Okay, this is an article on The Guardian.
It was published on February 10th, 2022, and it is written by one Nina Lacani.
One in three Americans have detectable levels of toxic weed killer in their body.
Study finds.
Human exposure to the herbicide 2-4-D has substantially risen amid expanding use among
farmers despite a multitude of health and environmental concerns, according to the first
nationally representative study evaluating the footprint of the chemical.
The herbicide was developed in the mid 1940s and quickly became the go-to weed killer for
farmers, focusing on increasing crop yields while also gaining popularity among gardeners
looking for a pristine lawn.
Its popularity dipped in favor of Roundup and genetically modified cotton and soybean
resistance to this herbicide, but it has seen a resurgence since the spread of Roundup-resistant
weeds have been found.
2-4-D is currently riding high thanks to this whack-a-mole approach to pest control and
industrialized farming, with about 600 U.S. agricultural and residential products now containing
the chemical, which can be ingested through the skin, mouth, and nose.
Who would have thought?
Who would have thought that it's more than just having to fully eat the entire thing?
Researchers from George Washington University examined the urine sample of 14,395 people
aged 6 and older from all walks of life who take part in the annual National Health and
Nutrition Examination Survey.
They looked for biomarkers to the pesticide and compared the exposure levels detected
from the use of 2-4-D from 2001 to 2014.
As the pesticide grew in popularity among farmers and gardeners, so did evidence of
human exposure rising from a low 17% in 2001 to a high of almost 40% a decade later.
Whoa.
I'm just going to skip ahead a bit.
A further study must determine how rising exposure to 2-4-D affects human health, especially
when exposure occurs early in life, said Melissa Perry, professor of environmental and occupational
health and senior author of the paper.
Children and other vulnerable groups are also increasingly exposed to other pesticides and
these chemicals may act synergistically to produce health problems.
The study also found that black participants who multiple previous studies have shown to
have higher exposure to all sorts of environmental pollutants showed signs of lower exposure
to the weed killer than white Americans.
This may be a result of historically racist policies restricting access to homes with
gardens and green spaces for black communities, the researcher argued.
And overall, the use of 2-4-D increased by 67% from 2012 to 2020, which wasn't even a
group that they were testing.
It was from 2001 to 2014.
So even higher now.
Yeah, that's crazy.
I mean, you got to have a nice garden.
Apparently.
You got to.
At the risk of cancer and anything else that it might do to you.
You got to.
For the garden.
For the garden, we should all die.
I think it's reasonable.
Nobody wants weeds.
And with that, I think we've bummed you all out enough to actually start a fun episode.
From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a Journey to the Fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe.
The only podcast brave enough not to assume a cryptic gender identity.
Don't believe us?
Look back, please, at our episodes, most specifically our Mothperson episodes.
We are your unassuming hosts, Taylor and Chelsea.
And today we're doing a bit of a follow up on an episode that in itself was a follow
up.
Now, Chelsea did the Mon Talk episode not that long ago.
And there was kind of like a one-off sentence that kind of set my research mind abuzz.
It was specifically about Project Phoenix and its relationship with Orgo and Energy,
which didn't really mean that much at the time.
It was really literally a sentence that I said, I'm not going to tell you anything else.
Yeah.
Too complicated.
You already had an interest in it, right?
Yeah, I've heard it enough that and I didn't really know what it was that I decided it
was time to actually take that look.
And my God is the history of this thing crazy.
Great.
Because I know nothing about it.
It turns out most of this episode actually isn't about Orgo and Energy itself, but its
main researcher.
So you might not leave knowing much more about Orgo and Energy.
We're never going to know anything about Orgo and Energy.
But you're going to know enough about Orgo and Energy.
And if you even look at the Wiki page, I didn't really know what Orgo and Energy was just
from the Wiki page.
It's pretty short.
It's pseudoscience and that's about where it leaves it off.
Where you really need to go is you need to go look at the original researcher by the
name of Wilhelm Reich.
That's what we're going to be doing.
We're going to start this episode off.
I'm going to give you the briefest definition I can of what Orgo and Energy is.
And then we're going to look at who Wilhelm Reich is because it is absolutely paramount
to knowing why this gets brought up and just how bizarre it is.
He's paramount.
Okay.
He is absolutely the key to all of this.
So there's no Orgon without?
Yeah, the trail starts at Wilhelm Reich, if you will.
What is Orgo and Energy to keep it as simple as possible?
It is a massless omnipresent substance similar to like the ether that people talk about or
chi, but more closely associated with living energy than with inert matter.
It could also allegedly coalesce to create organization on all scales from absolutely
tiny atoms in what they call bions in Orgo and Theory to macroscopic structures as big
as clouds or even galaxies at the absolute biggest level.
Wilhelm Reich, unfortunately, never lived to the day where he could study Orgo and Level
on the galactic level.
So that one's still a mystery.
I feel like we're still probably not there, but that's just an assumption at this point.
We're still in our infancy in Orgo and Energy.
Just a total assumption on my behalf on that one.
The thing that I've always associated, I don't know if you've ever seen this, Chelsea, it's
a box that just has a chair in it for people to sit and they close it.
I am familiar with it because I am looking at it currently.
Okay.
Yeah.
So that's an Orgo and Accumulation chamber.
And I've seen it before and I'm always like, what is it accumulating?
I don't know.
And like, it doesn't hook up to anything.
It's just a box.
No.
And it has reflective matter on the inside?
Kind of.
We might get into it.
So is this like Bitcoin?
No, you don't get money from it.
You might potentially not get cancer, but that is a heavily disputed thing.
It's even hard to say what Wilhelm Reich said about it.
With all the gardening going on in this day and age.
Yeah.
You might as well just sit inside a chamber.
You're probably healthier inside a chamber of metal and other products.
Who is this Wilhelm Reich character?
There are a few things I'm going to say that just sound weird.
Why am I including this?
A few paragraphs after I say it is going to make sense.
Especially this one here.
Wilhelm Reich was born in 1897 into a wealthy family in what would now be Ukraine.
Although this was all written pre-Russian war with them.
So I don't know where in Ukraine it was and whether or not it's still in the hands of
Ukraine.
He lost his virginity at the age of 11 to a family cook and to have visited a brothel
at age 15.
Yes, it is paramount to the story.
After serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I, he studied medicine in Vienna
when he heard of a seminar on sex being given by Sigmund Freud.
That man that we all know, Sigmund Freud.
What is going on?
Yeah, this is how it starts.
Wilhelm Reich goes and visits Sigmund and he's like, hey, I love your work.
Can I get a reading list?
I need to know where I need to advance to help get to where you are.
And they just immediately are like, oh yeah, we both really care an awful lot about weird
sex stuff.
So we're going to be friends now.
So these two are just friends now.
And in fact, kind of work buddies now, like it just happens.
Freud began referring patients to him and Reich started developing his own theories,
becoming convinced of the power of sexual healing.
Honestly, if this is where he decided to stop his research, he would probably be remembered
somewhere on the level of Freud, probably closer to like Carl Jung or Carl Jung.
So he would have been a highly respected psychotherapist of his day.
He actually had some interesting theories that he worked with.
This not being necessarily one of them, but this is a direct quote from one of his books.
If undischarged sexual energy caused neurosis, mightn't it follow that the discharge of
sexual energy was in itself a healing force?
He wrote this in the book, The Function of the Orgasm in 1926.
And he was convinced that good quality sexual climaxes promoted physical health.
When Reich gave Freud a copy of The Function of the Orgasm, the skeptical older man Freud
muttered that thick, eh?
And the pair would eventually fall out over their differing views.
In a letter to another psychoanalyst, Freud referred to Reich as the impetus young man
passionately devoted to his hobby horse, who now salutes in the genital orgasms the antidote
to every neurosis.
When Freud later developed cancer, Reich regarded it as a result of sexual frustration.
He got mouth cancer from smoking cigars.
This is also where he probably came up with like his biggest claim to fame as a psychotherapist.
Reich proposed that muscular armor was a defense that contained the history of the patient's
trauma.
For example, he blamed Freud's jaw cancer on his muscular armor rather than his smoking.
Freud's Judaism meant he was biting down impulsively rather than expressing his emotions.
Dissolving the armor would bring back the memory of childhood repression that had caused
the blockage in the first place.
As a psychotherapist, he had a lot of ideas of like, we need to sit down with these people
and actually talk with them, not just let them talk themselves to an answer.
We need to ask them questions, give them responses.
He was big on facing them, like face to face.
And then on the weirder end of his muscular armor thing, he also believed in like physically
touching patients to help them get past their muscular arm, which might be massaging in
certain places.
It does make sense though, like nervous kicks, you can talk about it and there might be something
to it where it comes from.
And that's kind of where the idea of muscular armor comes from insight is psychoanalytical
view.
Does that make sense?
A little.
Must touch the patients.
Yeah, let's touch the patients and get past it.
And I'm just going to state it now, it ends up to a lot of claims of sexual assault in
his clinics, not necessarily by him, but people working under him.
But I just need to get that out of the way because I didn't include the part at the end
where there's just a ton of kids.
And we're just going to get past that part.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
Also on top of that, he was living in what would be that time, the mid twenties Germany.
Also he claimed to be a developed Marxist.
He argued that the proletariat was so politically impotent because the workers were sexually
repressed revolution.
Right claim could only happen in an uninhibited release of sexual urges.
With that being said, developed Marxist, a lot about sex.
Hitler comes to power and he's like, this, this doesn't look good for me.
They're already cracking down on anybody who is not following gender conforming views,
sexual conforming views.
Maybe I need to get the fuck out of here.
So he gets on a train and he heads to Norway.
He leaves his first wife behind and he continues the research.
Yeah.
Okay.
I didn't look too much at that part just because it's not as crazy as the other stuff this
guy does.
It's not, but he just like, see ya.
Yeah.
He loves her his entire life, but he ends up having to leave her in Germany and he heads
to Norway.
Okay.
Weird tidbit.
Another weird tidbit.
Yeah.
And this in Norway, by the way, this is all on his Wikipedia page.
Like I went to a few outside sources to look at everything, but the conspiracy stuff is
just batshit insane.
So you have to stick with the Wikipedia page and make sure that it all makes sense together.
In Norway, he starts to continue on a path of research that he was already on, but this
is where Orgone really starts to come into light.
So while in Norway, as part of his biome research, Reik undertook extensive microscopic observations
of living cancer tissue.
He concluded that tumor formation involves a process of bionis, tissue disintegration,
and reorganization into amoeboids, cancer cells similar to the natural organization
of protozoa.
He had previously observed in pain fusions.
Reik was also able to isolate a specific pathogenic type of bion that he called the P. bacillus
from cancer tissue.
Reik also integrated insight derived from his clinical work in the study of cancer and
in his own clinical work with cancer patients, he frequently noted a characterological resignation
and shallow breathing.
In this context, he recognized the importance of Otto Warburg's earlier findings of reduced
aerobic respiration in cancer tissue.
And I just need to say this part onwards for a little while comes right from an Orgone
Institute website.
There are still people who talk about this stuff a lot.
During his medical research on cancer, Reik developed a series of blood and tissue tests
that were employed both for early diagnosis and to follow the patient's progress during
treatment.
The three Reik blood tests consisted of one, the microscope test, which measures the rate
of bionis disintegration of erythrocytes, red blood cells in physiological saline and
determines whether or not they disintegrate into blue PA biomes or T bacilli.
Two, the autoclave test, which assesses the cohesiveness of enthorocytes following sterilization
in an autoclave and three, the blood culture test in which an attempt is made to culture
T bacilli in bacteriological broth.
Reik also employed the examination of unsustained live specimens of sputum or vaginal secretions
in order to detect precancerous or cancerous cells.
This is where he discovers Orgone energy.
I just had to keep that in there because I didn't want to just go right into it.
I wanted to show he's at least doing some research and it is at least sounds fancy.
So it did sound rather fancy.
In 1939, Reik found that biomes prepared from ocean sand, SAPA biomes, had unusual radiant
energy properties, including luminescence in the dark, fogging of photographic plates
and reddening of skin exposed through quartz glass.
The finding that they could induce a charge on organic materials that would register on
an electroscope led him to call the radiation Orgone energy.
In an attempt to isolate this radiation, Reik enclosed the SAPA biome cultures in a modified
Faraday cage.
A Faraday cage is basically a box that you could build that keeps electromagnetic waves
out.
Okay.
You can build these.
These are very real things.
Like you can't use your phone inside them.
If you've ever seen Better Call Saul, Saul's brother lives in a fairly large Faraday cage
because he's scared of electricity.
But was surprised to find that the radiant energy phenomenon persists without the cultures.
After a series of observations and experiments, which continued in the United States where
Reik reestablishes their laboratory in late 1939, he came to the conclusion that Orgone
energy was also present in the surrounding atmosphere and could in fact be concentrated
by an apparatus such as his modified Faraday cage, which consisted of a galvanized iron
box surrounded by an organic material such as wood, wool, or fiberboard.
This apparatus, the Orgone energy accumulator, was then further modified to increase its
effects and extensively employed by Reik in both physical and biological investigations.
Reik made the remarkable discovery that a slight temperature difference called TOT existed
between Orgone energy accumulators and a control cabinet lacking metal, but with similar insulating
properties.
A difference which exhibited a diurinal variation increased in fair weather and decrease in
rainy weather or high humidity.
He also found that the discharge rate of charged electroscopes was much slower inside an Orgone
accumulator than in a control box or in an open air area.
And also that the electroscope discharge rate exhibited a diurinal variation and responded
to changes in the weather similar to TOT.
Several studies replicating these original findings have been published and the interested
readers referred to the bibliography.
We'll link the website in our summary just so people can go there if they feel like it.
So that's basically what he found.
You could find temperature variations inside of Orgone accumulation chamber that he had
built versus outside it.
And he felt that it was helping stop cancer from growing inside the Orgone.
And this was just a feeling he had at this point.
Well, he did studies on it.
They say these are backed with things, but if you keep listening, you're going to learn
a bit more.
Okay, I'll do that.
Like we saw from his earlier life, Reik really believed, like he had an obsession with sexuality.
So he believed Orgone was closely associated with sexuality.
Reik following Freud saw nascent sexuality as the primary energetic force of life.
The term itself, Orgone, was chosen because it had the root word orgasm combined with
the root word ozone.
So Orgone, orgasm ozone.
Okay.
The focus on sexuality, while acceptable in the clinic perspective of Viennese psychoanalytical
circles, scandalized the conservative American public even as it appealed to counterculture
figures around the world.
This guy inspired quite a few of the hippies, especially the writers in those days.
Also strangely enough, came up with the term sexual revolution.
He did?
Yeah, he is credited with coming up with that term.
Interesting.
Once this is all done, basically a professor came over and listened to a lecture he was
giving in Norway from, I believe it was the New School in New York.
I didn't write it down right here.
I think it comes up later, but they come over and they're like, my God, you have such unique
ideas.
You need to come over to the US.
So they bring him over, they get him a teaching position at a university and he comes over
and he's like, perfect.
This is the perfect place to start marketing and selling my Orgone accumulation chambers.
So in 1940, when he moves to the States, he began to build insulated Verity cages, he
called Orgone accumulators, that he said would concentrate the Orgo.
The earliest boxes were for laboratory animals.
First human sized five foot tall boxes were built in December of 1940 and set up in the
basement of his house, it was made of plywood lined with rock, wool and sheet iron and had
a chair inside and a small window.
The box had multiple layers of these materials, which caused the Orgone concentration inside
the box to be three to five times stronger than in the air, Reich said, and patients
were expected to sit inside them naked.
I don't know if my professor said, hey, you need to come over to my basement, get naked
and get inside this box.
It sounds like all sorts of stuff.
I'm going to sign up for that research.
Yeah.
So the accumulators were tested on plant growth in mice with cancer.
Reich wrote to his supporters in July of 1941, that Orgone is definitely able to destroy
cancer in the room.
This is proved by the fact that tumors in all parts of the body are disappearing or
diminishing.
No other remedy in the world can claim such a thing.
Although not licensed to practice medicine in the United States, he began testing the
boxes on human beings diagnosed with cancer and schizophrenia.
In one case, the test had to be stopped prematurely because a subject heard a rumor that Reich
was insane.
There were stories which were false that he had been hospitalized in the Utica State Mental
Hospital.
In another case, the father of an eight-year-old girl with cancer approached him for help,
then complained to the American Medical Association he was practicing without a license.
He asked his supporters to stick with him through the criticism, believing that he had
developed a grand unified theory of physical and mental health.
These are a bit of the claims.
The therapeutic effects of the Orgone energy accumulator were nothing short of miraculous.
In severe cases of burns, a pamphlet on the device claimed, Experiences have revealed the
amazing fact that no blisters appear and that the initial redness slowly disappears.
The wounds heal in a matter of a few hours.
Severe ones need a day or two.
The box's concentration of Orgone can even sterilize wounds plus treat colds, arthritis,
ulcers, and yes, even cure cancer if caught in its early stages.
There's no evidence that Reich actually made a pamphlet that said that, but there were
pamphlets that said that out.
And then in 1940, Wilhelm Reich wrote a letter to Albert Einstein because he thought he had
such good ideas, saying that he had a scientific discovery he wanted to discuss.
And in January of 1941, he visited Einstein in his home in Princeton.
Like this guy was that well known that Einstein actually felt like he at least had to humor
the guy with a visit, where they both talked for nearly five hours.
He told Einstein that he had discovered a specific biologically effective energy, which
behaves in many respects differently to all that is known about electromagnetic energy.
He said it could be used against disease and as a weapon in the fight against the fascist
pestilence.
Einstein agreed that if an object's temperature could be raised without apparent heating source,
as Reich was suggesting, it would be a quote unquote bomb.
And that was like the claim that was biggest about the Orgone accumulation chamber is that
it was able to raise the ambient temperature in it as opposed to everything else around
it without any energy source.
It should be impossible.
Like you shouldn't just be able to raise temperature willy nilly.
You need an input energy.
And that's why if it's true, Einstein said this would go against a lot of what's going
on or at least in our research in physics.
So we're humans create like living beings create this energy, right?
Everything creates it.
I didn't quite put the quote, but he says that the aurora borealis northern lights,
that's Orgone energy.
He gets to it eventually, weather is made by Orgone energy.
It's inside us.
It creates our happiness, our good feelings.
It's just something that's in the universe.
It's inert.
It's like chi, it's ether that flows through.
It's life force.
So it's not the fact that you're in an insulated container and it's like body heat
reflecting back or something like that?
No.
Reich was much encouraged by the meeting and hoped he would be invited to join Princeton's
Institute for Advanced Studies.
During their next meeting, he gave Einstein a small accumulator and over the next 10 days,
Einstein performed experiments with it in his basement, which involved taking the temperature
above inside and near the devices, stripping it down to a spare occasion to compare temperatures.
He observed an increase of temperature, which Reich argued was caused by Orgone.
One of Einstein's assistants pointed out that the temperature was lower on the floor
than on the ceiling.
And Einstein concluded that the effect was simply due to the temperature gradient inside
the room.
Through these experiments, I regard the matter as completely solved, he wrote to Reich on
February 7th, 1941.
So Einstein gets ahold of this and says, dude, you just don't understand how temperature
works apparently.
Like it's just going to be warmer higher up than near the ground.
Simple as that.
Reich responded with a 25 page letter in which he tried to change Einstein's mind.
To rule out the influence of convection, he told Einstein that he had taken certain measures,
including introducing a horizontal plate above the accumulator, wrapping it in a blanket,
hanging it from the ceiling, putting it underground and placing it outside.
He wrote that in all these circumstances, the temperature difference remained and it
was in fact more marked in the open air.
Einstein did not respond to this or to Reich's future correspondence, and Reich would write
regularly reporting the results of his experiments until Reich threatened three years later to
publish their previous exchange.
Einstein replied that he could not devote any further time to the matter and asked that
his name not be misused for advertising purposes.
Reich believed that Einstein's change of heart was part of a conspiracy of some kind
and perhaps related to the communists or prompted by that rumor that Reich was ill.
And Reich published the correspondence in 1953 as the Einstein affair.
He starts to get a little crazy at this point.
Reich lost his position at the New School in 1941 after writing to the director Alvin
Johnson to say he had saved several lives in secret experiments with the accumulator.
Again, he's not supposed to be practicing medicine, so the New School is going to be
getting into trouble for this.
And they don't want to be associated with this guy who's illegally practicing medicine.
So Johnson was aware of Reich's claims that he could cure cancer and told him the New
School was not an appropriate institution for the work.
Reich was evicted from his house on Kessel Street, which I didn't bring up, but his
original house after his neighbors complained about the animal experiments going on inside
it.
However, his supporters, including one, Walter Briel, gave him $14,000 to buy a new house
and he settled into a new one.
Things get a little heated on December 12, 1941, five days after the attack on Pearl
Harbor and a day after Germany declared its war on the US.
Reich was arrested in his home at 2 a.m. by the FBI and taken to Ellis Island, where he
was held for three weeks.
At the time, a lot of Germans were arrested because they thought they were sympathetic
to the German war movement.
He clearly wasn't, and it actually was a case of mistaken identity.
But this did make him even more paranoid than he was before.
So he gets a little crazier after this.
In November of 1942, Reich purchases an old farm for $4,000 in Dodge Pond, Maine, near
Wrangley with 280 acres of land.
He called it Organon.
And he started spending summers there and had a one-room cabin built in 1943, a laboratory
in 1945, and a larger cabin in 1946, and finally an observatory in 1948.
In 1950, he decided to live there year-round and in May that year moved from New York with
his son Peter, his wife Ilsa, who is his second wife, and Reich's daughter Eva with the idea
of creating a center for the study of Orgon.
Several colleagues moved there with him, including two physicians with an interest in Orgon and
Lois Wevel, who ran the Orgon Press Institute.
The artist, William Moyes, joined Reich as an assistant at Organon and later married
Eva Reich, his daughter.
Organon still houses the Wilhelm Reich Museum, so you can go there if you want.
I don't know what's actually there.
I didn't look at anything on it.
And as well as a holiday cottage available to rent, one of which is the cottage in which
Wilhelm himself lived.
There's a unique Airbnb experience.
Yeah, for sure.
I wonder how many weird chambers there are in that building.
Yeah, probably a lot.
It's going out on a limb.
While he's doing all this stuff in Organon, his reputation took a sudden downturn in April
of 1947 when articles were posted by one Mildred, Eddie Brady, in Harper's and the New Republic.
In the latter one, the New Republic was entitled The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich.
With the subhead, the man who blames both neurosis and cancer on unsatisfactory sexual
activities has been repudiated by only one scientific journal.
Brady's ultimate target was not Reich, but psychoanalysts, which according to Turner,
she saw as akin to astrology.
But she specifically wrote about Reich,
Orgone, named after the sexual orgasm, is according to Reich a cosmic energy.
It is in fact the cosmic energy.
Reich has not only discovered it, he has seen it, demonstrated it, and named a town Organon,
Maine, after it.
Here he builds accumulators of it which are rented out to patients who presumably derive
orgasmic potency from it.
She claimed falsely, however, that he had said the accumulators would cure not only
impotence but cancer.
Brady argued that the growing Reich cult had to be dealt with.
And it's at this point that the FDA gets an eye on Reich and he gets even more paranoid
because people start coming by and asking him questions about what he's actually doing.
His paranoia gets a little further and Reich and his second wife, Ilsa, divorce in September
of 1951.
Here's the story about it.
Essentially, because he thought she had an affair, she continued working with him for
another three years.
Even after he divorced, he suspected her of having affairs and persuaded her to sign
confessions about her feelings of fear and hatred towards him, which he locked away in
the archives of his Orgone Institute.
He wrote several documents denouncing her while having an affair himself with Lois Weville,
who ran the Orgone Institute Press.
Like the two women in his life.
While this is all going on though, Reich said he had discovered another type of energy that
he called dead-orgon radiation, or D.O.R., a cumulation of which played a role in desertification.
He designed a Cloudbuster row 15-foot aluminum pipes mounted on a mobile platform connected
to cables that were inserted into water.
He believed that it could unblock orgone energy in the atmosphere and cause rain.
Turner described it as an orgone box turned inside out.
He conducted dozens of experiments with the Cloudbuster, calling his research Cosmic Orgone
Engineering.
During a drought in 1953, two farmers in Maine offered to pay him if he could make it rain
to save their blueberry crop.
Reich used the Cloudbuster on the morning of July 6, and according to Banger's Daily
News based on an account from an anonymous eyewitness who was probably his son, Peter
Reich, rain began to fall that evening.
The crop survived, the farmers declared themselves satisfied, and Reich received his fee.
However, over the years the FDA interviewed physicians, Reich students, and his patients
asking about the Orgone Accumulator.
I love this quote.
I tried, there's a hyperlink in the wiki, but I couldn't get to the actual FDA document.
But I just love this.
A professor at the University of Oregon, not to be confused with Orgone, who bought an
accumulator told the FDA inspector that he knew the device was phony, but found it helpful
because his wife sat quietly in it for four hours every day.
It just keeps going on and on with glorious things.
Oh yeah, it doesn't do shit, but it keeps her quiet.
I just love that.
It's like getting your kids video games.
Yeah, I know it doesn't help them, but it shuts them up for a while.
The attention of the FDA triggered a belligerent response from Reich, who called the FDA Higgs,
which stood for hoodlums in government, and the tools of red fascists.
He developed delusions that he had powerful friends in the government, which included
President Eisenhower.
No idea why.
There's no communications between them.
Who he believed would protect him, and that the US Air Force was flying over Orgonen to
make sure that he was all right.
On July 29, 1952, three inspectors arrived at Orgonen unannounced.
Sheriff Wright said that Reich detested unannounced visitors.
He had once chased some people away with a gun just for looking at an adjacent property.
He told the inspectors they had to read his work before he would interact with them and
ordered them to leave.
And I don't know if it worked or not, but there's a two year gap now.
In 1954, the United States Attorney for the District of Maine filed a 27 page complaint
seeking a permanent injunction under Section 301 and 302 of the Federal Food, Drug, and
Cosmetics Act to prevent interstate shipment of Orgon Accumulators and ban promotional
literature.
Reich refused to appear in court, arguing that no court was in a position to evaluate
his work, and in a letter to John D. Clifford Jr., the judge, he wrote,
My factual position in this case, as well as in the world of science of today, does
not permit me to enter the case against the Food and Drug Administration.
If such an action would, in my mind, imply admission of the authority of this special
branch of the government to pass judgment on my primordial pre-atomic energy, orgon
energy, I therefore rest the case in full confidence in your hands.
So naturally, his argument that this government body has no authority works with the judge
and he says nothing I can do.
Just kidding, the injunction was granted by default on March 19th, 1954, merely one month
later, and the judge ordered that all accumulators, parts, and instructions be disparate, and
that several of Reich's books that mentioned Orgon be withheld.
The injunction triggered a further deterioration of Reich's mental health.
From at least early 1954, he came to believe that the planet was under attack by UFOs,
which he called energy alphas.
He said he often saw them flying over Orgonon, shaped like thin cigars with windows, leaving
streams of deadly black Orgon radiation in their wake, which he believed the aliens were
scattering to destroy the Earth.
He and his son would spend their nights searching for UFOs through telescopes and binoculars,
and sometimes when they believed they had found one, they would roll out a cloudbuster
to suck the energy out of it, the perceived or imagined UFO being the thing they're sucking
the energy out of.
Reich claimed he had shot several of them down.
Armed with two cloudbusters, they fought what Reich called a full-scale interplanetary
battle in Arizona, where he'd rented a house as a battle station.
The rumors were eventually true that he was insane.
In late 1954, Reich began an affair with Greta Hoff.
Hoff was married to another former student and patient of his, the psychologist Myron
Sheriff, who decades later, with his fury on Earth, became Reich's main biographer.
So she wrote his biography eventually.
Hoff and Sheriff had had their first child the year before Hoff left in for Reich.
The marriage was never repaired, although the affair had ended by June of 1955.
Two months later, Reich began another relationship, this time with Aurora Kerr, a medical researcher,
and in November, he moved out of Oregonon to an apartment in Albin Towers, Washington,
D.C. to live with her, using the pseudonym Dr. Walter Rohner.
The crazier he gets, the more affairs he gets into.
I've noticed so many affairs.
From this guy's full studies, like, it makes sense for the guy.
And he's so insane, and everybody wants to have an affair with him.
Oh, how many people have cloudbusters they can just show off?
That's true, that's true.
And he's got two of them that he can take to Nevada or Arizona.
However, while he was doing this battle in Arizona in May of 1956, one of his associates
sent an accumulator part through the mail to another state, which was in violation of
the injunction that the FDA had put on him through the courts.
And specifically, this piece that was put through the mail was sent to an FDA inspector
posing as a customer requesting it.
So Reich and another associate, Dr. Michael Silvert, were charged with contempt of court.
Reich appealed the lower-coast decision in October of 1956, but the Court of Appeals
upheld it in December of 11th of 1956.
He wrote several times to J. Edgar Hoover, who I'm sure he's come up on the show before,
head of the FBI in the 40s and 50s.
He requested a meeting with him.
He never received a response.
And he appealed to the Supreme Court, which decided on February 25th, 1957, not to review
his case.
On March 12th, 1957, Reich and his colleague Silvert were sent to Danbury Federal Prison.
Oh no.
Richard C. Hubbard, a psychiatrist who admired Reich, examined him on admission.
He recorded paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity, persecution, and ideas of
reference.
The patient feels that he has made outstanding discoveries.
Gradually, over a period of many years, he has explained the failures of his ideas and
becoming universally accepted by the elaboration of psychotic thinking.
The Rockefellers, which he put sick beside because he said Rockefellers, are against
me.
This has been a delusion of grandiosity.
The airplanes flying over prison are sent by the Air Force to encourage me.
Ideas of reference and grandiosity.
On March 19th, Reich was transferred to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary and examined
again.
This time it was decided that he was mentally competent and his personality seemed intact,
though he might become psychotic when stressed.
A few days later, on his 60th birthday, he wrote to his son Peter, who was then 13.
I am in Lewisburg.
I am calm, certain in my thoughts, and doing mathematics most of the time.
I don't know who needs to say that.
Is that what saying him does?
But I don't know.
Why include the math?
I am kind of above things, quote unquote, fully aware of what is up.
Do not worry too much about me.
Though anything might happen, I know, Pete, that you are strong and decent.
At first I thought that you should not visit me here.
I do not know.
With the world in turmoil, I now feel that a boy your age should experience what is coming
this way.
Fully digest it without getting a bellyache, so to speak, nor getting off the right track
of truth, fact, honesty, fair play, and being above board never a sneak.
Seems like a totally sane letter.
Yeah.
It starts off with F, so I mean.
Yeah, he's doing math.
All the time.
Yeah.
Insane people don't do math.
That is a fact.
Oh no.
He then applied for presidential pardon to no avail, and Peter visited him in jail several
times, where one prisoner said Reich was known as the flying saucer guy and the sex box man.
Which are apt.
Reich told Peter that he cried a lot, and wanted Peter to let himself cry too, believing
that tears are the great softener.
His last letter to his son was on October 22nd, 1957, when he said he was looking forward
to being released on November 10th.
He served one third of his sentence.
A parole hearing had been scheduled for a few days before that date, and he wrote that
he and Peter had a date for a meal at the Howard Johnson restaurant near Peter's school.
However, on November 3rd, 1957, Reich failed to appear for roll call and was found at 7am
in his bed fully clothed but for his shoes, and the prison doctor said that he had died
during the night of myocardial insufficiency with sudden heart failure.
Just eight days until his release.
Or at least supposed release.
He was buried in a vault at Organaude that he had asked his caretakers to dig in 1955,
and he had left instructions that there was to be no religious ceremony, but that a record
should be played by Schubert's Ava Maria, sung by Marianne Anderson, and that his granite
headstone should read simply, Wilhelm Reich, born March 24th, 1897, died dot dot dot, because
he didn't know his death.
None of the academic journals really said anything about him or had an obituary for
him, but the Time magazines wrote on November 18th, 1957,
Wilhelm Reich died at 60.
Once famed psychoanalyst, associate, and follower of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Wilhelm Reich
Foundation, lately better known for his unorthodox sex and energy theories, died of a heart attack
in Lewisburg, Federal Penitentiary, Pennsylvania, where he was serving a two-year term for distributing
his invention, the Orgone Energy Accumulator, in violation of the FDA, a telephone boost-sized
device that supposedly gathered energy from the atmosphere and could cure while the patient
sat inside, common colds, cancers, and impotence.
That's the story of Wilhelm Reich and Orgone Energy.
What an incredible story.
That was something.
Now, I want to ask, was there any actual research done into whether this actually had healing
qualities?
There were two trains of thought in my research into this, and I didn't have enough time
to actually look into which one was correct.
The full believers in Orgone Energy say that there are papers out there that show these
things absolutely can cure many things.
There are some who say that it does show some signs that it can help.
I saw a paper that said that it was able to help the germination of seeds that were germinated
inside it.
Okay.
Anything above that, they couldn't see.
And then there were people that found that there was nothing above placebo-level effects.
You would think that, I mean, placebo or not, it's still something, right?
Well, yeah, but you could give a sugar pail instead of building a box for people to sit
in, unless you want four hours of privacy from your wife.
Well, exactly.
I mean, that's enough.
Some people.
Yeah.
And especially when germinating seeds, I mean, how would that be a placebo effect?
It's pretty cut or dry.
It's not really...
And I could not look at the papers that actually cited that, so I'm not sure how official it
is that they did do that.
I can tell you that Albert Einstein laughed at it and said, it's pretty simple, the mistake
you made, and then never looked at it again.
And the guy's pretty credible.
That was my next question, because he pretty much just said you didn't account for it being
colder down below than up high, and then just kind of wrote it off.
But it doesn't seem like he looked at anything else.
Well, he studied it for 10 days and said that was the thing that was happening.
So I really don't know.
But I do know this guy is not taken seriously by anybody.
I could see why a little bit.
But him saying you didn't look at the temperature variance properly doesn't actually say there's
no evidence that this is actually healing anything.
Know what I mean?
Yeah.
And I should also say, especially if you're looking at cancer treatment or any type of
medical treatment, you need to be very careful what you're actually looking at.
If something can cure cancer, it might be that you have some cancer cells in a petri
dish.
If you administer enough of anything to something just grown in a petri dish, it will die.
So just letting something live in a petri dish in a box likely could kill it.
So I haven't looked enough at what his actual studies were.
The turnaround was too tight and I'm not that well versed at reading medical research.
So I don't know if I'm the right person to do that.
Maybe we can talk to somebody someday who can actually read those for us and tell us
what's up.
But at this point, I'm comfortable saying that if nobody has taken this research seriously,
that there might be a reason for it.
Fair enough.
I really enjoyed the ride.
That was a really good one.
That was a nice biography.
And it's not done.
That's the biography, but there is more to it.
Oh, okay.
You know what was not mentioned at all in the entirety of that biography?
Any governmental work, like say on a project called Project Phoenix.
Oh, I didn't even remember.
In fact, he seemed to hate the government.
Like at the end, he hated it.
Yeah, okay.
So how the hell did this guy get involved?
And I found a review of the Montag project by Preston Nichols.
The reviewer is a James D'Amelio, who is a PhD.
He has those extra letters behind his name.
Therefore his opinion holds some sort of level with us.
And I just need to read the whole of this review because I feel like it's going to
shed some light on that episode as well.
Okay, great.
Let's shed some light onto it.
The author asserts that Wilhelm Reich played an important role.
Chapter seven of the book titled Wilhelm Reich and the Phoenix Project identifies Reich's
discovery of Orgone energy, D-O-R, that's the dead Orgone energy, and other details
suggesting the author has studied Reich in some manner.
The author asserts Reich's atmospheric work was also followed by the US government officials
who with Reich's cooperation use his discoveries to develop the radio sound, a device sent
up in weather balloons for measuring upper atmospheric temperature, humidity and pressure.
However, the Montauk project presents the radio sound as a secret, reichian weather
control device developed in collusion with the US government.
A separate one page appendix titled Wilhelm Reich presents a few additional confused and
error filled paragraphs.
The author knows enough about Reich's work to use his terms such as Orgone and D-O-R
buster, which suggests the fabrications are not accidental.
The author cleverly accuses disbelievers and critics of his fantasy tale of engaging in
disinformation, which may be a Freudian slip for the motivation to include Reich in the
book.
For example, and this is a quote from the book, despite what disinformation you may
hear the government already knew that Reich could do and considered him a brilliant man.
They asked for his prototypes and he was happy to oblige them.
Later the author asserts that the reichian weather control aspects of the radio spawn
are cleverly disguised in its electronics because of these precautions the secret was
maintained for over 40 years.
Of course there is not one shred of evidence behind these fairy tales, but no matter, the
book is filled with such paranoid confusion from start to finish.
To summarize my feelings about this book, it is mediocre science fiction, which he said
you could read it as.
Yeah, that sounds like a great fact.
Yeah, oh and sorry that comes out.
The Philadelphia experiment for example is the least documented of any of the supposed
secret government research projects.
I recall reading about this experiment more than 30 years ago as a teenager in science
fiction paperback and comics.
The entire fabric of the story is woven from assertions by a few individuals who claim
to have inside knowledge which came to them after regaining previously blocked memories.
In an introductory passage the author admits the book is but an exercise of consciousness
and states the story is founded upon soft facts and grey facts in contrast to hard facts
backed by documentation.
And so by the author's own admission the Montauk project fails to document any of its
central premises regarding the reported strange experiments or the proposed role of Reich
or Tesla for that matter who does not open the book to apparently in any of it.
Having seen and weathered far more studied attempts to undermine Reich's solid research,
I can't get worked up about this book.
No scholar will take the book seriously because in addition to lacking documentation, the
author admits the disorientation, flights of fantasy, breaking with reality and open
involvement with psychoactive electronics.
My major annoyance is that growing numbers of laypeople who know nothing about Reich
are taking the book seriously.
It is becoming a hot item on the strangeness circuit.
Already I have received a dozen calls asking if the book is true.
Several mail-ordered book catalogs devoted to unorthodox subjects also carry it alongside
other titles on bona fide subjects, letting an aura of legitimacy to it.
And recently the author Nichols has lectured to eager audiences at various free energy
or new age groups.
The Rimm Institute Center in Arizona also scheduled a workshop on time travel in the
alien presence with the following description in their catalog.
Quote, the Montauk Project has been called one of America's greatest modern mysteries.
The story began with the pioneering work of Wilhelm Reich and Nikola Tesla.
Took form in government-sponsored weather control experiments from the early 1940s and
crystallized in the ill-fated Philadelphia experiment on invisibility during World War
II.
The incredible story includes joint human-alien research, abduction and brainwashing, advanced
age regression techniques, psychics linked into Tesla technology, missing Nazi gold,
explorers lost forever in alternate worlds.
Nichols regained the blank memories of his role as chief technician for the project after
years of struggle.
And so the amazing story of Wilhelm Reich's secret government research spreads.
The author of The Montauk Project will likely find a warmer welcome on the public speaking
circuit than anyone who has only researched Reich's findings on fascism, sexuality and
biomes, organ accumulators, cloudbusters or other less spectacular subjects.
In fact, to satisfy the growing public's interest in this fairy tale, a second book,
Montauk Revisited, was recently released along with a video, Montauk Project Tour.
It is a strange social phenomenon indeed.
For those who have been emotionally touched and helped by Reich's discovery, who have
worked hard to keep the organomy clean of mystical distortions, delusions, fabrications
and hostile attacks, the book presents quite a challenge.
The public appears thirsty not for the difficult truths and facts developed in Reich's painstaking
research, but instead for whatever meager scraps of fantasy and mystical delusions which
can be conjured up to erode away those same hard facts.
Reich is more acceptable as the archetypical mad scientist or as part of a secret governmental
experiment, moving back and forth into other dimensions.
Perhaps this is to be expected from a popular culture addicted to violence, mysticism and
horror films, and it makes one wish Reich actually did develop a method for time travel
as there are a few people we'd like to tell were back to the stone age.
This guy seemed to quite like Reich so he's quite pissed off about how he's used, but
that's the only actual connection I could find between Reich and Montauk or Phoenix
Project was that book.
Nobody else makes that connection.
That's hilarious.
So it was to just take the mysticism of the guy and add it into this other weird stuff.
Which is also kind of partially how Tesla has the mystique he has today, but maybe we
could do a Tesla episode in the later days.
Yeah, I'm sure we could.
But yeah, that's Orgone energy and why it has to do with Montauk Project and Wilhelm
Reich.
One last thing, there were the proponents who really believed in Wilhelm Reich that
really came about the 1960s.
Like I said, the term sexual revolution comes from this man.
One of the big ones was William S. Burroughs who wrote A Naked Lunch.
Super weird book.
I believe it was one of the last books that was ever just outright banned in the United
States.
Here's a little paragraph I found about this.
William S. Burroughs was a major proponent of Orgone research, who often included it
as a part of the surreal imagery in his novels.
Orgone interested Burroughs particularly because he believed that it could be used to ease
or alleviate junk sickness, a popular term for heroin withdrawal.
This fitted well in the context of his novels, which were usually narrative recreations of
his own experiences with narcotics and the beat life.
Burroughs explicitly compares kicking the habit to cancer in the novel Junkie and ties it
to the use of Orgone Accumulators.
At the time that Burroughs was writing, Orgone Accumulators were only available from Reich's
Orgone Institute in New York.
Offered for a $10 per month donation, Burroughs built his own, instead substituting Rockwell
for the sheet iron, but believed it still achieved the desired effect.
So major influences through the 1960s believed in this man a lot.
So you really see a lot of his ideas and work kind of just being intermeshed with the 1960s
sexual revolution.
Interesting.
I really like this one.
This is a good one.
It was super weird.
Like, did you expect that?
Not one part of it.
No.
You know what?
I wish my biography would be this.
Like that was a pretty great biography.
I don't think that I could wish for anything more on a biography if it were me.
Sadly, my life was taken another turn.
Where have I gone wrong?
If you want to learn more about Orgone Energy, there are definitely still websites out there
devoted to it where you can learn more.
There was specifically one webpage, the OrganomicScience.org, where you can learn about Orgone therapy.
I definitely tried to leave a lot of the sexual assault stuff out of this episode just because
we are already over an hour.
And that would have just added so much unneeded sadness to this otherwise interesting episode.
Just keep in mind, if we're talking about Wilhelm Reich, there is a lot of sexual abuse
also.
Okay, good to know.
At least alleged.
But yeah, that's what I got.
Chelsea, anything to add?
No, I've added everything that I could think of.
Okay.
Well, with that, I bid you all an Orgonian adieu.
I am Taylor here, Chelsea.
We have been Journey to the Fringe.
Thank you all for listening and we will see you next week.
Bye.
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