The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Men Who Stare At Goats - The True Story Behind The Film By Dick Allgire

It was some thirty years ago on the big screen that we watched Darth Vader kill a subordinate with sheer force of will. Displeased with the performance of Admiral Ozzel because he brought his ships out of hyperspace too soon, alerting the Rebels to their presence, Darth Vader held up his hand and pinched the air. Moviegoers will recall the hapless admiral choking for air and falling over dead. Darth Vader killed the admiral with a look, employing some unseen force of Mind.

It was pure science fiction. Or was it? At about this same time, a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier was felling goats in much the same manner. Now this story is coming to the big screen.

"The Men Who Stare At Goats" is a soon to be released major motion picture starring George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, and Ewan McGregor. It is a lighthearted look at how the U.S. Army explored paranormal powers, "new age" parapsychology and psychic functioning in the late 1970's and early 80s. The film portrays all of this in a whimsical and comical tone, but the real story is deadly serious.

The character portrayed by George Clooney is based on retired Special Forces Intel First Sergeant Glenn Wheaton. In real life Wheaton is a character far too complex to portray in a two-hour movie. In his Army career Wheaton was a stone cold killer, a Green Beret door-knocker as well as a remote viewer, a type of psychic spy who could readily displace his awareness to remote locations across space and time to bring back actual intelligence grade data using only his mind. He's also a boy from the Louisiana Bayou, a southern gentleman, a kind and caring teacher.

The title of the upcoming movie, "The Men Who Stare at Goats" is based on an incident in which a Green Beret instructor killed a goat by staring at it. Glenn Wheaton witnessed the event and recounted it to author Jon Ronson, who wrote about it in his book "The Crazy Rulers of the World." Glenn Wheaton sat down and talked about the goat incident recently during an interview for a documentary planned for release in conjunction with the movie "The Men Who Stare at Goats." His interview will also be included in the "Extras" in the home DVD version of the movie.

At the Special Warfare Center and School at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina they had what the Green Berets called "The Goat Lab." Special Forces medics were required to learn how to treat gunshot wounds, trauma cases, broken bones, and other types of battlefield injuries. It may sound cruel to members of PETA, but they shot goats and subjected them to numerous traumatic injuries, and then tried to revive and stabilize them. Soldiers also slaughtered the goats, learning so they would be able to teach people in third world countries how to butcher and dress an animal and prepare it for food. So they brought in goats from Honduras, and at least one of the goats became a victim of a Darth Vader type mental energy killing.

"I was there the day the first goat died," recalls Glenn Wheaton. He remembers it was in the dead of winter at Ft. Bragg. The Special Forces students had finished their usual ten to fifteen mile predawn run and headed to the woods for hand-to-hand combat training. At that time the 5th Special Forces Group hand-to-hand combat instructor was a martial arts expert named Mike Echanis.

"We got to the training area," Wheaton says, "and there was a dagger stuck in a tree." That meant Echanis was in the Bear Pit. The Bear Pit was hole in the sandy North Carolina soil, 8 to 10 feet deep and 60 to 80 feet wide. The instructor would wait in the pit. The students couldn't see him. It wasn't that he was actually invisible, but he could blend in, using both camouflage and mental trickery, that they couldn't spot him. He was able to adapt and blend into the environment so well that those looking down into the pit just could not see him. A trainee would jump into the pit, and suddenly Echanis would come out of nowhere and be upon him, and the hand-to-hand combat would ensue. The students were certain to endure a severe beating.

On this particular day, Echanis had brought a goat with him down into the pit. As the soldiers fought the goat would scamper and jump about, trying to avoid the combatants being hurled around the pit.

At the completion of the class, Echanis challenged the soldiers: "Where is your mind?"

Then the demonstration none of them would ever forget. Wheaton recalls that the instructor "grabbed the goat by the horns. He dragged him to the middle of the pit, pushing a green stake to the bottom of the pit, attaching the goat to it. Then he asked us again 'Where are your minds?' Michael had recently completed a lot of training in Qigong, the force you couldn't see that moves like a train."

Glenn Wheaton witnessed the incredible feat. The instructor never touched the goat. "Michael focused on the goat pretty intensely," he says. "It started to bray like a donkey or horse. It dropped down to its forelegs; blood began to drip from its nose. About 20 to 30 seconds later red suds began to froth from the goat's mouth. The goat lost its equilibrium and passed away in a fit."

There was nothing done physically to the goat. Wheaton says, "Michael never had to touch the goat, other than dragging him and sinking the anchor in the sand. A demonstration we required he repeat."

They tested Echanis several times under less brutal circumstances. They filled balloons with ink and the balloons were suspended in an aquarium. "He was able to successfully break or rupture three balloons filled with ink suspended in an aquarium filled with water," Wheaton recounts. "He was able to rupture each one of those balloons, causing the ink to contaminate the water."

Wheaton says it was "a lot to think about." And he goes on to say, "as an adaptation it has immediate applications. Could anyone do it, or could only Michael do it? That's what we investigated after that."

Wheaton does not talk about whether this technique was ever employed against humans, but he says Green Berets did study so called "paranormal powers" as part of a program called Project Jedi. What kind of techniques did they study in Project Jedi? Wheaton answers, "Can you be warm when everyone else around you is freezing cold? Can you regulate your respiration and heart rate so that when everyone else is huffing and puffing because you're running up a really long hill, can you manage your own body? Can you keep going when everyone else will stop?


That's what the empowerment portion of Project Jedi was for. You had to be perfectly able to control yourself, because if you couldn't control yourself you couldn't control anything else. So being able to control your blood pressure is a good thing. Being able to send heat to an exposed part of your body by will alone is a good thing. Being able to hear when there is only a cacophony of noise, a single thing. If I turned on a vacuum cleaner and gave a lecture that you couldn't hear, after a while could you hear? You learn to filter your environment so that you can accomplish any mission."

Glenn Wheaton is currently the president and chief instructor at the Hawaii Remote Viewers' Guild. He has been teaching advanced communication skills and mental focus techniques to civilians, for free, for the past 12 years.

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" currently in theaters. There will be a documentary released soon about the true story behind the movie, and the home DVD version will contain interviews with Glenn Wheaton and Jim Channon.


- Dick Allgire

Aloha All,

I got some new information from the production folks in Puerto Rico today from the set of "The Men Who Stare at Goats". The cast includes George Clooney, Ewan Mcgregor, Kevin Spacey, and Jeff Bridges. Not to shabby for a story that began for Jon Ronson in my living room at the old Hrvg HQ in Kaneohe. One thing that will be certain is that the work itself will be a work of fiction with a bit of Science Fiction thrown in. The Character Clooney will play will be a quasi-hybrid of me and Uri Geller. The writers have taken my experiences with Project Trojan (Jedi) and the events surrounding the death of a goat at Fort Bragg during a demonstration of Gi Gong in a remote section of Fort Bragg called the Mata Mile. Mix in a bit of Uri Geller and you will have Clooney's character. Where they go from there will be anyone's guess. For the record some time back I wrote about the day the goat that started it all died. It is a true story and it happened just as it is portrayed.

The Goat that died...

The Goat was an old goat and well past his prime. He was actually born in Honduras and got to Ft; Bragg with several hundred goats on a C-130 intended to be used in slaughter classes to train Green Berets how to slaughter livestock. We learn to slaughter everything from chickens to water buffalos to feed indigenous troops we train in some pretty remote areas.
What very few people know is that the death of the goat was what helped usher in Project Trojan (AKA Project Jedi) into the Special Forces. This goat's death was under such extraordinary circumstances that it was actually classified.

The day the Goat died.

It was winter in North Carolina and on the morning the goat died it was about 35 degrees with a foot of snow on the ground. On a normal training day at Ft. Bragg the Special Forces run the sandy trails in the woods in an area called "The Mata Mile" from about 4:30am to 6:00am. At 6:00am or so they pull into the deep woods for hand-to-hand combat training. We had arranged to train on this day with Michael Echanis, a long time combat trainer in the 5th Special Forces group. I was in the 400th Army Security Agency Detachment at that time which is the Intelligence arm of the 5th Special Forces Group. Although part of the Special Forces Group, we really worked for the National Security Agency. There were 7 of us on this morning and as we finished our run we pulled in at a location called the "Bear Pit". The bear pit is actually a huge pit about 10 feet deep and about 80 feet wide.

On a normal training morning we fight in the pit for 1 to 2 hours before heading to the NCO club for breakfast. It was just dawn when reached the pit and we could see a dagger stuck into the tall pine tree near the pit which told us the instructor was already there. The 7 of us stood on the periphery of the pit and stared down into the piney dawn shadows trying to see where Michael was. This was where Michael excelled at being invisible. You would never see him until you jumped down into the sandy depths of the pit, and then it was too late, because he would be on you and for the next hour you had to fight virtually every second, it was all of you against him.

I remembered hearing the goat somewhere in the pit, mewling and shuffling as bodies were being thrown about. At times the goat would flat out run to escape the violence Michael was dealing in every direction, running in circles and leaping over and between us. When Michael was finished with us we collapsed in heaps on the floor of the pit. Michael cornered the goat and grabbed him by the horns and drug him to the center of the pit and tethered him to a stake he forced into the sandy floor. He looked around the pit and simply said, "Where are your minds?"

The goat was exhaling frosty breath and kept shifting depending on where Michael was. We were all wondering what the heck the goat was for when Michael pulled a knife from his boot and slowly raked it between each of his fingers on both his hands. There was a fair amount of blood seeping between his fingers when he picked up two handfuls of sand and began to squeeze the sand through his fingers. When the last of the sand had fallen to the ground we could see that his hands were no longer bleeding. Once again he said, "Where are your minds?" He then turned his attention to the goat. It immediately began to bray, more like a horse or donkey but very unlike a goat. The goat began to shudder then dropped to his front knees, he was obviously in distress, and slowly blood began to drip from his nose and mouth. In less than a minute the blood began to froth and spill like red suds to the sand. It was then he fell over to his side and passed in a fit of jerks. Michael got up and as we sat in the sand totally in shock he leaped the 10 feet to exit the pit, pulled the dagger from the tree and stared at us from the edge of the pit. He looked down at us and said once more, "Where are your minds?"

We buried the Goat in the floor of the pit and turned the sand to erase the blood scar left by its death. After raking the pit floor we ran back to the barracks and got cleaned up. Later at breakfast at the club we discussed what had happened and how it happened. This was the critical moment for us; it was when we decided to begin the search for a new way to think about how we get our minds right about being soldiers.

That's the story, that's the truth of it. Michael did kill the goat and never laid a finger on him. I don't really know the hamster killer wannabe boy from Jon's book, but my guess is he is so fill of crap his eyes are brown. It is doubtful and improbable he had any involvement with the experiments conducted after that day in the bear pit. There were only 7 soldiers ever involved and were all Intelligence assigned to my team. There were no civilians involved. Anyway I hope the story rings true, it is the way of it.

Glenn Wheaton's (www.hrvg.org)