took a running start at the partition wall in his Pentagon office, trying to phase his molecules through the drywall. He did this repeatedly, ultimately giving himself a bloody nose and a bruised ego.

But Stubblebine was no fool. He was a decorated combat veteran. He simply believed that the Soviet Union was light years ahead of the US in "psychotronics." Rumors abounded that the KGB had trained thousands of psychic spies. If the Reds were reading the President's mind, Stubblebine reasoned, the US needed its own battalion of super-soldiers. The Men Who Stare At Goats

Thus, he gave his blessing to a lieutenant colonel named Jim Channon.

The infamous "Goat Lab" at Fort Bragg is the Holy Grail of this story. According to multiple first-hand accounts, including those of Guy Savelli and other veterans, the lab was a small concrete blockhouse. Inside, a goat was strapped to a table. Sensors monitored its heart rate.

The soldiers, who had been trained in bio-feedback and meditation, would sit a few feet away. They would focus on their own heart rate, slow it down, and then project that stillness onto the goat. The goal was to create a "resonant frequency" that would cause the goat’s heart to fibrillate and stop.

Savelli claimed he did it. He said the goat stiffened, its eyes glazed over, and the monitors flatlined. Then, a medic rushed in to revive the animal.

Other soldiers who were there claim nothing happened. They say it was a psychological exercise to build confidence—a placebo designed to make soldiers feel invincible. They would be told the goat died, but in reality, it was a trick. The story of The Men Who Stare at

Regardless of the truth, the legend of the "goat killers" spread through the ranks. It became a symbol of a military that had lost its grip on reality, chasing magic while ignoring the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Army wasn't alone in this madness. At the same time that Stubblebine was trying to walk through walls, the CIA and DIA were funding a secret program known as Project Stargate.

This program took remote viewing seriously. For two decades (roughly 1972 to 1995), the government paid psychics like Ingo Swann, Joe McMoneagle, and Pat Price to "see" secret Soviet facilities from thousands of miles away. They sat in sound-proofed rooms with blindfolds on, drawing sketches of cranes, missile silos, and submarines.

Shockingly, some of their results were eerily accurate. McMoneagle once described a secret submarine base on the coast of Russia that the CIA had not yet discovered. When satellites checked the location, McMoneagle’s sketch was correct.

Of course, for every hit, there were a thousand misses. Psychics described alien bases on Mars and claimed to have conversations with dead people. The program was eventually declassified and shuttered in 1995, with a CIA report concluding that remote viewing had "no operational value." As the commanding general of the U

But the damage—or the glory, depending on your perspective—was done. The men who stared at goats had been legitimized at the highest levels of power.

To the astonishment of rational officers, the Army brass didn't laugh Channon out of the Pentagon. They funded it. The unit was known as the "Remote Viewing" program, later codenamed Project Stargate, based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

The most famous member of this group was a retired Vietnam War intelligence officer named Major General Albert Stubblebine. Stubblebine was the head of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). He was in charge of 14,000 spies and analysts. And he was convinced he had a problem: his physical body kept getting in the way.

Stubblebine spent months trying to "astral project" his body across the Potomac River. Then he focused on a more tangible goal: walking through a wall. Day after day, he would stand three feet from the cinderblock wall in his office, close his eyes, and run into it. He broke his nose several times. He chipped a tooth.

When asked why he kept it up, Stubblebine told Ronson: "Because I knew it was possible. The atoms are mostly empty space. I just had to convince my atoms to slip through the gaps in their atoms."

He never succeeded. But he did convince the Army to spend millions training soldiers in "remote viewing."