Adventures in Cloudbusting

Wilhelm Reich and his cloudbuster

Soon after its release in 1985, I bought a cassette copy of Kate Bush’s album Hounds of Love, which, as far as I’m concerned, remains her finest work. Bush had not really gained all that much popularity in the United States in any way comparable to the phenom she had been in England, but I heard the track “Running up that Hill (A Deal with God)” and was so struck by the thundering drums, ethereal Fairlight keyboard sounds, and the drenchingly emotional vocal that I plunked down the cash for the full album. I was not disappointed.

A few years later, I was sharing my love for the album with my coworker at the bookstore where we worked and we started talking about the final track on side one (yes, boys and girls, there used to be things called “sides” before the digital revolution), a song called “Cloudbusting.” I loved the video and the story, but I was a bit dumbfounded when my friend told me it was based on a true story. She led me to the biography section of the store and pointed me to A Book of Dreams: A Memoir of Wilhelm Reich by Peter Reich, the son of the controversial psychoanalyst and scientist. I knew absolutely nothing about the elder Reich, but I bought the book. It relates the fascinating story of Wilhelm Reich’s relationship to his son and their adventures in cloudbusting and alternative scientific research in 1950s America. It’s also a very sad story, as Peter’s father ends his days in prison after falling afoul of government authority.

Wilhelm Reich invented what he called a “cloudbuster” after observing the behavior of water in a bucket when a pipe was held above its surface. He was even hired by blueberry farmers in Maine to end a deadly drought that threatened their harvest and livelihoods. As reported in the Bangor Daily News on 24 July 1953:

“Dr. Reich and three assistants set up their ‘rain-making’ device off the shores of Grand Lake, near Bangor hydro-electric dam, at 10:30 on Monday morning 6 July. The device, a set of hollow tubes, suspended over a small cylinder, connected by a cable, conducted a ‘drawing’ operation for about an hour and ten minutes….

“According to a reliable source in Ellsworth the following climactic changes took place in that city on the night of 6 July and the early morning of 7 July: ‘Rain began to fall shortly after ten o’clock Monday evening, first as a drizzle and then by midnight as a gentle, steady rain. Rain continued throughout the night, and a rainfall of 0.24 inches was recorded in Ellsworth following morning.

“A puzzled witness to the ‘rain-making’ process said: ‘The queerest looking clouds you ever saw began to form soon after they got the thing rolling.’ And later the same witness and the scientists were able to change the course of the wind by manipulation of the device.” [1]

Needless to say, I found this fascinating. Who wouldn’t? But, try as I might, I could find almost no information about Reich or cloudbusting. This was in the days before the internet, of course. Since then all kinds of things are available online, though I am often skeptical of the claims found there.

In about 1993 or so, I actually met someone who had a couple of cloudbusters. Let’s call him “Norman.” Norman lived in a quaint subdivision not far away from me. A friend of mine, a chiropractor, wanted me to meet him, since he knew both of us were interested in biodynamics and alternative farming (you can read about some of these things in the book Secrets of the Soil by Peter Thompson and Christopher Bird). Norman’s yard looked like something from a sci-fi novel. He let everything grow, planted every inch of it with vegetables, fruits, beneficial plants, and had even devised a creek that surrounded his property—replete with frogs and other wildlife. This in the middle of a neighborhood characterized by ugly landscaping and ChemLawn services! I don’t think he exactly got on with the neighbors. Norman’s garden boasted some amazing results—his tomatoes and carrots were impressive with their rich colors and tastes, and he even devised a gazebo within which he planted figs. I visited him few times to share ideas—though he was far more knowledgeable than I was. I learned a lot from him.

I asked Norman about his cloudbusters, and he told me that he primarily used them to “clean up the atmosphere” of pollution and other antagonistic substances. This was the first time I’d ever heard the term “chemtrail.” I found the idea kind of preposterous—why would evil geniuses, governmental or otherwise, risk poisoning their own families? Norman more or less blew-off my question. Instead, he told me some shady figures from the government stopped by his suburban abode to ask if he had a scalar weapon (I didn’t know what that was, either). He said he laughed and replied, “It’s just me and my little cloudbusters.”

I didn’t doubt all things Norman told me, I just didn’t know what to make of it all.

Years later, almost four years ago to be exact, I started thinking about cloudbusters again. That summer our farm and those around us were inundated with rain. Fields were flooded out, and our ability to make a living was under serious threat. The rain simply would not stop. I had read that not only could cloudbusters make rain, they could also stop it. Desperate for something to change, I figured it was worth a shot.

So, one afternoon, I assembled all the appropriate materials in my barn and put together some sort of cloudbuster. My wife thought I was wasting my time. But what did I have to lose with the exception of a few hours? I set the device out on an old deck near our pond and waited, making sure not to have it pointed anywhere.

Before long, another deluge arrived. I pointed the pipes at the thickest part of the cloud-cover and, sure enough, the rain stopped within a few minutes. As you might be thinking, this could have been a coincidence. That was certainly a possibility as far as I was concerned. So, in the true spirit of science, I experimented.

I am very hesitant to monkey around with the weather, so I am not at all cavalier in the way I use this device. Nevertheless, once during a drought, I was looking to pull some rain near the farm. Luckily, we have a tool in our pockets that would have cost a fortune in Reich’s day—weather radar! So, in my experimentation, I would look to see where the rain was, even just the tiniest of systems, and see if I could pull it over. Worked. I’ve done it more than a few times, so much so that my wife has asked me to turn the cloudbuster on when the garden needs watering. I’m hesitant to do so—“It’s not like the hose!” I tell her. But then I saw this image float across social media the other day (an image from the early 1950s).

So maybe it is like the hose.

Over the past few months, I have experimented with dispelling chemtrails/contrails. I’m not exactly 100% sold on chemtrail theory—but nothing governments do could surprise me—but, chemtrail or contrail, neither one could be good for the environment. It was odd that I saw very few of these—the kind that go from horizon to horizon—over the past half-year or so, but at the end of January/beginning of February they seemed to appear daily. In the spirit of experiment, I decided to see if I could get rid of them. It worked. Then, a few weeks ago, I was driving home from an errand and saw dozens of these trails striping the firmament. I wanted to get home in a hurry to turn the cloudbuster on them. However, not a few minutes later I noticed the trails starting to dissolve. I wondered if my wife had been playing with the cloudbuster (she’d never so much as touched it before, so it would be odd.) Sure enough, when I arrived home, the cloudbuster was pointed in the right direction. I asked my wife if she’d done it. She said she hadn’t—but that she’d told our youngest to do it.

This may all seem like strange talk. But is it really? That guy in the pastel sweaters has been banging on quite a bit about changing the weather though dimming the rays of the sun by use of mists of calcium carbonate spread via aircraft, and the Chinese government is at the moment planning to massively expand its weather-modification program. I have little faith in these actors. But that doesn’t mean what they’re planning isn’t possible. In fact, I’d be willing to say they and others like them have been at this project for a good long while.

When Wilhelm Reich was imprisoned, all of his scientific papers were confiscated and destroyed under the guise that his was the work of a charlatan and that the things he proposed didn’t work.

I’m not so sure about that.

Herself:

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.

1. In Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 379-80.

Sophiology, Food, Farming, and Evil

While I am happy to see Sophiology reaching a wider audience over the last few years (and David Bentley Hart’s sophiological sensibilities are definitely exposed in his new book, Roland in Moonlight) I am nevertheless concerned that it is often an intellectual exercise with which some become fascinated or intrigued at the expense of the engagement with the Real which is the true core of Sophiology. That engagement, as I have said many times, resides in an agapeic attention to the Creation and the simultaneous shining of Divinity through Creation. Sophia is the name of that shining; she is the metaxu who occupies the threshold.

This agapeic engagement is not realized in isolation, however, even though a contemplative disposition allows one access to the sophianic. The sophianic is realized in diversity, in engagement, and in interaction: with the natural world—with the diversity of plants, animals, and other human beings—as well as in the panoply found in the more purely spiritual worlds of ideas and concepts. The sophianic can be experienced in agapeic engagement with the world, the cosmos, even if one has never heard of Sophia or Sophiology. I would even go as far as to suggest that the vast panorama of religions and spiritual traditions all touch on this reality in various dimensions, though I would hesitate to suggest that dogmas or theological propositions do much to foster such insights. This is why traditions as diverse as the cult of the Great Mother of late-antiquity (delightfully and fancifully illustrated in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass), Sufism, Hinduism, the Kabbalah, and, of course, Christianity have often come to sophianic insights quite naturally and spontaneously—and before turning to theologies or available religious or philosophical vocabularies to find a language for making sense of the experience. That is, the experience of the sophianic comes first, while the intellectual grasping to explain or understand comes afterwards. I’m sure the reverse can be true—that one comes upon sophiological discourse and begins to appreciate it, and then looks for it in the Creation; but without the experience of the sophianic in Creation, the appreciation for it as an intellectual stream becomes arid and sterile—just like any other conceptual framework—and becomes idolatry if it is not discarded in its entirety out of a sort of spiritual ennui or atrophy.

Sophiology, that is, is practical. This is why my wife and I are involved with biodynamic farming. Nothing is more real than dealing with Natura on her own terms—without the mechanistic and dogmatic commitments of domination and colonization that so characterize much of conventional agriculture and reach their apotheosis in the marriage of BigAg to BigTech.

For these (and other) reasons, I have for a long time been a great supporter of Indian bioactivist Vandana Shiva, who since the 1980s has fought against the encroachments of BigAg in Indian farming, and which she has since turned into a worldwide movement. Shiva holds a doctorate in quantum physics, ideas of which still inform her work, upholding as they do “the non-separation and the potential” and which she believes “will get the mechanistic thinking out of the world.” She extends this commitment to include civil disobedience, the moment for which, in the context of farming, has more than arrived.

I caught Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s recent interview with Shiva (as far as I’m concerned, both of them are practically saints). The main topic of their interview was Bill Gates and his ventures into agriculture—which are part and parcel of his interventions into “health” and medicine—and which are nothing less than diabolical in their implications.

Gates, as you’ve probably heard, in addition to his role as primary funder of the WHO and as a proponent of vaccines, vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports (even though his investment portfolios are rank with conflicts of interest through his investments in these technologies), has moved into farming—gobbling up farmland at a gluttonous rate, investing large amounts of capital in the production of synthetic meat, and pushing GMO seed on the world. He wants control over them. GMO seed is patented, and Gates is avidly gaining control of seedbanks across the globe. As Shiva argues, Gates is “turning the land into a portfolio, the biodiversity into a portfolio, and thinking it’s some smart economics.” In addition, Gates is also investing in the Google company Alphabet to develop robotic farm workers designed to replace human farmers. This is why Shiva is calling for civil disobedience: “let us do a civil disobedience against force feeding of bad food. Whether it be lab food, like Impossible Burger, or golden rice, because he’s preparing for biofortification to be made compulsory. And we’ve seen how he can make things compulsory.” This man is no friend of humanity. “Bill Gates, keeps talking about innovation, all he’s doing is colonization.” And not only are farms being colonized, so are bodies. Our bodies.

And we’re being colonized with the full cooperation of the political class, for the most part.

Gates has money, and politicians—not to mention NGOs, universities, and other institutions—have an addiction to it. Thoreau describes our current situation with great alacrity in Civil Disobedience:

“The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders—serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few—as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men—serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.”

So don’t let Sophiology be a purely theoretical exercise of spiritual self-pleasuring. Do something. Engage the world. Don’t hide in your Covid bunker. Don’t fill your body with poisons, whether ingested or injected. Fight for biodiversity. Join an organic or biodynamic CSA. Start an organic garden. Choose life.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.