to live with Reich shortly before Christmas 1954. Reich had already left for Tucson on
October 18. He drove west with Eva, while Peter went with Bill Moise in one of the cloud-
buster trucks.
The preparations for the trip, the trip itself, and events in Arizona were written up
by Reich in 1955 in an unusual document entitled Contact with Space (published in 1957). I
say “unusual” because the book was submitted as part of Reich’s court appeals of his later
“Contempt of Injunction” verdict. Only a very limited number of copies of this work were
available. The book was also extraordinary because of its content. Written under great pres-
sure and disorganized in structure, it blended wild speculation about space ships and blasts
at the FDA as well as other enemies with remarkably sensitive observations and acute con-
ceptualizations of the relationship between orgone energy and DOR^41.
In his description of the trip west, Reich is at his very best. He carefully noted the
environment—weather, landscape, pollution en route. Reich had learned to bring to the
landscape the same observational acuity which he had long brought to the observation of
patients. He could let the expression of the landscape impress him and then render it in
words. As he put it: “A landscape has an expression and an emotional flavor like a human
being or an animal. To learn to know this flavor and to live with itin good comfort takes time,
patience,absence of prejudice and arrogant know-it-allness, or similar attitudes adverse to
learning.”^42
Thus he described traveling down through Virginia:
From the mountain ridge at the “Skyline Drive” we saw for the first time
the “Desert Armor. “... On the ridge, vegetation and trees looked sparkling, healthi-
er, greener than down in the valley... Below the ridge, one could see the DOR-layer
all formed, covering the earth to the distant horizon like a blanket, with a sharply
delineated upper edge; beneath it the details of distant views were hidden in an
opaque veil,as it were...As the ridge road rose over peaks and dipped down into
passes,one could subjectively feel the abrupt descent into the DOR layer: as a sud-
den pressure in head or chest, a sour taste in the mouth.... One could also observe
that while the trees sparkled and stood erect above the DOR ceiling, they drooped,
were withered, and looked dark below it...^43.When Reich arrived in Arizona at the end of October, he rented a house in Tucson
with a large amount of land, calling this base of operations “little Orgonon.” There he con-
tinued with the development of cloud-busting, augmenting it with material called “Orur.”
Orur was a milligram of radium from the original Oranur experiment contained in a lead
casing. Its long soaking in an orgone energy atmosphere had given it particular properties
that,in Reich’s opinion, vastly augmented the efficiency of the cloud-buster.
Even before the Orur arrived, flown behind a specially chartered plane with Silvert
coordinating the shipment, Reich had been busy for some weeks with the cloud-buster. He
claimed to have increased the natural humidity considerably. But he found it much harder to
28 : The FDA Injunction and Reich’s Responses: 1951-1955 401