Since my last comment on this post I’ve written about The Men Who Stare at Goats in the April 2010 issue of the newsletter I edit for the local science fiction society: “We talked about The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was about the US Army investigating psychic phenomena for possible military applications. I said that it reminded me of frequent Coast to Coast AM guest Major Edward ‘Ed’ Dames, who did ‘remote viewing’ sessions for the Army (initially working for Ingo Swann, then running the project—codenamed ‘Stargate’—himself). He and his students were only given target co-ordinates, with no hint of what to expect. They got the right answer most of the time (Dames says 80%, but there are no records). After the Army cancelled Stargate, Dames began offering public courses and videos.”

In the past year one of rjschwarz’s points has become much more valid: that the Democrats have not done F.A. for the country, or at the very least, they may have been working like crazy to salvage things behind the scenes, but if so they’ve totally failed to communicate or advertise it. The impression the world (I’m in Canada, but we follow U.S. politics here, because they’re more interesting than ours) has is that the Democrats are too afraid of the Republicans to get anything done, and have therefore let down the people who elected them in their 2006–2008 Oval Office/Congress/Senate hat-trick. Any votes they get from now on will only be because it’s a two-party system and the other choice is the Republicans, rather than because anyone has any faith in the Democrats.

Faith, of course, is also part of the problem with psychical research. (With a segue that fast, I should qualify for a red key!) And faith, too, is an issue that has become more hotly debated (or as the British say, “hotted up”) in the past year. As the militant atheists and the religious right gear up for culture war, the rest of us agnostics and people who would like to believe in something are caught in the crossfire. And speaking of crosses on fire: thanks to a severe on-line flaming by a militant atheist—who claimed that my willingness to entertain the idea of the paranormal made me complicit in the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, AIDS in Africa, Scientology, and Islamofascism—I’ve been pushed much further towards the spiritual side than the materialist side, and anyone who self-identifies as an atheist pops a red flag in my mind now.

(Thus, I have to resist the urge to react badly to those in this thread who said that Project Goatstare was a tragic waste of money and time.)

That’s not saying that psychology is a non-subjective “hard science,” only that philosophical objections to it do not affect its practical utility one way or another.

The military may actually be one of the better organizations for doing some directly applicable scientific research, given that its research did bring us ARPAnet, which in turn produced our internet. Still, I think their psi ops projects were pretty much doomed from the start no matter who they put in charge of them. (That part about it being dedicated hippies in charge of the projects wasn’t entirely fictional either, although I seem to recall it was actually the CIA that tried shooting a few test subjects up with LSD to see if it would give them any special powers.)

As shown in the movie, though, having such a program led by a dedicated hippy under the aegis of the U.S. military probably isn’t the best scenario…

As for the movie, well, I haven’t seen it myself, but I do know the history of our various military forces conducting supernatural experiments is real enough. Considering that these experiments seem to have been mostly a complete waste of money and yielded stupid and disappointing results, I can see how a story about them played the right way could pull a few good horselaughs at the absurdity of the whole enterprise.

At the same time, a non-committal ending is rather appropriate to the subject, since there’s usually some reason for even the strangest of activities. America did have the Cold War going on with Russia at the time, and recently opened archives from the former Soviet Union reveal that our secret agents’ reports that Russia and its satellites were experimenting with “psychic power” were by no means inaccurate, though how successful any of these experiments actually were is still very much in dispute. In other words, Strangelovian as it may seem, our government did have some reason to be concerned that we would have a “psychic power gap” with Russia if we didn’t research this stuff ourselves.

The real absurdity of it all is that people kept trying to apply the scientific method to stuff that, by its very definition, is beyond the scientific method’s reach. Magic and miraculous events are supernatural, literally “above and beyond nature,” and science is the study of nature. In other words, science is supposed to be about nature’s laws, not the exceptions to those laws; yet the supernatural is by definition exceptional to those laws.

Supernatural events are not repeatable, not predictable, and not subject to natural law. Therefore, all attempts at scientific study for them are doomed to frustration and failure even if they happen to get a positive result; they won’t be able to repeat the result consistently and may not even be able to repeat it at all.

I say this as a believer in God and the Bible and free will and all the supernatural stuff involved in each. The reason scientists studying “psychic” phenomena can never quite seem to get their act together enough to publish anything favoring its reality that stands up to skeptical scrutiny is that the supernatural answers to absolutely nobody’s demands for a repeat performance. The Bible records the miracle-working Jesus saying as much to people when they made such demands of him.

Of course, this inability to test the supernatural empirically is also the reason so many don’t believe in it, but such skepticism leads to the further absurdity of putting one’s faith in materialism, which is every bit as untestable as the supernatural. That’s why this film left open either interpretation while committing to neither. Judging by your review, it may also have left open a third possibility: that the supernatural exists, but is not what the character Cassady believes–or claims to believe–it is.

Getting back to the movie – not bad but I find movie-as-political-soapboxing pretty damn tiresome. However, George Clooney blowing up goats with his mind? That’s got ‘drinking game’ written ALL over it.

I wonder how he would have done that with a movie about psychic warfare? I guess the cliche would be to have peaceful researchers shocked, shocked when their military funders want to apply their discoveries to war (as in Dreamscape or The Lawnmower Man). But that wouldn’t be an issue when the project is started by the Pentagon. How did you see it playing out, in your initial misgivings?