Fantastically Wrong: Why Is the Sky Blue? It’s Packed With Sexy Energy, of Course

I KNOW OF a simple box that can radically improve your health, a device so powerful that the FDA once banned it and condemned its inventor to prison. But luckily, and quite graciously, its design has been left unpatented, free for all who might care to harness the mysterious “orgone energy” that pervades our universe. You can even get the 175-page instruction manual as a PDF here.

First things first: Your Orgone Energy Accumulator, as it’s known, must be big enough to comfortably seat a human being, and if you’re able to bury it in the soil, all the better, for the dirt only enhances the effects of the orgone. Its walls must consist of alternating layers of a metallic and a non-metallic substance, say steel wool and cotton. And the inner surface of the device must be bare metal of some sort.

When you’re done, simply enter the box, shut the door behind you, and take a seat. After a few minutes your skin will begin to tingle, and you’ll feel a sort of warming. Your heart rate will stabilize at a Goldilocks pace—neither too high nor too low. You will feel, in a word, enlivened. But take care not to stay too long. The minute you begin to feel nauseated, make your exit, for your body has been charged to capacity with orgone.

In the strange and colorful history of pseudoscience, Wilhelm Reich’s “discovery” of orgone—a substance that’s not only a life force, but indeed makes up the very fabric of space—must surely be a watershed. This is a story of a man who went from psychoanalysis wunderkind to enemy of Hitler to enemy of the US government, only to die a lonely death in prison. Yet somehow, almost a century later, his bonkers ideas live on.