(part one of a two part series)

At the time, Reich, a trained psychoanalyst who had once belonged to Sigmund Freud's inner Vienna circle, was already facing what he called "emotional and physical misery" caused by his more terrestrial battle with the U.S. Food & Drug Administration over the use of "orgone," a controversial form of ambient "life energy" he claimed to have discovered.

Reich found an inexhaustible range of uses for his discovery, touting orgone as everything from the secret of antigravity to a tool for weather control, especially rainmaking. Most importantly, he found that he could use orgone to "interfere" with UFOs.

But to the FDA, orgone simply did not exist, rendering Reich's orgone-based therapies prosecutable under quackery statutes. Even today, four decades after the controversy, Reichian therapists claim to be able to manipulate the energy for a wide variety of healing effects, including the cure for cancer, without resorting to drugs, radiation or chemicals. Instead, Reichians work to build up a current of orgone within the patient's vicinity in order to strengthen and heal the underlying life force itself.

Nevertheless, Reich's legal fight with the FDA ended with his death in prison after defying a federal injunction against the use of orgone for medical purposes.

Whatever the official status of his medical theories, Reich expected a response when he wrote to the U.S. Air Force about his UFO sighting. He reasoned that "the U.S. Air Force is the natural organization in the Western world responsible" for dealing with such phenomena because "it operates in the atmosphere and watches the frontier upward toward outer space." When the military didn't deal with his report to his satisfaction, Reich took matters into his own hands.

In his letter to the Air Force, reproduced in his last book, Contact With Space, Reich described his sighting as "a brightly shining light" moving from west to east through the forest outside Rangeley, Maine. A second, similar phenomenon soon joined the first, both moving steadily in front of Spotted Mountain. He concluded that the objects were not stars due to their course and the mountain intervening between their apparent motion and the sky, but the possibility that they were military vehicles or other objects of a terrestrial type did not seem to occur to him.

At around the same time, Reich's secretary, Ilse Ollendorff, also reported seeing "a similar, but brighter and bigger, because closer, object." Like the aerial phenomena observed by Reich, Ollendorff's sighting hovered in front of a mountain, but then "was seen rising once vertically upward, settling down again and then disappearing."

The Air Force, for its part, was either unaware of Reich's running battle with the FDA, or was intrigued enough by his encounter to overlook the controversy. Lt. Steven J. Hebert, stationed at the Presque Isle Air Force Base, wrote back telling Reich that the "subject officer notified this organization to take whatever action necessary, since this unit is interested in investigating unidentified aerial phenomena."

Hebert enclosed a copy of Technical Information Sheet Form A, the Air Force's UFO reporting questionnaire, for Reich and Ollendorff to fill out and return. As Contact With Space ruefully notes, Reich received the letter only five days before the FDA obtained the injunction forbidding the distribution of orgone equipment as medical devices.

Reich returned the questionnaire along with a copy of a short essay, "Survey on Ea," providing background on other unusual occurrences around the Orgonon research facility, including the revelation that friends had told Reich "of saucers having been seen over Orgonon in 1951." However, he had taken little personal interest in the reports until 1953, when his discovery of Keyhoe's book made him wonder whether UFOs -- or, in his terminology, "Enigma Alpha" or "Ea" -- might be propelled by orgone.

The Air Force did not reply, perhaps put off by the impenetrable nature of the "basic orgonometric equations" included as an appendix to "Survey on Ea." In the book, Reich includes a rather coyly self-important note saying "not all can be revealed" about his relationship with the Air Force, but there is no evidence in Contact With Space that Reich was in communication with the military until October, a full six months later.

Instead, during that time, Reich writes that he busied himself with appealing the FDA injunction and preparing a research trip to Arizona, where he hoped to investigate the role played by orgone reactions in the formation of deserts.

In looking toward space to explain his sighting, Reich showed himself to be anything but an uncontaminated witness. Like most U.S. citizens in the 1950s, exposed to years of speculation that flying saucers were not native to the Earth, Reich already believed that unknown aerial phenomena were, in his words, most likely "contacts with visitors from outer space."

Reich was familiar with Donald Keyhoe's groundbreaking 1953 book Flying Saucers from Outer Space, leaving him predisposed to look for extraterrestrial explanations for the unknown lights weaving across the sky near his Maine research facility. Moreover, the fact that he had seen 'War of the Worlds' only three weeks before reporting his sighting was also likely a contributing factor -- as Reich called the film "a rather realistic approach to the planetary emergency," it evidently made quite an impression.

Furthermore, the cultural climate of the 1950s not only predisposed Reich to look beyond the Earth, but to look for evidence that his UFOs were engaged in "warlike" behavior.

The threat of war was in the air, both in Reich's embattled personal life and in the broader political framework. The Keyhoe book popularized several apparently hostile encounters between Air Force pilots and unidentified aerial phenomena, while no less a personage than General Douglas MacArthur would warn only a year after Reich's sighting that "all countries on Earth will have to unite to ... make a common front against attack by people on other planets."

With that in mind, the Austrian refugee, who had fled to the United States from the Nazis, considered it not only a scientific but a patriotic duty to alert Air Force Intelligence to the encounter at once.

This policy of full disclosure was typical to Reich, who had taken care to keep the White House informed about developments in orgone research since 1951. While his critics point to this as another symptom of what long-time skeptic Martin Gardner called Reich's "paranoid egoism," Reich himself seems to have considered the matter a "major responsibility" and seems to have downplayed the potential uses of his encounter as a self-promotional vehicle.

In May, however, Reich made an accidental discovery that a few Air Force officers, including General Harold Watson, chief of intelligence at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, would find very interesting.

As Reich was scanning the sky with a "cloudbuster," a device he had designed to draw orgone out of the sky in order to induce rain, he saw a star "fade out" in the presence of three other witnesses. He pointed the cloudbuster pipes at a second blinking light, which also faded in brightness. Meanwhile, the first star reasserted itself once the cloudbuster was pointed away from it.

Reich repeated the experiment three more times in quick succession, reporting identical effects each time. As it was scientifically impossible that his device could have interacted with actual stars -- even in orthodox Reichian literature, the cloudbuster's range was measured in kilometers, not lightyears -- he concluded that his device had interfered with two UFOs.

Having concluded that his cloudbuster could also function as a "spacegun," Wilhelm Reich began to outfit his Arizona expedition as though preparing for a war with outer space.