The centrepiece of the movie The Men Who Stare At Goats is a US Army experiment in which a soldier kills a goat simply by staring at it. This is fiction, but based on a supposed real-life test reported in Jon Ronson’s non-fiction book of the same name. A martial arts master called Guy Savelli claims to have carried out the killing.

Scientists have been looking into magical murders for some time. In a 1942 paper on “Voodoo Death”, anthropologist Walter Cannon compiled histories of cases witnessed by trained doctors. These were typic­ally caused by “bone-pointing” in which a shaman or witch points at the victim and curses them, telling them they will die. The victim immediately starts trembling and goes into a decline; in a typical case, their vitality seems to drain away “like water”. Sometimes the death follows in as little as 24 hours.

Cannon, who was the first to describe the ‘fight or flight’ reflex, theorised that a disorder of the sympathetic nervous system was behind the bone-pointing deaths. He suggested that the “lasting and intense action” of stress hormones caused low blood press­ure, damaging the organs and, accelerated by dehydration, led ultimately to death.

There has been considerable further study into the subject. Some have been sceptical, such as Theodore Barber, who in a 1961 paper questioned whether poisoning or physical illness had been adequately ruled out. As with many fortean phenomena, the lack of precise observation and measurement makes scient­ific acceptance difficult. However, some objective evidence was supplied by some rather cruel experiments which showed that rats would die of stress when placed in a hopeless situation.

The large number of well-documented cases means that bone-pointing or voodoo deaths are now medically accepted. Social isolation of the victim and loss of the will to live appear to be crucial, but the technical cause of death is not resolved. It might be related to stress hormones, or it might be more direct.

As Patrick Hahn puts it in a 2007 paper on self-willed death: “Already given up for dead by family and friends, by all he has known and loved, the victim… gives up on himself and refuses water. Death comes inevitably in a few days – or sooner than that, under the blazing sun of the Aust­ralian outback.” The victim’s own belief is vital: there do not appear to be any cases of non-believers dying in this way.

Modern studies have continued to investigate the “nocebo effect”, described as the dark twin of the placebo effect. In the placebo effect, a sugar pill becomes an effective treatment because the patient believes in it. In the nocebo effect, belief turns something harmless into something dangerous. Suggest to someone that the food they’ve just eaten was contaminated and most people will soon become anxious and start noticing symptoms.

However, this does little to explain how a goat could be killed in minutes rather than hours.

Remote psychic attack is a trick claimed in several martial arts, and there are Internet videos showing the “no touch knockout”. This is an attack in which the master causes an opponent to faint from several feet away, apparently by projecting Chi (energy) at them. However, while this seems to work well enough against trainee martial artists, demonstrations against sceptics are rather harder to pull off. When an attempt to knock out a scientist failed in a National Geographic documentary, the master explained that it might have been because the victim’s tongue was in the wrong place.

According to Col John Alexander, the goat-killing technique actually investigated by the US Army was a form of Dim Mak, or Death Touch, supposedly used in some oriental martial arts. This was to be taught as a survival technique that could be used by soldiers even if they were injured. Dim Mak does require some physical contact; the term literally translates to “press artery”, and the idea is that by applying seemingly slight force to exactly the right pressure point the victim can be incapacitated or even killed, immediately or some time later. In the delayed death touch, the target dies days or even weeks afterwards, and may not have even noticed the touch when it occurred. (See “The Touch of Death” by Michael Goss, FT31:14–20.)

One of the many legends surrounding the death of Bruce Lee (FT217:52–53) suggests that he was killed by a delayed-action Dim Mak, carried out by masters who were angry that he was revealing forbidden secrets to outsiders. (The conventional explanation is a cerebral œdema caused by a react­ion to the painkiller Equagesic).

Science cannot divine any basis for Dim Mak, which is rooted in the same oriental tradition as acupunct­ure. According to this, the blow does not affect the flow of blood through the arteries, but interrupts the flow of vital force through the meridians – concepts unknown to, and unrecognised by, Western medicine. As Dim Mak is one of the most advanced techniques and practitioners are sworn to secrecy, no reputable master would ever demonstrate this skill.

Meanwhile, Guy Savelli has been criticised by other martial artists for making wildly outrageous claims, including time distortion and other paranormal feats. The obvious rebuttal would be to stage a decis­ive demonstration of remote goat-killing: over to you, Mr Savelli.