Kenneth Glad
Cold War pressure pushed unusual theories into official spaces. What followed became one of America’s strangest military experiments.
In 1983, Major General Albert Stubblebine stood in his Arlington office and studied the wall in front of him.
According to the history site Historienet, citing Jon Ronson’s later account, the U.S. Army intelligence chief believed intense focus might let him pass through it. He told himself, “It is your choice. It is your choice.”
He ran at the wall. It did not move.
Cold war paranoia opened the door
The failed attempt was not an isolated oddity. After the Vietnam War, parts of the U.S. military were searching for new ways to think about power, fear and future conflict.
According to Historienet, Soviet-linked misinformation helped fuel claims that Moscow was studying psychic soldiers.
In that climate, remote viewing and other paranormal ideas gained attention inside American defense circles.
U.S. remote-viewing projects, later reviewed by the CIA, examined whether people could describe distant locations without seeing them. The findings never produced dependable intelligence value.
Another army imagined
One key figure was Jim Channon, a Vietnam veteran and U.S. officer who looked beyond traditional firepower.
In the late 1970s, he explored California’s new age scene and developed the “First Earth Battalion.”
His imagined soldier meditated, used intuition, practiced martial arts and favored nonlethal tactics.
Historienet describes ideas that included music, dowsing and even animals meant to project peace near battle zones.
Noriega exposed the limits
The ideas reached a strange test during the 1989 hunt for Manuel Noriega, Panama’s strongman and former U.S. intelligence contact.
At Fort Meade, personnel tried remote viewing to find him. One note read, “Ask Kristy McNichol.” McNichol was reportedly contacted, but she had no useful information.
Noriega was eventually located after taking refuge at the Vatican embassy in Panama City, through normal diplomatic channels.
Some accounts also describe goat experiments in which soldiers were told to stare at animals and imagine their deaths. No reliable evidence showed that it worked.
The psychic-soldier efforts faded. Nonlethal concepts lived on in altered forms, including sticky foam, though that too proved hard to control and potentially dangerous.
Sources: Historienet
