"The Men Who Stare at Goats," a farcical new movie starring George Clooney and Jeff Bridges, revolves around a scruffy 1970s visionary based on retired Lt. Col. Jim Channon — a Hawaii resident for the last two decades.

"Bill Django," the character based on Channon and played by Bridges, introduces the U.S. Army to a smorgasbord of New Age mysticism and old-fashioned paranormal pursuits.

For this, Channon is mostly grateful.

Channon has a sense of humor about his real-life role as "warrior monk" advocate, which started to take shape while serving in the Vietnam War.

Talking to The Advertiser by phone from his home on the Big Island, Channon said he didn't mind scenes in which soldiers take up yoga, chant to Mother Earth and test psychic sensitivities amid a joke-strewn landscape.

Clooney and Kevin Spacey play oddball military men schooled in unorthodox — and sometimes violent — techniques. The film's title refers to the ability to kill a goat merely by staring intensely into its eyes. The tagline: "No goats, no glory." Ewan McGregor plays a reporter who wants to tell their story.

First-time director Grant Heslov, Clooney's producing partner, made the film in New Mexico and Puerto Rico.

One detail in the movie that makes Channon cringe: Bridges' Django sports a ponytail while dressed in military uniform.

"I was clean as a whistle," said the son of a military officer, pointing to an old photo of himself with closely cropped dark hair and a '70s-style thick mustache.

When Channon touched down in Vietnam to lead search and destroy operations, his platoon was immediately plunged into battle with an enemy hidden in tropical forest. "The very first day was such insanity that by the second day I changed everything I knew about combat," he said.

Channon then led his soldiers in an effort to sharpen their senses. They started by simply moving about quietly, talking with their hands. "We were walking around like hunters," he said. "So, we began to pick up that extended hearing and observation and pattern recognition that skilled hunters have."

As months passed, Channon said, some soldiers pushed intuition further with instances of extra-sensory perception, also called "remote-viewing," during which they claimed to see figures hidden from their line of vision.

"We were being psychic, but we didn't have a name for it," he said.

After his tour of duty, Channon earned permission to further explore paranormal and potential mental skills that could help a front-line soldier.

"There was an innovation explosion in the Army," he said, ignited by the quagmire in Vietnam and the looming prospect of facing off — out-manned and out-gunned — with a Soviet army on a European battlefield.

While serving as an Army public information officer in California, Channon pursued a two-year mission investigating the "Human Potential Movement." He experimented with everything from spoon-bending to martial arts, and checked out organizations ranging from "Beyond Jogging" to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, where he met famed mythology scholar Joseph Campbell and other counterculture icons.

In 1978, the Army published the resulting field manual, "Evolutionary Tactics," which Channon organized as a consciousness catalog filled with concise reports on "out-of-the-box" disciplines that could give modern soldiers a tactical edge.

He also staged a series of theatrical events, attended by military personnel and civilian scientists, at which he shared his concept of soldier of the future — a warrior monk who combines human potential and appropriate technology with "ecological balance" to reach peak potential.

At the events, Channon presented his "proto-mythology" for the soldier under the title "First Earth Battalion."

An enthusiastic general offered him the chance to assemble an actual experimental unit on the ground, but Channon turned down the offer.

In the movie, however, Django seizes the opportunity to form the fictious "The New Earth Army."

The character also ends up getting booted from the military.

Channon said he was never discharged. He began his Army service in 1962 and retired 20 years later.

During the mid-1980s, he searched the world for the perfect place to live, and almost landed in southwest Australia or Bali. Then, while attending a conference on the Big Island, he said, "the physical energy of the land rose up in my body and claimed me."

Channon, now 70, lives on a three-acre "eco-homestead" — complete with solar power and a water-catchment system — in the rural Häwí area on the northwest side of the Big Island. Its dozen residents grow almost half of their food, and the property is slated to be self-sufficient and sustainable by 2012.

These days, Channon advises businesses as a "corporate shaman," developing workplace strategies and using ceremonial storytelling to help energize groups.

He also continues to train soliders as a contractor. "I'm trying to take a whole vocabulary of esoteric skills and pick the ones that match the military the best and then translate those for soldiers," he said.

His dream is to see service branches recast as environmental warriors — with, perhaps, armies re-foresting areas and cleaning fresh water; Marines reviving threatened coral reef and coastal waters; the Air Force monitoring air quality; and the navies tending to other sea water issues, such as overfishing and illegal dumping.

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" starts with an opening title that reads: "More of this is true than you would believe."

Channon estimates that about one-third of the movie's content is accurate. He noted that although he never had ties to the goat lab at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, a respected peer has confirmed that at least one soldier apparently stopped a goat's heart there.

Regardless of the fact-fiction blur, Channon hopes viewers will enjoy the film for its humor and insights and leave the movie theater with the idea that there are "new possibilities for the use of military force." He said, "I want them to remember that their armies (and other service branches) can actually fix the planet. They can."