Fellow-travelers, greetings from the edge of the Great Beyond! As I gaze into the abyss (and perceive, just as Friedrich Nietzsche warned us, that it gazes back at me), visions of the future form in my slightly foggy mind.
Visions of… you! Yes, you, doing something… something obscure, uncommon… something odd, very odd, in this, the 21st Century, the era of people so distrustful they would rather catch a deadly virus than take the vaccine against it!
You are seated atyour computer, reading an ebook!
A very naughty ebook, I might add. How do I know? Certain subtle signs… or not so subtle, if you’re a guy. I never bothered to count, but I seem to have approximately equal sales to both pitchers and catchers, if you catch my drift?
Or maybe it’s a book that makes you uncomfortable, for some reason. It’s a brutally honest tale of childhood, helplessness, and sexual abuse… but far be it from me to dictate your tastes in erotica or pornography!
What’s the book’s title, you ask? Alas, the spirits refuse to adjust the focus on my Beyond-O-Scope, and it’s too blurred to read. But I do know what you are thinking!
You are thinking “Good grief, what a piece of shit! I disagree with everything this author has to say, in this or any other book he or she has ever authored, and I have developed a profound personal dislike for him or her! Furthermore, this writing style sucks donkey dicks! It’s somewhere between reading Vladimir Putin’s annual speech to the Duma, and the science-fiction novels of A. E. Van Vogt! I can’t believe the publisher paid… oh wait…”
And then you remember that you are reading a self-published ebook, and there are no editors, proof-readers or publishers standing in-between you, naked, and the writer’s wounded, bleeding, pus-oozing, maggot-infested ideas.
Nothing at all!
And you smile… yes, smile… because YOU, lucky human, BOUGHT THIS BOOK ON SALE, at discounts ranging from 25-50%! At that rate, even this sordid, cliché-ridden piece of monkey excrement is a bargain!
And bravely, brushing the flies off the carcass of Western literature, you turn back to your screen and read on!
I told you I would not dictate your tastes in sexually titillating reading, and I won’t. But let me politely SUGGEST this:
If you buy my ebooks from Smashwords (adult filter set to “All Erotica”) between March 5-11, including the memoir “Growing Up in the Orgone Box: Secrets of a Reichian Childhood” at 50% off ($3.49), and/or my non-fiction interspecies romance novel, “Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover,” at 25% off ($5.24), YOU WILL NOT BE BORED AND WILL NOT REGRET IT!
Your precious time will be spent reading only carefully-crafted words picked for the peak of perfection, woven into epic, thunderous, yet strangely tender tales, stories that seem hauntingly familiar yet unutterably alien, true stories that no other writer dares tell, and tells as well as me, the one and only Malcolm J. Brenner!
Wait! My astral vision is coming back into focus, somebody has turned the knob, cleaned the lens! I see clearly now, the fog is gone…
…In the future, I see you reading an ebook I wrote. You are nodding, smiling, perhaps chuckling a little, sipping a cup of your favorite beverage and carelessly nibbling an oatmeal cooking with raisins, oblivious to the crumbs falling into your keyboard… and you are HAPPY!
And I am very, very grateful! Thanks, readers, comrades, fellow-travelers, and anybody else who appreciates my stories, or buys them to burn in a self-righteous bonfire! The joke’s on you, asshole, your kid has purloined a copy and is reading it under the covers at night, by flashlight! — Malcolm
The author as an evil genius. Photo by Keithen Martinez.
Hey, gang, here I go again! Only I lied when I wrote that headline, because these babies are brand new bargains and rarin’ to go! Drive ’em off the lot for up to 1/2 price, no trade-in required and no tiresome negotiations! I just didn’t think you’d believe me if I said that in the headline!
Yes, it’s the annual Summer/Winter Sale at Smashwords, my favorite purveyor of e-literature. Why? Because, with exquisite taste, they published me, when all other e-book distributors gave me either derisive scorn, or mocking laughter, at the thought of publishing a human-dolphin romance novel!
Well I’ve shown them, haven’t I? Since 2010, over 2,150 copies of Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover sold in 18 countries, not including South Korea, which for some reason has a ban on Western books going even to U.S. service personnel, but a psychiatric institute in Beijing did order a copy to complete their collection on decadent, imperialistic Western sexual perversions, I guess. Got to keep up with trends in mental illness, after all, and delphinophilia is one of the latest!
(When looking for my books in Smashwords, be sure to set Filtering in the blue bar at the top of the page to Include all Erotica, otherwise you’ll never see them!)
To get a 25% discount on Wet Goddess regular price of $6.99, use this code: WE48B.
Not only that, but the memoir that rips wide-open the weird, creepy, seamy side of my childhood, and exposes New Age psychiatrist Dr. Wilhelm Reich for the idiotic fraud he was, Growing Up in the Orgone Box: Secrets of a Reichian Childhood, is on sale for 50% off!
What’s it like to be only 5 years old and lying on a couch, butt naked, with a dark, bitter man staring at you, who is going to hurt you, molest you and cause you only pain? And soundproof walls and a locked door stand between him and your father?
This book tells that story, reveals my mother’s callous indifference to my welfare, and exposes the dangers of believing in pseudo-science, or any unwarranted belief system whether religious or not, rather than your own child.
To get a 50% discount on Orgone Box regular price of $6.99, use this code: BJ25B
The Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale lasts from July 1-July 31, and they call it that because when it’s summer in this hemisphere it’s winter Down Under, right? Right!
And, maybe, I will get out an e-book copy of my straight, heterosexual sex-with-an-alien science-fiction novel Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair in time for the sale. I’ve had some people who don’t like the audio book asking for it, and it’s time I did it, because it sure is gathering dust in paperback! Stranger things have happened, pigs have flown.
But basically you should buy my books for 2 reasons:
1) They are supremely entertaining, if weird, stories that happen to be true, and
2) I need to increase my gross income, so I can support my writing habit. And I’m Jonesing bad, man, bad!
NEWS FLASH: At precisely 8 p.m. on June 30 (if hostess TerriLee has her act together, likewise me, and the internet gods smile upon us), I will be a guest, for the second freaking time, on the podcast True Crime & Coke. This marks a new level of sophistication in my career as a dolphin evangelist, because it’s the first time anyone has asked me to be on a second time!
But this time, the subject won’t be those clever dolphins and their unstoppable sex drives. Instead, it will be two experiences in my life which affected me profoundly: The influence of the mad 1950’s pseudo-scientist Wilhelm Reich on my family when I was a child, documented in my memoir Growing Up in the Orgone Box;and, decades later, in my 30’s, learning to become a Witch (yes, not a warlock) from my first wife Seafoam, only to suffer, some 20 years later, a complete loss of my faith in ritual and magic as my marriage to my second wife (I can’t remember her magical name, so I’ll just call her as I do in my most recent science-fiction novel Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair, Susie Louise) crumbled around me, taking my profession, home, family and sanity with it.
The late Dr. Wilhelm Reich with his “orgone energy cloud buster,” a claimed weather modification device which ran on bluster and pseudoscience.
I don’t know exactly how long the program will be, 1-2 hrs. (I can’t go much longer than that, especially starting at 8 p.m.) is the usual, or whether listeners will be able to ask questions by text or call in. All that is to be determined, is above my pay grade, is being contemplated by cool and objective minds far greater than mine… or any humans! Muuu-hahahahaha! But, if you’re not too busy digging your new flower bed in the evening hours, or working on a canning project, or finding a cleaning solution that remove those stubborn blood stains from the curtains, why don’t you tune in?
Members of the Neo-Pagan community particularly invited, not because I’m going to try to talk you into or out of anything, but maybe you can find something in my story to relate to. After all, who among us has not, at some time, doubted the efficacy of their magic? And Reichians? Sure, they can listen in if they want, and learn that their “Great Man” (Reich’s own term for himself — modest, much, Wilhelm?) had serious feet of clay. A man who, despite having written a textbook called Character Analysis, proved to be an absolutely clueless idiot when it came to analyzing the character of his closest associates.
What more can I say? I’m going to reveal some really awful family secrets? Yes. I’m going to spill my guts? I’m going to set my hair on fire? Sorry, no seppuku, no ignitions, but, as said of the celebrated Mr. Kite in the Beatles’ song,
“A splendid time is guaranteed for all, and tonight Mr. Kite is topping the biiiillllll!” (Cue the calliope.)
Cover by Thea Boodhoo, creative artist extraordinaire!
Hey, gang!
And I mean that not in the sense of “gang,” as in The Warriors, but more the way it addressed all the readership of MAD Magazine, the coolest comic of the 1950’s and the hippest of the 1960’s long before the Beatles toured American, without regard to race, sex, gender, ethnicity, nationality, or whether you were the White Spy or the Black one — that kind a gang, a communal, non-violent cavalcade of young minds all impressed by Mad’s humor and savvy insights into the materialistic, middle-class world of suburban America, exposing things like the KKK and sexism long before it was done in the popular media — yes, that kind of gang, dear reader, one that requires no iniatory offering or ritual, no scarification, no teardrop tattoo under the left eye, and let’s not go any further than that —
Having thus allayed the “gang” issue, we turn now to the central theme of this post, which is that I am one again having a
SCREAMING BIG SALE ON eBooks AT SMASHWORDS!
One Week Only, March 3-7, get your coupon codes here:
Wet Goddess, XG95GOrgone Box, PT69X
If you are overseas, you are advised to take advantage of this to avoid excessive shipping charges on my books, which weigh about 1 lb. (0.45 kg.) and cost to ship anywhere from somewhat less than the retail price of the book ($18.95 + tax where applicable) to about 60% more for distant places like Australia and New Zealand (although, as regular readers of this blog know, I have lost all respect for the customs, laws and regulatory bodies of that puritanical little nation since my struggle with a radio station down there, and isn’t simply owning a copy of Wet Goddess punishable by being nibbled to death by sheep?).
While applicable state & local taxes will still apply, it will be on a price that is 25% off retail in the case of the ever-popular non-fiction novel Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover, and 50% off my childhood memoir, Growing Up in the Orgone Box: Secrets of a Reichian Childhood.
Both ebooks retain all the content and most of the photos of the original trade paperback, as allowed for by layout.
What’s that, you ask? Why is Orgone Box cheaper? Well, for one thing, it didn’t take me 37 linear years of my life, or 24 work years if you count the 13 when I put it aside and didn’t work on it at all, to write. A couple of years after I finished the dolphin novel, the determination to write this factual book, and document the evil a pedophile child psychiatrist brought to me and hundreds of other innocents and their families in the name of practicing Wilhelm Reich’s bogus “orgone therapy,” became overwhelming. Although I had planned to do another project at the time, I put it aside and began to obsessively gather the details needed to write about my twisted childhood in greater depth, while at the same time being utterly true to my own memories.
Another reason is it’s not currently available in trade paperback or any other printed or audible form, this is the only way you can acquire it, and it hasn’t sold nearly was well as the dolphin book, which is going on 2,100 copies, or the UFO book, maybe 200. Many copies of the original, and only, printing of 50 books, went to my friends and family. While I would like to reprint it in trade paperback, don’t hold your breath, because only 3 months after I paid my printer for 50 copies of WG, they have nearly all sold! In February, yet, the driest of dry months!
To be fair to Reich’s sometimes-reputation as a (self-proclaimed) “great man,” depending on whom you ask, the book also features a short introduction by my brother Hugh R. Brenner, RN and a skilled psychiatric nurse, who practices Reich’s body therapy without all the malignancy and rampant sexual abuse of this other Reichian’s sessions. Hugh learned orgonomy from Dr. Morton Herskowitz, D.O., who represented the left wing of Reich’s students, having been the last one to accepted by Reich for training. My years-long therapy with him is also discussed in Orgone Box. Unlike the other, he did me no harm, but in all that time, he never guessed or figured out that the other so-called Reichian (I won’t humanize him by calling him out) had molested me! Instead, he attributed all the quirks of my wounded psyche to my narcississtic mother, and there was precious little he could do about her except try to strengthen my self-esteem to resist her.
NOTE: You will have to manually set your filter to Allow All Erotica, including taboo topics, to be able to locate Wet Goddess. Apparently having loving sex with a bottlenose dolphin is taboo, but non-consensual oral sex with innocent 5-year-olds is not! I just wish there was some kind of ethical consistency here, but Smashwords sometimes has to do what the the insurance companies tell them to, just like the rest of us bozos.
And that’s all I really have to say! You who snoozes, loses, take advantage of this offer to read my books if you live outside the U.S.A.!
The first installment in this series dealt with my brief association, in late 1974, with Dr. Richard A. Blasband, a well-known orgonomist, and how I came to be present at a demonstration by Blasband of the “cloud buster,” a device Reich invented originally to remove poisonous nuclear radiation from his Maine laboratory which later turned out to be a boffo weather control machine, capable of making it rain in the Arizona desert (or so Reich said)!
The second installment dealt with the actual circumstances of Blasband’s demonstration and technical details about how I photographed it on Kodak Infrared Ektachrome with Blasband’s top-end Topcon camera and wide-angle lens. What I did not report, at that time, but which I remember distinctly, is thinking I should take photographs with a large amount of sky in them, because if anything was going to appear, it would probably appear there. Given what was recorded on the slides, I find this premonition eerily prescient.
This final installment deals with unpacking the 35mm. slides, my analysis and that by some technical representatives from Eastman Kodak. It also exposes the dreadful fate that befell the original slides, and why we have to work from custom high-quality 4×5″ negatives.
On October 27, 1974 I wrote: We have some very, very interesting things on film!! On the day I photographed, we got some very strange things. On one shot of the orgonomists we have something like this:
Then, when Blasband was busting on Oct. 11 we got some really weird stuff. (The 36 exposure roll of infrared slides was unfinished when I was done shooting, having about 12 shots left on it, and the film being an expensive special order item, I gave the camera to Blasband to finish up the roll and turn it in to Kodak for processing. Why I don’t think he messed with the film will be explained later on.) I don’t know who was taking the photos – we got some strange, ring-like formations in the sky, like this:
We can see, very faintly on projections something like a dome – but the fuckers are transparent, except for the rim lights!! We’re fascinated. In one series a small brilliant red light appears on the ground to the W. when the ring is directly in the CB beam – ring disappears, dot back near CB – ring appears to W. of CB, dot under it!! Don’t think these are lens flares – they’re there on the shots at f16 but not at f5.6. Very odd…
On Thursday, November 28, 1974 I again met with Blasband at his laboratory outside Doylestown, Pa. He operated his cloud buster, and we took more Super 8 movies and 35mm. slides, but this time with a camera borrowed from my friend Bill Hayward and conventional Fujichrome 100 slide film, which I had observed was better at discriminating closely-matched neutral tones than Kodachrome or Ektachrome. There were no results out of the ordinary. The next day, Friday, November 29:
…Then I took the slides over to Kodak (field office) in Ft. Washington and showed them to a Technical Rep named Barry DuBois (that really was his name!). Fortunately he’s very interested in UFOs! – he has good eyes and saw all kind of things in them. He agreed that the strange objects are much too uniform to be defects in the film & lens flare, and suggested we contact one of the UFO organizations such as NICAP (National Investigations Committee on AerialPhenomena), which I guess we’ll do – after I consult Blasband.
These are my last journal notes on the cloud busting demonstrations with Dr. Blasband and the resulting UAPs; I’m not sure the things I photographed are “objects” so much as phenomena. At this point we should look at scans of the original slides, but I have a sorry, stoned confession to make. After showing the slides to the Kodak tech-rep and friends, I tried a couple of times to have them copied with no success; the weird colors of the Infrared Ektachrome defeated the Kodak duplicating film, and the copy slides were either over- or under-exposed. So I put the slides away and didn’t mess much with them until I was running a B&W photo lab in Seattle in the early 1980s.
At that time I edited the slides and had a custom color lab we did business with make 4×5″ inch (10×12.5 cm.) color internegatives from them, including the complete area of the slide to the edges of the mount window. Color negatives offer a greater range of correction than trying to print from color slides, which is notoriously fickle, and the oversize negatives have virtually no grain and capture every bit of the slide’s resolution.
After that, the slides were again put away until the mid-1990s, when I was working as a reporter for a daily newspaper in Gallup, N.M. One assignment brought me in touch with some experienced UFO investigators from MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), and I asked them where I should send the slides to have them computer-scanned and professionally analyzed. “Send them to optical physicist Bruce Maccabee, he’s excellent and will take good care of the originals,” they said. “He really knows his shit.”
But for some reason I do not now recall, I didn’t follow this great advice. Instead, I somehow got Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Ph.D., mixed up with Village Labs’ Jim Dilletoso, a rather notorious person in the UFO community. Notorious for his flakiness and unreliability. And that’s exactly what happened to the slides.
After Dillettoso had received the slides, I didn’t hear from him, so I called. “These are remarkable!” he said. “There’s nothing like them in my database of over 10,000 images! I need more time to study them.”
And that was the last from Jim Dilletoso. The slides disappeared into the gaping maw of Village Labs, AND HAVE NEVER BEEN RETURNED! So much for Mr. Dilletoso; fortunately, we still have the internegatives to study. Let us turn to them. The 4×5″ internegatives were re-photographed with an iPhone camera, then inverted into positives in PhotoShop.
Cloud busting image #1: Overall view of the site.
The first photo shows a general overview of the site, with the upper half sky. The cloud buster is out of frame. In the sky are 4 transparent “orbs,” and to the left, behind the power lines, is a bright curved line of light of unknown origin.
The white spots are dust on the internegative, except for the one immediately to the left of the curved line, which is part of the image. This raises two questions:
1) Are the orbs due to lens flare from glare on the chrome of the car, just below the trees on the left side? No. Lens flare due to light sources in the picture is always transposed to the opposite side of the image and inverted; thus, if the orbs were from the glare on the car, they would appear at the extreme right of the image, slightly above the centerline.
2) Is the curved line of light an artifact? No. The Kodak reps checked the surface of the slide, and the curved line is not a scratch in the emulsion or any other kind of defect. It was in the scene, recorded by the Ektachrome Infrared film, but otherwise invisible to the eye at the time.
The cloud buster, pointing north at about 30 degrees elevation, and the body of water nearby for the tubes, visible between the tires.
The second image shows the cloud buster itself, no humans present in the photo, with details of its construction revealed. In the sky there is another invisible phenomenon.
The close-up shows another curved line in the sky, with a lighter patch apparently emanating from it, expanding in a downward direction. I have no idea what the fuck this is, but it was in the original scene, invisible to the eye and is not an artifact of any type. Everything else in the sky, that is, black lines or white spots, is dirt or dust. Sorry about that.
The cloud buster in scene, pointing 90 degrees left from last photo, presumably west. The dark circle in the sky near the center frame is an artifact.
The third image, somewhat under-exposed, shows the farm structures and a house near the location of the cloud buster. Dr. Blasband rotated the tubes approximately 90º left, and began “drawing” (the orgonomists’ word for what a cloud buster does) from the west. The dark circular area is an artifact of the copy process, but in there we can see something that is recorded on the film:
It’s that odd swatch of light again! What is it doing there, and more fundamentally, WHAT THE HELL IS IT? A close examination shows there is also a faint black line on the lower side of the wider white line. We will explore the possibility that the photos were faked in one way or another shortly.
The final photo shows the gathered orgonomists near the cloud buster.
Note the very odd globular light forms in the sky. They resemble “orbs,” in that they are both luminous and transparent, but anyone can create beautiful orbs with a spray bottle and a cheap camera – cheap, because they have the flash close to the lens, and that’s what’s needed to create the phenomenon best known by its SCUBA divers’ name: BACKSCATTER.
Above, this was created with a $50 digital camera and a spray bottle. Just blow some spray into the air in front of the lens and take a picture, and oh, make sure the flash fires, because it’s the reflected light from the flash that makes the suspended droplets appear luminescent. I’ve diagnosed a couple of “paranormal” photos of orbs that have been taken this way – the same thing can happen with raindrops, dew, drifting mist, an insect or any other reflective object in front of the lens – and the photographers always seem to hate me, for some reason, when I tell them their orbs aren’t the ghost of Aunt Laurie, or visitors from the Pleiades. I really don’t understand it. Don’t people want to know what they’ve photographed?
But back to cloud buster photo #4. There was, of course, no mammoth spray bottle to provide droplets, and no flash on the camera, although the sun, coming from behind the photographer, will do the same job. The shadows of the orgonomists show this to be the case, the sun is directly behind me. There are 4 orbs, and they appear to be in the shape of a triangle, with the fourth orb located on an imaginary straight line between two points of the triangle. Of course, please note that ANY 3 POINTS not in a straight line will be automatically categorized by the human mind as a triangle, be it obtuse, acute or right angle.
The last photo is a detail of #4 showing the orbs with greater clarity. (The tiny white spots are, alas, dust.) The triangle at first appears to be a right angle, with the bottom almost parallel to the ground below. The two orbs denoting the ends of the hypotenuse are of approximately similar size and color, while the two other, smaller orbs have a bluish cast. If you draw all the lines from orb to orb, this displays ALL the triangles: obtuse (the lower three orbs), acute (the upper three orbs) and right angle (the overall figure)!
The orbs don’t appear to be reflections from specular highlights in the scene, like the bright chrome on the car; they’re not the right shape or in the right position.
This invisible figure is just utterly weird. I have no idea what is causing the orbs or arranging them in this peculiar fashion, and although I am no statistician I can tell you the odds against this happening by random chance, and my photographing it without being able to see it, are millions to one.
Which raises a question: Were these photos faked? Short answer: I think not, for several reasons. As I remember it, I shot about 24 pictures on the 36-exposure roll. At this point I could either have rewound the film and developed it, in which case the last 12 pictures would have been wasted (Kodak returned them as unmounted, short black strips of film), or I could leave the camera with Dr. Blasband, let him finish the roll shooting something else and have the film developed. I opted for the latter, because, well, I’m cheap, and the thought of throwing away 1/3 of a roll of special-order Kodak slide film didn’t appeal to me. So Dr. Blasband had the loaded camera for about a week before he finished the film and sent it to Kodak for developing.
During that time, the possibility exists that Blasband did something to the film to create these images, but although I acknowledge that, I think the odds are vanishingly small. Let me explain. The typical way to produce these images, which are lights against a darker background, is by double-exposure. This involves either shooting the two overlapping exposures in quick succession or rewinding the film and running it through the camera a second time to add the supplemental exposures afterward. The Beseler Topcon Super D camera we used had no provision for making intentional double exposures; indeed, there was a wind/shutter interlock against it! It wasn’t until later that professional-grades cameras began to incorporate this feature for special effects photography.
The other method, rewinding the film, requires that you line up the film while loading it accurately both times; usually you mark the 35mm. film leader with a Sharpie, and line this up with some part of the camera, so that both exposures overlap on the same frame line. Then you close the camera and wind to the first frame where you want to add a lighter object and photograph it against a black background, being careful to place it where you want to appear in the final photo. Since the film is slides, the original film is developed to produce the final image, and there is no printing process involving negatives to manipulate the image, add or remove things from it. Slide film is the original WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)! Since I’d never marked the film the first time I loaded it, Blasband would have no reference point to re-load it, and his second batch of double-exposed images might not have lined-up with the first, which I shot. It would be one hell of a crap shoot to get them right!
Finally, although Dr. Blasband owned a couple of expensive cameras, he was basically a photographic novice and didn’t possess either the technical skills or the imagination to create these vague images. And why on Earth would anyone who was going to go to perpetuate a UFO fraud make such a poor, insubstantial one? I’d have gone out of my way to make it much more impressive than this stuff!
Dr. Blasband shot the rest of the roll taking pictures of random things around his property, and I think his wife took a few of him. Of course, the infrared film does nothing for his complexion. And Jim Dilletoso, damn his fucking ass, still has the original slides.
Conclusions
What conclusions can be drawn from these four images? We will not speculate, but deal strictly with the evidence, what was recorded on the film.
Four exposures (1/9) of the Ektachrome Infrared film revealed strange aerial optical phenomena, luminous in the IR range but invisible to the eye.
Are these phenomena connected to the demonstration of the cloud buster? There just isn’t enough information to say either way, and we don’t have a big enough sample to know if these phenomena occur when the cloud buster isn’t operating. It is tempting to connect the two events, the CB demonstration and the appearance of the luminous phenomena, but we can’t do it with any certainty.
The luminous phenomena don’t appear to be artifacts, film defects or processing errors, such as scratches of the emulsion on the film. They don’t appear to be any type of lens flare or other optical artifacts that I know of. The Kodak tech rep Barry Dubois (remember that name?) confirmed this.
The luminous phenomena all appear in the sky. Three of them are similar, a small curved white line of light, while the fourth is a meta-triangle made of orbs, which should not, under these conditions, be recorded.
The curved white line of light moves around from picture to picture; it is apparently something out in the environment. One of the photos shows what appears to be a hazy cone of light extending earthward from the line of light.
It’s unlikely, due to Dr. Blasband’s lack of technical expertise and the characteristics of the camera used, that the optical phenomena recorded are the result of deliberate deception, lens artifacts or special effects.
The event appears to be a singularity. It would be interesting to repeat this photographic experiment at other cloud busting demonstrations and see if anything is recorded; modern digital cameras and camcorders can be modified to record IR and/or UV light.
I have no fucking idea what is going on here. If you do, please write it down on a scrap of paper, enclose with $20 in Bitcoin and mail it to me at the Coyote Enrichment Foundation, Easy Street, Port Charlotte FL 33***. Unfortunately it won’t be tax deductible, but I will ask my private daemon, a python, to give you a hug.
Doubtless if anybody into Reich’s “orgone energy” shit reads this stuff, they’ll be pissed that I’m skeptical and report that this all reinforces Reich’s work. As I pointed out above, we simply don’t have a large enough sample to make this conclusion with any certainty. If we had photographed 100 cloud busting demonstrations, and these luminous phenomena showed up in a statistically significant portion of them, we might be able to conclude that they do tend to appear more often at CB demonstrations than not, but we STILL would not have established any cause and effect, let alone established any proof of Reich’s outlandish claims.
The film project with Dr. Blasband fell apart when I submitted a demo film that was misfortunately lacking a soundtrack to a competition for funding. I began moving away from everything having to do with orgone energy and Reich’s work as I got a better, adult understanding of what science is: a laborious, methodical process of failing to prove something wrong. Only then can we assume it is correct, until a better model comes along and pushes it aside. Reich, as anyone familiar with his career knows, hopped from one field of science to another like a frog in a pond full of lily pads, never staying with any one long enough to master it and disrespecting the accepted masters when they failed to agree with him. I went back to Florida and lost contact with Blasband, who passed away some years ago. I don’t know what happened to his cloud buster.
The odd photos I recorded at that event on windy day outside Doylestown remain a mystery, like many other things in my life. I refuse to speculate on what they might be, where they come from or if they have any intentions, and I am reconciled to the fact that I’ll never know much more about them than I do now. These photos, however, do bear mute witness to the fact that they were there, and so was I.
The first installment of this three-part series dealt with my involvement in the 1970’s with Dr. Richard Blasband, a follower of the late misfortunate Neo-Freudian psychiatrist Dr. Wilhelm Reich, who claimed to have discovered “orgone energy” in the 1930’s, a primordial substance that explained… everything! Except why Reich was such a narcissist, comparing his heavy-handed prosecution by the FDA to the cruxifixction of Christ, for instance. Got it?
The third part will deal with the analysis of the photos taken at the cloud busting training session.
This installment is taken directly from my journal That Ol’ Tripe-Face Boogie, a spiral-bound notebook dated beginning January 1974. Dr. Blasband’s cloud-busting training session occurred on September 28, 1974, a Saturday.Sections in italics are my editorial clarifications of things that need to be explained in context.
…So we come to today (actually the previous day, as this was written at 3:30 a.m.). Hugh (my brother Hugh R. Brenner, R.N., then receiving orgone therapy himself) and I set off for Blasband’s early but he took a long time showering at Rena’s so we got there 20 minutes late – not that it mattered much. Blasband was in the middle of a very detailed lecture to a group of about a dozen ergonomists and others – (M.D. Charles R.) Konia, Sally L****’s orgonomist, was there, looking very strange – Gypsy-ish, with swarthy skin and heavily lidded eyes.
After about an hour’s lecture we removed to the field with the CB (cloud buster in Reichian jargon) in it. It was a beautiful day but unfortunately no clouds. The air was very clear but not quite sparkling. I was filming with the Beaulieu (Blasband’s movie camera, a very expensive French Super-8 mm. with an excellent Angenieux zoom lens) and trying hard to remember all the controls – I think it’s not well-human engineered but I think I did everything right. Blasband put the (cloudbuster’s flexible metal) tubes in the water (a pond) and pointed it W. Within 5 minutes a strong breeze had sprung up. The breezes had been fairly random all day, more or less from the east, but this was constant and from the W. I couldn’t see the discharges on the tubes too well – only a slight purplish flame – but we noticed that the W –> E shimmer of the atmosphere OR (orgone energy or “heat waves”) stopped and went straight up. I tried to film it but the 66 mm. telephoto (on the Beaulieu) wasn’t quite long enough. 100 mm. would be good.
I had Blasband’s Beseler Topcon (a 1960’s Japanese 35mm. camera equivalent to the Nikon-F) full of EK IR (Ektachrome Infrared, a unique Kodak color slide film that recorded red and infrared light in false colors) rated at 100 ASA (now ISO) thru deep red filter and took a lot of photos (with a Topcon RE 35mm. f2.8 lens) at 1/125 @ f5.6 and f16, for bracketing. 5.6 was the meter reading off the grass. I was getting pretty close to the tubes & began to feel dizzy and slightly sick. Blasband had pointed out a kind of patchy blackening of the horizon of a hill to the W. Now the blackening was swirling in a cyclonic fashion! I had never seen anything like it before! It looked like Cecil B. DeMille special effects. I could just barely perceive it. How do we record it on film? It reminded me of a passage in (Arthur C. Clarke’s science-fiction novel) Childhood’s End where Clarke describes the Overmind manifesting itself.
I tried shooting the pipes in innumerable different ways. My spaghetti-legs tripod didn’t help. Finally I felt I had enough. I was so highly charged I felt like I was tripping. B. then swung the CB to the north. Within a minute, the wind had changed direction! That was eerie. I felt like an observer at a magic ritual – things unseen, powers almost beyond control surging around me. I shot the tubes both in normal speed and at 4 fps. at f22, shutter closed to 1/2, 1 stop underexposed. We went back – I’d shot 2-1/2 rolls, or about 7 minutes worth – good tie-in for the footage we already have.
I just threw up twice in the bathroom. 5:20 a.m. This could have any one of 4 causes: 1) The Sherman’s cigarettes I’ve been smoking. As of now I stop smoking cigarettes forever. 2) The dinner – although it wasn’t all that bad; ham, sweet potatoes, string beans. 3) The wine and beer I had at Rena’s (our stepmother). 4) Overcharge from the CB, or 5) all of the above. Sometimes I do abuse my system a little… (writing about sister’s birthday party). …In retrospect, even tho’ there were no clouds to bust, the demonstration was very impressive.
(Historical note: I came to my senses quite suddenly one afternoon, while talking with a customer over a joint in the back of my Seattle photolab, Superposter. When I told him about having had orgone therapy, he said “Huh! You went through that shit?”)
(I’d never heard anyone refer to Reich’s work like that, but his words seem to coalesce several suspicious, subversive thoughts about Reich’s work, the objectivity of his science, the reality of “orgone energy,” his self-appointed reputation as a Great Man, his “UFO experiences,” his closeness to the Great Cosmic Orgone, whether the USAF was REALLY watching over him as he believed, his “murder” in a federal penitentiary, how crazy the people who followed him were, etc., and from that point on I found myself falling out of love with Herr DoktorReich. His feet of clay had left tracks all over my life.)
(But, at the time this was written, I was still amenable to explaining everything in orgonomic terms, hence the comments about the “purplish flame on the tubes” (retinal rhodopsin fatigue, when you gaze steadily at any object) and the swirling cyclonic formation — I was obviously seeing something, but I don’t attribute it to the demonstration of the cloud buster any more. I am absolutely certain that “orgone energy” as Reich described it, a bio-field or life-energy that apparently extends into the Universe at large, and moves everything, doesn’t exist, and Reich’s headlong plunge into self-delusion about it only shows how increasingly narcissistic and crazy he became toward the end of his life.)
In the 1970’s I was still under the thrall of my family’s very own “orgone guru,” the late, absolutely bonkers Austrian Freudian psychiatrist Dr. Wihelm Reich. I lent what skills I had to proving to skeptics that “orgone energy,” which I really can’t explain here except to say that it explains EVERYTHING,existed, could be measured and, possibly, photographed with the appropriate equipment, filters and film.
Thus it was I found myself working with Dr. Richard A. Blasband,one of the last orgonomists to be trained by Reich,a rather humorless man in his mid-40’s who had established an orgonomically-correct (no fluorescent lights, not near a nuclear power plant, etc.) laboratory in the countryside outside Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
The thing that made Blasband interesting was that he had constructed a “cloudbuster,” a purported weather-control device with which Reich claimed he had made it rain in the Arizona desert, among other achievements. You can see something like it in the Kate Bush/Donald Sutherland video “Cloudbusting,” but that’s sort of the Terry Gilliam version of one; Reich’s, as you can see, was much less complicated!(The photo is uncredited and in the public domain.)
The Mad Scientist with his Weather Machine
Basically this isn’t a machine at all, as it has no obvious energy input, and you can only detect the output if you are a sufficiently “open” or “sensitive” or “unarmored” or “orgastically potent,” which all are ways of saying you’ve paid some Reichian therapist (they drift rather far afield, these days, from what Reich wrote) a lot of dead presidents to treat the chronic muscular tensions that are the root of all your neuroses, psychoses, repressed desire to kill/fuck your mother/father/poodle/FFA project or whatever is bothering you.
The cloudbuster’s nothing but a bunch of telescoping aluminum tubes on a gimbaled axis that allows it to be swung and aimed at any point of the sky, preferably from the horizon to the zenith. The tubes, in turn, are, by Reichian logic, grounded by connecting them to a body of water (running is best)with flexible metal BX cable that has been wrapped in adhesive cloth tape. The theory is that the cloud buster will then “draw” the orgone energy from the sky to the body of water, and, depending on how you manipulate it, make all the clouds in the vicinity of where you point it either grow, or shrink.
(Hey, clouds are either doing one or the other, so you’re bound to win, right?)
With this contraption, Reich’s heirs (Such as Charles Kelly, James Trevor Constable, Blasband et. al.) claim to be able to do wondrous things such as change the path of mighty hurricanes by influencing the Earth’s “orgone energy envelope,” which is the force that controls hurricanes, natch.
(Hey, it’s Reichian physics, the less objective sense it makes, the greater its appeal!)
Let’s get one thing straight: Reich was trained as an M.D. and a psychiatrist, and that’s what he should have stuck with. His fascination with the microscope and his discovery of the “bions” (basic units of life) was the beginning of his endless fall down the rabbit hole of his own ego. Just because a man has a couple of interesting social ideas or espouses an appealing philosophy or writes a textbook titled “Character Analysis” doesn’t mean he, himself, can’t be totally fooled by a slick, sadistic, pedophile quack psychiatrist named Dr. Albert Duvall, who will molest virtually all of his pediatric patients as well as break his Hippocratic and psychiatric oaths with his adult patients.
Dr. Albert Duvall, the serial pediatric sadist, with his cloud buster. Notice the pack of cigarettes in the shirt pocket. Duvall always stank of cigarettes.
Hmm, this piece is getting rather long, since I still have the original notes from the experiment, and the rather extensive analysis of the slides to refer to. Perhaps I should make this Part 1, and continue later in the day, it being 12:07 a.m.? Perhaps indeed.
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Six tons of them. Reich had quite a prodigious output. None of it what anyone who knows what real science is would dare call “science.”
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Malcolm J. Brenner 