The Loch Ness Monster Is a Dinosaur’s Ghost
While designing The Esoterrorists, I had no idea that a top-notch systemless sourcebook already exists for the game: Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare At Goats. It’s an alternately funny and scary journalistic inquiry into the influence of New Age and paranormal beliefs on US military intelligence in the age of terror. Ronson traces the ongoing impact of “The First Earth Battalion”, a hippy-dippy military study written in the 70s in the wake of Vietnam and heavily flavored by the human potential movement. This web of sometimes-tenuous connections takes him into the field of non-lethal weapons, on a tangent into the Heaven’s Gate suicides, backwards in time to the even more sinister layer beneath MK-ULTRA, and into the heart of darkness at Abu Ghraib. Ronson’s first person style is vivid, human, and often hilariously droll. Unlike most writers to plough these fields, he scrupulously separates provable fact from tantalizing conjecture. With this and his previous book, Them: Adventures With Extremists, Ronson has definitively established himself as the George Plimpton of conspiracy/paranormal weirdness.