I read in the FAQ that this movie is based on a true story. If so, how much of the stuff in the film actually happened? o.O
Someone couldn't have possibly killed a goat with his mind.... right?
I highly recommend reading the book, by Jon Ronson.
The film comes off as rather outlandish; I think this is because they had to find a setting to tell the story of the First Earth Battalion.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Earth_Battalion
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The book is not as adventurous, it's more of an account of Jon going around, meeting various quirky people that were involved with the psychic spy business (which is quite bizarre, to any skeptic). It's a good read, though, highly recommended.
As for the goat, I guess we'll never really know... But perhaps it is somewhat more likely that, out of the many times they did the goat staring, one day someone just happened to be staring at one particularly sickly goat (that probably hadn't been treated too well), and it just happened to die whilst being stared at.
It is inspired by the author meeting eccentrics who claimed they took part in psy-ops.
It's that man again!!
The film is totally fictional with fictional characters and a fictional story, although some characters are indeed based on real people and the New Earth Army was in reality the First Earth Battalion. A lot of the NEA stuff was true for the FEB, in that they were looking into New Age ideas like psychic powers and such, using non-lethal methods, LSD testing, etc. Some of the real guys have been investigated for fraud, others not so.
Here's an article I did about Project STAR GATE, it was started by the U.S. Army but eventually picked up by the DIA and eventually CIA and focused on using remote viewing to see things around the world, basically "psychic spies." It wasn't as strange as the FEB, and some stuff was kind of interesting, such as finding a crashed Tupolev bomber, and how a lot of the people involved ended up being Scientologists somehow.
https://northatlanticblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/12/project-star-gate-revisited/
Even if you don't believe in paranormal phenomena, it does say something that so many countries looked into unexplained research like the U.S., the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Japan, etc. In the USSR they studied "psychotechnics" before the U.S. ever started STAR GATE, and there was an old woman named Nina Kulagina whom Soviet scientists studied for 20 years who claimed she had psychic abilities. Personally I think there might be something to that. Yeah there's a lot of crazy people and a lot of con artists, but it's a fun idea to think about.
Can't be too careful with all those weirdos running around.