Ronson Gets My Goat

Letter from Jim Schnabel to the Guardian newspaper, re Jon Ronson, 9 November 2009

To the editors:

With the recent opening of the film The Men Who Stare at Goats, Guardian contributor Jon Ronson has been getting some renewed accolades for his 2004 book of the same name.  One would think, from some of this praise, that Ronson had single-handedly blown the lid off the U.S. government’s involvement in paranormal research.  One reviewer of his book even compared him to the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

Ronson does not seem shy about taking such credit.  On his website, for example, he has described the documentary that accompanied his book 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.”  In that documentary and in his book, Ronson presented nearly all his material in a way that suggested that he had been the first journalist on the scene.

In fact, many of the key government/paranormal stories and themes in Ronson’s Goats project had been reported long before he arrived.  An example (see page one of Ronson’s book) is the story of U.S. Army intelligence chief Albert Stubblebine and his career-ending enthusiasm for the paranormal.  I am acutely aware of this because quite a few of these stories were reported by me in my book Remote Viewers: the Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies (Dell 1997), and in a documentary, The Real X-Files, which I presented in 1995 on Channel Four TV and which also appeared the following year on the Discovery Channel.

Ordinarily I would not go out of my way to claim some kind of journalistic priority on these stories, for myself or anyone else.  Ordinarily I would not dream of picking a fight with Jon Ronson, who is undoubtedly a talented writer.  But particularly when it comes to the government/paranormal angle, Ronson’s original contributions have been so slight, and the media commentary on him so uncritical, that some record-straightening seems in order.

My impression is that Ronson also has had a certain reluctance to disclose how derivative some of his material is.  As one example, I reprint here an anecdote that Ronson apparently borrowed from me – and that the Goats film producers used too.  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.  (Ronson did mention Remote Viewers in an acknowledgments section at the very back of his book – which had neither a source notes section nor separate bibliography – but he cited it merely as one of several sources of background information for a couple of his chapters.)

Incidentally, Lyn Buchanan told me that the quotes above didn’t come from any interview he had done with Ronson.  When shown Ronson’s version of the anecdote alongside my earlier reporting, Buchanan wrote to me:  ”With the high coincidence of the wording, I strongly suspect that it was plagiarized.”

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, information which he had already learned from other people’s journalism, perhaps so that he could present that interview material as his original “reporting.”

In noting all this, I don’t mean to deny that Ronson did some genuinely original and interesting reporting in his Goats project.  But again, I think it is fair to say that his overall contribution to the history of U.S. government paranormal research was very minor – which in turn makes his uncredited borrowings and his self-promotional blather even less justifiable.

Clearly one of Ronson’s main contributions was the in-depth Jim Channon story.  I too wrote about Jim Channon (as had the author Ron McRae in an earlier book), but I didn’t spend much ink on him because 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.

On the other hand, I was initially impressed by Ronson’s original story about Guy Savelli and a psychic goat-killing facility at Fort Bragg.  Soon it became clear, though, from Ronson’s own reporting, that the whole thing was informal and not terribly consequential.

It would have been something if Savelli, even in one instance, had been able to kill a goat with some kind of psychokinetic karate chop.  But recently I found out that Colonel John Alexander, one of the more prominent characters in Ronson’s book (and mine), has been insisting for years that Savelli physically struck the goat in question.

If that is so, then Ronson is the fellow with truly magical powers here, having conjured so much journalistic glory — not to mention, money — out of so little that was really substantive and original.

Jim Schnabel

[address]

______________________

P.S. See this separate account of what appears to be a Ronson plagiarism — and the lame and dubious reply from the Guardian.