Goat Laboratory Concentration Trial

experimentNo. 0043categoryHistory & trainingrecordingpendingdataCC BY 4.0

The fly holds both forelegs to its head in a period military test room while a goat shakes, heats, smokes and, at 30 seconds, ruptures into 128 fragments.

Setup

• Seven stages over 53 seconds: facing the goat, concentration, shaking, heat and smoke, rupture, window and wall impacts, and the settled room.
• Fragments strike four walls, the observation window and the floor; wall fragments slide down while red streaks lengthen behind them.
• Two amber rotating beacons sweep the room during shaking and heating; a faint, viewport-only holographic spiral surrounds the goat until rupture.
• Five cameras: the test chamber, the fly's foreleg pose, the goat, observation-window impacts and the view from behind the observation glass.
• Loop is off by default; a replay control starts at the heating stage.

Measurement

• Retinal-only live input reaches the fixed connectome model; neural weights are not changed.
• The concentration pose and the explosion are pre-programmed; the goat's sequence follows a fixed programmed timeline.
• The holographic spiral is excluded from the retinal image.

Limitations

• The cited accounts describe an alleged attempt to stop a goat's heart by staring, not an exploding goat; heating, rupture and gore are included in the model without a documented source.
• The room is an original period-style model, not a survey of a historical facility; no historical experiment result is fabricated.
• Fragment flight uses deterministic trajectories and gravity; the subsequent slides are pre-programmed, not a tissue model.

Sources

• Jon Ronson, 2009 NPR interview (WFAE)
• Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats (Google Books)
• INSCOM GRILL FLAME remote-viewing session, 5 March 1981 (CIA Reading Room)
• CIA History Staff overview, 27 October 2021