by Kenn Thomas
Conspiracy Author and Investigator

December 12, 2005

from PhenomenaCineScape Website

In one version of the story, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was flown to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio on February 20, 1954 to see the debris and dead bodies from the infamous UFO crash of 1947 at Roswell, New Mexico. Some versions weave a far more elaborate tale and maintain that Ike met with human-looking aliens and began intergalactic peace talks with both them and several other extraterrestrial races. Ike reportedly struggled to deal with those alien

presences in the remaining years of his presidency and retired in frustration in 1961, giving a gravely foreboding warning that the military industrial complex he helped create would spin wildly out of control. Or so the story goes among UFO enthusiasts and folklorists.

Although the Eisenhower tale remains a well-known one within the history of the UFO puzzle, like many similar tales no concrete proof has, to date, been forthcoming. Unlike many similar legends, however, there is a historical trail of data that does provide, at least, some provocative and intriguing corroboration for the stories concerning Ike and aliens. Strangely enough, archival documentation and secondary historical sources come together in remarkable ways regarding President Eisenhower’s connection to the UFO subject. Stranger still, those crossroads occur primarily in the biography and career of one of Sigmund Freud’s most renowned protégés, Wilhelm Reich, who spent his final years in America chasing UFOs, ostensibly with Eisenhower’s blessing, and leaving behind an unusual and illuminating paper trail.

Reich’s story begins in Vienna in the 1920s. Recognized as a maverick in Freud’s inner circle, Reich was eventually dismissed by Freud. And as a member of the Communist Party, Reich’s ideas were deemed too psychoanalytic, and he was summarily dismissed from the party as well. With the ascendancy of the Nazis in Germany, however, Reich fled first to Norway and then to America, moving away from both psychoanalysis and Marxism into equally controversial areas.

It was during this period that Reich discovered what he termed “Orgone,” (or OR) a “universal cosmic and biological energy” that Reich believed was ever-present throughout both the Cosmos and living bodies. Reich claimed to have constructed a device that he called an Orgone Accumulator, and that allegedly both collected and accumulated Orgone from the atmosphere. Reich further claimed that exposure to Orgone, particularly through sitting in the Accumulator, promoted both health and vitality, and was an effective treatment for cancer. Reich also asserted that he had detected another energy, that he called “Deadly Orgone Radiation,” or DOR, and which produced negative health effects. In the Eisenhower America of the 1950s, Reich reputedly used Orgone energy to combat hostile UFOs that were seen soaring across the skies of the United States. The historical record suggests, too, that Reich met with Eisenhower at around the time that the president supposedly had his secret liaison with the extraterrestrials.

Dwight Eisenhower’s contact with aliens occurred in February 1954, according to the legend. However, the president’s cover story—that he was on vacation in Palm Springs, Florida—was belied by the fact that he had just returned from a vacation in Georgia. And it is indeed a reality that the media of the day reported the alarming news of a total disappearance by Ike on the night of February 20 during the Palm Springs stay. The official explanation offered after the fact was that the president had lost a tooth cap during a meal and was forced to make a late-night visit to a local dentist. Evidence of this does not appear in the existing, extensive medical record on Dwight Eisenhower from his time as president, however. Interestingly, the widow of the dentist had only vague memories of the event, which by any measure should surely have made a detailed and lasting impression on her.

Was Ike really flown to Wright Patterson Air Force Base on that fateful night to view the recovered saucer and alien bodies from the crash at Roswell, as the persistent rumors suggest? Enter Wilhelm Reich. In the course of his UFO adventures in 1955, Reich traveled through Roswell, New Mexico. He was on his way to Tucson, Arizona with his “Orgone equipment,” to study its capacity to alleviate desert conditions. Reich went on to record these experiences in his book, Contact With Space, now an extremely hard-to-find underground classic. Although his immediate destination was Ruidoso Downs, New Mexico, there seems little doubt that Reich had aliens firmly impressed upon his mind as he passed through the town of Roswell.

Reich wrote:

“Although it was very hot as we neared Roswell, New Mexico, no OR flow was visible on the road, which should have been shimmering with ‘heat-waves’. Instead, DOR was well marked to the west against purplish, black, barren mountains, in the sky as a blinding grayness, and over the horizon as a grayish layer. The caking of formerly good soil was progressively characteristic and eventually caked soil prevailed over the vegetation, which now consisted only of scattered low brushes, while grass disappeared.”

The Roswell episode in Contact With Space concludes:

“After the desert valley it was a relief to spend a night in Ruidoso, New Mexico, in the Sierra Blanca Mountains (near 7000 feet). Here a strong, reactive secondary vegetation had sprung up, again more marked on the western slope…”

Skeptics of the Roswell story often claim that interest in the event dropped off immediately after its initial media flash, only to be revived in the late 1980s by unreliable UFO researchers seeking to profit from a myth of their own creation. Reich’s visit to Roswell, with its clear references to aliens, contradicts that assumption. So does remarkably strong archival documentation from several disparate sources that show an interlocking connection between Reich and Dwight Eisenhower.

First in this line of documentation is the so-called “Cutler-Twining memo.” The National Archives in Maryland still contains this onion-skinned carbon of a memo calling for the postponement of a meeting of a special studies section of a group known as MJ-12. UFO researchers recognize MJ-12 as a super-secret group of scientists, intelligence personnel and military men that was created by President Harry Truman in direct response to the events at Roswell in July 1947. Skeptics claim that all of the documents reflecting this possibility have been faked. Nevertheless, the National Archives retains this one letter, unwilling or unable to establish with any degree of certainty that it is not authentic. Its date: July 14, 1954, five months from Eisenhower’s supposed meeting with the aliens.

The author of the C-T memo, Robert Cutler, served in the CIA under Eisenhower in its division of psychological operations and had virtually written Ike’s famous “Atoms for Peace” speech, which took as its title a phrase used by Reich long before to describe his Orgone work.

The second curious document in this research line was recovered only recently by an investigator named Jim Martin, whose comprehensive examination of Wilhelm Reich’s life in the 1950s can be found within the pages of Wilhelm Reich and the Cold War. Referred to as the Moise-Douglas memo, it was discovered by Martin in the archives of Lew Douglas, a member of Eisenhower’s “kitchen cabinet,” who was assigned to a presidential committee on weather control. In Contact With Space, Reich claimed that he had corresponded with Douglas; and Martin’s discovery of this memo strongly suggests Reich was speaking truthfully. From Douglas himself, it describes the latest of several failed attempts by Reich’s assistant, William Moise, to make contact with this high ranking official in the Eisenhower administration. Although the memo itself is not dated, a handwritten note at its bottom indicates a great change of heart by Douglas, who ultimately did telegraph Moise on July 27, 1954.

Douglas’ about-face with regard to Reich, coming at any point in July 1954, indicates that he had been briefed at the MJ-12 meeting described in the Cutler-Twining memo. The object of the “Special Studies Project,” at least in part, would be Reich’s counterattack on UFOs. In the end, Douglas wound up bankrolling in part some of Reich’s environmental work in Tucson.

Then there is Reich’s own meeting with Eisenhower. One witness claimed that during a hunting- and fishing-trip to Rangeley, Maine (where Reich’s Orgonon lab was located) Eisenhower met face to face with the inventor of the anti-UFO technology. The Eisenhower Library even records a visit to Rangeley by the president during that UFO laden period of the mid-1950s, from June to July 1955. In the end, however, the memory of the witness to the meeting became as vague as that of the dentist’s widow from Ike’s alien visit of the year before.

The historic trail vaporizes after that, to re-emerge obliquely only once. According to the biography of his second wife, the screen comedian Jackie Gleason caught a glimpse of alien bodies in 1973 at the behest of then president Richard Nixon. Nixon, of course, had been Eisenhower’s vice president. He took his friend Gleason to a secret facility in Florida, where Ike had disappeared for one night for his visitation with aliens all those years before.

Does any of this data amount to proof that such creatures exist and that Eisenhower met with them? Such questions always contain relative judgments, and, of course, in the end no absolute proof can be offered for anything. However, more historic evidence exists for this bizarre proposition, for instance, than for Lyndon Johnson’s claim of an attack on US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin or George Bush’s claims for the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.

Reich was eventually prosecuted for his Orgone devices. They had been unfairly characterized as quack cancer cure machines, and a technical violation of an FDA injunction led to Reich’s imprisonment. Federal authorities duly destroyed much of his scientific equipment and his books were burned. Many believe that the prosecution resulted from big-money medical and pharmaceutical interests threatened by Reich’s work. He died in prison in 1957.

Some of the language contained in Eisenhower’s retirement speech, the one that coined the phrase “military-industrial complex”, conjures up an image of Wilhelm Reich, Ike’s possible secret ally in the war against extraterrestrials:

“Today,” Eisenhower noted, “the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields…a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present…”

Although the record suggests that Reich received both interest and support from the Eisenhower administration in his desert battles against UFOs, he never required it. Although Reich believed in nuts and bolts space ships piloted by extra-terrestrials, he regarded contact with them as character logical events, not simply sightings of craft. But he needed no stamp of approval from any government authority to make this claim.

“There is no proof,” wrote Reich in Contact With Space. “There are no authorities whatever. No president, Academy, Court of Law, Congress or Senate on this earth has the knowledge or power to decide what will be the knowledge of tomorrow. There is no use in trying to prove something that is unknown to somebody who is ignorant of the unknown, or fearful of its threatening power. Only the good old rules of learning will eventually bring about understanding of what has invaded our earthly existence.”

The Wilhelm Reich Museum

The Wilhelm Reich Museum at Orgonon was both Reich’s home and his place of work. Located in the Rangeley Lakes Region of Maine and comprising no less than 175 acres of fields and woodland, it represents the life and work of this renowned researcher and the environment in which he investigated the energy functions that he believed govern all living matter. The museum is owned and operated by The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust that was established by Reich in his will. The Orgone Energy Observatory, designed for Reich in 1948, has been entered in the National Register of Historic Places and visitors to the museum are introduced to Reich’s life and work by a video presentation. Biographical materials, inventions, and equipment used in his pioneering experiments are exhibited, and Reich’s library, personal memorabilia, sculpture, and paintings are also on view for the visitor.

There is a discovery room and play area for children and the observatory deck on the roof provides a spectacular vista of the surrounding countryside. Reich’s tomb, with a dramatic bronze portrait bust, stands in a forest clearing nearby. The Conference Center hosts an annual summer conference on various aspects of Reich’s work and its relation to current social and scientific issues. This building, formerly a students’ laboratory, is also used for the museum’s Natural Science Program, which stimulates awareness of the natural environment and provides educational opportunities for its study and appreciation. Museum offices are housed in the conference center and fund-raising events take place there.

For further details, contact:

• The Wilhelm Reich Museum

  Orgonon, Dodge Pond Road, P.O. Box 687, Rangeley, ME 04970

• Telephone/Fax: (207) 864-5156

• Telephone: (207) 864-3443

• E-Mail: wreich@rangeley.org

• Website: http://www.wilhelmreichmuseum.org/ 
  

   

Wilhelm Reich and the FBI

Under the terms of the United States Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has declassified an extensive surveillance file on the activities and life of Wilhelm Reich. In 1947, according to the FBI, a security investigation concluded that the staff of Reich’s Orgone Project was not involved in activities that could be termed subversive and was not in violation of any statue that fell within the jurisdiction of the FBI.

In 1954, FBI records reveal, the United States Attorney General filed a complaint seeking permanent injunction to prevent interstate shipment of devices and literature put out by Reich’s group. That same year, Reich was arrested for contempt of court for violation of the Attorney General’s injunction. Those wanting to learn more about the FBI’s files on Wilhelm Reich - that reveals a wealth of data on the man, his research and the Government’s response to his research and work - can see below report: