Latest / David & Sarah Dig Deep / Bizarre Story of The First Earth Battalion and the Secrets of Goat Lab

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Bizarre Story of The First Earth Battalion and the Secrets of Goat Lab · David & Sarah Dig Deep

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever looked at the night sky and felt a pull?
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• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly, David.
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• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Class is in session, and it's time to dig deep.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, setting the scene.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: And he is highly decorated, incredibly powerful, highly educated.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we're talking about Major General Albert Stubblebine III.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_03: He's the U.S.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_03: Army's chief of intelligence.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right, a very serious guy.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Exactly.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: He has 16,000 soldiers under his direct command.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_03: He controls these vast networks of spies scattered all across the globe.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_03: But right now, on this random summer day, he isn't looking at a map or, you know, reading a classified briefing.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell No, he's definitely not.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell He is standing perfectly still, just staring intensely at the wall of his office.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: And then he steps forward, fully intending to pass straight through the solid drywall to the other side.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell And of course, reality just completely refuses to cooperate.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, obviously.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: He bangs his nose like hard against the wall.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: But what's fascinating here is what happens next.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: He doesn't rub his nose and laugh at himself for being foolish, you know.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: He believes the failure isn't in the concept.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: He genuinely believes the failure is simply that his mind is too cluttered with paperwork and like global conflicts.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Okay.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_03: Let's unpack this.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_03: Because if you're listening to this right now thinking, this has to be a joke, you are stepping directly into the bizarre, highly classified, and totally real history of the U.S.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: military's experiments with psychic warfare.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell It sounds made up, but it is entirely documented.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_03: It really is.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_03: Today we're doing a deep dive into the source material from John Ronson's incredible investigative book, The Men Who Stare at Goats.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: We're getting into a world where the rigid rules of military combat just completely dissolved into new age philosophy and like literal attempts at magic.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Yeah, because he wasn't crazy in the clinical sense.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he had a master's degree in chemical engineering.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: He's a man of science.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Exactly.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: He had a deeply structured, supposedly scientific logic for why walking through a wall should be perfectly possible.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell So what was that logic?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_03: Because to me it's just a guy hitting a wall.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Well, Stubblebind was applying a very specific, albeit flawed interpretation of quantum physics.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: He reasoned that on a molecular level, atoms are predominantly made up of empty space.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Okay, sure.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: And he is made of atoms.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: The wall is made of atoms.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, both he and the wall are mostly empty space.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: So from his perspective, the perceived solidity of that wall is just an optical and tactile illusion.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh well.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: He figured all he logically had do was align the empty space in his atoms with the empty space in the wall's atoms, and he would just slide right through.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's almost like um like a software engineer trying to hack the underlying code of the universe.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: Like he's utterly convinced that if he just types the right mental sequence, he can bypass the firewall of physics.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell But the firewall keeps winning.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_03: It does.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: His nose keeps taking a beating.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_03: So feeling frustrated by his own limitations and his heavy in tray, he actually packs his bags and heads down to Fort Bragg in North Carolina to pitch these exact ideas to the commanders of the elite special forces.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: And you really have to picture the tension in this room.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: I can only imagine.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: You have Albert Stubblebein standing in front of seasoned, hardened Green Beret commanders.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: These are men whose entire careers are built on kinetic warfare, right?
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: Bullets, explosives, tangible physics.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell And here comes the chief of intelligence.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: And he starts pitching them on weaponizing their thoughts.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: He suggests using psychic healing on the battlefield so wounded soldiers can instantly recover.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_03: Which, okay, nice thought.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: But then he pulls out bent spoons to prove the power of the mind.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: And the grand finale of his pitch is suggesting that they could end enemy threats without a single bullet.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_03: By doing what?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: By stopping or bursting animal hearts using only concentrated intent.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Just staring an animal into cardiac arrest.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: And the special forces guys are just what, staring at him?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: Absolute icy silence.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell I mean, I'm thinking of this like a Fortune 500 CEO confidently pitching literal wizardry to a board of directors.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_03: They had to be looking at him like he was completely nuts.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, they definitely were.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: They looked at him with these blank, expressionless faces.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: They politely endure the whole presentation, and when he finally asks if they have any animals on the base to test this heartbursting theory on, they just look him dead in the eye and say, No, we don't have access to any animals.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_03: Which we know is a lie.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell A massive, calculated lie.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: They were hiding something right under his nose, which we will get to in a bit.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: But their reaction is entirely predictable for conventional soldiers.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Hold on, I'm struggling with the logic here before we even move forward.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_03: As we said, Stubblebein is a man of science.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: He's at the pinnacle of military intelligence.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: How does a guy with his background not hear himself talking about bursting hearts with his mind and realize he sounds insane?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_03: Where did he even get a framework for this?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell So he got it from a highly influential yet deeply obscure military manual written back in 1979.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: It was written by a lieutenant colonel named Jim Channan.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: And this manual became Stubblebein's holy text, basically.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: But to really understand why brilliant military minds embraced it, you have to understand the profound trauma that birthed it.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_03: Because Channan was a Vietnam vet, right?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: Jim Channan was an infantry officer.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: And on his first day of combat at the Songdongnai River in Vietnam, his unit was ambushed by a sniper.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: But instead of returning fire to kill, his young, terrified soldiers impulsively fired their weapons high into the trees.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_03: They intentionally missed.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: Because they hesitated, because they just couldn't bring themselves to shoot another human being.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: A fellow soldier, Private First Class Shaw, was killed right in front of Channon.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: That has to completely shatter your understanding of how an army is supposed to function.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you train these guys, you give them a weapon, and when the literal moment comes, their instinct is to miss on purpose.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: It broke Channon completely.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: And the thing is, it wasn't an isolated incident.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: After World War II, a military historian named S.L.A.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: Marshall published these staggering numbers.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: What do they show?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: The data revealed that in continuous inescapable combat, a massive percentage of soldiers simply will not shoot to kill.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: It suggested that combat traumatizes about 98% of human beings.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: The only soldiers who instinctively shoot to kill without hesitation are that remaining 2%.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: And those guys essentially fit a psychopathic profile.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_03: So the military brass was quietly realizing that they were taking kind-hearted, everyday young men and thrusting them into an environment that fundamentally broke their psyche.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: So Channon falls into this severe post-combat depression.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: He's watching the soul of the American soldier just being destroyed by conventional warfare.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: And the military's response to his crisis is actually fascinating, right?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_03: They fund him to take a road trip.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and in the late 1970s, the Pentagon essentially pays Jim Channan to wander through California's New Age movement.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell, which is wild.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: He visits the Esseln Institute, he hangs out with ambient musicians, he explores aura reading, uh alternative spirituality, and he comes back and writes the first Earth Battalion Operations Manual.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell What was the core idea of that manual?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: His vision was to create what he called the warrior monk.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: He wanted an army that was vastly more cunning and effective, but entirely peaceful.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_03: So, like elite fighters who are also spiritually enlightened.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Right.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: He wanted soldiers who possessed the discipline of special forces, but the spiritual dedication of monks.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: His manual proposed a battlefield where troops carried uh divining tools to find safe paths or ginseng regulators to maintain their internal energy instead of relying on adrenaline.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Here's where it gets really interesting, though.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: Let's talk about the specific tactics, because this is where you, as the listener, might think we are just making things up.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: The tactics get out there.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell One of the tactics in Channon's manual was to have soldiers carry baby lambs into hostile territory.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Yes, the lamb protocol.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell The idea was for a soldier to cradle this baby lamb, approach the enemy with what the manual literally called sparkly eyes, gently set the lamb on the ground, and then give the enemy an automatic hug to melt their hostility.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we are talking about a military that just came out of the brutal jungles of Vietnam.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_03: If the problem was that soldiers were traumatized by missing targets and watching their friends die, how on earth does handing them a baby lamb solve anything?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_03: What is the actual psychological bridge between combat trauma and this extreme new age pacifism?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Well, it's a radical cognitive reframing.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: The leaders who read Shannon's manual weren't necessarily looking at the lamb as a literal tactical weapon.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Okay, so it was metaphorical.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Partly.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: They were looking at the psychological shift it represented.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: If you force a soldier to go into a war zone with the intent to destroy, you create severe psychological damage.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: But if you can fundamentally shift that soldier's core intent from destruction to connection, from killing to disarming through overwhelming, unexpected empathy, you theoretically eliminate the trauma of taking a life.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_03: You're trying to engineer a superpower that neutralizes the enemy's will to fight without firing a single bullet.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Exactly.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: And the wild thing is, the military brass actually bought into it.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: Jim Channing himself didn't even want to lead a formal unit.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: He wanted his first Earth Battalion concepts to just organically infiltrate the minds of military leaders over time.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell But the Special Forces quietly started weaving his ideas into real actionable training regimens anyway, totally under the radar.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they created something in the mid-1980s called Project Jedi.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_03: Project Jedi, led by guys like Sergeant First Class Glenn Wheaton.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Right.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: They structured this evolution into three very distinct levels of Jedi training.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell So Level One was all about observation, right?
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_03: But not just keeping your eyes peeled.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: No, exactly.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: It was supernatural observation.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: A level one trainee was expected to walk into a house and instantly, without consciously scanning or counting, know precisely how many chairs, light fixtures, and power outlets were in the room.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Which honestly sounds like a hyper-militarized version of Sherlock Holmes.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_03: You walk in, your subconscious absorbs the data, and your conscious mind just retrieves it on demand.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Exactly.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's extreme situational awareness.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Then you move to level two, which was intuition.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_03: That was being able to stand at a literal physical fork in the road in hostile territory with zero intelligence reports, snap your fingers, and just instantly know which path is safe.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Right.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: Tapping into that gut instinct to a supernatural degree.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell But level three is where they take a massive leap into the bizarre.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: Invisibility.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: And we have to be really clear about what they meant by invisibility.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Yeah, they weren't turning transparent.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: No, they weren't trying to make a human body literally see-through.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: What Wheaton and the Jedi program taught was how to dance with invisibility by weaponizing the brain's natural filtering system.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell How's that work?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: Think about how you might sit in a busy restaurant and completely fail to notice the person clearing the table next to you.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, sure.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: You just tune them out.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: Your brain dismisses them as unimportant background data.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: The Jedi training taught soldiers a philosophical and physical linkage between observation and reality.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: The idea that you only truly exist in a space if someone consciously registers your presence.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: If an enemy's brain simply edits you out of the room because you're not registering as a threat, you are, for all practical intents, invisible.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_03: So is this actually supernatural or just a stage magician trick applied to combat?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Well, to the observer, it looks like magic.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: But for the military, it didn't really matter if it was stage magic, psychology, or literal psychic power.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: The tactical advantage was identical.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: The soldier wasn't seen.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_03: But that tactical advantage took a very dark turn when we loop back to General Stubblebein's pitch.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_03: Remember how the Special Forces commanders looked him in the eye and said they didn't have any animals to test on?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: The big lie.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: They were lying to the chief of intelligence.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_03: Because hidden away in condemned clapboard buildings at Fort Bragg was a highly classified facility known as Goat Lab.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: The existence of Goat Lab is just one of the most surreal details in this entire history.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: The military secretly housed about a hundred goats in these sheds.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_03: And originally it had a medical purpose, right?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell, Yes.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: Initially the purpose was purely medical training.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: Special Forces medics would shoot the goats in the leg with a capped bolt gun.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: Then the medics would rush the injured animals into a bunker to practice battlefield trauma surgery, dressing the wounds and nursing the goats back to health.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_03: And the detail from the source material that just haunts you, it really does, is that these goats were secretly de-bleed.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's horrific.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_03: The military surgeons surgically cauterized the goats' vocal cords so they couldn't make a single sound.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_03: They did this because they were terrified the local animal welfare organizations like the ASPCA would hear a hundred injured goats crying out in the North Carolina woods.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: So you have to picture this environment.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: It is completely unnervingly silent.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: You just have dozens of hobbling animals in plaster casts unable to vocalize their distress.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: And this silent, grim laboratory is exactly where the Jedi warriors decided to test their ultimate lethal power.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus Staring an animal to death.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell Right.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: They brought in civilian martial arts experts, guys like Michael Oconis and Guy Savelli, to attempt to stop the goat's hearts using nothing but focused psychic intent.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus And within the lore of the program, they believed they actually succeeded.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: But the trainers warned of a terrifying consequence.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: They called it sympathetic injury.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell, which sounds straight out of an old martial arts movie.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: How exactly was this sympathetic injury supposed to work?
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell It's rooted in a bastardization of Eastern energy concepts, like qi.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: The belief was that the human mind had to generate an immense, violent surge of energetic intent to reach out and stop the physical beating of a goat's heart.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: But energy doesn't just vanish, it creates a feedback loop.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: When that lethal force impacted the animal, the psychic shockwave would allegedly rebound back to the master, causing actual physical damage to their own heart.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_03: We really have to pause and do a reality check here, because John Ronson even watched a home video provided by Guy Savelli, which supposedly showed him staring hamsters into immobility.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the hamster video.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_03: You watch the tape, and the hamster just suddenly falls over, legs in the air, totally frozen.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_03: But look at the context of goat lab.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: You have goats that have been shot, operated on, and confined in a bizarre, stressful environment.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: So what does this all mean?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_03: Is it not infinitely more likely that these poor animals were just dying of extreme physical trauma and stress rather than martial artists harnessing lethal telekinesis?
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell, I mean, from an objective, scientific standpoint, absolutely.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: Extreme stress and prior trauma are the logical culprits here.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Right.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: But that kind of misses the point of why this matters historically.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: Within the highly insulated, deeply secretive culture of Goat Lab, these operatives genuinely believed they were wielding telekinesis.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: They truly believed reality was bending to their will.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Which raises the biggest question of all for me.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_03: How on earth does a government fund this?
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_03: How do you get taxpayer money for silent goats and telekinetic assassins?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell To understand that, you have to look at the broader historical timeline of U.S.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: intelligence, specifically tracing it back to the Cold War.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell The paranoid years.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Very paranoid.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: In 1953, the director of the CIA, Alan Dulles, gave a speech where he explicitly declared that the mind was the great battlefield of the new era.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: The U.S.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: was deeply terrified that the Soviets had cracked the code on mind control and brainwashing.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell So they felt they were already behind in a psychic arms race.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Exactly.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that fear birthed Project MK Ultra.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_02: This was the dark origin point where the government officially decided that reality was pliable and traditional ethics were just a liability.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Right.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_03: The LSD experiments.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Yes.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: The CIA began secretly dosing unsuspecting people with LSD to see if they could break the human mind and basically rebuild it.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell And this is where we get the tragic story of Frank Olson, right?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_03: He was a government scientist who was secretly given LSD by his own colleagues.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: He suffered a massive mental breakdown and ultimately fell to his death from a tenth floor hotel window.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: So the intelligence community established a baseline in the 50s that basically said, we will experiment on anyone with anything if it gives us an itch.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Yes.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: It proved that the institutional framework for funding the impossible and the horrific was already deeply entrenched.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: They wanted truth serums.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: They wanted remote viewers.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: So by the time Jim Chanon's New Age Manual came along in the late 70s, the military apparatus was already fully primed to accept bizarre, paradigm-shifting ideas.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_03: But the irony is that while the military was so obsessed with absolute secrecy, I mean, General Stubblebein believed deeply in the sacred oath of silence, the whole thing was leaking like a sieve.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, everywhere.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_03: The official military stance on psychic warfare has always been neither confirmed nor deny.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_03: But then you have these retired operatives, guys like Major Ed Dames, who just start calling in to late-night paranormal radio shows like Coast to Coast with Art Bell.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell It was a bizarre spectacle.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: You had highly trained former intelligence officers going on national radio to millions of listeners, just bragging about how they used psychic spying to look for Soviet submarines or like the Loch Ness monster.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell It's like a leaky bucket.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_03: How can the military maintain a veil of super secrecy when its former psychic spies won't stop bragging on paranormal radio?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_03: The old guard like Stubblebein must have despised these leaks.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell They did.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: But despite the absurdity and the leaks, you have former intelligence officers who fiercely defend these programs to this day.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: Colonel John Alexander, a major figure in this world, gave a chilling justification.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_03: What did he say?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: He said, World War X is on, and it is religious.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_03: What did he mean by that?
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: Alexander was expressing the mindset of the modern intelligence community facing asymmetrical warfare.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: They feel they are engaged in an endless unconventional war against non-state actors and ideological extremists.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_03: So the old rules don't apply.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: To them, the enemy isn't playing by the rules of physics, geography, or conventional diplomacy.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, the U.S.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: military feels it cannot afford to restrict itself to conventional intelligence.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: If the enemy is fighting a spiritual or psychological war, the military believes it must master the psycho-spiritual domain.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell And that philosophy didn't just stay in a theoretical manual.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_03: You know, these 1970s New Age concepts mutated and actually found their way onto the modern battlefield, particularly in the war on terror.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell They absolutely did.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_03: For instance, that same Colonel John Alexander took the first Earth Battalion's call for non-lethal, peaceful weapons and actually invented something called sticky foam.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: Sticky foam is the perfect example of lofty New Age philosophy colliding with harsh physical reality.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Yeah, how did that go?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Well, the concept was brilliant.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: A weapon that fires a substance that expands and hardens instantly, immobilizing a target without causing him any physical harm.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: They actually deployed it in Somalia in the 1990s to deal with rioters.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell But the mechanics of it completely.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Completely failed in practice, didn't they?
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: Miserably.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: When they sprayed it, the writers just stood there, waited a few moments for the foam to harden into a solid mass, and then simply used it as a step stool to climb over the barricades.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my god.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: Observers compared it to watching Bill Murray get slimed in the movie Ghostbusters.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: It was messy, absurd, and tactically useless.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell And yet the military was so committed to these alternative weapons that they still hauled bottles of sticky foam into Iraq in 2003, hoping to spray it on suspected weapons of mass destruction to seal them up.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Which is just wild to think about.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_03: But the sticky foam is just the clumsy, slightly funny side of this evolution.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_03: The way these ideas influenced modern psychological operations, or psyops, is profoundly dark.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_03: Let's look at Jim Chanon's original manual again.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: He innocently suggested that soldiers should carry loudspeakers to play indigenous music and words of peace to calm the enemy and avoid bloodshed.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell But PsyOps analysts looked at that concept and inverted it.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: They realized that if you can use specific frequencies and culturally resonant sound to calm a human mind, you can use culturally dissonant sound to shatter a human mind.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell We saw the early, almost theatrical version of this in 1989, right?
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_03: The U.S.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_03: military surrounded Manuel Noriego's compound in Panama and blasted him with guns and roses around the clock.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Yeah, the classic example.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: But by the time we get to the war on terror, that tactic had evolved from harassment into calculated mental torture.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell It did.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: In May 2003, U.S.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: forces set up shipping containers behind a disused railway station in Al-Qaim, near the Syrian border in Iraq.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: They locked prisoners inside these metal boxes in the sweltering heat.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: And then they blasted them with the theme song to Barney the Purple Dinosaur, layered with flashing strobe lights, for hours and hours on end.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_03: The theme song to a children's television show.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it is such a devastating, grim irony.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_03: Channel's first Earth Battalion program was originally designed to end the trauma of war.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: He wanted to use New Age pacifism to save the souls of American soldiers.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: Right, that was the whole point of the lamb.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_03: And the military bureaucracy took that exact concept, the power of music and the psychospiritual dimension, and weaponized it into a bizarre, highly effective form of psychological torture.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_02: The Psyops doctrine refers to this as disequilibrating the enemy.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: They learned through these experimental programs that sensory overload with deeply culturally dissonant audio bypasses a prisoner's physical resilience.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_03: Because you can't block it out.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: You can train a soldier to withstand a physical beating, but you cannot train a human brain to withstand the endless, looping assault of a purple dinosaur singing about love while locked in a dark box.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: It attacks the psyche directly.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_03: It really is a staggering trajectory.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_03: We started this deep dive with General Stubbelbein in Arlington, desperately bumping his nose against his office wall, hoping the universe was made of empty space.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: We did.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_03: And then we ventured into a clapboard shed in North Carolina filled with a hundred silent dee-bleeded goats.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_03: And we ended up in the Iraqi desert where the U.S.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_03: military deployed a children's song as a weapon of war.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: It really forces us to confront the core premise of Jim Channan's manual.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: He suggested that reality is defined entirely by what we collectively believe is possible.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_02: But if a global military superpower decides to fundamentally alter its definition of reality, if it pours millions of dollars into psychic assassins, telekinetic goat staring and weaponized empathy, where exactly is the line between a visionary tactical breakthrough and collective institutional madness?
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell That is the thought we want to leave you with today.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_03: The next time you hear a wild conspiracy theory on the internet, just remember that the actual documented history of the United States military might be far stranger than anything someone could invent.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_03: Something for you to mull over the next time you find yourself staring just a little too hard at a solid wall.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the men who stare at goats.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_03: Stay curious, and we will catch you next time.