Channon, a Vietnam veteran at Fort Leavenworth, was tasked by commanders shaken by the war to imagine the soldier of the future. The manual exists, complete with his own illustrations: soldiers carrying speakers playing discordant music, practicing the First Earth handshake, aiming to resolve conflict ethically. Elements fed into real programs: psychological operations research, nonlethal weapons development, and the Army's remote viewing unit.
Jon Ronson's 2004 book and the 2009 film turned the battalion into shorthand for the military's occult decade, amplifying tales of goat-staring death tests and walk-through-walls training. The famous goat story belongs to a different unit's lore and the film is largely invention.
The structural point: post-Vietnam, the US military genuinely explored consciousness as a battlespace, and the First Earth Battalion is the honest brochure of that turn. What reads as comedy was the visible tip of documented programs in remote viewing, sonic weapons and behavior influence.
If the manual was a joke, why did half its program get funded anyway?