The Men Who Stare At Goats

Just saw The Men Who Stare At Goats. It seems to be loosely based on a book of the same title by Jon Ronson. I say "loosely based" because it is obviously structured into a comedy story that has a happy ending. The book seems to be a history of the alleged secret use of the paranormal with in the US military.

What's interesting is that while the book concentrates on the period of the '60s and '70s, there may be a longer history to such assertions. Thomas Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow mentions a department of Eisenhower's invasion army in England called "the White Visitation." In the novel, it is a psychic counterpart to the secret Bletchley Park code breaking computer facility. Formerly a mental hospital, it houses "wild talents--clairvoyants and mad magicians" who use Ouija board techniques to tease out military intelligence. Whether this is true or not, I don't know. But it seems to be true that WWII was also the time of our first incidents of UFO reports. Only pilots call them "foo-fighters" at the time.

The Men Who Stare At Goats triggered a memory I had of a discussion with a civilian clergyman who'd been stationed near an army base in Germany during the '70s and '80s. He told me a story he'd heard about a group of military intelligence soldiers who's gone AWOL from their base in Germany and ended up in Florida for the expressed purpose of "killing the anti-Christ." On searching Google today, I uncovered this article on "the Gulf Breeze Six" which reports just exactly that story.

The movie also reminded me of the time I'd partaken of the services of a medical practitioner who eventually told me that he'd been in the army and stationed in Washington D.C. and had become a victim of the CIA's MK Ultra LSD experiments. He said that during his involuntary LSD trip, he became aware of the presence of a nasty three foot little fellow he recognized was a demon. (sounded like a "Grey" to me). But he also experienced the presence of a being he recognized as Christ. He later became a Quaker because of this experience.

The things one runs into without even trying!

And this concludes my much belated Halloween post. ;-)