Next Clooney Film is Low on Glitz - But It Has Goats

Even the writer can't believe his luck. The cast of a film version of British journalist Jon Ronson's acclaimed book The Men Who Stare at Goats sounds too starry to be true. Actor George Clooney, who bought the film rights at the Cannes film festival this spring, has assembled a line-up to rival the biggest of Hollywood blockbusters. Jeff Bridges and Ewan McGregor agreed to star with Clooney in the anti-war satire over the summer, and this weekend Kevin Spacey confirmed he is free to start filming early next month.

Spacey, who is artistic director at London's Old Vic, said he would attend the opening night of his fifth season at the theatre on 6 October and then join the cast in New Mexico and Puerto Rico. 'It examines a secret special forces unit in the United States army that was experimenting whether they could achieve the ability to kill the enemy psychically,' he said.

Ronson's non-fiction book came out in 2004 to coincide with his television Channel 4 television series Crazy Rulers of the World. It told the improbable story of a secret unit of CIA operatives who had experimented with unlikely methods of tackling the enemy. These included developing homicidal psychic powers; they practiced by concentrating hard on goats, then examining the effect. The team, Ronson discovered, received covert funding from the US government shortly after the Vietnam war.

'When I tell people who is going to be in the film, they look at me blankly, obviously not believing me,' said Ronson. 'Or they say, "I knew if you hung around for long enough something like this would happen for you one day." I suspect most also feel slightly sick.'

The fictionalized adaptation has been written by Peter Straughan, who has set it in present-day Iraq. Clooney will play Lyn Cassady, a former member of the unit. McGregor plays Bob Wilton, a reporter who travels through Iraq with Cassady in search of a new secret unit working on paranormal powers. Bridges is cast as Bill Django, the program founder, with Spacey as Larry Hopper, a former psychic soldier running a prison camp in Iraq.

In Ronson's C4 documentary, he tried to track down the truth about experiments carried out at America's Fort Bragg, in which a sergeant reportedly stopped a goat's heart by force of will. Ronson eventually found Major General Albert Stubblebine III, the US army's former head of Intelligence and Security Command, who said it was merely lack of focus that had thwarted his efforts to walk through walls. 'There's the wall's space and there's my space. All you gotta do is merge the spaces. But I didn't master it, Jon. I kept bumping my nose. If you really want to know, it's a disappointment,' he said.

The documentary proved the impact of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s on the US military. The founder of the unit, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon, had returned from Vietnam determined to find non-violent means of waging war. He came up with the First Earth Battalion, a force that would carry lambs, wear monks' hoods and play soothing music to the enemy through loudspeakers.

So if Ronson finds still the stellar cast of the film hard to believe, he should remember that the most bizarre stories often turn out to be true.