Psychic Spies: Any Truth in 'Men Who Stare at Goats?'

Major Paul H. Smith calls it his "Men in Black" moment.

It was 1983 and he was working as a Middle East analyst at Fort Meade, Md., when a fellow intelligence officer approached him with a highly-classified, so-called "black project."

They couldn't tell him what it was. They just said that as an intelligent, accomplished, open-minded and creative person, he fit the profile.

Intrigued, Smith agreed to take the tests thrown at him. And when the results confirmed his competence for the top-secret task, he was invited to try his hand at a new mission: To uncover details about places and activities around the world without stepping off of a U.S. military base.

"We're basically asking you to become a psychic spy," Smith, now retired, said he was told.

At first, the skeptic in him resisted. But when the recruiter revealed that the military was actually funding an ESP-type program, he thought, "There's got to be something to it. At that point, I had to know what there was to it."

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Congress Funded Parapsychology Program for 20 Years

For seven years, Smith took part in a congressionally-funded program focused on training officers in "remote viewing," or a paranormal skill that supposedly allows a person to see a target despite the restrictions of space or time.

And though the program was shut down in the mid-1990s after 20 years, stories of it and other allegedly paranormal military activities are at the heart of the new George Clooney movie "The Men Who Stare at Goats," and the Jon Ronson book upon which it was based.

In the movie, the paranormal is played up to the extreme. Soldiers attempt to become invisible, walk through walls and even kill a goat just by staring at it.

Smith and others familiar with the actual events upon which the movie and book are based say they only loosely reflect reality. But they also say that in ways both formal and informal, the military did dabble in the paranormal. And, they claim, they had some success.