In 1957, Dr. Wilhelm Reich died in a Federal Penitentiary, having lost a battle against his medical/psychiatric contemporaries, as specifically organized against him through the US Food and Drug Administration. The story of Dr. Reich's battle has been discussed and reviewed elsewhere, by many authors, with much thoroughness. Since his death, however, the attacks against those scientists and health professionals who have chosen to follow his leadership have not ended.

The US Government has never admitted to any wrong-doing in this particular case, even though the Reich Legal Case overshadows the Scopes Monkey Trial in both Legal and Constitutional significance . The actions of the US Food and Drug Administration against Dr. Reich were astounding. They fabricated a case against him, never undertook a genuine review and analysis of his findings, engaged in the warrantless invasions of homes, siezed and destroyed scientific instruments. Even books and research journals published by Dr. Reich's institute were siezed and burned in incinerators, up into the early 1960s. Even to this day, 1996, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continues to portray the attack against Dr. Reich as totally legitimate, with no apologies whatsoever. This kind of conduct by the FDA is rather routine today, but it appears they started down this path, towards a medical police state, in the 1950s. I have written another article on this subject, and so will not repeat the incredible facts which demonstrate how the FDA today is more like the repressive Soviet-era Communist Party apparatus than anything which should be allowed to exist in a democratic state.

As a consequence, it should be obvious, that any spoken or written opinions about the work of Dr. Reich, or about the work of others who have followed in his path, or about the question of orgone energy, the orgone energy accumulator, the medical dor-buster, etc., any such opinions which come from the FDA must be viewed with this history of unethical abuse of power in mind, and appropriately be considered disinformation. This term and the conduct which it represents, were developed and perfected during the Soviet era by the Communists. It is deeply regrettable to see that specific parts of the US Government are now infected with such emotionally plagued behavior. Unfortunately, the FDA is not the only such bureaucracy which has been so infected.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a group within its structure, the Atmospheric Programs Office (NOAA-APO), which oversees the regulation of weather modification activities, namely cloudseeding. Since the days when Reich's followers began to examine and evaluate his discovery of the cloudbuster (which is entirely different from cloudseeding), they had been sending documentation to NOAA-APO, following all laws and regulations, even though NOAA had not required this, and even though there are very good reasons to question if the laws governing cloudseeding are applicable to cloudbusting. In my view, cloudbusting is not "weather modification" as conventionally defined, and many workers in orgone biophysics do not use the "control-make" language of the cloudseeders. In any event, I discovered, in the early 1980s, that NOAA-APO had been discarding documentary materials sent to them on the subject of cloudbusting, or putting them into their "crank file", not taking them seriously. This included my own detailed publications on the subject, which provided some of the clearest data-documentation on cloudbusting which had ever been gathered, including my 1979 Thesis undertaken at the University of Kansas, and other papers presented at scholarly societies, such as the Association of American Geographers, Association for Arid Lands Studies, and so on. Worse, the director of NOAA-APO at that time, Mr. Ronald Lavoie, was spreading patently false statements and disinformation about cloudbusting which had serious consequences for our work, undermining various projects being initiated.

When the disinformation campaign at NOAA-APO was discovered, the officials in charge were confronted: We would no longer follow rules and procedures for the governance of "weather modification" if NOAA-APO was going to portray cloudbusting as some kind of fraud or sham science. I demanded that they send me a letter, stating that they at least viewed cloudbusting as an "experimental technique of weather modification", something to set it apart from rain-dancing or fraud. They refused to do so, in spite of the piles of evidence I had sent to them, including a detailed study suggesting very positive results from cloudbusting undertaken by myself, with the peer-review and guidance of a group of professors at the University of Kansas. Shortly after this, I discovered that Mr. Lavoie had left his position at NOAA-APO. Before leaving, however, he had purged NOAA-APO files of most documents sent to him over the previous decade! Learning about this, I requested the subsequent director of NOAA-APO to return to me all remaining copies of documents previously sent to them, to learn the extent of the destruction and purging of documentation. What I received back was about 10% of the materials previously sent to NOAA-APO. In a last effort to provide a secure information source to NOAA, I attempted to donate a set of books and documents to the NOAA Library in Washington, DC, such that officials in the larger NOAA hierarchy would have access to materials the NOAA-APO was willfully suppressing and misrepresenting. NOAA Library refused to accept an outright donation of the materials! From this shabby affair, it was clear: Officials at NOAA were very content and eager to portray cloudbusting as an "unworkable technology", or even as a fraud, in spite of whatever documentation was given to them demonstrating otherwise. Furthermore, certain key officials at NOAA were willing to commit unethical destruction of documents (similar to the burning of Dr. Reich's books) in order to conceal the facts. Surely, there must be a law which prohibits public officials from destroying documents and records which support a scientific position they may personally disagree with -- but this kind of attitude and conduct in the US Government is not restricted to the issue of Reich's discoveries or cloudbusting, and is an unfortunately widespread phenomenon. It is in fact not surprising at all, when one considers that NOAA-APO is dedicated to expensive cloudseeding programs, which are frequently made unnecessary by the natural rainfall cycles which may follow successful Cosmic ORgone Engineering (cloudbusting). (Full documentation on this matter is available.)

NOAA-APO continued to misportray cloudbusting in a false and highly prejudicial manner all the way into the end of the 20th Century, though it is possible with changes in the Federal administration, this might change.

The main organizational entity by which the above kinds of disinformation has been most widely distributed has been the "skeptics groups", led by the larger CSICOP organization. (CSICOP = "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal"). CSICOP is an organization of mostly non-scientists, but it abuses the names and reputations of many well-known scientists by listing them on its masthead. CSICOP does no research, routinely and unethically refuses scientists and others attacked in the pages of it journal Skeptical Inquirer the right of rebuttal, and I have given some details on CSICOP's history and record of attacking Reich in my privately published "Rebuttal" to Martin Gardner's article. "Skeptics" may be rationally viewed much like "religious policemen" within the scientific community. Anything which they do not like, which offends their personal sense of what constitutes genuine science, is attacked. Often in a very malicious and underhanded manner. The ranks of the skeptics groups are filled with "science zealots" who write disinformation articles, hate-mail, and otherwise engage in social campaigns aimed at suppressing things they do not like.

When one of their targets is an academic research scientist, or a medical or health professional, they work together with academic bureaucrats and hierarchies to centrifuge the offending worker out of the system. When the offending professional does their work privately, then the skeptics organize campaigns which interface with government and academic groups, to portray the professional in a malicious manner, with hopes to provoke some kind of "official action" against them. It is not too different from what happens in Islamic countries, or even in moralist towns in the USA, when a birth control clinic opens down the street. Surely all the priests and mullahs are "shocked" and "outraged". A similar emotional reaction occurs in American Universities and Colleges, when unorthodox research is undertaken; I have witnessed and experienced this very reaction myself on numerous occasions, and know about other examples as well. There is not today, for example, a single scientist employed in an American University who dares to openly investigate the biophysical findings of Reich. Many do so privately, or even publish papers on the subject of orgone biophysics under a false name, but none to my knowledge do so openly, in the light of day, for the sole reason that they want to keep their jobs. I was one of the few who dared to do so, but after 10 years of difficult and turbulent situations, finally quit academic teaching entirely to pursue this research through my own private institute. There are other academic scientists who have a strong interest in Reich, but they remain quiet and silent about it, to preserve their employment. It is a sorry situation, indeed. The reader will not appreciate the depth of what I speak about here, unless they have shaken off completely all the self-serving portrayals of "academic freedom" and "freedom of inquiry" which exist in these grand American institutions only with respect to very small and inconsequential questions of science. In fact, for major and fundamental questions of science, especially those which might offend the money-powers which dominate university funding and appointment decisions, these important principles simply do not exist. It is not an exaggeration to say, for substantive and important matters of science, Academic Freedom is Totally Dead in the USA, and it is under significant challenge in other countries as well. The examples which prove this statement are numerous, ranging far beyond the Reich controversy, and will be the subject of a separate article in the near future.

And so, Martin Gardner, Richard Morrock, Joel Carlinsky and other "skeptics" can today write horrible smear articles attacking Reich, DeMeo, and orgonomy in total, and those articles are wilfully and enthusiastically passed around in academic circles and government bureaucracies. Those disinformation experts, who never undertook a single experiment in their entire life, are quoted for their "opinions" about research matters they know little of substance about (or which they purposefully and willfully misrepresent), while dedicated and honest research scientists with decades of focused work on the same questions are ridiculed, attacked and suppressed. This is the unfortunate background to the current disinformation campaign against Reich and his followers in the USA.

To the above, I should note that nearly every scientist who has serious investigated Reich's work has been targeted with hate mail and malicious rumor-campaigns, as was Reich himself. Even personal threats are not uncommon, and these are part of the background reasons why so many of Reich's followers have a very reserved attitude when dealing with the general public. Mr. Carlinsky, author of numerous malicious "skeptic" articles attacking Reich and his followers, once served time in prison for his criminal antics directed against the followers of Reich, and has been a one-man industry in the generation of hate-mail and smear articles. His materials often turns up in highly unusual places. When people do not know about the background history, such materials sometimes reinforce existing fears and prejudices against Reich's work. Usually, fortunately, hate-mail is transparent, and defeats its own purpose. For the more polished attempts to dis-inform, the main weapon we have is the truth. Fortunately, the truth is a very powerful weapon.

The research findings of Wilhelm Reich on sexuality, emotional health, bions, orgone energy, orgone accumulator, oranur phenomenon, and the cloudbuster, continue to gather support and a wider respect with each passing year. The scientific evidence supporting his conclusions continues to build and is very difficult for any genuine and honest natural scientist to ignore, even if they do not agree with all of Reich's conclusions. In the public eye, Reich's work is viewed with increasing interest and seriousness, while the prejudicial opinions and disinformation of organizations such as the FDA, NOAA-APO and the "skeptics", is increasingly discredited.

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