Men Who Stare at Goats, The

So this is interesting. I was listening to a bit of Coast to Coast AM the other night and their guest was Stephen Root, best known for his portrayals of Milton in Office Space and Jimmy James on Newsradio. He mentioned a new project he was working on with the likes of Kevin Spacey and George Clooney called The Men Who Stare at Goats. Isn't that the best title ever?

Anyway, the film is based on a five-year-old book that delves into attempts by the United States military in waging psychological warfare. These range from the more-or-less conventional - such as playing loud music to disarm and "break" targets in hostage situations - to full-blown "psychic" operations. Interestingly enough, the latter wasn't always considered hokey and fake. The Soviet Union is especially well known for its psychic research during the Cold War, especially on topics like remote viewing, the gleaning of secrets by "seeing" objects or documents via extrasensory means.

Also of note is HAARP, the United States Air Force's High Frequency Active Aurora Research Station. The station is essentially a large Alaska transceiver that is used to research the ionosphere in various forms - measurements cannot be taken easily in the ionosphere, as the thickness of the air there is insufficient for a balloon, but the drag makes orbit at these altitudes impossible. The array can also generate frequencies falling into the VLF and ELF range by using a pseudo-transmission antennae created by the use of auroral electrojet. In observation of these frequencies, rumor has it that strange effects have been induced into subjects. Some posit that it could be possible to manipulate or disrupt certain human mental faculties (messing with emotions, fight or flight response, etc.) using ELF (sub 20Hz) broadcasts.

Regardless, all this remains pseudoscience for now - an interesting read at the most. Among all the forms of warfare and interrogation, psychological manipulation is one of the most frightening thanks to its ability to disrupt what we think and feel internally rather than being a secondary effect from some sort of physical torture. Though having psychokinetic powers like Sylar from the Heroes series would be pretty fun. And who knows what's to come in the future? Such things could certainly be replicated with some kind of chip implant that could read your mind coupled with some sort of magnetic field to manipulate objects with. Hell, I still think it's incredible that surgeons can wear gloves that control robots when operating:

In 2001, Doctor Jacques Marescaux performed a gallbladder operation on a patient over six thousand miles away via this type of telepresence. The technology, in the future, could perform surgeries unassisted by a human thanks to gobs of data gathered through thousands of operations. This could make previously costly surgeries plummet in price and make wait times virtually nonexistant. Oh, the future never looked so bright!