Ok, here's the next weird story: I've been involved with alot of strange characters in my day, and one of them was Laura Knight-Jadczyk (founder of the Cassiopaea and Signs of the Times websites). I don't know if any of you guys are familiar with her, but this was almost a decade ago at the beginning of her "project", when I was looking into channeling as a potential tool to contact higher intelligences. From my point of view at the time, all the great and wise men were dead, and so perhaps our only hope was to contact the intelligences directly.
That's a whole story in itself, but my story is particularly about the time when I drove to Florida and actually visited her. I used to take lots of road trips to visit "paranormal" sites, and a little before 2000 I was planning a trip to Florida to see Coral Castle when I discovered that her house was right along the way. There were actually alot of people from her yahoo group meeting up at the time, so I decided to go and meet some of these people I had been talking with online.
We met up, and one of the guys was a university student who was a couple years younger than me. He was very interested in Wilhelm Reich and his orgone experiments, and was well-versed in all his books (those that weren't actually burned by the FDA). Orgone is said to be an all-pervasive substance somewhat like the ether, but different from ether in that it interacts with our consciousness.
Anyway, he told me that he could build a "cloudbuster" and demonstrate it for us. A cloudbuster, according to Reich, is basically a rain-making device. Quoting Wikipedia, the cloudbuster is said to "manipulate streams of orgone energy in the atmosphere to induce rain by forcing clouds to form and disperse." The device can also apparently be amplified by the conscious intent of the participants.
Anyway, I had no opinions on the matter but I was definitely interested in seeing a demonstration. So were Laura and her husband, and when he told us that a cloudbuster could be built from simple parts they all drove over to home depot and bought the necessary equipment.
We went out in Laura's back yard and he built it. When it was done, it really looked pretty ridiculous. As best as I can remember, it consisted of a bucket, several metallic parallel pipes about 5 feet long, a water hose, and some metal rings. It looked like some kind of retro folk-art, and certainly didn't appear to have any sort of function.
Nevertheless, we'd gone this far and he was ready to start the demonstration. It was a bright clear day with a few scattered white clouds, so we were definitely interested in seeing this thing make rain. He ran the hose water inside the pipes, and pointed the pipes up into the sky above us.
We stood and waited. Just a clear sky, nothing weird.
In the meantime, Laura had some brownies for us so several of us went inside because apparently it took a little while to work.
No joke, 20 minutes later it was raining so hard that the wind blew over Laura's backyard table & chairs. This was no drizzle, it almost felt like we were in a tropical storm. It was all very sudden, so we brought in the dog and sat inside, disputing amongst ourselves whether we could attribute this storm to the orgone device.
It's a questionable event of course, because weather is unpredictable and so it's really tough to prove that one thing "caused" weather to happen. The guy who built the device claimed that he's repeated the experiment and confirmed the cause/effect relationship between the device and weather, but I've not done any follow-up experiments myself.
A strange story either way, and I remain with no particular opinions on Reich's ideas. Is anyone else here familiar with Reich's writings, or weather-modification devices?
That's a whole story in itself, but my story is particularly about the time when I drove to Florida and actually visited her. I used to take lots of road trips to visit "paranormal" sites, and a little before 2000 I was planning a trip to Florida to see Coral Castle when I discovered that her house was right along the way. There were actually alot of people from her yahoo group meeting up at the time, so I decided to go and meet some of these people I had been talking with online.
We met up, and one of the guys was a university student who was a couple years younger than me. He was very interested in Wilhelm Reich and his orgone experiments, and was well-versed in all his books (those that weren't actually burned by the FDA). Orgone is said to be an all-pervasive substance somewhat like the ether, but different from ether in that it interacts with our consciousness.
Anyway, he told me that he could build a "cloudbuster" and demonstrate it for us. A cloudbuster, according to Reich, is basically a rain-making device. Quoting Wikipedia, the cloudbuster is said to "manipulate streams of orgone energy in the atmosphere to induce rain by forcing clouds to form and disperse." The device can also apparently be amplified by the conscious intent of the participants.
Anyway, I had no opinions on the matter but I was definitely interested in seeing a demonstration. So were Laura and her husband, and when he told us that a cloudbuster could be built from simple parts they all drove over to home depot and bought the necessary equipment.
We went out in Laura's back yard and he built it. When it was done, it really looked pretty ridiculous. As best as I can remember, it consisted of a bucket, several metallic parallel pipes about 5 feet long, a water hose, and some metal rings. It looked like some kind of retro folk-art, and certainly didn't appear to have any sort of function.
Nevertheless, we'd gone this far and he was ready to start the demonstration. It was a bright clear day with a few scattered white clouds, so we were definitely interested in seeing this thing make rain. He ran the hose water inside the pipes, and pointed the pipes up into the sky above us.
We stood and waited. Just a clear sky, nothing weird.
In the meantime, Laura had some brownies for us so several of us went inside because apparently it took a little while to work.
No joke, 20 minutes later it was raining so hard that the wind blew over Laura's backyard table & chairs. This was no drizzle, it almost felt like we were in a tropical storm. It was all very sudden, so we brought in the dog and sat inside, disputing amongst ourselves whether we could attribute this storm to the orgone device.
It's a questionable event of course, because weather is unpredictable and so it's really tough to prove that one thing "caused" weather to happen. The guy who built the device claimed that he's repeated the experiment and confirmed the cause/effect relationship between the device and weather, but I've not done any follow-up experiments myself.
A strange story either way, and I remain with no particular opinions on Reich's ideas. Is anyone else here familiar with Reich's writings, or weather-modification devices?