The Cloudbuster: Wilhelm Reich, Orgone Energy, and the Forgotten Experiments With the Sky

The man who invented the cloudbuster died in a federal prison, and his research was burned, ordered by a US court.

His name was Wilhelm Reich, a physician and psychoanalyst who spent decades studying what he called orgone energy, a force he believed moved through living things and the atmosphere.

Reich designed arrays of hollow metal pipes connected to water and pointed them at the sky. He claimed they could shift atmospheric conditions, dissipate clouds, and even bring rain. In 1953, blueberry growers in Maine paid him after rain followed one of his experiments. In the mid-1950s, he ran the same tests in the Arizona desert.

Then the FDA came for his orgone accumulators, a federal court issued an injunction, and quantities of his publications were destroyed under court order. He died in prison in 1957.

I've been running my own backyard version of his work. Copper pipes in the garden. A gravel basin with water. Blackberries and strawberries responding on the copper side. Skies clearing after wildfire smoke. And posts about it getting flagged and hidden online.

If copper in a garden is harmless nonsense, why work so hard to make sure people don't hear about it? That's what this one is really about.

You’ll Learn:

[0:00] Introduction

[3:24] Copper in the garden and getting community noted

[5:46] Orgone energy and why modern physics rejects it

[9:43] Deadly orgone radiation and cosmic orgone engineering

[13:29] Why copper became the material of choice for builders

[15:03] The FDA injunction and burning of Reich's publications

[17:53] Reasons someone might want the cloud buster information gone

[20:36] What homesteading teaches about trusting your own observations

Resources Mentioned:

Cloudbuster | Wikipedia
The Development of Orgonomy, Wilhelm Reich | Website

Every time I look up lately, I find myself paying more attention to the sky.

The clouds. The weather. The strange shifts that seem to happen throughout the day. And recently, I started experimenting with something on my homestead that has made me pay even closer attention: copper pipes pointed toward the sky.

It's called a Cloudbuster.

Most people have probably never heard of one, but the idea behind it goes back more than 70 years to a physician and researcher named Wilhelm Reich. Reich believed there was an energetic relationship between the earth, water, living things, and the atmosphere, and he spent years experimenting with devices he claimed could interact with that energy.

Eventually, those experiments led him to build what became known as the Cloudbuster: an unusual arrangement of metal pipes that he believed could influence atmospheric conditions, disperse clouds, and even encourage rainfall.

It sounds unbelievable. But the history behind it is even stranger.

Reich conducted experiments during drought conditions, claimed remarkable results, eventually found himself in a battle with the United States government, had publications destroyed under federal court orders, and ultimately died in federal prison.

So what exactly was Wilhelm Reich experimenting with? How was a Cloudbuster supposedly able to affect the atmosphere? And what actually happened when he pointed those strange metal pipes toward the sky?

Today we're going to dig deep into that.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Gubba Homestead Podcast. I'm Gubba, a first-time homesteader following in the footsteps of my homesteading forebears. I discuss everything from homesteading to prepping and everything in between.

And today I want to explore with you the strange history of the Cloudbuster, the research of Wilhelm Reich, how he believed these devices worked, and why more than 70 years later, people are still building them and looking toward the sky.

Wilhelm Reich was born in 1897 in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He became a physician and psychoanalyst and, early in his career, worked within the intellectual world surrounding Sigmund Freud.

That part of Reich's history sometimes gets lost because his later work became so controversial, but he didn't begin his career as some random man pointing pipes toward clouds. He was medically trained and deeply involved in psychoanalytic research. Over time, however, Reich became increasingly interested in the relationship between the body, biology, electricity, and energy.

His ideas moved farther away from conventional psychoanalysis until he eventually proposed that there was a fundamental form of energy permeating living organisms and the environment. He called this energy "orgone."

Reich believed orgone energy existed throughout nature. According to his theory, it was present in living organisms, the atmosphere, and throughout the universe. He began designing experiments and devices that he thought could detect, concentrate, or manipulate it.

Orgone energy has never been demonstrated according to accepted experimental standards, and modern physics does not recognize it as a known form of energy. Reich, however, believed his experiments were revealing a genuine natural phenomenon, and eventually his research moved beyond the laboratory and into the atmosphere.

From those experiments came the machine that became known as the Cloudbuster. Reich's original apparatus wasn't the resin-and-crystal pyramid sometimes sold online today as an "orgone Cloudbuster."

His machine was considerably larger and looked almost industrial. It generally consisted of several long, hollow metal pipes mounted together so they could be aimed toward different portions of the sky. Those pipes were connected through metal tubing or cables to water. Reich considered water particularly important because, according to his theory, water had a strong attraction for orgone energy.

The easiest way to understand Reich's proposed mechanism is to think about a drain rather than a cannon. Despite the name Cloudbuster, the machine wasn't supposed to fire something into a cloud. Reich believed the pipes could establish a connection between a selected portion of the atmosphere and a body of water.

Because he believed water attracted orgone, the arrangement supposedly allowed atmospheric energy to be drawn away from the region toward which the pipes were pointed. Changing the concentration of energy in one area, he believed, disturbed the equilibrium of the surrounding atmosphere. Under the right conditions, he claimed the visible result could be cloud dissipation, cloud development, changes in atmospheric moisture, or eventually rainfall.

Reich therefore wasn't claiming that his machine manufactured water from nothing. He viewed the atmosphere as a dynamic system and believed the Cloudbuster could alter conditions already present within it. He experimented with pointing the pipes directly toward clouds, around clouds, toward different areas of the horizon, and for varying periods of time.

The direction of the pipes, atmospheric conditions, duration of an operation, and connection to water were all considered important within his system. In Reich's view, the Cloudbuster wasn't overpowering nature; it was supposedly altering an energetic imbalance and allowing the atmosphere to reorganize.

His theories eventually expanded to include something he called DOR, meaning "Deadly Orgone Radiation." Reich described DOR as a stagnant or disturbed energetic condition and associated it with dryness, environmental deterioration, uncomfortable atmospheric conditions, and desertification. He believed healthy atmospheric orgone was mobile and life-supporting, while DOR represented stagnation.

His later Cloudbuster work therefore became about more than simply making individual clouds appear or disappear. Reich believed he was restoring movement to an atmospheric energy system, and he eventually called this work Cosmic Orgone Engineering, or C.O.R.E.

One of the most famous episodes occurred in Maine in 1953. Reich had established a research property near Rangeley known as Orgonon, where he conducted much of his later work. The surrounding region was experiencing dry conditions, and blueberry growers were concerned about their crop.

Reich conducted a Cloudbuster operation in July of that year. According to historical accounts associated with Reich's organization, rain followed the operation, and the growers believed his experiment had helped enough that Reich was paid for his work. It became one of the central stories surrounding the Cloudbuster: a controversial researcher operates a strange array of metal pipes during dry conditions, and rain subsequently arrives.

Rain occurring after an experiment, of course, doesn't establish that the experiment caused it. Weather contains an enormous number of interacting variables. Demonstrating causation would require repeated controlled observations, comparable atmospheric conditions without the device operating, independent measurements, and successful replication. Reich's work never produced that level of scientific evidence. What makes the episode historically interesting is that Reich believed the result supported his theory strongly enough to continue experimenting.

Those experiments eventually took him to the Arizona desert. In the mid-1950s, Reich traveled near Tucson to investigate whether his methods could affect extremely dry environments. He conducted Cloudbuster operations and reported atmospheric changes that he interpreted as reductions in DOR and improvements in moisture conditions.

Rainfall and increased moisture subsequently occurred in the region, which Reich regarded as evidence supporting his work. So imagine witnessing these experiments at the time: a physician standing in the Arizona desert with enormous metal pipes aimed toward the sky, claiming he was interacting with an invisible atmospheric energy system.

This is one reason I'm fascinated by the Cloudbuster. The proposed mechanism is completely different from the way we generally think about influencing weather. His theory revolved around relationships between metal, water, earth, and atmosphere. The pipes supposedly acted as directional components while the water served as an energetic sink, creating a difference that he believed caused the larger atmospheric system to seek equilibrium.

Modern Cloudbusters have changed considerably from Reich's original apparatus. Today you'll find people using copper pipes, coils, crystals, buried metal components, and resin structures, often grouping all of these under the term "orgone devices." They shouldn't automatically be attributed to Reich.

His atmospheric apparatus primarily involved hollow metal pipes connected to water. Some modern builders have adapted the concept by connecting conductive materials directly to the earth instead, which is closer to the type of experiment I've been interested in around my homestead.

Copper also plays a larger role in many modern versions. We know copper is an excellent electrical and thermal conductor, which is why humans have used it extensively for wiring, plumbing, and countless other applications. That known conductivity doesn't demonstrate that copper conducts orgone energy because orgone itself hasn't been established as a measurable physical phenomenon.

Still, it's easy to understand why people experimenting with Reich's ideas gravitated toward copper. If you're investigating a hypothetical relationship between atmospheric energy, conductive material, and the earth, copper is an obvious material to experiment with.

Reich's story eventually collided dramatically with the United States government, although the conflict centered largely on his health-related orgone devices rather than the Cloudbuster itself.

Reich developed structures called orgone energy accumulators, which he believed could concentrate orgone energy and which became associated with health claims. The FDA challenged the interstate distribution and promotion of those devices, and a federal court issued an injunction in 1954.

Reich refused to defend the scientific validity of his ideas through the conventional court process because he argued that a court couldn't determine whether a natural phenomenon existed. The injunction was entered, violations followed, and Reich was eventually convicted of contempt and sentenced to federal prison, where he died in 1957.

One of the strangest parts of the story is what happened to his publications. Under federal court orders connected to the case, materials associated with the prohibited devices were destroyed, including quantities of Reich's publications that were burned. That historical fact has understandably fueled decades of speculation surrounding his work.

This is an extraordinary chapter in American scientific and legal history. Combine unconventional experiments, government intervention, destroyed publications, imprisonment, and giant machines pointed toward the atmosphere, and it's easy to understand why Reich remains such a controversial figure more than half a century later.

What interests me most about his work is the question it raises about observation.

Homesteading has completely changed how I look at the natural world because when you live closely with animals, plants, soil, weather, and seasons, you start noticing relationships that are easy to ignore when most of your life happens indoors. You notice animals behaving differently before storms, wind changing before weather moves in, the smell of incoming rain, clouds forming around mountains, and subtle changes in the landscape as pressure, temperature, and moisture shift. Nature begins to feel less like a collection of isolated things and more like an interconnected system.

That's the mindset I'm bringing to experimenting with a Cloudbuster on my homestead. If I put it outside and a cloud disappears, that doesn't automatically mean the Cloudbuster did it. If rain arrives afterward, that doesn't prove anything by itself either.

What would interest me is whether consistent patterns emerge over time. Does cloud behavior repeatedly differ in the direction the pipes are pointed? Does orientation seem to matter? Are there noticeable differences when the device is being used compared with when it isn't? Those are observations worth documenting instead of immediately deciding what they mean.

And this is something I think we've lost in modern culture. Every unusual idea seems to have to fall into one of two categories: either you immediately believe it, or you immediately ridicule it. There's another option, and that's to investigate it. Read what the person actually claimed. Understand the proposed mechanism. Compare it with what we already know. Observe what happens yourself, document what you see, and remain willing to discover that your original assumption was wrong.

So, does a Cloudbuster actually manipulate the atmosphere? Does copper interacting with the earth and sky influence something we don't currently measure? Was Reich observing a real phenomenon but misunderstanding its mechanism, or was he interpreting ordinary weather fluctuations through a theory he already believed?

I don't know, and that's exactly why I find the subject interesting. I don't think curiosity requires certainty. Sometimes it's simply about being willing to look at something strange, learn its history, and ask questions.

For me, the Cloudbuster is an experiment. I'm going to observe it on my homestead, pay attention to what happens around it, document anything interesting, and continue researching Reich's original work. Maybe nothing happens. Maybe everything I observe has a perfectly ordinary meteorological explanation. Maybe something happens that makes me ask even more questions. Either way, I'm paying attention.

Because homesteading isn't just about going backward. For me, it's also about rediscovering the habit of observing the world directly instead of outsourcing every conclusion to someone else. Plant the seed and see how it grows. Watch the animals and learn their behavior. Look at the clouds. Notice the seasons. Read the old books. Study the forgotten experiments. Question your own assumptions just as much as you question everyone else's.

And sometimes, point a few copper pipes toward the sky and see what happens.
Thanks for hanging out with me today on the Gubba Homestead Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss the next one. And if you've experimented with Cloudbusters, Wilhelm Reich's work, or similar ideas on your own land, I'd love to hear what you've observed.

Until next time, I'll see you around the homestead.