The Men Who Stare at Goats movie is a fictional adaptation of Jon Ronson's 2004 book that tells the story of Ronson's initiation into "high strangeness" infecting the U.S. Intelligence Community.

The truth behind the "goats" tales spans the cold war and, according to sources, continues in the post-9/11 world.

In the 1990s, I initiated a private research effort to gather information on emerging ideas at the fringe of the scientific community.

In 2004, I decided to formalize my survey which had begun in the 1990s as STARstream Research ( www.starstreamresearch.com ).

Perhaps the most visible fringe topic was the quest to find a working theory of "the quantum mind" -- an attempt to merge the strange aspects of quantum theory with the mechanics of the human brain to explain cognition and the experience of consciousness.

The idea that quantum and mind belong together in the same sentence had been promoted by Sir Roger Penrose, the famous Oxford mathematical physicist.

Penrose, along with many physicists, struggled with the unsolved problem of merging Einstein's general relativity of curved spacetime, a theory used to explain the very large, with quantum mechanics, the weird counter-intuitive world of the very small.

Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist at the University of Arizona, had proposed the idea that information in the brain might be processed by microtubules, cell structures at a scale below the neural networks of neurons popularly thought to be the basis of human thought.

In the 1990s, I had been fortunate to have been included in Hameroff's on-line discussion group, a virtual think-tank self-tasked to conquer the problem of consciousness and perception.

Hameroff came to believe, in addition to the electrochemical signals handled at the level of the neurons, microtubules acted as biological quantum computer elements accessing the fundamental structure of spacetime in a process Penrose called OR (objective reduction). Just as a computer operates on bits which may take one of two possible values, the biological quantum computer would operate using qu-bits, or quantum bits, which could be in a superposition of two states at the state time. It was this magical property of quantum mechanics that opened up unique new possibilities for the theory of consciousness.

The fundamental aspect of consciousness -- the "hard problem" -- is the experience of perception, often explained as the problem of "redness." How is it that we experience "red" or any other sensation, from a flood of information entering the brain?

The "hard problem" left open the possibility there might be "paranormal" or "paraphysical" aspects of reality that science either did not understand, or, perhaps, cannot understand.

It was this gap in human knowledge, combined with intelligence coming from the Former Soviet Union, that had ignited the "psi-gap": concerns were raised that America was at risk of falling behind Soviet paranormal efforts because the academic world in the west actively discouraged this kind of thinking.

In the intelligence community, paranormal activity (Anomalous Mental Phenomena) was divided into two broad categories: psychic perceptions, known as "remote viewing," and material perturbation, commonly called mind-over-matter psychokinesis.

During the secret phase of America's effort, research into psychokinesis (the kind of phenomena alleged to appear in "goat staring") was conducted at Laurence Livermore National Laboratory. Other efforts to measure the human brain under paranormal conditions took place at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Research was also conducted at two major American defense institutions: SRI International, and SAIC.

Following a Congressional declassification of America's STAR GATE psychic spy effort, the CIA began to release sanitized versions of some of the scientific research that had been conducted from 1972 to the end of the STAR GATE programs in 1995.

One of the motivations behind the Congressional action had been to open up information exchange with former Soviet scientists, and their counterparts in China.

By the end of the 1990s, with the world wide phenomena of the Internet going full speed ahead, this effort to exchange "fringe" research was set into full motion, along with the expected intelligence monitoring on both sides of the ocean.

The true story of the "goats" involves the fringe research, foreign operatives and scientists, the intelligence communities, the use of the Internet for espionage, and, most importantly, real anomalous data.

Some of the anomalous information had been used as intelligence to support other, more conventional intelligence collection efforts, as I have documented in my series KNOWING THE FUTURE: CIA, 9/11, UFOs, AND THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL PRESENCE.

One mystery remains to be explored: were the tales of extraterrestrial beings at Los Alamos a cover story to discourage mainstream media from penetrating America's real secret psychic research?

For more information, please visit www.starpod.org.