Although it may sound unusual, the US military in particular has used an array of methods to get ahead in the fight against "evil".
Some of the methods were so bizarre that they were turned into the book The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was in turn made into a film starring George Clooney.
Project Jedi, as it was named in the book, was a top-secret military project to create a breed of "super-soldier" who would be fantastically strong and possess superior intelligence, cunning and intuition.
They would then use psychic powers to spy on the enemy, disable nuclear bombs with telekinesis, and effortlessly kill with the power of thought alone.
The military has also been credited with creating and attempting to create a series of innovations, including the Jet Pack, which was ditched when it became apparent that they were too heavy for pilots to land safely; the Bat Bomb, a plan to strap timed incendiary bombs to Mexican free-tailed bats and then release them in small capsules from bombers over Japan; not to mention the Exploding Cigar, one of many alleged CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro during the 1960s.
The CIA has also been accused of causing the "cursed bread" of Pont-Saint-Espirit in France, when in 1951 residents began suffering hallucinations and mass insanity, with at least five people dying and dozens interned in asylums.
For years it had been assumed the local bread was unwittingly poisoned with LSD, but an investigative journalist last year claimed the CIA peppered the food as part of a mind control experiment at the heart of the Cold War.