The Why Files: Operation Podcast - 618: The First Earth Battalion: America's Strangest Military Experiment

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

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

Imagine an army that uses music instead of bullets, that drinks herbal tea and meditates between combat patrols, that studies Aikido and carries baby lambs into conflict zones. In 1979, the U.S. Army launched Project Jedi, a program to build an army of psychic soldiers. They were called the First Earth Battalion. The program was shut down, officially. But those soldiers are still serving, and the techniques they developed are still being used. The only thing that changed is the name. It's zero 900 hours at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. At the Special Warfare Center,

soldiers run urban combat drills, paratroopers practice jumps, and at building 4-1156, another unit runs a different kind of drill. They're trying to kill goats with their minds. Guy Covelli stares at Specimen 17, a two-year-old brown and white goat. The room is silent because the goats are silent. Their vocal cords were removed to keep them quiet during these experiments. For 20 minutes, Civelli stares. Then the goat's ears start to twitch. Its eyes roll back. It falls over. A military veterinarian checks the animal. It's heart stop. The experiment worked. These are the men who stare at goats. And if you saw the movie with George Clooney, it wasn't fiction. It was a real U.S. Army program called the First Earth Battalion.

Ew, have any men tried staring at kids. Stop it. The unit was created by Lieutenant Colonel Jim Shannon, a decorated Vietnam veteran with one of the most unusual records in military history. Shannon spent 319 days in combat. He led search and destroy operations in Vietnam. His unit was part of the 170,000, Airborne Brigade, one of the first major army units deployed to Vietnam in 1965. They operated in the Iron Triangle, one of the war's deadliest zones. The 173rd suffered massive casualties. In 1967 during Operation Junction City, the brigade took over 400 casualties in a single month,

but Shannon lost only one soldier, and he was killed by a sniper on his first day. For the next 317 days, his platoon suffered zero casualties. and they never killed a single innocent civilian. On one patrol deep in enemy territory, Shannon's men froze. They didn't make a sound or signal each other. They just stopped. 30 seconds later, a large group of North Vietnamese soldiers walked past them, 20 feet away, and the enemy never knew the platoon was there.

When Shannon returned from Vietnam in 1979, he knew soldiers needed better tools, not bigger guns, better mines. He spent months riding the First Earth Battalion Field Matters, a guide that detailed his operations and techniques. It contained things like herbal supplements, mindfulness, music used in combat. Soldiers were supposed to hug every day to exchange energy. Shannon's guide read more like hippie new age philosophy than military tactics. But the U.S. Army took Shannon's ideas seriously.

They had to. His combat record proved they were. So instead of dismissing Shannon's techniques, the army began using them. You know what's not fun? Cleaning three litter boxes for three main cune cats. But ever since I switched to pretty litter, my life and my nose have been so much happier. Pretty litter isn't just regular litter. It's made with ultra-absorbent crystals that trap odors and moisture on contact.

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That's pretty litter.com slash the Y files to get your first bag for just $14.99. Pretty litter cannot detect every feline health issue or prevent or diagnose diseases. A diagnosis can only come from a licensed veterinarian. Terms and conditions apply, see sight for details. Jim Shannon believed he had a special kind of intuition that saved his platoon in Vietnam, and he wanted to teach that skill to the entire U.S. Army. And all those techniques are outlined in the first Earth Battalion Field Manual. And this might sound made up, but it's a real document.

And you can read it right now. It's been declassified and archived online. Shannon wrote it at Fort Leavenworth in 1979. He taught future generals from 11 nations while he developed his vision for warfare's future. The manual was a self-help book for creating warrior monks. Soldiers would receive ginseng regulators, natural supplements for night vision, and dividing rods for locating hidden enemies. For hand-to-hand combat, pressure points from Tai Chi.

And these weren't just to disable enemies, but to heal wounded allies. Shiatsu massage for a combat first aid, hypnotherapy for weapons effectiveness. The manual also covered hygiene and affection. A specific hand soap cost $7,600 a gallon. Shannon claimed it had mystical capabilities that could alter time. Then there was the warrior hug. Soldiers were expected to hug each other three times a day to exchange energy. Did he look into the benefits of a little friendly towel snapping?

I don't think so. Even the uniform was unique, biodegradable materials that wouldn't harm the environment, built in solar panels for charging equipment, and color-changing fabric that adapts the surroundings. There are embedded health sensors to monitor vital signs in real time. And Shana described all this in 1979, smart fabrics, wearable health monitors, adaptive camouflage, technology that wouldn't exist for another 30 years. Now, the unit's command center wouldn't be a sterile room with max. and radios. It would be a cerebral environment with breathing exercises, relaxation music, and

isolation tanks. Commanders would float in darkness to achieve expanded consciousness for better decision-making. It sounds like a tech startup. Did they have beanbag chairs and kombucha on tap, too? Actually, yes, Shannon taught something very similar to modern biohacking. I knew it. Suckerberg is a warrior monk. A lizard monk. One of the crazy things when you do this live Q&A is some of them are very silly. So we got one. Mark, are the allegations true that you're secretly a lizard? I'm going to have to go with no on that.

I am not a lizard, but keep the high-quality comments coming in. There were lots of food recommendations. No more turkey loaf sea rations. Instead, they ate algae-based protein bars, dehydrated vegetable cubes, and fasting protocols were designed to enhance mental clarity. Then there was psychotronics, the use of sound frequencies to affect the mental states of the enemy. In November 1979, Shannon presented the first Earth Battalion manual at the Task Force Delta Conference, military leaders from multiple commands attended. And when they heard Shannon's ideas,

they didn't laugh. They took notes. One general specifically was fascinated. General Max Thurman, future commander of the 1989 invasion of Panama. and considered one of the Army's most brilliant strategic minds. After the presentation, Thurman pulled Shannon aside with an offer, Build and Lead the First Battalion, not on paper, not in class, in combat. General Max Thurman saw the potential in Shannon's manual, and he wanted him to lead the new unit into battle.

Shannon said no. He felt the First Earth Battalion was more powerful as a concept than as a literal fighting force. And he believed the first battalion should fight for the planet, not just for the United States. He wanted troops to carry loudspeakers into hostile territory to play indigenous music and words of peace. He wanted soldiers to bring baby lambs into combat zones as living symbols of nonviolence. Hold on. The guy who murders goats says goats are symbols of nonviolence. I admit, I see the contradiction. Shannon even described a sparkly eye technique,

a form of nonverbal influence to calm enemies through eye contact. Yeah, oh, sparkly eye technique. That's in a combat strategy. That's how I ended up with 3x wives and guppy support payments up the wazoo. So Shannon passed, but the army didn't need him. They had his field manual. By 1980, Special Forces operators meditated before weapons drills and practiced Aikido in full combat gear.

They studied ancient martial arts pressure points. between live-fire exercises. They implemented Shannon's nutrition strategies, intermittent fasting, optimized macronutrients, supplements for cognitive enhancement. In 1979, military nutritionists

dismissed this as hippie nonsense, now at standard practice. At Fort Bragg in a classified facility, Project Jedi tested whether human minds could be weaponized. The Goat Lab was just the beginning. The program's biggest champion was Major General Albert Stubblebine

the 3rd, West Point graduate, master's degree in chemical engineering, 32 years of military service. Stubblebine was commander of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, Inscom, responsible for all Army intelligence operations around the world, 16,000 soldiers under his command, every spy, every analyst, every codebreaker. He stood in his office in the Pentagon. He stared at the wall across from his desk. He took a breath, focused his mind, and ran straight into the wall. He hit his head, hard, again and again and again. Stubblebine believed he could walk through walls.

He figured that atoms are mostly empty space, and if he could just get his own atoms to align with the wall's atoms, he would slip right through. He practiced every day. He also tried to levitate, which probably didn't work either. Sometimes Stubblebine stood on his porch and stared at the sky. He tried to break clouds with his mind, A major general, he screamed mentally at cumulus clouds until they disappeared.

This man commanded army intelligence during the height of the Cold War. He's in the military intelligence Hall of Fame, and he was absolutely convinced that Jim Shannon's first Earth Battalion manual was a blueprint for the future of warfare. Under Stubblebine's command, the military's psychic programs escalated. He hosted spoon-bending parties. High-ranking officers were required to attend. They gathered in a room with silverware.

They stared at the metal until it melted. Some of them swore it worked. He brought in psychic Yuri Geller. Stubblebine wanted to know if Geller could telepathically erase computer disks, or even better, possibly trigger nuclear launch codes. And Stubblebine had believers everywhere, colonels, majors, intelligence officers, they all read the first Earth Battalion manual and they saw the possibility.

Millions were invested in classified psychic warfare programs, driven by the fear that the Soviets were doing the same thing, and the Soviets were doing the same thing. Soviet research into psychotronics is well-documented. The Cold War wasn't just missiles and tanks, it was mines. And whoever harnessed human consciousness first would have an unbeatable advantage. So Stubblebine gave the order,

the psychic programs were going operational. General Stubblebine had turned the First Earth Battalion's concepts into operational projects. Now, the military needed soldiers who could actually do the work. What started as Jim Shannon's one-man vision became a network of classified psychic programs. Scanate became Gondola Wish. Gondola Wish became Brill Flame. Grill Flame evolved into Center Lane, then Sun Street. Then finally, Stargate.

Different aims, same goal. weaponized human consciousness. The CIA recruited people with natural talent for remote viewing, gave them nothing but geographical coordinates, and asked them to describe what they saw thousands of miles away. Remote viewers described a massive Soviet submarine under construction before satellite imagery confirmed it actually existed. They sketched building layouts that later matched actual facilities.

They provided details that went beyond chance. One remote viewer codenamed subject 372 was given coordinates, nothing else. He described a large building with a distinctive curved roof. He said it was near water. He drew a sketch that showed unusual architectural features. The target was a Soviet shipyard 4,000 miles away. His drawing matched satellite photos taken three days later. Same building, same curved roof, same unusual features. The CIA couldn't explain it, but they kept using him. Subject 372 was Pat Price, a former police commissioner from California who became one of the most gifted remote viewers in the program.

He died under mysterious circumstances in 1975, but not before he proved he could see things that no one should be able to see. Ingo-Swan, another legendary viewer, claimed he could see Jupiter's rings before NASA discovered them. Joe McMonicle spent years remote-viewing Soviet facilities. His accuracy was so consistent, he received a lesion of merit for his intelligence work. These were trained professionals with documented results.

But in 1995, the CIA reviewed the entire program. They said that remote viewing had not been proven to work by a psychic mechanism. So they shut it down, allegedly. But the people didn't disappear. Major General Stubblebine retired and founded Sightek, a private remote viewing company. And other viewers also went into business offering their services to private clients. But the techniques from Shannon's manual grounded in physics and psychology were quietly absorbed into standard military training. And to nobody's surprise, these techniques worked.

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That's up to 50% off at Masterclass.com slash the Y Files. Masterclass.com slash the Y Files. The CIA officially shut down its psychic spy programs in 1995, but the military didn't throw away Jim Shannon's manual. Walk into any U.S. Special Forces training facility today. You won't find soldiers staring at goats, and you won't see generals. running into walls, but you will see other techniques from the first Earth field manual. Special operators practice controlled breathing for high-stress exercises. Navy SEALs use mindfulness techniques to maintain focus during operations, and Army Rangers train in heightened

sensory perception and intuitive threat detection. Shannon provided the philosophy, the modern army provided the budget. In the 90s, the Army released two documents, Force 21 and the Army after next. These documents are almost identical to Shannon's manual. They just remove the hippie language. Neuroscience confirms what Shannon intuitively understood. The prefrontal cortex responds to meditation. The parasympathetic nervous system activates with controlled breathing. Pattern recognition improves with mindfulness training. These are techniques that you can try for yourself. They're easy to learn, but hard to master. But once you master them, you'll see that they work. The non-lethal weapons survived too, and they got weird. In 1989, the Army tested Shannon's psychotronic sound

weapons during Operation Just Cause. They surrounded Manuel Noriega's compound in Panama. They didn't shoot. They set up massive speakers and played Van Halen and the clash at deafening volumes for three days straight. He surrendered. They played Van Halen? Yep. Yeah, come on, playing Panama and Panama, that's just lazy, right? If the U.S. military makes a K-pop playlist, they may conquer the world. In 194, the Air Force Right Laboratory proposed a halitosis bomb, a chemical weapon to give enemies severe bad breath. Ech, I guess it's still better than the flagellant's grenade.

Then came the gay bomb. They wanted to spray aphrodisiacs over enemy troops to make them sexually attracted to each other. It was a real funded proposal. Oh, did the K-POM work? I didn't ask, and they didn't tell. Yeah, nice. Other non-lethal technologies Shannon envisioned are now standard equipment, sticky foam that immobilizes targets,

calming techniques for crowd control, electronic vehicle stopping devices. Colonel John Alexander, a former member of the First Earth Battalion, became known as the father of non-lethal weaponry. Shannon had a technique called Omnidirectional Thought, when today the Army calls it multi-domain operations. The idea is that soldiers have to perceive threats across land, air, sea, cyber, and space simultaneously. The Warrior Hug is also used. Soldiers build emotional bonds through physical contact.

Oh, does it get hit with the gay bomb? No, but this became the foundation for modern combat psychology. And units that emphasize team cohesion and emotional support, they show lower rates of PTSD. Modern counterinsurgency emphasizes winning hearts and minds. Special forces train in cultural sensitivity. language skills and community engagement. It's warrior diplomacy. All of these techniques come from Jim Shannon, so his vision wasn't wrong. In fact, it was way ahead of its time. As the air turns crisp and the holidays draw near, comfort becomes the best gift of all,

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But how much of it is true? Well, soldiers never learned to walk through walls, but it is true that General Subalbine kept trying. And the Goat Lab stories, they happened, but they were mostly exaggerated. One of the goats' terrors, Guy Sevelli, claimed he stopped the goat's heart with his mind, but he later admitted he was aiming for Goat 16, but accidentally killed Goathe. goat number 70. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This guy's supposed to be a trained psychic soldier, and he can't even hit the right goat?

What do you do? Use Yahoo Maps? No, he... Human. I once tried to order a pizza and accidentally bought a timeshare. At least I can admit I was drinking on Airman. What's his excuse? At remote viewing, despite 16 years of research, at least, and millions in funding, at least.

The CIA said it never produced reliable results. They said it was just good guessing. Though personally, I think Pat Price had a gift of something, probably ESP. And Ingo Swan and Joe McMonigle also got a lot of things right. But the skeptics say that if you spend thousands of hours remote viewing, eventually you'll get some things right. But the failure of psychic programs doesn't mean the First Earth Battalion was worthless. In high-stress situations, the human mind is capable of far more than we realize. Shannon's Vietnam platoon proved that.

His soldiers weren't psychic. they were just really well-trained. If you can develop a high sense of situational awareness, it looks like predicting the future, when it's done right. And soldiers who can settle their minds during combat can compartmentalize fear and make better decisions. The First Earth Battalion's biggest mistake wasn't the ideas. It was the branding.

If Shannon had called it neurological combat optimization instead of Warrior Monks with ESP, the program might still be running under its original name. But here's what Jim Shannon got right. War doesn't have to be about maximum violence. Soldiers can be trained to operate with precision, awareness, and minimal collateral damage. They can use technology to achieve objectives without massive body counts. Today, that's not a conspiracy theory.

That's a fact. Eventually, Jim Shannon retired to Hawaii, where he built an eco-friendly home, and in his final years, he tried to mobilize the military to plant trees and historical reefs. He founded footprints for the future. He taught communities how to live sustainably. The man who wrote a manual about warrior monks fighting for the planet had become exactly that. Not as a soldier anymore, as an environmentalist.

And Shannon passed away in 2017, and he never got to see special forces operators use his techniques or non-lethal weapons become standard. Maybe that's the real tragedy. Not that his psychic experiments failed, but that his core message got lost in the noise. Soldiers should be aware, but also compassionate. We're passionate.

War should be a last resort, not a first response. Imagine what the human race could achieve if we spent our energy solving actual problems. Climate, disease, hunger. We have the resources. We just keep using them to build better weapons. Shannon understood that 40 years ago and knew that we can do better, that we can be better. Colonel Jim Shannon didn't want us to get better at killing. He wanted us to get better at living.

He literally wrote the book on peace. So how many people have to die before we start listening? Thank you so much for hanging out today. I'm AJ, there's cycle fish. Yeah, I'm looking for some cats to stay right with my evil power is. This has been the Wi-Files. Get fun, learn anything, or felt like this was a good way to kill a few minutes.

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It goes to Team. So if you want to support the team, save a few bucks, that would really be appreciated. Keep that secret close to your guilt, Zach. We got it all? It felt like it. A lot of plugs. More are coming. I keep threatening, but they are coming.

But until then, be safe. Be kind. And know that you are appreciated. I play for Libbya scenario 51 A secret code inside the Bible said I would I love my UFOs and paranormal fun As well as music So I'm singing like I should

But then another conspiracy theory Be it comes the truth, my friends, and it never ends. No, it never ends. I fear the crap cat and got stuck inside males hole with M.K.O.T.O.T.R. A being only two of where. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone? alone on a film set were the shadow people

there the Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man I'm told and his name was cold and I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish hit no fish on Thursday next

Wednesday j-2 and the rabbis have been all through the night What did you just hear the truth? So the world falls on your feet all through the night. The Mouthman's sightings and the solar stones still come to have got the secret city. underground

mysterious number stations planets are both two project star gate and what the dark watchers found in a simulation don't you worry though the black night said a lot

it told me so I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish heckle fish on Thursday next when they chase you and the wild finds out of the feet all through the night all I ever wanted

was you just hear the truth so the white balls on repeat all through the night Kendall fish on Thursday next Wednesday J-2 and the weapons have to be all through the night all I've ever wanted what did you just hear the truth so the one fall of summer beat all through

go online Gertie loves to dance I'm the dance Because she is a camel And camels love to dance When the camel When the feeling is right on wasting time Good in love, dead.

Good in love, then. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.