At the start of the twisted treasure hunt that is ''The Men Who Stare at Goats,'' the journalist Jon Ronson appears to be looking for furtive, paranoid quacks who play mind games. He seems to have hit the mother lode.
Take the goats of the title: Mr. Ronson cites a hundred of them. He says that they have been hidden at a Goat Lab at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and de-bleated for security reasons.
They have been used in top-secret experiments by psychic spies whose existence is not officially acknowledged by the United States Army. Military psychics are so well hidden that they aren't covered by the Army's coffee budget. It makes them cranky to have to bring their own coffee to work.
''The damn psychic spies should be keeping their damn mouths shut, instead of chitchatting all over town about what they did.'' So says retired Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III, the first of the many characters redolent of ''Dr. Strangelove'' who are found in this jaw-dropper of a -- hard to believe, but, yes -- nonfiction story.
Some of these experts contend that a goat's heart can be stopped by the intense gaze of a certain kind of supersoldier. ''Goat didn't have a chance,'' one of these tough guys tells Mr. Ronson. Such fighters sometimes refer to themselves as Jedi Warriors, because the thinking about their occult superpowers dates back to early ''Star Wars'' days. It was then that the post-Vietnam military, demoralized and fiscally hamstrung, was ready to try anything in the way of intangible new weaponry.
Mr. Ronson sets his book up beautifully. It moves with wry, precise agility from crackpot to crackpot in its search for the essence of this early New Age creativity. Much of it can be traced to the 1977 fact-finding mission of Lt. Col. Jim Channon, now also retired but given credit for an influential legacy.
It was Colonel Channon's 125-page ''First Earth Battalion Operations Manual'' that suggested a whole new approach to combat and a whole new type of military uniform. According to Colonel Channon's plan, soldiers' uniforms should include pouches for ginseng regulators, divining tools and loudspeakers that would emit ''indigenous music and words of peace.''
The author's explorations also take him to one soldier of fortune who died after ''acting too big for his boots regarding his superhuman powers,'' and to a New Age company alleged to be dealing in both healing bars (costing $7,600 and resembling blocks of soap) and group sex (''Don't tell your husband because he wouldn't understand the energy work'').
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