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In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.

And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.

Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.

The Men Who Stare At Goats

Cardiff-born British journalist Jon Ronson had been working professionally for a number of years when he'd published his first book Clubbed Class — a work in which he discussed his attempts to fake his way into a high-class lifestyle. Ronson first made an impression on the world stage with Them — his second book in which he wrote about his experiences covering certain extremist groups from the inside. In the book, he relates attempts he'd made to infiltrate the shadowy groups that, according to some theories, rule the world. In 2005, film rights to Them had been purchased by Universal Pictures. By this time, Ronson had finished his third book: The Men Who Stare At Goats. In it, he details his exploration into the bizarre and shadowy end of the U.S. military. The book had a companion TV documentary. Both met with sufficient popularity to warrant the attention of BBC Films and a consortium of other film producers (including George Clooney), who have released a big-budget film inspired by the book.

The Book

In Hawaii, Ronson had met Glenn Wheaton - a U.S. army sergeant who claimed to be a part of a special forces unit called Project Jedi. Jedi was involved in trying to create a team of elite agents who could, among other things, will a goat to die just by staring at it. Further research found Ronson discovering actual accounts from people who were involved with the program — evidently situated out of a disused hospital in Fort Bragg. The rest of the book outlines Ronson's white rabbit-like adventure into a strange, little-known end of the U.S. Military that perhaps has its origins with a now retired US Army Colonel named Jim Channon.

Channon, the book states, had returned from Viet Nam and ended up spending time with founders of the human potential movement in California in the 1960s. Having learned from the movement, he went on to develop a vision for a new U.S. military that he outlined in a 125-page manual. He referred to the new vision as The First Earth Battalion — an idea involving soldiers going into battle playing soothing music and carrying baby lambs, greeting enemy combatants with hugs. If that didn't pacify the enemy combatants, the battalion would attempt to pacify them using non-lethal means.

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