First Earth Battalion - New Directions

New Directions

A number of Channon’s ideas on training were investigated by the Pentagon, and the First Earth Battalion had over 800 officers and bureaucrats on its mailing list, including eight generals and an undersecretary of defense. Some ideas proposed in the writings of Channon later found their way into military procedures for psychological warfare. Within weeks of the publication of the First Earth Battalion operations manual in the spring of 1979, soldiers throughout the U.S. Army began seriously trying to implement his ideas. One example was when the Army's Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) began developing its own remote viewing program in 1979, which was a parapsychological intelligence gathering method that had already been experimentally tested at Stanford Research Institute since 1972 by parapsychologists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff. Channon's principles may have even contributed to the Army slogan Be All You Can Be. A Special Operations experimental team, dubbed “Jedi Warriors,” after the Star Wars craze, was trained in a wide array of Eastern oriental martial arts and meditative techniques, combined with strenuous physical training programs. Ronson specifically cites the First Earth Battalion manual's proposal to use music to effect "psychic mind-change" as one.