A close encounter with remote viewing

Rating: 9/10 (13 May 2010)

By now most people are aware that the US military once had a 'remote viewing' team of psychics, who would sit in the USA and remotely view Soviet military sites. Individuals such as Ingo Swann made this popular knowledge long ago, several years after the team was supposedly officially disbanded. This film is based upon the experiences of certain former 'psychic warriors', as recounted in a book about them by Jon Ronson. Some of these men appear in candid interviews in a documentary, 'The Real Men of the First Earth Battalion', which is an extra on the DVD, and which is just as interesting as the main film itself. We must not be so naïve as to imagine that the whole story, or even a wholly accurate partial story of this subject has been or ever can be revealed to the public. To a certain extent, partial revelation even could be considered to constitute disinformation. If you have ten things to say and you only talk about two of them, while concealing the eight others, your frankness about the two you choose to reveal is not necessarily as frank as it seems. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear. The title of this film refers to the fact that the military psychics would stare at goats and by the power of their mental concentration alone would make their hearts stop, so that they would drop dead. There is said to have been a real goat unit, and that this story is true. I have no doubt that it is. Hence, 'the men who stare at goats'. Someone has seen the comedic potential in all this, and the film is an outrageously funny comedy with a serious background. George Clooney's comic talents are in full play, and 'Clooney as a looney' is a great success. He certainly is one of Hollywood's finest and most interesting actors. Jeff Bridges gives admirable comic support as a soldier who turns into a hippie and starts all this alternative mind-bending stuff. Kevin Spacey is excellent at being the jealous and ruthless sorehead who wants all the glory for himself, which is of course the path of the fallen angels. The true roots of all this go back to Nazi Germany. It was the Nazis, especially the teams who worked under Heinrich Himmler, who perpetuated the black uses of psychic phenomena which they had derived from the tradition of their predecessors, the Teutonic Knights. The USA became alarmed by this in the late 1930s and authorised the well-known psychologist Clark Hull to try to befriend Hitler and Himmler's chief hypnotist, Ferenc Volgyesi, which he did prior to the outbreak of the War. When the War was over, under Operation Paperclip and other similar operations, a large number of SS specialists came to America, and Volgyesi was amongst them. He even adopted the name 'Frank' to show how American he was willing to be. The public story goes that the USA did not wake up to psychic phenomena until Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier published their extraordinary best-seller LE MATIN DES MAGICIENS in 1960, which appeared in England in 1963 as THE DAWN OF MAGIC and in the USA in 1964 as THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS. This shocking book was followed a few years later by the best-seller PSYCHIC DISCOVERIES BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN, by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, a copy of which is seen being read in this film. The story for public consumption is that the appearance of these books woke up a sleepy Pentagon and made them realize that the Soviets were deeply involved in psychic research in relation to warfare, and that the USA had better do the same, or it might be a security threat to America. Of course, what had really been going on was that America's Germans and the Soviet Union's Germans had been competing with each other in these areas ever since 1945. For instance, more than 50% of all hypnosis experiments in the history of the USA have been carried out by agencies or departments of the Government and are classified as top secret. The revelations about Project MK Ultra and related endeavours are only the tip of an iceberg of which we will never see the rest. We should not be so silly as to imagine that just because the battalion portrayed in this film was disbanded many years ago, all such things have stopped. Many of the phenomena shown in this film in comedic fashion are deadly serious matters which have been studied for millennia. Take the attempt by soldiers to pass through walls by running at them, as shown in the film. Anyone familiar with Chinese Taoism will have read the supernatural stories of Pu Songling, dating from 1679. Here is a quote from his story 'The Taoist Priest of Lao-Shan'. The priest has a disciple called Wang and 'he told him to walk through the wall, and the wall yielding to him as he passed, in a moment he found himself outside.' As Tang Meng-Lai, a commentator on Pu Songling, points out: 'Men are wont to attribute an existence only to such things as they daily see with their own eyes  how then is it possible for a man to understand the rationale of things he can neither see nor hear  but we cannot argue therefore that they do not exist.' Astrophysicists now say that 95% of the Universe consists of 'dark matter' and they don't know what it is. Well, well! Is that so? If you think the Pentagon and the security agencies have lost interest in 'the vast invisible', think again. But while we muse on that subject, powerless to learn more, we can meanwhile laugh our heads off at George Clooney. That's called fiddling while the goats die. No animal was harmed in the writing of this review.