On March 20, 1956, 10 p.m. a thought of a very remote possibility entered my mind, which, I fear, will never leave me again: Am I a Spaceman? Do I belong to a new race on earth, bred by men from outer space in embraces with earth women? Are my children offspring of the first interplanetary race?
Has the melting pot of interplanetary society already been created on our planet, as the melting pot of all earth nations was established in the U.S.A. 190 years ago? Or does this thought relate to things to come in the future? I request my right and privilege to have such thoughts and to ask such questions without being threatened to be jailed by any administrative agency of society.
(Dr. Reich was not the first man to harbor such radical ideas; nor was he the first to be jailed and executed for publishing them abroad. The Wardens of this prison of the solar system look with extreme prejudice on anyone who even suggests that it is possible to escape, or that there are advanced, loving beings who are ready, willing and able to help us to rehabilitate ourselves and get the hell off the earth!)
Many matters of my existence have, with this question, fallen quickly into place, having been uncertainties only four days ago; the temptation to answer the above question in the positive is irresistible. However, I shall postpone final decision until the facts have spoken. In the meantime I shall proceed on the assumption: It is not beyond actual possibilities that men from outer space have landed (or will in the future land) on earth and have begun to breed here for whatever reason they may have had.
This idea is not as foreign to the human race as it may appear on first encounter. In 1951, I believe, Hollywood introduced a new film with the title "The Day the Earth Stood Still". In this film a spaceship landed on earth; a spaceman, looking much the same as an ordinary, but very intelligent earthman, met with earth people. He fell in love with an earthwoman, made friends with her little boy. He knew mathematics far better than the mathematical genius of the earth century. The earth people got panicky since he was able to stop all earthly traffic by pressing a button. In the end the earthmen did to him what they [17] always do in such cases; they had their military hunt him and shoot him down in the street. He was brought to his spaceship by a robot; a new type of medicine, unknown on earth, revived him.
The film was excellent. It tended to prepare the population for extraordinary events yet to come. It had the right, and not the wrong, ideas about the functioning of cosmic energy used in the propulsion of space-ships. It pictured the spaceman as being akin to earthmen, but different in his attitude to women, in his behavior with a small boy, etc. It conceded that insoluble problems of mathematics were easily solved with his knowledge of the Life Energy. There was no doubt that the Life Energy was meant: Light went on in the space-ship when fingers moved across certain switches; lumination of vacuum tubes can actually be achieved by approaching strong bodily energy fields.
A BIT OF REICH'S OWN STORY
All through the film show I had the distinct impression 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.
I did not at that time have the thought that I could actually be a spaceman's offspring. Without my intention somehow a ball of history started rolling, putting me in the center of space problems: I made actual contact by way of the cloudbuster with luminous objects in the sky May 12, 1954, between 9:40 and 10:45 p.m. (And then he lists the evening planets for 1954.)
During this hour men on earth saw for the first time in the history of man and his science two "Stars" to the west fade out several times when cosmic energy was drawn from them. The shock of this experience was great enough not to repeat such action until Oct. 10th, 1954. The reason for the hesitation was obviously the risk to precipitate an interplanetary war by such experimentation. The event was kept secret.
I am a modest, orderly, rational man. I tend to understate my stature rather than to state my full potential as a scientist. I hate mystical irrationalism (Well, your editor hopes Dr. Reich won't mind this mystical irrationality reproducing part of his banned book in this Journal!); but I believe that even in the most flagrant irrationality there must be some rational truth; there is nothing in the world of men that is not true somehow, somewhere, even if distorted to the utmost; this I used to tell my students. However, I never permitted irresponsible mystification of such serious affairs as interplanetary contact to confuse our grave task.
The Ruppelt report ("The Report On Unidentified Flying Objects") on UFO's clearly reveals the helplessness of mechanistic method in coming to grips with the problems posed by the spacemen. The cosmic orgone energy which these living beings are using [18] in their technology is beyond the grasp of mechanistic science since cosmic laws of functioning are not mechanical, but what I term functional. Even though the mathematics necessary to formulate these problems and make them technologically usable, cannot use any of the old mechanistic methods of thought to cope with the functional OR facts. (See Orgone Energy Bulletin, 1950-1953.)
The helplessness of mechanistic thinking appears in the tragic shortcoming of our fastest jet fighter planes to make and hold contact with UFOs. Being unavoidably outdistanced is not a flattering situation for military pride. The conclusion seems to be correct: Mechanistic methods of locomotion must be counted out in coping with the spaceship problem. Neither propeller or jet will or can ever get us into space beyond.
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 to a SPACEGUN. From then onward, too, our approach to the problem of space became positive, affirmative, confident in using our carefully screened data.
When I saw the "Star" to the west fade out four times in succession, what had been left of the old world of human knowledge after the discovery of the OR energy 1936-1940 humbled beyond retrieve. From now on everything, anything was possible. Nothing could any longer be declared "impossible" . . . There was only one conclusion: The thing we had drawn from was not a star. It was something else, a UFO . . .
* * *
So, Dr. Reich suggested the formation of "a Planetary Professional Citizens Committee with sufficient work democratic organizational and statutory power to take over the responsibility for the direction of the Social Reconstruction of the Planet Earth and of the Ea operations of the future", a work which was already underway with the organizations and functioning of the United Nations. Now, 22 years later, the formation of a UFO research committee is contemplated, which can make an "end run" around the Silence Policy on UFOs of the individual nations.
Dr. Reich's plea to be allowed to think unthinkable thoughts about Flying Saucers and the possibility of his being a spaceman himself received an immediate and vindictive response from the U.S. government. His books were piled on the beach in Maine and burned. He was not only jailed but was suddenly dead in a U.S. prison.
References
- Reich, Wilhelm. Contact with Space: Oranur Second Report, 1951-1956. Orop Desert Ea, 1954-1955. New York: Core Pilot Press, 1957. Print. <http://amzn.to/1tvq9Hp> [Re-edition: <http://wilhelmreichtrust.org/contact_with_space.html>]
- Ruppelt, Edward J. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1956. Print. <http://amzn.to/1pk49v9> [Digital: <http://gutenberg.org/ebooks/17346>]
- Orgone Energy Bulletin. Orgone Institute Research Laboratories, 1949-1953. Print. [Re-editions: <http://wilhelmreichtrust.org/orgone_energy_bulletin.html>]