A Skeptical Scrutiny of the Works and Theories of WILHELM REICH

As related to

Energy alphas

By Roger M. Wilcox

Last modified 14-January-2013

In the 1950s, Reich began seeing strange lights in the sky over Orgonon, his laboratory in Rangeley, Maine. He dubbed them "Energy alphas," or "Ea"s, the "alpha" carrying the connotation that they were "primordial" or "first" in some way. Reich was of the opinion that these lights were spacecraft piloted by hostile aliens who were slowly and insidiously turning Earth's natural orgone energy envelope into DOR.

Reich described the Ea's and his activities with them in his last book, Contact With Space, the Second Oranur Report, published by Core Pilot Press in 1957. Only one printing run of this book was ever made, and it is currently only available in bound photocopied form from the Wilhelm Reich Museum Bookstore. There is a good reason why Contact With Space has never been reprinted: it is an embarrassment to even the most credulous orgonomists. If there was ever any doubt that Wilhelm Reich was a raving crackpot, Contact With Space erases it. With this book, Reich joined the ranks of every paranoid conspiracy-minded overimaginative credulous UFO enthusiast that has ever pointed a finger at a weather balloon and screamed, "Space aliens!"

Reich didn't merely see flying saucers. Between 9:40 and 10:45 PM on 12-May-1954, he pointed his cloudbuster at two of them to knock 'em out of the sky:

"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."

— Contact With Space, p. 4 [capitalization in original]

As with any UFO enthusiast's story of strange lights in the sky, there are many, many more possibilities for these lights than alien spacecraft. They could have been the landing lights of airplanes flying in a holding pattern, which would explain why they appeared to "wink out" shortly after the time when Reich happened to point his Cloudbuster in their direction.

— Remainder of article yet to be written. —

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