The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004) is a non-fiction book by Jon Ronson concerning the U.S. Army's exploration of New Age concepts and the potential military applications of the paranormal.

The book is a companion to a three-part TV series broadcast in Britain on Channel 4—Crazy Rulers of the World (2004)—the first episode of which is also entitled "The Men Who Stare at Goats".

The book's first five chapters examine the efforts of a handful of U.S. Army officers in the late 1970s and early 1980s to exploit paranormal phenomena, New Age philosophy, and elements of the human potential movement to enhance U.S. military intelligence-gathering capabilities as well as overall operational effectiveness.

These include the First Earth Battalion Operations Manual (1979) and a "psychic spy unit" established by Army Intelligence at Fort Meade, Maryland, in the late 1970s.

He examines, and dispenses with, several candidates for the legendary "master sergeant" (Chapter 2) who was reported to have killed a goat simply by staring at it, in the earliest days of the program.

Alex Heard's review in U-T San Diego was subtitled "Goats tries hard to link psychic-spy projects from the past to today's events, and mostly fails".

The result is a strange new blend: Conspiracy theory meets Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.... You're left feeling like you've been told a shaggy-goat story.

Coinciding with the release of the feature film in 2009, John Sergeant, the producer of the TV series Crazy Rulers of the World, accused Ronson of "airbrushing him out of the story".