Ronson’s Plunder

Hopefully at least a few readers of Jon Ronson’s book, The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004) had a sense of déjà vu as they went through its pages.  Certainly I did, when I read the book in October 2009.  Many of the stories in Goats, particularly on the government/paranormal theme, are essentially retellings of stories presented in my book, Remote Viewers (1997) and in a connected television documentary and newspaper feature I did in 1995.

Since it seems that no one else has raised this issue, I guess it is left to me to point out that Ronson presented much of this overlapping material in his book (and in an accompanying documentary) as the product of his own, original journalism, when, essentially, it wasn’t.

Moreover, where Ronson’s material was original, it seems to me to have been less substantive than his readers were led to believe.  I am not the only one who thinks so.  Ronson has been accused by central figures in his book – Jim Channon, John Alexander, and Lyn “Cassidy” Buchanan – of sensationalizing and fictionalizing his material, right down to the story of the psychokinetically-slain goat.  Thus, in my view, Ronson’s borrowings made up the most substantial parts of his book.

To top things off, apparently much of the research that went into Ronson’s book/documentary was done by his then-partner, John Sergeant, who also conducted many of the interviews, sometimes in Ronson’s absence.  As far as I can tell, Sergeant was not given sufficient credit for this in the book, and was not mentioned at all in any of the publicity surrounding the film.  In my view, the accomplishment for which Sergeant now wants to be recognized (and I guess paid) is dubious, for all the reasons I have outlined so far.  But when Sergeant complained to a reporter of having been “airbrushed out” of the picture by Ronson, I must admit that I felt a certain kinship with him.

For anyone who is interested, I lay out some details of what I see as “Ronson’s plunder,” although I strongly encourage readers to set aside my opinions and simply make their own comparisons of Ronson’s book/documentary to my own earlier journalism on this subject.

One thing to bear in mind:  I think that few other useful sources in print would have been available to Ronson (i.e., Ronson/Sergeant) in 2001-02, when it appears that the bulk of the Goats project was undertaken, and my comments here are principally about similarities between the Goats material and mine.  But Ronson may also have borrowed from other books that were published after Remote Viewers.

Apparent plagiarism of a significant anecdote

The anecdote that follows is one that appears in Ronson’s book.  It may seem to be only a minor story, but somehow it was appealing enough to be included in the Goats film.

I have placed some text in bold to highlight the areas of near-identical similarity, although even without these textual similarities, it should be clear that Ronson’s anecdote is only superficially different from mine (and mine was based on original interviews):

Schnabel (1997), p. 333:

A few years later, in December 1989, a similar RV operation would be mounted against Manuel Noriega in Panama. In the wake of the American invasion of that country, Noriega went into hiding, and DT-S was asked to help find him. For several days of intense work, the unit described a variety of locations. As with the Libya raid, some of the remote viewers’ information in retrospect would seem to have been accurate, but it was never precise enough, or consistent enough. At one point Lyn Buchanan told his session monitor he had received a powerful impulse regarding Noriega’s location. The impulse was telling him that the location was somehow known to the young television actress Kristy McNichol. “Ask Kristy McNichol,” he kept writing on his session paper. “Ask Kristy McNichol.” But no one checked with Kristy McNichol, and the U.S. government never “caught” Noriega. He surfaced on his own, inside the Vatican embassy, and was later imprisoned in the United States and convicted of drug trafficking.

Ronson (2004), p. 80:

An agency within the U.S. government (Sergeant Lyn Buchanan told me he couldn’t remember which it was, and anyway, the information was probably still classified) called up the psychic spies. Where was Noriega? Lyn Buchanan sat inside the clapboard building in Fort Meade, put himself into a trance, and received “a powerful impulse regarding Noriega’s location.”

“Ask Christy McNichol,” he kept writing on a piece of paper. “Ask Christy McNichol.”

Sergeant Buchanan was certain that the TV actress Kristy McNichol, who appeared in Starsky & Hutch, the ABC miniseries Family, The Bionic Woman, and The Love Boat II, held the key to the whereabouts of General Noriega. At that time, in December 1989, Kristy McNichol had just recorded the CBS special Candid Camera! The First 40 Years, had a guest role in Murder, She Wrote, and had starred in the erotic thriller Two Moon Junction.

“Ask Kristy McNichol,” Lyn continually wrote, in his trance state.

Lyn Buchanan stopped at this point and said he didn’t know whether anyone had acted on his divination. The way the secret unit had been structured, he explained, meant that once his divinations had been passed upward, he was rarely given feedback about what happened next. He had no idea if the authorities subsequently contacted Kristy McNichol.

So I attempted to ask her myself….

I never got a reply.

Ronson should have acknowledged in a footnote that this anecdote had first appeared in my book.  Instead he seems to have disguised it as the product of his own journalism, i.e., as a story that Lyn Buchanan told him and one that had never been reported before.  This sort of thing is normally considered plagiarism.

Incidentally, Lyn Buchanan told me that the quotes above didn’t come from any interview he had done with Ronson.  “With the high coincidence of the wording, I strongly suspect that it was plagiarized,” he wrote to me.

Further comments from Buchanan and others suggested to me that it had been a general strategy of Ronson’s to try to elicit, during interviews, the re-telling of stories from my book (or other sources) perhaps so that he could present this interview material as his original “reporting.”

Other borrowings

All of Ronson’s major stories and themes either had been reported before, or were firmly rooted in previous reporting.  Three had been reported by me in detail: (1) The story of General Stubblebine, his paranormal enthusiasms while at INSCOM, his career downfall, and his post-Army career on the New Age circuit; (2) the remote viewing program that was based partly at Fort Meade, and the related adventures of Lyn Buchanan and Ed Dames among many others; and (3) the bureaucratic connection (however tenuous) between the CIA’s remote viewing program and its previous MKULTRA program, via the controversial Sidney Gottlieb.

In each of these cases, I think that Ronson added relatively little substantive journalism of his own to what I had reported before.  (In the third story mentioned, the MKULTRA connection, Ronson did add quite a bit of substantive material – but that material came from another writer, Michael Ignatieff.)

False claim that his central theme was original

Ronson on his website has described his documentary as “the extraordinary, never before told story of what happened when chiefs of US intelligence, the army, and the government began believing in very strange things.”  But – again – the truth is that a detailed history of the government’s paranormal research program, and “what happened” in connection with it, had been published/aired years before Ronson came along.  (A U.S. government memo from 1995, declassified in 2003, is interesting in this regard.)

Relative lack of substance in the reporting that was original

Ronson did add some new material to this history, but it seems to me that in comparison to what had been out there already, his contributions  were minor at best. In particular, he seems to have exaggerated the significance of two of his most prominent “original” themes, the Jim Channon story and the Fort Bragg goats story.

I too wrote about Jim Channon (as had Ron McRae in an earlier book), but to me Channon’s “First Earth Battalion” was merely one of thousands of ad hoc U.S. military projects that had come and gone without serious consequence.  Ronson’s thesis that Channon’s impact was huge and can be traced all the way to Abu Ghraib seems so ludicrous that I wonder how Ronson could really have believed it.  Certainly the U.S. military has done some unusual things, and some have had New Age-ish overtones.  But isn’t it more plausible to locate the source of those influences more broadly – U.S. civilian society is full of New Age thinking, after all – than in one mid-level Army officer and his modest, short-lived project?

The remote-influencing experiments at Fort Bragg also appear, from Ronson’s own reporting, to have been informal and not terribly consequential – in contrast to the remote viewing program which included a formal and extended scientific research program that lasted for a quarter-century.  John Alexander has even said that the goat around which Ronson built his book’s title was struck physically – not psychically.

In any case, my point here isn’t that Ronson shouldn’t have written about Channon or the goats.  My point is that he had no right, based on that insubstantial stuff, to make the grand journalistic claims that he did.

Relevant to this point is the fact that Channon, in a press release; Buchanan, in communications with me; and former Fort Meade remote viewer Paul Smith, in an Amazon review of Goats, have separately suggested that Ronson played fast and loose with interview material and generally larded his reporting with “speculation and inaccuracy,” as Channon has phrased it.

Failure to make appropriate references and attributions

In the edition of his book that I read, Ronson did make a reference to Remote Viewers; but he did so only obscurely at the back of the book, where he indicated that it had been merely one of several sources of background information for a couple of his chapters. He did not make clear which of his themes and specific anecdotes he had borrowed from it.  Ronson also did not give his book a separate bibliography, source notes or index – and I think it is fair to say that these omissions made it harder for readers to see how much he had borrowed from me and others.

Aside from the brief mention at the back of his book, Ronson failed to mention my journalism at all.  In at least one passage he implicitly denied that any journalist had covered these stories before him:  On page 9 of his book, he claimed that in 2001 “It was Uri Geller who set me on the trail” and implied that through his own reportorial legwork he, Ronson, had been able to break through the fog of “rumor” about Geller’s connection to espionage and “discover” that there had been a “secret military psychic spying unit.”  Was Ronson really unaware at this time that I had already written a book detailing the origins and history of the “secret military psychic spying unit” and had devoted many pages to Geller, with a discussion of his claimed connections to U.S. and Israeli spy agencies?  Even if he had been that clueless, I think that Geller, whom I had interviewed, would have mentioned it to him.

Ronson’s documentary

As I noted above, I also presented an hour-long documentary about the remote-viewing unit. Titled The Real X-Files: America’s Psychic Spies, and produced by Wall to Wall TV in London, the documentary appeared on the UK’s Channel Four in August 1995 and on Discovery Channel in March 1996. It covered the Cold War origins of the remote viewing unit and its strange history, with stories about the rise and fall of Stubblebine at INSCOM and the effects of paranormal-oriented work on members of the unit.  John Alexander, Lyn Buchanan and Ed Dames all featured prominently — as did a former CIA director, a former head of Army intelligence, and a former manager of the remote viewing research program.

My understanding is that about two million people in the UK watched this documentary at its first airing, in addition to the many others who read my accompanying newspaper feature or read my book.  Yet in 2004 Ronson presented his own (three-hour) TV documentary, Crazy Rulers of the World, as if everything in it was new.  “The things we reveal in this film have remained, until now, military intelligence secrets,” Ronson announced at the start of the first episode.  Unknown to most of his viewers, Ronson effectively belied this claim by making use – only four minutes in – of a clip that had appeared in The Real X-Files, a zoom-in to a still image of Gen. Stubblebine in uniform.

Down the memory hole

Could Ronson have sold his project in any of its forms (book, documentary, film rights, etc.) if he had made clear to the buyers precisely how much of his material had been derived from someone else’s reporting?  I wonder.

And apparently he would have had to make his borrowings absolutely clear, if anyone in our age of ever-shortening memories was to notice.  As far as I can tell, no one who reviewed Ronson’s book in 2004 had the wit to detect its overlap with Remote Viewers, which at the time was still in print and had sold, I think, at least 50,000 copies in its English-language edition and in its various translations.  Thus, although I hate to write a document such as this, I have the feeling — call it a premonition — that if I don’t try to set the record straight, no one else ever will.

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Postscript (May 2010):

Here is a separate account of what appears to be a Ronson plagiarism — and here is the predictably lame and dubious explanation.