Licking his wounds from the failure of Leatherheads, of which he stated, ""It bombed and when I say bombed, it bombed. Someone said, 'How does that feel?' and it stings a little bit," George Clooney is not sitting by idly. He'll star in Men Who Stare at Goats, which will be directed by his career-long friend and associate Grant Heslov.

It's an unusual title, no doubt, and the film is based on the book by Welsh reporter Jon Ronson about the U.S. Army's First Earth Battalion, which I have never heard of. That's surprising considering the First was to rely on paranormal powers to achieve readiness for battle.

Now, in the real world, the First Earth Battalion never existed...at least so far as we know. But in the 1970s a Vietnam veteran named Jim Channon spent time with New Age practitioners developing highly impractical methods of persuasion, including carrying lambs - seen as symbols of peace - to subdue foes.

The book's title refers to the belief that if soldiers in the First Earth Battalion trained rigorously enough, they could kill a goat just by staring at it.