Crazy Rulers Of The World (C4)

Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (C4)

YOU don't have to be mad to work for the US military or intelligence, but it helps. I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn't April Fool's Day while watching the first part of Jon Ronson's Crazy Rulers Of The World. The opening instalment, The Men Who Stare At Goats, was as bizarre as its sub-title with tales of intelligence men walking through walls, carrying lambs into battle and - try not to giggle at the back - staring an animal to death.

If this had been a Monty Python sketch, we'd have laughed ourselves silly. The worrying thing was that the top military men advocating these measures were deadly serious. Dr Ray Hyman, a CIA contract psychologist (as opposed to contract killer, presumably), said there was as much nuttiness within the CIA and defence department as there was outside.

Why might this be? inquired Ronson. His reply, "Because people are basically nutty" was not very reassuring.

Ronson's mission was to see if oddball ideas, some dating back to the Vietnam War, were being used in the war against terror.

The marvellously-named retired Major General Albert Stubblebine III spoke of attempts to walk through walls using the space between atoms (or something like that, I wasn't much good at science). He never mastered the art, ending up walking into rather than through a brick wall every time.

Bending cutlery was another suggestion. "If I can do that with my mind, what else can I do?" he said. Imagine, a whole army of Uri Gellers. That's enough to frighten the enemy into surrendering.

Another idea was to stare at an animal and make its heart explode. This led to the establishment of the "goat lab" as part of Project JedI 20 years ago. The original plan was to try it on dogs but nobody wanted to do it to do it to man's best friend, opting to butcher goats instead.

Ronson went in search of the master sergeant who people said had succeeded in killing a goat this way. He encountered The First Earth Battalion, a product of New Age thinking. The manual advocated soldiers carrying a lamb into hostile territory as part of the plan to create a master warrior-monk.

He discovered that the animal-staring programme is back, being used as part of a new way of interrogating terrorists post 9/11. And he did find Guy Savelli, who runs a dance and kung fu academy (now there's a combination) and told Ronson he had stared his hamster to death.

He gave Ronson a video of the act. The film stopped just before he alleged the animal dropped dead. "He didn't want me to see the part where the hamster died," explained Ronson.

Explorer Monty Halls took Jules Verne's novel Journey To The Centre Of The Earth as the starting point for his adventure-meets-science trip to the last frontier - the earth's core.

He didn't get very far because at present it's only possible to travel two of the 4,000 miles to the centre of the earth. But Halls gave it a go - parachuting, tunnelling, diving, and travelling in an imaginary capsule propelled by computer graphics. The difficulty of penetrating to the earth's core was illustrated by the Russians who drilled straight down into the crust - it took them 19 years to drill seven-and-a-half miles down.