Alongside Colbert Thursday night was Jon Ronson, the British author of "The Men Who Stare at Goats," which details a secret U.S. Army unit that used the directive to teach soldiers to tap into their psychic abilities.
The manual, Colbert reports, "promised to train soldiers to predict future events, read other people's thoughts, stop their own hearts, even bend spoons with their minds."
"How are you going to eat your hummus now Al Qaeda?," Colbert says. "Your spoon's all bent. Advantage: America!"
On Colbert's show, Ronson discusses a military "goat lab" at Fort Bragg, where soldiers tried to burst goat hearts by staring at them.
As Colbert notes: "So, why stare at them? It seems to me we've had the technology to burst goat hearts for a long time."
The military, according to Ronson, tried lining up 30 goats in a room to test their ability to stare goats to death.
Alas, Ronson says "at one point the goat starer was staring at number 16, and goat number 17 fell over and died. I guess that's collateral damage."
A 2005 book review in The New York Times praised Ronson's non-fiction book, but the folks at Wired.com reported in 2007 that the goats at Fort Bragg are used to train medics, rather than psychics.
Colbert failed to kill the goat with the powers of his mind, but George Clooney will try the same tactics in the big-screen version of Ronson's book: The film version of "The Men Who Stare at Goats" is set to be released November 6.
---David Edwards and Kathleen Miller
This video is from Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, broadcast Sept. 17, 2009.
Download video via RawReplay.com
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