The Real Story Behind the Men Who Stare at Goats

WASHINGTON (Nov. 6) -- Here's the question that emerges from the newly released movie, The Men Who Stare At Goats: Did a member of an elite branch of the U.S. military really kill a goat with his mind?

Not exactly, says John Alexander, a retired U.S. Army colonel and key character in the book of the same name.

"Here is where we disagree," says Alexander, who was a fierce critic of the book, written by British journalist Jon Ronson, when it was first published. "They hit the goat -- I know the guy who hit the goat; I trained with him as well. But this was dim mak."

Dim mak, or the "death touch," is a form of martial arts that "defies conventional physiology," Alexander says. It works by disrupting the body's "chi."

The movie follows the adventures of a reactivated "psychic spy," played by George Clooney, traveling through Iraq with a journalist. As a member of the First Earth Battalion, Clooney, as the movie's title suggests, has mental powers that enable him to kill a goat just by staring at it.

Laura Macgruder, Overture Films / AP

George Clooney staring at a goat in "The Men Who Stare At Goats."

So how much then is true in the movie and the book? Well, the Pentagon really did have a "psychic spy" research program, that went under the name of Remote Viewing (though it was never operational); there is such a thing as First Earth Battalion that was influential in some military circles (though an operational "battalion" as depicted in the movie and satirized in the book never actually existed); and the military and the CIA really did experiment with LSD.

When the book was published, Alexander attacked the author and the book, claiming Ronson heavily fictionalized the events, a claim Ronson disputed. And yet, according to Alexander, there really was a mysterious dead goat.

It just didn't happen quite the way the book or the movie depict.

The movie's release prompted Alexander to look back at the origins of the now infamous goat story. Alexander has recently written an essay called "Staring at Goats: The Rest of the Story" that traces what he says are the real-life origins of the goat story back to James "Nick" Rowe, a member of special forces who was held captive during the Vietnam War and later assassinated in the Philippines.

Rowe was a director of the Army's Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape school at Fort Bragg, where he investigated dim mak as a way to help train soldiers. Eventually, a dim mak expert was brought to Fort Bragg, and one of the soldiers the expert trained used dim mak on a goat. The goat died.

"Therefore, taken in context, staring at goats, or hitting them, makes more sense than what one might initially believe," Alexander writes.

Despite what he still says are important inaccuracies in the book, Alexander says he likes the movie.

"It's fairly funny," he says. "I love the ending."