Maj Gen Albert Stubblebine III
Intelligence chief whose psychic experiments were evoked in the film The Men who Stare at Goats
MAJOR GENERAL ALBERT STUBBLEBINE III, who has died on his 87th birthday, was head of US Army Intelligence in the early 1980s; he was nicknamed “spoonbender” for his belief in the use of psychic and telepathic powers in warfare that was later evoked in Grant Heslov’s film The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009), starring George Clooney as a Special Forces operative who trains “psychic spies”.
The film was widely regarded as an absurd comedy, but The Men Who Stare at Goats was adapted from a nonfiction book by Jon Ronson which documented how, beginning in the late 1970s, a secret wing of the US military really did try to create “warrior monks” capable of psychic feats that included walking through walls and killing a goat simply by staring at it.
At a time when the military was still traumatised by its withdrawal from Vietnam, a number of officers grew interested in Californian “New Age” movements and eastern spiritual techniques and came up with the theory of “peaceful” warfare that would draw upon spiritual and psychedelic techniques to help resolve conflicts.
The engine behind the idea was Inscom, the army’s Intelligence and Security Command, which encouraged officers such as Colonel Jim Channon when in 1979 he established the “First Earth Battalion” at Fort Knox.
Inspired by the Bhagavad Gita and Zen Buddhism, Channon believed in rebirthing, naked hot-tub encounter sessions and chanting “Om”. His aim was to create a cadre of “warrior monks” – soldiers who would go to war to the sound of New Age music carrying with them “symbolic animals” such as baby lambs. Once in hostile territory they would greet people with “sparkly eyes” and give the enemy “an automatic hug”.
In 1981 Stubblebine, a Vietnam veteran who had been serving as head of the Electronics Research and Development Command (Eradcom), became the commanding officer of Inscom. Stubblebine had earned a reputation as a lateral thinker through his sponsorship of the so-called “Stargate” project, a secret Army unit established at Fort Meade, Maryland, to investigate the potential for psychic techniques in military and domestic intelligence applications. He had been deeply impressed by the “spoonbending” skills of the illusionist Uri Geller, who had managed to convince Stargate researchers that he was a “psychic warrior”.
At Inscom, Stubblebine began a programme called the “High Performance Task Force”, involving psychokinetic “spoon-bending” sessions, “neuro-linguistic programming” for marksmen, and charisma-building courses for generals.
In addition he set up a special psychic spying unit, whose members would engage in “remote viewing”, a technique which involved sitting in a hut waiting for sudden psychic flashes which might show, for example, the design of a Russian warship or the location of an enemy general.
He also became a frequent visitor to the Monroe Institute, a privatelyowned centre for investigation into the paranormal near Charlottesville, Virginia, where a process known as “hemi-sync” was used to stimulate out-of-body experiences.
By 1983 Stubblebine had become convinced that psychic techniques could have widespread military applications and decided to present his ideas to colleagues at the Special Forces Command Centre at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
Among other things he suggested that psychic healing could be used to treat wounds in the field, and that the military should establish a clandestine animal heart-bursting programme, to test whether soldiers could cause goats (and by extension, enemy troops) to die using willpower alone.
The demonstration was not a success. Yet according to Jon Ronson, what Stubblebine did not know was that Special Forces “actually considered his ideas to be excellent ones”. In fact, claimed Ronson, the top brass at Fort Bragg were keeping 100 goats (de-bleated to maintain secrecy) in a shed just down the road where they carried out experiments to see if it was possible to kill a goat by staring at it (hence the title of Ronson’s book).
Shortly before he was relieved of his command, Stubblebine became convinced that it was possible for a human being to walk through walls and to levitate. Sadly, his own experiments proved unsuccessful. When he tried walking through walls, he told Ronson, he kept bumping his nose, and when he tried to levitate, “I could not get my fat ass off the ground, excuse my language”.
In 1984 General JA Wickham, the new Chief of the Army Staff, forced Stubblebine to retire, after the latter offered to perform a spoon-bending demonstration at a public function.
Albert Newton Stubblebine III was born on February 6 1930, graduated from the United States Military Academy and subsequently took a degree in chemical engineering from Columbia University.
He began his military career in a tank regiment, but later transferred to military intelligence, serving with the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam and later as an intelligence officer with the 25th Infantry Division. For his service in Vietnam Stubblebine was awarded the Legion of Merit and Bronze Star.
As head of US Army Intelligence, with 16,000 soldiers under his command, Stubblebine was instrumental in the invasions of Panama and Grenada. He was also said to have attempted psychic spying on Anastasio Somoza, which the Nicaraguan dictator is said to have countered by putting paper strips in his shoes.
After Stubblebine retired from the Army he worked as a vice-president of BDM Corporation, a Washington-area defence and intelligence contractor, retiring in 1990.
In later years he popped up to take issue with the official version of events on 9/11. The Pentagon, he claimed, had not been hit by a Boeing 757, but by a missile, while the collapse of the twin towers had been caused by controlled demolition – not fuel from the hijacked planes. Images that backed up his claims about the Pentagon had, he claimed, been removed from the Internet and replaced with doctored pictures.
His first marriage, to Geraldine Murphy, with whom he had two adopted children, was dissolved. He married, secondly, Rima Laibow, a psychiatrist and nutrition campaigner who has claimed to be a UFO abduction victim.
Major General Albert Stubblebine, born February 6 1930, died February 6 2017