Men Who Stare At Goats

Fifteen years ago, I had a patient who was crazy.  He called himself the Red Baron, and drove a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado around town, red with the biggest tailfins you ever saw.  He wore a scarf, and goggles, and smiled and waved at everyone he passed on the road.  Everyone knew he was a few cards short of a full deck, but he didn’t bother anyone driving around like that—you just wouldn’t want your kids to get in the car with him.  And then one day he became my patient.

He had a cancer growing in his parotid gland, the large salivary gland on the side of the jaw. The tumor was resected, but the surgeon was concerned about residual disease, so the Red Baron was referred to me. During our first meeting, I didn’t get to talk very much because he didn’t want to hear about the radiation.  He knew all about radiation already, because he had been abducted by aliens, and he told me flat out that that was why he had cancer.

He told me a lot of other things too.  He said he had been in the military and that they had hired him for two reasons:  one was that he had ESP, and the ability for “remote viewing.”  The other was that he was an artist, and he could draw what he saw remotely.  He said that the Army was VERY interested in him, because of these talents, and also of course because he had been abducted by aliens.  He could draw them and their ships.  He said that the aliens had experimented on him, and that the parotid cancer was only the beginning. We smiled and nodded, me and my nurse, and then we laughed about it later.

He kept to himself a lot during his treatment for that cancer.  He didn’t talk too much to the people in the waiting room, and he didn’t complain much during his weekly on treatment visits.  Once he got to know us better, he began to bring in some of his drawings and paintings of the aliens.  They were always female, beautiful, brunette with tiny waists and very large breasts.  They had large dark eyes, which were slanted, and the pupils black as night.   They held out their hands in his pictures, beckoning him.  They looked just like the aliens in cheap science fiction thrillers.

When he came in again, two years later, it was for prostate cancer.  He told me that he had been taking tranquilizers at bedtime to stop his dreams.  He said that the Army was expecting him to do scenarios about the war in Kosovo, and that he saw people starving and suffering in his dreams.   But he could not stop the visions during the day time.  He told me that a woman in our waiting room had a tumor on the right side of her brain—she had not told him but he had “seen” it.  He said he could sense that she was very worried that she would not live to see her child grow up.  He wanted me to reassure her that she would indeed live.  In fact she did.  His prostate cancer responded well to treatment and he went back to being the Red Baron.

The last time I saw him was in 2003.  He had cancer again, this time lung cancer.  He was not surprised. He knew it was from the experiments that had been done to him during his abduction.  He was worried, and I thought it was because he knew this would be his last cancer but he also told me we were going to war again in Iraq.  A lot of people thought that, at the time.  But that third primary cancer in the space of five years had me wondering about those aliens.  There can be significant exposure to radiation when you go into space, without the protection of our atmosphere.  And this man was no astronaut.   He did not survive his third cancer.

In 2004, a book came out by Jon Ronson, called “The Men Who Stare at Goats”, about the Army’s attempts to explore New Age concepts and harness the paranormal.  They made a movie out of it in 2009 with George Clooney and Jeff Bridges.  The movie is subtitled  “More of this is truer than you would believe.”  I did not read the book, but when I saw that movie there was a pang of recognition.  I don’t know if the Red Baron was abducted by large breasted aliens with big dark eyes who experimented on him and gave him cancer.  But I had come to think that more of what he told me was truer than I had believed.

About the same time I treated the Red Baron, I had another patient who liked to tell tall tales.  She told me with no trace of irony that her white miniature poodle, whose name happened to be Charlie Brown, had told her she had breast cancer.  One day he put his nose right on her breast and told her she had cancer.  That’s when she felt the lump.  I thought she was crazy too.  As it turns out, she wasn’t.