Y'know, I feel a whole ton of Welsh jokes descending on me . . .

As they do.

That was the US military, not the (UK) Royal Navy.

Have you read the book The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson?

It's a great-fun read -- better on that score than it is as an information source, in fact, because it's all kind of journalistic and Immediate an' Right In There an' stuff. I read it a year or two back for my Corrupted Science research.

Why would it have given you the heeby-jeebies?

"Fierce Food"

Oo, that looks fun. It might have to be bought . . .

I love Ronson's stuff. Them is even better than The Men Who Stare At Goats.
Incidentally, a few years ago I interviewed someone who claimed to have been one of the Fort Meade remote viewers.

I have Them somewhere, but have yet to get round to reading it.

My enthusiasm for The Men Who Stare at Goats is, as I say, modified by the fact that it's not good as an information source: it desperately needed him to forget the writerly pyrotechnics every now and then and just summarize what he's actually talking about. I still don't know what some of the loonies he discusses thought their experiments might achieve.

I don't mind that so much; I like the way he writes. He has a similar approach on paper to the approach Louis Theroux takes on film, and I enjoy reading that.
Them includes a marvellous portrait of Omar Bakri, the `Tottenham Taliban,' who briefly became Public Enemy Number One over here, which really underscores the sheer mundanity of life for these `enemies of the state.' I think it's good writing.

And I think, in his defence, that some of the loonies didn't know what their experiments were meant to achieve, either.

And, in passing, wouldn't The Men Who Stare At Goats be a wonderful name for a band?