By: Pete Porro
Re: ORGONE.1

 Excerpted from the Fall 1988 "Skeptical Inquirer" - the Journal of the
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
(CSICOP) Vol.13, No.1  To subscribe, call toll free  1-800-634-1610

By Martin Gardner:
NOTES OF A FRINGE-WATCHER - Reich the Rainmaker: The Orgone Obsession

          OF THE MANY fringe psychotherapies that flourished
       in the fifties, the two most bizarre were each founded
       by a paranoid egotist who had not the foggiest understanding
       of scientific method or even of the fields in which he
       claimed revolutionary discoveries. One was Scientology,
       the other was orgonomy.

          Orgone energy - an energy no physicist outside orgonomy
       circles has detected - was "discovered" by Wilhelm Reich
       (1897-1956), who began his tragic career an an Austrian
       associate of Freud. After being expelled from the German
       Communist Party, and later from the International Psychoanalytic
       Association, Reich eventually settled in the United States,
       where he established a "laboratory" at Rangeley, Maine. Reich
       first discovered orgone energy in living things, hence its
       name, but he soon became convinced that it was a primeval
       force responsible for the evolution of the universe, for
       gravity, for life, and for the energy released in sexual
       orgasms. He announced that he had created living cells from
       inorganic matter and that cancer cells are actually protozoa
       that "have a tail and move in the manner of fish." Orgone
       energy, he insisted, made the sky blue and caused stars to
       twinkle, as if physicists hadn't long understood such phenomena.

          Reich's main therapeutic tool was what he called an "orgone
       accumulator." It is a box about the size of a phone booth, its
       walls made of alternating layers of metal and organic material.
       (One is on display in St. Louis's National Museum of Quackery.)
       There are no electrical connections. You sit inside to soak up
       orgone energy that accumulates inside the box like heat in a
       greenhouse. The concentrated orgone is said to relieve symptoms
       of almost every illness from cancer to impotence. Smaller models,
       such as the shooter box, the orgone blanket, and the orgone
       funnel, apply orgone to ailing body parts.

          Thousands of intelligent people with only a dim knowledge of
       science - including writers, artists, actors, educators, even
       philosophers - sat inside orgone boxes and believed they were
       enormously benefitted. The comic Orson Bean sang the praises of
       orgonomy in his book "Me and the Orgone." "WR: Mysteries of the
       Organism" was a comic film about orgonomy by Yugoslav filmmaker
       Dusan Makavejev, who had earlier been enamoured of Reich's ability
       to stir together psychoanalysis and Marxism.

          Unable to get published in mainstream journals, Reich came more
       and more to resemble a movie version of the mad scientist. He
       likened himself to such martyrs as Socrates, Bruno, Galileo, and
       Jesus. Soon he was discovering that orgone had a destructive side
       he called "DOR," an acronym for Deadly Orgone Energy. To dispel
       the DOR that accumulated in the atmosphere, Reich invented what
       he called a "cloudbuster"(Note: See the now rare Donald Sutherland
       Video with that British Singer - Tom Mickus). It consisted of
       long parallel pipes, their empty interiors "grounded" by hollow
       cables to a source of flowing water. Like a lightening rod, the
       machine was supposed to draw DOR from the sky. To his amazement,
       Reich found that his machine would also condense clouds and
       produce rain. "One may create clouds in the cloud-free sky in a
       certain manner by disturbing the eveness in the distribution of
       the atmospheric orgone energy...The more clouds that are present
       and the heavier the clouds, the easier it is to induce growth
       of clouds and finally rain" (Selected Writings, p.444).

          This was topped by a still more sensational discovery. Reich
       observed that when his cloudburster was operating it attracted
       EA's. EA stood for Energy Alpha, Reich's term for a UFO. (Reich
       was fond of acronyms like HIG for Hoodlums in Government, EPPO
       for Emotional Plague Prevention Office, and dozens of others.)
       EA's are propelled by orgone motors that give off vast quantities
       of DOR. At first Reich thought this was an innocent by-product
       of spaceships, but soon became convinced that evil aliens were
       spying on him and intentionally damaging the area. Fortunately
       his cloudbuster drained the DOR from their motors, forcing the
       EA's to flee.

          In 1954, when Reich banished his first EA, he recorded the
       great event in his notebook: "Tonight for the first time in the
       history of man, the war waged for ages by living beings from
       outer space upon this earth...was reciprocated...with positive
       results." The battle took place in Arizona. Here is how Reich's
       son Peter described it in A Book of Dreams, a touching biography
       of his father:

                      I was just about to go back downstairs
                      when I saw it, hovering in the south. I
                      watched it for a minute. It pulsated and
                      glowed. Then I ran to get daddy. He was
                      sitting in his work room at a long desk
                      writing in one of his red ledger books.
                      "Daddy, I spotted one. In the east. It
                      looks pretty big." [Peter went to summon
                      Reich's daughter, Eva, and her husband,
                      Bill.] Bill pulled out his binoculars.
                      "Boy, it sure is something," he said,
                      handing the glasses to Eva. She looked
                      for a while and said, "I knew it would
                      come ."  Daddy took off his hat and
                      pushed his hand through his long silvery
                      hair. "I wish I knew if this was an
                      attack or if they were just observing
                      the Earth."
                                  *     *     *
                      I moved the cloudbuster slowly from one
                      side of the EA to the other. I let it
                      draw on the right side for a while and
                      then dipped it slowly like a baby's cradle
                      on a yo-yo and rubbed back and forth at the
                      sky beneath it before coming back up to the
                      other side. I let the cloudbuster orunize
                      on either side...
                         "Why its gone!" Bill said...
                          Daddy said, "That was very good Peeps,
                      very good. You are a real good little soldier
                      because you have discovered a new way to
                      disable EA's. I am very proud of you."

          Reich's last and craziest book, "Contact with Space", was
       published posthumously in a limited edition and is now
       extremely rare. It tells of his efforts to save the world
       from the CORE (Cosmic Orgone Energy) men, Reich's term for
       the aliens from space. "On March 20, 1956, 10 P.M." the book
       opens, "a thought of a very remote possibility entered my
       mind, which I fear will never leave me again. Am I a spaceman?
       Do I belong to a new race on earth, bred by men from outer
       space in embraces with earth women?" What inspired this
       thought? It was seeing the science-fiction film "The Day the
       Earth Stood Still", about a spaceman who comes to Earth in
       a flying saucer to save us from self-destruction in a nuclear
       war. "All through the film," Reich says, "I had a distinct
       impression that it was a bit of "my story" which was depicted
       there, even the actor's expressions and looks reminded me and
       others of myself as I had appeared 15 to 20 years ago."