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The Suppression of Unorthodox Science 241
rose anomalously. Control experiments eliminated all standard explanations
for the temperature rise.
To follow what Reich was doing, he said, a scientist would have to drop
all the intellectual baggage that's connected to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Otherwise, "he will not understand the temperature difference;
he will feel inclined to do away with it as only heat convection or ... this
or that. He will fail to see its orgonomic, atmospheric significance."
Believers in the hypothesis of empty space likewise would not understand
that a vacuum could light up and that the effect can vary with weather
changes, Reich said.
In the orgone accumulator, heat is not produced out of nothing, Reich
said, but rather the moving orgone within it is stopped by the accumulator's
inner wall or the palm of a hand, and is then expressed as heat.
Reich's bion experiments continued, including one type which showed
fogging on X-ray plates from the bions' radiation.
ACCUMULATOR TO ORANUR
Over the following years Reich's patients reported that the orgone accumulator
was helpful in treating many types of disorders such as arthritis,
and especially cancer. He never claimed it was a cure for cancer, but
somehow he gained the reputation of having claimed this.
He moved from New York to a small rural community, Rangeley,
Maine, and set up an institute he called Orgonon. Throughout the 1940s
he researched the orgone as well as kept up a practice and publishing his
own journal The International Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone
Research.
Reich also reported discovering the motor force—he claimed that
enough energy was collected in an orgone accumulator to run an electric
motor about the size of an orange. Plans for the motor were never published
because he said humanity was not ready. As with all orgone phenomena,
such as the accumulator, the orgone motor varied with the weather.
Today, the Wilhelm Reich museum has a film of the motor.
The saga at Orgonon took a frightening turn when in 1951 Reich tried
putting a small amount of radioactive material—radium—in an orgone
accumulator. His hypothesis was that powerful orgone would wipe out the
bad effects of nuclear radiation. He was wrong. Some unknown force, different
and more powerful than the radioactive material itself, went crazy.
The reaction of an area highly charged with orgone and then exposed to
radioactivity caused a local disaster; Reich's "oranur" experiment contaminated
his laboratory, killed mice which he had in the laboratory for experiments
and made everyone at the institute quite sick, including Reich, who
fainted several times in the sickening atmosphere caused by the experiment.