Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

by Turner, Christopher

  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.”53 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.”54 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.

  On December 14, 1954, Dr. Silvert traveled to Arizona from Orgonon in a chartered plane, bringing as his special cargo a one-milligram vial of “orur”—previously radioactive material from the Oranur experiment that had been buried in an iron safe for three years. The safe ap
parently acted like an accumulator; secreted there, the concentrated orgone energy supposedly worked to neutralize the nuclear radiation in just the way that Reich had anticipated it would when he set out on his fateful experiment. Reich used the orur to excite and bolster the cloudbuster, harnessing it to the device to increase its potency. The lead vial containing the radium was placed in a leather pouch and dangled, like testicles, from the base of the guns.

  Silvert was delivering the orur to Arizona so that Reich could turn the cloudbuster into a powerful space gun with which to fight the aliens that he felt were attacking and destroying the earth. The orur was thought to be so potent that it was secured in an eight-inch-long tear-shape container and towed behind the aircraft on a 150-foot nylon line. When the plane landed the powerful load was reeled in, but because it was deemed so dangerous, it was never allowed closer than five feet to the plane, so was left to bounce and drag along the airstrip. Silvert, who took Paki Wright along for the ride, insisted that it be guarded at all times during the several refueling stops, and he monitored the pilots with a Geiger-Müller counter to see if they had been contaminated with radioactivity. When they got to Arizona he insisted they all take a Reich Blood Test.

  Reich had established a base in a small rented house just outside Tucson, which he renamed Little Orgonon. His coworkers were now mainly family: Peter; Eva; his son-in-law, Bill Moise, an artist who had been an anti aircraft gunner during the war; and Robert McCullough, a biologist who worked at the University of New Hampshire when he first met Reich in 1953. Reich and Eva had driven the long distance down to Arizona in his brand-new white Chrysler convertible, and McCullough, Moise, and Peter drove down in Chevy trucks with two cloudbusters. They hoped to use the machines to attack UFOs and to clean up the DOR with which Reich thought these alien craft were deliberately polluting the desert. The operation was termed grandiosely OROP Desert (Orgone Energy Operation in the Desert), and the trucks that carried the cloudbusters had spinning wave logos emblazoned down the side to represent the cosmic waves Reich thought the spaceships rode on.

  Peter Reich’s memoir, A Book of Dreams (1973), tells the story of his eccentric upbringing as seen through a child’s eyes. In Arizona he was a ten-year-old sergeant in Reich’s “Corps of Cosmic Engineers,” with red crayon stripes to prove it drawn on the pith helmet with which his father equipped all the operators of the cloudbuster. Peter would sit up at night alongside his father with a telescope and binoculars, on the lookout for UFOs, which were visible to them as “silvery disks” and “yellow pulsations.” They saw one pulsating, speeding, red and green blob with such frequency that they christened it the Southern Belle.

  Once a sighting had been made, they would rush to the cloudbuster to unplug the aluminum tubes and extend the pipes out like a telescope until they reached some fifteen feet. They would then chase the UFO across the night sky, cranking the wheels of the device to spin the turret around and to raise and lower the guns, until they managed to sap the flying saucer of energy. The UFOs began to blink erratically, to fade, sometimes to disappear completely, Peter later reported. Reich claimed to have shot down several UFOs in this manner. It was almost as if Reich and his group felt they were the last line of defense between America and the universe.

  Reich first used the cloudbuster this way on May 12, 1954. Reich wrote in Contact with Space (1957):

  Easy contact was made on that fateful day with what obviously turned out to be a heretofore unknown type of UFO. I had hesitated for weeks to turn my cloudbuster pipes toward a “star,” as if I had known that some of the blinking lights hanging in the sky were not planets or fixed stars but SPACE machines. With the fading out of the two “stars,” the cloudbuster had suddenly changed into a SPACEGUN…What had been left of the old world of human knowledge after the discovery of the OR energy (1936–40) tumbled beyond reprieve. Nothing could any longer be considered “impossible.” I had directed [the] drawpipes, connected with the deep well toward an ordinary star, and the star had faded out four times.55

  In Arizona they fought what Reich described as a heroic “full-scale interplanetary battle.” (Reich had seen War of the Worlds earlier that year.)56 This was so intense, Peter described in his memoir, that it required two cloudbusters, and he includes childhood sketches showing how they were mobilized. Reich acted like a military general, deploying them in strategic places, and the two gunners communicated with each other using whistles: one blast for north, three long blasts for west, three short ones for east, four for south, and two for “zenith,” which meant guns straight up.

  A huge black-purple mushroom cloud “looking like smoke from a huge fire” formed over Little Orgonon, which had an angry reddish glow. Reich’s Geiger counter apparently went crazy, and the team “suffered from nausea, quivering, pain in the upper abdomen and discoloration of movements”; in one “battle” McCullough was apparently temporarily paralyzed on his right side.57 It took an hour of furious work to clear the cloud, and when this had been done two B-52 bombers flew low over Little Orgonon, which Reich thought was an overflight intended to salute their good work.

  I met Peter Reich for Sunday lunch at his home in Massachusetts, two hours outside of Boston. He works as assistant to the dean of the Harvard Medical School—an unlikely job for someone whose father devoted the last two decades of his life to battling the “pharmaceutical interest.” Peter said, “I’ve spent sixteen years working for the enemy.”

  “What my kids don’t understand,” Peter told me as we sat in deck chairs in his garden, “was that people in Reich and my mother’s generation really believed in a better world. It was probably going to look like a Socialist world. It wasn’t going to be Communist, it wasn’t going to be fascist. It was fair and honorable, and sexuality would be part of that better world. There was a vibrancy and a hope. But that better world didn’t make it and people today don’t know about that.”

  When I asked him to describe his father’s obvious charisma, Peter Reich invoked movies. “When Star Wars came out and I saw the scene where Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker about the Force, I really felt kind of ripped off. And that is the best description. He had that presence that Obi-Wan Kenobi projected and that same belief in that same force.” To understand Reich, Peter told me, you had to understand how he modeled his life on the films he saw.

  “He thought these movies were about him, and maybe they were, you see. It’s hard to know where the circle starts. For example, High Noon, he was really into High Noon, and Bad Day at Black Rock. And this is why he wore a cowboy hat: he was Gary Cooper. And when the FDA came up to see him at Orgonon, he was just like Spencer Tracy. He’d say, ‘Listen, mister’—he used that language. That was really part of his American persona, the movie person. He didn’t make a distinction between that and real life.

  “He could put his hands on you, and he was a healer, he really was. And I think he felt that he could heal the world, because these cloudbusters really seemed to work. So he really felt like he was in control of everything. And he didn’t understand why other people didn’t see that. He shared the moral certainty that Gary Cooper had in High Noon and Spencer Tracy had in Bad Day at Black Rock, and that Sir Thomas More had in A Man for All Seasons.”58

  I imagine Reich as the Burt Lancaster character in The Rainmaker, a naïve showman and energetic charlatan who charms a sexless old maid and then actually drums up a storm. The very idea of orgone energy might be seen as cinematic: in The Blue Light (Das Blaue Licht [1932]), a feral Leni Riefenstahl is the guardian of a high-altitude cavern that glows an ethereal blue during full moons and lures men to their deaths in the mountains.

  I put it to Peter Reich that in every biography of Reich there seems to be a cutoff point, an eye-rolling threshold after which the biographer considers Reich to be mad. For the psychoanalysts it was Lucerne; for others it was one of his odd inventions, be it the orgone box, the cloudbuster, or the space gun. Even among his devotees, only a very few managed to follow him until the end.
A. S. Neill, Reich’s faithful friend since the 1930s, was exasperated when he received a copy of Reich’s new journal, CORE (Cosmic Orgone Engineering), which described the “cloudbusting” experiments: “If I had never heard of Reich and had read CORE for the first time,” he wrote to Reich in January 1955, “I would have concluded that the author was either meschugge [mad] or the greatest discoverer in centuries. Since I know you aren’t meschugge I have to accept the alternative. I can’t follow you…is there anyone who can?”59

  Peter Reich replied: “Okay, I was on that operation when the blueberry growers paid Reich to make rain in ’54, and it started to rain. I just couldn’t believe it. Another time, this hurricane was heading right towards us and all of a sudden it veered off. You know, I participated in a lot of things that I think really happened. And I don’t know what to make of them. I remember in Arizona, he’d bought his telescope and he was seeing these flying saucers, and I remember looking through the telescope and I didn’t see the thin cigar shape with the little windows [this is how Reich described a UFO to him]. I remember thinking to myself, Well, I don’t know. That’s where I drew the line, I think, and that was as a ten-year-old boy. But I made it rain, I made the wind come up. I don’t know, I just really don’t know.

  “He was a nineteenth-century scientist, he wasn’t a twentieth-century scientist. He didn’t practice science the way scientists do today. He was a nineteenth-century mind who came crashing into twentieth-century America. And boom! The FDA was hot to get a prosecution and he walked right into it. He was sending telegrams to the president of the United States, saying that he was stopping hurricanes and claiming that the FDA were Communists. He walked right into it, with his eyes wide open.”