Adventures in the Orgasmatron (63 page)

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 apparently 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.”

When
A Book of Dreams
came out in 1973, Peter Reich was criticized for not being able to state clearly whether he now believed in orgone energy or not, though it is precisely this irresolution that makes the book such a compelling read. In 1988, in a preface to a new edition of the book, Peter Reich wrote: “The forty-four-year-old husband and father is a private person to whom this all happened a long time ago. He waits, he watches. A critic once said that Wilhelm Reich had grabbed truth by more than its tail. How much more? Does anybody know? Does Orgone Energy exist? So, yes, the son is still hedging.”
⁶⁰
Almost twenty years later he is still equivocating; his is an ambivalent, complicated relationship to his father’s ideas and inventions. “Perhaps it is the easy way out,” Peter Reich speculated in his book. “Keeping one foot in the dream—but it is deeper than that. My childhood is the dream.”
⁶¹

“You know, he was like Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he repeated. “He was all there, all the time. He would get drunk—he did have a bad drinking problem. And he beat my mother up. But it’s funny, that doesn’t detract in my mind. He would get drunk because he was so lonely. One by one [his friends] got to the eye-rolling point. They kept peeling off. At a certain point I just think he started spiraling and he knew that it couldn’t go on anymore. [The Yugoslav filmmaker Dušan] Makavejev said that everybody has a blind spot when it comes to Reich, and I think that’s true. But where does that blind spot begin?”

In 1956 Peter Reich spent the summer at Summerhill. When a military plane flew overhead he told Neill that it had been sent to protect him against his father’s enemies. Neill told Peter that this was nonsense—the planes weren’t his guardian angels but were passing overhead because there was a large U.S. atom bomb base several miles from Summerhill. When Reich heard of Neill’s response, he told his inner circle that Neill was “unreliable” and was not to be trusted. “I was genuinely concerned about Peter and his fears of overhead planes,” Neill protested to Reich when he heard he’d been blacklisted. “And his grown-upness which is not real, for he wants to be childish and play a lot of the time…He looks too anxious. I think he is trying to live a part…‘I am the only one who understands what Daddy is doing.’ He may understand but his emotions are all mixed up. He isn’t Peter Reich; he is Peter Reich plus Wilhelm Reich. And, dear old friend, call this emotional plague or what you will. To me it is just plain truth.” After wishing Reich luck, Neill signed off, “Goodbye Reich, and God bless you.”
⁶²

“And what if he did go mad?” Neill wrote in 1971. “Often [Reich] said that our asylums are full of people who aren’t mad enough to live in our sick civilization…It is an odd world if Reich were mad and the politicians and the Pentagon and the color-haters are sane.”
⁶³

Peter took me to a shed crammed full of bicycles, tools, and discarded car batteries. In the back of the shed, accessible via a path cleared through all the bric-a-brac, was an orgone energy accumulator. There was a blue chair inside it with a cushion on the seat. “This is like the first ones ever made,” Peter said proudly, “like the one Eva is sitting in in the accumulator booklet, where she’s pictured with a black band over her eyes. This is the real McCoy! Hop in.” When I was shut inside the device he instructed me, “Breathe deeply, Chris, breathe deeply!”