If you stare at certain animals (including people) you can freak them out. Hence the title of “The Men Who Stare at Goats”, directed by Grant Heslov for BBC and Overture Films. A journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), seeking for adventure to run from a sinking marriage, meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a special forces agent who aims to end war as we know it with psychic operations. The film is supposed to take place in Kuwait and Iraq, but most of it was filmed in White Sands, New Mexico (although it is UK-funded). There really are some goats, and they are not George W.’s “my pet goat” (“W.” makes a cameo in the film).
Wilton and Cassady are kind of like a tag-team of “brothers”, almost Supernatural-style, for a lot of the movie, getting each other out of jams. But there are a lot of flashbacks that track the Army’s supposed psychic operations back to Vietnam , with Jeff Bridges as the lead exponent, and Kevin Spacey as the balding, aging Cheney-like defense contractor. As with many indie films today, this one has a lot of A-list stars. In the end, the reporter will learn how to go through walls himself.
Attribution link for Wikipedia picture of White Sands. I visited the area of 1979, and it figures in to Dan Fry's "To Men od Earth".
The film talks about “remote viewing”, which is supposedly a way that the CIA learns about alien civilizations that could have outposts on Mars, Europa, or Titan. There was a book on the topic by Courtney Brown in the 1990s called “Cosmic Voyage” which claims that there is a remote viewing training center in the Charlottesville, VA area. Here it’s another technique of the New Earth Army. In the movie, there’s one scene that takes place at “Area 51.”
You do wonder what dabbling in telepathy and the paranormal would do to “don’t ask don’t tell”. A lot more that what Facebook does.
The film is based on a book by Jon Ronson and claims to be based on true events. The names have been changed to protect the innocent (and to protect "online reputation").
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