Page Content (OCR)
assassinated and that a worldwide blackout was going to punish the world for three terrible days. I was lucky. I didn’t cry their warning from the housetops. I didn’t surround myself with a wild-eyed cult impressed with the accuracy of the previous predictions. Others haven’t been so lucky. Dr. Charles A. Laughead, an MD on the staff of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, started communicating with as- sorted entities ‘from outer space” in 1954, largely through trance mediums who served as instruments for Ashtar and his cronies from that great intergalactic council in the sky. A number of minor prophecies were passed along, and as usual, they all came true on the nose. Then Ashtar tossed in his bombshell. The world was going to end on December 21, 1954, he announced convincingly. He spelled out the exact nature of the cataclysm: North America was going to split in two, and the Atlantic coast would sink into the sea. France, England and Russia were also slated for a watery grave. However, all was not lost. A few chosen people would be rescued by spaceships. Naturally, Dr. Laughead and his friends were among that select group. Having been impressed by the validity of the earlier predictions of the entities, Dr. Laughead took this one most seriously, made sober declarations to the press, and on December 21, 1954, he and a group of his fellow believers clustered together in a garden to await rescue. They had been instructed to wear no metal, and they therefore discarded belt buckles, pens, clasps, cigarette lighters, and shoes with metal eyelets. Then they waited. And waited. And waited. That same year, another doctor named Wilhelm Reich was watching glittering starlike objects maneuver over his home in Rangeley, Maine. The “‘space people” had a little gift for him, too: a strange theory about cosmic energies called Orgone. Dr. Reich had studied and worked under Freud in Vienna and later held posts at several important educational institutions. He was a brilliant, highly educated man. But somehow he became convinced that Orgone was the vital life force of the universe and that it even powered the UFOs that were flooding the world’s skies in 1954. His colleagues and the Food and Drug Administration viewed his theories with some dismay. He was drummed out of the medical ranks, hauled into court, tried, and jailed. He died in prison eight months later, a broken man still convinced that he had unlocked a great cosmic secret. Two years earlier, in that grand UFO year of 1952, two men were 248 / Operation Trojan Horse