18 Chapter 1
long, though: he was found dead on November 3, 1957, in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. The verdict was heart failure. He was just sixty. There are indications that even today the government has its uneasy concerns about Reich and his work. In 1999, the FBI placed almost eight hundred pages of previously classified files on Reich into the public domain. The documents were soon uploaded to the FBI’s website. Eight years later, however, the documents were quietly removed. The file continues to remain absent from its original website, as well as from the FBI’s additional site, The Vault, which was created in 2011. The FBI states that the file was removed as it was not seen as being historically valuable. Reich’s followers would certainly disagree with that conclusion. Fortunately, the FBI’s file on Reich can still be found online—at archive .org—under the title “Wilhelm Reich: Federal Bureau of Investigation.” As for Reich’s almost legendary orgone, even though US authorities had no time for it and did all they could to shut Reich’s work down—and succeeded in doing so—it’s an important part of the story of paranormal parasites in our midst. In fact, it’s a vital component of the overall controversy. As we have seen, Reich concluded that orgone was a form of sexual energy that acted as a battery. Orgone could be directed into a person and offer them a new life, one filled with vigor and absent of anxieties. More importantly, though, orgone could be removed from the body—basically the equivalent of putting the accumulator in reverse.