Speaker
Speaker Information
One of ufology’s most significant chapters remains one of its most obscure. In the early nineteen fifties, the brilliant scientist and pioneering psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich developed the cloudbuster, a simple yet effective apparatus which, when properly employed, is capable of altering the weather and breaking droughts.
Equally if not more extraordinary, some of these weather modification operations attracted the attention of UFOs – first over southern Maine during his initial 1953 experiment in weather modification, then again above Tucson, Arizona during cloud busting operations the following year.
Reich’s observations, study, and opinions of these often sensationalized and illusive phenomena were well-documented and multiply witnessed.
His conclusions regarding their reality were relentlessly attacked by the elements within the media, the scientific community at large, and the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), intent since 1947 on discrediting his professional reputation due to their unfounded belief that he was nothing more than ‘sex’ quack’ and conman. But like the respected, courageous atmospheric physicist and scientific ufologist Dr. James McDonald (who we know had an interest in Reich’s work), the fact that he publicly dared to take the UFO phenomenon seriously cost him everything.
Reich named the science he pioneered ‘Orgonomy’ and its focus is simple: how energy functions in the living and the non-living realms. As such, it cuts across the scientific disciplines offering ground-breaking applications in fields as diverse as biology, psychology, human sexuality, meteorology, cancer research, sociopolitical behavior, and ultimately, the world of UFO/UAP studies. A brief review of Reich’s life and scientific achievements precede this account of his involvement with UFOs.
Peter Robbins is best known for his UFO/UAP related writing, talks, interviews and broadcasts, but was introduced to the life and work of Dr. Wilhelm Reich as a teenager, ten years prior to to his entry into the field. His interest and involvement in this area of study has been unflagging since then. In 1976 Robbins met Dr. Elsworth F. Baker, the psychiatrist and medical orgonomist who had been Reich’s first assistant for the last eleven years of his life. Shortly thereafter, he became a patient of Baker’s, entering into more than six years of medical orgone therapy as formulated and developed by Reich with Baker. Before his death in 1957, Reich designated Dr. Baker as the person who should carry on his work and legacy and conduct the training of succeeding generations of medical orgonomists. During those years and the years following, Robbins had the opportunity to meet with, interview, and in some cases become friends with some of the individuals who had worked along-side, studied with or been a patient of Reich’s.
Robbins went on to enroll in New York University classes then offered in scientific and social orgonomy, these taught by the Reich scholars Professors John Bell and Paul Matthews. They in turn invited him to become a member of their ongoing Seminar in Social and Scientific Orgonomy, patterned after the seminars which Freud presided over in the 1920s. He was a volunteer fundraiser for the American College of Orgonomy’s (ACO) Building Fund and had two papers on Wilhelm Reich and UFOs published in The Journal of Orgonomy. He was part of a select group of volunteers invited to witness a demonstration of cloudbusting technology that took place on the rural New Jersey property of an ACO supporter. It was a day he will never forget. Robbins first presented on the subject of Wilhelm Reich and UFOs at the ACO’s Princeton New Jersey campus in the early nineties. Since then, he has lectured at international conferences on the life and work of Wilhelm Reich in New York City, Ashland Oregon, Niece France, Karavomilos and Athens Greece, and Rome. His lectures on the life and work of Reich, Reich and 20th Century History, The Einstein Affair: The Documented Meeting Between Albert Einstein and Wilhelm Reich and what came of it, Introduction to the science of orgonomy, Wilhelm Reich and the Mass Psychology of Fascism, and Wilhelm Reich and UFOs have been well received at scientific and UFO conferences both here and abroad, this while his articles have been published in a variety of print and web publications. Robbins’ extensively researched paper, “Politics, Religion and Human Nature: Practical Problems and Roadblocks on the Path Toward Official UFO Acknowledgement” was published by Annals of the Institute for Orgonomic Science in 2011. Additionally, Robbins is a twice invited speaker on UFOs for the students and faculty of the Summerhill School in Leiston, Suffolk, England. The educator and Summerhill founder A.S. Neill and Wilhelm Reich were good friends of more than twenty years.