"More of this is true than you would believe."

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" book and movie both offer a darkly humorous picture of American military and spy agency interest in paranormal activity.

In his book, Jon Ronson begins by asking why the Intelligence Community would have allowed itself to become entangled with all the craziness.

To understand the rationale behind the madness, I turned to the CIA STAR GATE psychic spy files for some of the answers.

Following a Congressional request to review America's twenty-three year secret foray into psychic warfare, CIA took control, hired a select panel of experts to review a limited selection of program files, and promptly closed the STAR GATE.

As a result of this exorcism of paranormal activity, roughly two-thirds of program files are available to review, and, in despite the use of "black marker" redactions of sensitive information, a large body of psychic scientific research has been declassified.

By late September 1994, STAR GATE research was being conducted by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC, one of the top defense contractors to the Department of Defense). A major report was presented to the U.S. government titled "Phenomenological Research and Analysis," which presented various scientific reasons paranormal activity should be taken seriously.

The report claims SAIC had "Successfully verified a claim from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and from the U.S. that it is possible to influence the physiology of an isolated individual exclusively by anomalous mental phenomena ... that is, mental intention of a distant agent appears to cause physiological changes in an isolate individual."

The report later claimed that SAIC:

"Developed and calibrated instrumentation to replicate a physics-type experiment from the FSU that suggests a new form of energy might be responsible as the carrier of anomalous mental phenomena signals."

This "spooky action-at-a-distance" effect seen in the SAIC experiments, inspired a good deal of speculation about the mechanism linking the mind to the body, and beyond.

In early 1994, SAIC prepared a new five-year program plan.

SAIC cited  "strong advancements in the three-fold area of anomalous mental phenomena (AMP), including "insight into foreign activity, breakthroughs in research, and a substantial base of prima facie evidence for AMP's capabilities in applications" as the basis for a renewed effort.

Here are a few of the ideas presented to the U.S. government:

Probable Futures: "Precognition may be the underlying mechanism. If, for some yet unknown reason, humans have access to probable futures rather than actual futures, then the perception appears not to contradict the rules of physics."

Quantum Theory -- Einstein, Poldasky, Rosen Paradox (EPR): "The paradox suggest possible information transport during the collapse of a [quantum] wave function ... [however] ... Brain functioning at room temperatures appears not to be a quantum system."

General Relativity: "The recent resurgence of interest in Einstein's general theory of relativity has led to some startling theoretical conclusions about the nature of space-time again bringing to the forefront the fact that science has not unveiled all the secrets associated with time."

Time and Entropy: "The possibility that macroscopic time or psychological time, the time that we perceive, is actually determined by the change of entropy ... given that we showed experimentally that the total change of entropy is related to the quality of anomalous cognition, this theoretical approach seems most promising."

Novel Potentials: "Recently a series of clever experiments ... showing that a potential can have an effect on a particle even when there was no corresponding force present. The electromagnetic vector and scalar potentials or torsion fields are examples of such novel potentials."

To impact the heart of the goat, an individual would need to remotely influence the autonomic nervous system of the target goat, and, having done so by mental means, reduce or interfere with the beating of the goat's heart. Supporting this idea is a claim that "recent breakthroughs in research indicate ... that the brain reacts similarly to anomalous mental phenomena as it does to other sensorial stimuli, such as light flashes."

Based upon the above, the idea of "goat-staring" might seem a tad less silly, yet highly improbable.