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When Channon submitted this idea to the military, they rejected it. Channon retired some time later, but some of the ideas he pioneered in the manual for the First Earth Battalion live on in Project Jedi and a number of other, far more sinister programs that Ronson delves into with a great deal of style. Ronson tempers the obvious humor inherent in his subject matter with serious tones. What he discusses here ranges from the bizarre to the comical to the truly disturbing. It's all delivered in a subject-by-subject format that passes through the more interesting ends of some of the biggest news stories of the late 1990s/early 2000s.

A paranormal investigator for the US military was involved with a secret remote pseudo-psychic war with Manuel Noriega prior to the US invasion of Panama. US forces had allegedly hired a Russian expert to attempt to broadcast the voice of Charlton Heston-as-god into the heads of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas in 1993. The strange practice of putting Iraqi prisoners in metal shipping crates and blasting the crates with strobe lights and the theme song from the Barney TV show may have been the product of very sinister motives. And why did a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay have a boombox in his cell casually playing CDs by a Fleetwood Mac cover band and Matchbox Twenty? How was the military's Psyops involved in lurid pictures from Abu Ghraib?

All of these subjects are explored from a respectful distance that neither sensationalizes nor trivializes them. This is dark, conspiracy-related stuff that is written in a way similar to acclaimed author Jerome Clark's exploration of UFOlogy. The best way to cover outrageous claims is with a clear, objective head and like Clark, Ronson uses an exceedingly approachable, down to earth style of prose that lays bare the mystery that makes the subject matter so interesting to begin with. Ronson's exceedingly conversational narrative may not have the dry, journalistic tones found in Clark's work, but it gives the subject matter an overwhelmingly human feel.

Of particular note here is the Eric Olson's search for the truth of his father's death in the midst of the U.S. Government's MK-ULTRA mind control experiments. The official government story is that Olson's father jumped out of a window in New York as a result of government use of LSD with respect to MK-ULTRA. Olson's been obsessed with trying to get to the truth behind the story. Ronson's treatment of the human end of this really brings the fantastic elements of the novel into full, vivid emotional reality. There's a dark side out there and it's difficult to distinguish fact from fantasy in a shadowy world of intelligence and counter intelligence.

The Movie

In principle, the idea behind the film adaptation of the novel should have worked. In a way, it kind of did. The idea of turning a disjointed narrative into single, coherent action/adventure plot is a sound and cautious one. The idea of fusing the dozen or more people who figure prominently in Ronson's novel together into simple Hollywood character types makes clean, economic sense. Having those characters played by some really talented, big name Hollywood actors also makes a lot of sense. Limiting the plot to coverage of only the central issues of the book with only occasional glances at some of the book's other details is very practical. In theory, all of these decisions could've made for a really interesting narrative film adaptation of the book. The film consistently fails to execute any of these ideas in any practical way.

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