Adventures in the Orgasmatron (62 page)

The first of these devices, a Duchamp-like construction, was built for him by Tom Ross, Reich’s caretaker at Orgonon, who had also built accumulators for him. It had a wooden turret and rows of pipes that could be spun around with a revolving system made from several recycled bicycle wheels. Reich now thought that DOR was attracted to water, and his machine worked like a lightning rod to ground DOR as if it were electricity. Ross’s prototype had a double row of five fifteen-foot-long aluminum pipes, which were connected by cables to water so as to draw off the DOR in the atmosphere and purify it. In 1940, when he had “discovered” orgone energy, Reich had directed his orgonoscope, a hollow tube, at Mooselookmeguntic Lake. He felt, like King Canute, that he was able to move the waves by pointing it.

The “cloudbuster,” as it was dubbed, looked like an antiaircraft gun. Reich thought that when he pointed the battery of aluminum pipes at the sky, he was able to draw off the polluting DOR by moving his machine in a circular motion. After an hour or so of his massaging a black cloud in this way, it seemed, miraculously, to dissipate. Whereas Reich invented the accumulator to dissolve stagnant repressions in the body, this larger device was designed to get blocked orgone energy flowing in the atmosphere itself. Tom Ross once said that he was sure the cloudbuster worked, but that no one except Reich really knew how to work it.

The existence of DOR conveniently explained why the accumulator was not always effective: recent atomic energy explosions caused a dissipation of the orgone energy in the atmosphere, which made the accumulator less powerful and even reversed its effects, Reich theorized. Reich arranged for all accumulator users to be sent a new instruction sheet advising them to adapt their boxes by grounding the devices in water with cables so as to draw off dangerous DOR. Reich also had miniature models of the cloudbuster built that were the size of his shooter boxes. They looked like old-fashioned cameras with multiple lenses, but instead of a curtain at the back they had a cluster of hosepipes that were grounded in a bucket or sink. Reich taught his physicians how to use the cloudbuster in therapy to draw out the polluting DOR from the bodies of their patients as if it were some kind of psychoanalytic vacuum cleaner.

In May 1953, Baker, Duvall, and Raphael flew to Maine so that Reich could demonstrate his cloudbuster to them (Reich had had two more devices built in Portland). “During the operation,” Baker reported,

the gravitational pull around the cloudbuster and for some distance away seemed to increase markedly, making it actually difficult to pick up one’s feet from the ground. The atmosphere around the cloudbuster was highly charged, and, in a few minutes, our lips became blue and parched, our mouths dry. Soon our faces were blue, and we became dizzy and unsteady. We kept wet cloths on our faces. Smoke appeared to be gushing from the ends of the ten pipes. Reich said it looked like an anti-aircraft gun during firing. Whether the smoke-like material was being sucked into the pipes or being emitted from them I could not be sure.

It was all very impressive and made us aware again of the tremendous forces at work, forces with which we had become familiar since the beginning of the Oranur experiment. We who have been through this experiment know how real and actually terrifying it all was and how frustrating to meet scoffers who belittle Reich’s work and call him insane.
⁴²

Reich assumed the mythic status of rainmaker and felt that he could not only redirect storms but also summon them up. He offered to break the drought for a local blueberry farmer for the sum of one hundred dollars. According to Peter Reich, it rained.

On February 10, 1954, at the FDA’s request, a twenty-seven-page complaint for injunction was filed against Wilhelm Reich, Ilse Ollendorff, and the Wilhelm Reich Foundation. Extensive tests, the report stated, had proved that orgone energy was nonexistent, and therefore the accumulators were “misbranded under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act because of false and misleading claims.”
⁴³
The FDA estimated that more than a thousand accumulators, shooter boxes, orgone energy blankets, and orgone energy funnels had been sold or rented, at costs of between $15 and $225. All Reich’s publications, including the celebrated
Character Analysis
and
The Sexual Revolution
, were deemed part of a fraudulent “promotion of cures” to advertise accumulators, as the publications made frequent reference to this energy the FDA considered to be spurious.

Reich apparently went into shock for three days after a federal marshal delivered a copy of the complaint. He politely offered the marshal a drink, but Ollendorff claimed that she bore the brunt of his later anger: “Reich directed his whole fury against the outside world at me.” He once hit her so hard he perforated an eardrum; she left Orgonon in August 1954.
⁴⁴
The complaint was a devastating indictment of his life’s work. To add insult to injury, it was signed by Peter Mills, Reich’s lawyer in the late forties and early fifties, who had become U.S. attorney for the state of Maine in 1953.

Eventually Reich consulted a local lawyer, who suggested that he agree to stop selling orgone products, which he thought would then allow Reich to continue selling his literature. However, Reich refused to do this: “The moment we start to bargain…we would stamp the accumulator as fraud. It is not a fraud. Therefore we can not agree to any bargaining.”
⁴⁵

Reich refused to cooperate with the courts, and instead of appearing for trial he sent a “Response,” which stated: “It is not permissible, either morally, legally, or factually to force a natural scientist to expose his scientific results and methods of basic research in court.” Reich hinted at the great power of the secrets he harbored. “Such disclosure,” he wrote enigmatically, “would involve untold complications and possible national disaster.”
⁴⁶
It was interpreted as a “crank letter” and not treated as evidence.

There was no contest to the injunction because Reich, too proud to expose himself to ridicule in defending his discovery, failed to show up in court, so the FDA won its case by default. The judge decreed that all rented accumulators were to be recalled and destroyed and all paperback editions of Reich’s literature was to be burned. Reich’s more expensive hardbound books were not to be sold until the portions containing curative claims were deleted. Since Reich referred to orgone energy on almost every page of many of these volumes, this would have not only been costly but would have rendered the texts meaningless. The defendants, the judge ordered, were “perpetually enjoined and restrained from…making statements and representations pertaining to the existence of orgone energy.”
⁴⁷

On March 19, 1954, FDA commissioner Charles Crawford sent letters to many official bodies—including the American Psychoanalytic Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Medical Association—bragging over this easily won victory:

Dr. Reich has long contended that only the hopelessly ignorant could disagree with his theories or doubt his miraculous cures with orgone energy accumulators. Repeated challenges were issued in literature, widely distributed by the Wilhelm Reich Foundation, daring medical physicists to test accumulators adequately. FDA accepted the challenge and has concluded that there is no such energy as orgone and that Orgone Energy Accumulator devices are worthless in the treatment of any disease or disease condition of man.

Irreparable harm may result to persons who abandon or postpone rational medical treatment while pinning their faith on worthless devices such as these.
⁴⁸

In response, Reich fired off telegrams to the president, J. Edgar Hoover, and members of the press. “Established knowledge,” he wrote, “must have no authority ever to decide what is NEW knowledge.” Reich threatened to prove the existence of orgone energy by summoning up violent storms with his cloudbuster: “According to the Federal Food and Drug Administration, Orgone Energy does not exist. We are drawing east to west from Hancock, Maine, and Orgonon, Rangeley, Maine, to cause [a] storm to prove that orgone energy does exist…We are flooding the East as you are drying [in] the Southwest. You do not play with serious natural-scientific research.”
⁴⁹

In March 1954, a seventy-ton hydrogen bomb was dropped on Bikini Atoll, unleashing the power of 1,200 atomic bombs when it vaporized the small island in the Pacific. The weapon, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Arthur Crompton warned, threatened to draw the final curtain on humanity. One of the men who worked on the super, as the bomb was referred to, nicknamed it Campbell’s—it promised to turn the planet to soup.

Reich was too caught up in his own private battles to take much notice, yet he might have registered the event. The slight to his ego that the FDA injunction represented caused him to retreat even further into a world of fantasy, which reflected in distorted ways the anxieties about the current political situation. Reich became convinced that creatures from outer space were attacking the earth, riding their spaceships, which were powered by orgone energy, on the “OR energy streams of the Universe.” He thought that the exhaust, or “offal,” from these machines was the black powdery substance he had seen around Orgonon, and which he referred to as melanor, or black-DOR, and that the spacemen were deliberately scattering it over the earth to render the planet dead and barren. Reich believed they were turning America into a wasteland, and he used his cloudbuster to combat them—in this fashion, he was dealing with the “planetary emergency” in his uniquely engaged way, re-creating his earthly struggles with the FDA on a cosmic scale. He wrote to Neill in August 1954, “I am far off in space as it were.”
⁵⁰

Reich peppered the air force with letters detailing his weather control and UFO-busting discoveries. He was not the only person who believed in UFOs at that time: numerous sightings prompted a Pentagon press conference in 1952 and then an air force investigation, known as Project Blue Book. At the end of 1953 Reich read several books about flying saucers, including Donald Keyhoe’s
The Flying Saucers Are Real
(1950). Keyhoe thought that the UFOs had been summoned by the atomic explosions; he reported that their “observation suddenly increased in 1947, following the series of bomb explosions in 1945.”
⁵¹
After the explosion of the H-bomb there was an even bigger smoke signal to attract them.

UFOs seemed to account for all the loose ends of everything Reich had discovered; now anything that he could not explain was attributed to spacemen, even his German shepherd dog’s mysteriously broken hind leg. It seemed that the visitors from outer space knew all the orgonomic secrets of the universe that he did, and therefore only he had the knowledge to match and outwit them. Every new and curious phenomenon was incorporated into Reich’s elastic orgonomic scheme of things. “Things were fitting well, even too neatly for my taste,” he wrote in his posthumously published report on UFOs,
Contact with Space
(1957). “Therefore I hesitated to tell anything to anyone about them.”
⁵²

Reich wanted to explain UFOs on an orgonomic basis, much as Carl Jung, who was also then much preoccupied with flying saucers, sought to explain them in terms of psychic projection. “At a time when the world is divided by an iron curtain,” Jung wrote in 1958 after a decade of research into flying saucers, “we might expect all sorts of funny things, since when such a thing happens in an individual it means a complete dissociation, which is instantly compensated [for] by symbols of wholeness and unity.”
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Reich in his bipolar states suffered just such a split, and indeed his whole oceanic theory of orgone energy might be interpreted in that light. Some nights he would spot three or four Eas (energy alphas, as he called UFOs) hovering in the sky above Orgonon. They would leave the atmosphere heavy and black, but by mobilizing the cloudbuster Reich was able to clear the air and make the sky blue again.

As fact and fiction blurred, Reich’s work took on the apocalyptic urgency of a science fiction film. Robert Wise’s
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(1951) was a particularly important influence. The film tells the story of a humanoid extraterrestrial, Klaatu, who lands his spacecraft in Washington, bringing the message that something drastic needs to be done to stop impending nuclear catastrophe. In the film, the army, quick to violence in the face of the unknown, shoots and wounds the spaceman. The alien nevertheless manages to visit a famous scientist and to convince him, by completing a previously unsolved mathematical problem, to listen to his doom-laden message. After a feature-length manhunt, the military finally kills him, but Klaatu is resurrected in the spacecraft, which is powered by atomic energy, and delivers a final warning: he tells the scientists of the world, whom he has called together for an emergency briefing, that earth can either decide to abandon warfare and join other peaceful space-faring nations or it will be destroyed as a dangerous threat.

The film captured Reich’s sense of alienation and he empathized with Klaatu, the gaunt but well-spoken alien peacemaker. “I had the distinct impression,” he wrote, “that it was a bit of my story which was depicted there; even the actor’s expression and looks reminded me and others of myself as I had appeared 15 to 20 years ago.”
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He felt that he was similarly hunted, and that no one—not even Einstein—heeded his warnings of a similarly dangerous threat, sexual repression, which only he had the knowledge and means to combat.