I think Stubblebine and his alternative therapist wife are great characters, but I am certain that the military waste very little time staring at goats. Though maybe they did back in the ’60s when some crazy stuff went on; faked UFO reports, CIA acid gurus and adolescents blowing up nuclear reactors in the desert. I’d heard of Patton but didn’t know he was such an obsessive war nutter.
Telepathy? I think there are deep reasons why we can’t know each other’s thoughts, like we can’t foresee the future. Links between minds seem likely to exhibit quantum-like properties such as indeterminacy and complementarity that preclude unambiguous communication.