The First Earth Battalion: America's Strangest Military Experiment

The Why Files: Operation Podcast

The Why Files

Society & Culture, Documentary, Science Fiction, Science, Life Sciences, Fiction

4.8 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A Vietnam War hero with zero casualties wrote a manual about warrior monks who hug daily and use ESP in combat. Instead of dismissing it, the US Army turned it into Project Jedi—a decades-long experiment in psychic warfare. Generals tried walking through walls. Intelligence officers hosted spoon-bending parties. Soldiers stared at goats until their hearts stopped. The CIA spent millions on remote viewers who claimed to see Soviet secrets thousands of miles away. Most experiments failed, but the successful techniques became foundational to modern Special Forces training. This is the true story of America's psychic soldier program and how a hippie field manual accidentally revolutionized military operations.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP3pOszdr5U Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Imagine an army that uses music instead of bullets, that drinks herbal tea and meditates
0:07.3	between combat patrols, that studies Aikido and carries baby lambs into conflict zones.
0:13.8	In 1979, the U.S. Army launched Project Jedi, a program to build an army of psychic soldiers.
0:20.8	They were called the First Earth Battalion.
0:23.1	The program was shut down, officially.
0:26.1	But those soldiers are still serving, and the techniques they developed are still being used.
0:31.0	The only thing that changed is the name.
0:37.1	The United States. It's zero nine hundred hours at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
0:50.5	At the Special Warfare Center, soldiers run urban combat drills, paratroopers practice jumps,
0:56.5	and at building 4-1156, another unit runs a different kind of drill.
1:01.4	They're trying to kill goats with their minds.
1:05.3	Guy Covelli stares at Specimen 17, the two-year-old brown and white goat.
1:09.8	The room is silent because the goats are silent.
1:12.4	Their vocal cords were removed to keep them quiet during these experiments.
1:16.2	For 20 minutes, Civelli stares. Then the goat's ears start to twitch. Its eyes roll back. It
1:23.2	falls over. A military veterinarian checks the animal. It's hard stop. The experiment worked.
1:29.5	These are the men who stare at goats. And if you saw the movie with George Clooney, it wasn't fiction.
1:35.2	It was a real U.S. Army program called the First Earth Battalion.
1:38.4	Ew, have any men tried staring at kids.
1:41.2	Stop it.
1:42.2	The unit was created by Lieutenant Colonel Jim Shannon, a decorated Vietnam veteran with
1:46.8	one of the most unusual records in military history.
	...

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