JON RONSON AND I ARE WALKING DOWN a grimy Soho street, deep in conversation about mind-control.
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 w
hen 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.
Ronson is smiling across the table as we discuss the debleated goats he discovered at an army base in Fort Mead, North Carolina, but his story has the darkest of undertones. "It felt as if I was really finding this stuff out for the first time," he says. "No-one knows about the goats. They’re completely new and the guy who told me immediately regretted it."
Such experiments, rumours of which have circulated in the military for years, now have chilling applications in Iraq and Cuba, where suspected terrorists are being interrogated. "What I’m really trying to say is that this stuff is funny and slapstick until it’s implemented and then what you have is Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay," says Ronson.
The US media may have chosen to joke about using the I Love You song from the popular children’s show Barney as a weapon on Iraqi prisoners, but Ronson may have the real story. He believes popular music, even children’s music, is being used as a form of mental torture that can be traced back to another ex-officer, Vietnam-vet and New Age guru Jim Channon. After the bruising of Vietnam, when enlistment was at an all-time low and the American military’s reputation lay in tatters, Channon set out to reform it. He produced a manual called The First Earth Battalion, in which he advocated that instead of assaulting the enemy, US soldiers should carry lambs into battle and wear "sparkly eyes" while speakers would transmit "indigenous music and words of peace". The average grunt would become a Zen monk who would win hearts and minds; killing would become obsolete.
His ideas were widely taken up by officers doing their own soul-searching in the 1980s. Now they have re-emerged in frighteningly different scenarios on the front line.
Ronson talked to Christopher Cerf, the composer for the children’s show Sesame Street for the last 25 years. Fuelled by reports that his songs were being used on Iraqi prisoners, Cerf joked that he should be getting royalties for each interrogation. It is testament to Ronson’s skill as an interviewer that Cerf openly considers the possibility that "if I have the power to suck information out of people’s brains by writing these songs, maybe that’s something that could be useful to the CIA for brainwashing techniques". He seems torn between a genuine desire to make money and a faint awareness that his desire is crass.
Ronson says that Channon, who looks like an ageing hippie with his steel-grey beard and baggy cotton clothes, brought together disparate ideas and introduced them to the US army intelligence community. "Even if it had been used before, Jim was the first person to grasp the significance of musical torture," he says. "I have two people who’ve told me that yes, when people are being tortured musically in Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq, that’s because of Jim’s manual." But Channon dismissed this connection.
"He’s like a grandparent who won’t countenance the idea that his grandchildren have misbehaved," says Ronson. "Jim may look like a hippie and act like a hippie but he’s rational enough to understand that the US army has to do monstrous things in war."
What Ronson has uncovered is not just monstrous, but so deeply weird that he may have a battle getting his readers to take the psychic spies seriously. When he showed his father footage of the Bohemian Grove owl-burning ceremony, complete with a human effigy, his comment was, "That didn’t happen." Ronson throws up his hands in frustration. "I think what was going through his mind was that I’d employed 1,000 extras to don robes, but I can’t even get Channel 4 to send me premium economy, let alone pay for that," he laughs.
But this time Ronson has corroboration from the Pentagon on his side. Even though sources who worked at Guantanamo Bay have revealed much more than the Pentagon has admitted about their use of strobe lights and loud music (Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine and Eminem are on the playlist) to force prisoners into confessions, Ronson has been vindicated. Even his interviews with Psyops specialists at Fort Meade seem to suggest that the terrible abuses at Abu Ghraib prison really were part of an intelligence operation. "A lot of people in this story had military credentials," he says. "But whether they tell you lies, you’ll have to decide for yourself. Denial, deception and half-truths ... it’s part of their nature to deceive people."
So how does Ronson get people who have every reason to be evasive and deceptive to talk? "I’m nothing but charm," he says - and he is indeed engaging. "I’m a big huge mission of charm." On camera, even when martial arts master Pete Brusso is urging Ronson to choke him, the charm is turned up full strength. Whatever the situation, he seems genuinely interested in hearing what his subjects have to say.
"I actually find most people will talk." Many of the contributors to The Men Who Stare At Goats, he says, answered questions that no-one else had ever bothered to ask them. It was as simple as that.
Or is it? Despite the charm mission, Ronson is smoking cigarette after cigarette and tells me that getting this project together took such a toll that he actually fainted a couple of times. "I really started getting aches and pains, not because of the subject matter but because of the complexity of getting it right," he says. "That’s never happened before." Ronson and his wife are taking their six-year-old son ("an angel from heaven") to Disney World for a holiday. No doubt they’ll give Barney the purple dinosaur a wide berth.
The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson is published by Picador, priced £16.99. Crazy Rulers of the World screens on Sunday, Channel 4, 8pm.
