"There is no doubt that I am at war" with the UFOs, Reich wrote hours after four bright pulsating lights hovered for hours over Orgonon, his research facility in rural Maine. "What seemed only a possibility one year ago is certainty now."

The UFOs had been menacing Orgonon since Reich began experiments with super-charging his "cloudbuster" weather-control device with small amounts of radioactive material. Reich had learned in May that the cloudbuster not only apparently pulled rain out of clouds, but also drained energy from lights in the sky, making it, in his words, a "spacegun" effective against UFOs.

Like the cloudbuster, the Austrian psychiatrist turned "natural scientist" was convinced, UFOs operated on orgone, an ambient energy source that interacts with life and organic matter. Reich's claims to the contrary, the FDA had determined that orgone did not exist, and so had obtained an injunction against any medical treatment purporting to effect cures through orgone manipulation.

However, Reich stayed devoted to the reality of his discovery. He trained the "spacegun" on two aerial objects as they hovered ominously over Orgonon, causing both to retreat. One "disappeared after weakening, waning and blinking, leading Reich to conclude triumphantly that "tonight, for the first time in the history of man, the war waged for ages by living beings from outer space upon this Earth . . . was reciprocated."

As above, so below. On that same day, Reich informed the authorities in Portland that he would resume his orgone-oriented publishing efforts. This defiance would lead to his death in prison less than three years later.

Reich, convinced that the aliens were waging their "war" against Earth by poisoning its orgone, creating deserts, decided to test his spacegun in the drought-wracked wastes north of Tucson, AZ. According to his final book, Contact With Space, it had not rained in Tucson for 5 years, making the desert a perfect proving ground for both the cloudbuster's rainmaking and UFO-weakening abilities.

Meanwhile, in order to share his findings with the Air Force, Reich sent his assistant William Moise ahead to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. As Reich bitterly noted, Orgonon "had received no direct help from the Air Force, financial or otherwise," but he remained eager to keep the military posted on the extraterrestrial-combat uses of orgone.

Moise, however, got a guarded reception at Wright-Patterson. General Harold Watson, chief of Air Force Intelligence, had initially seemed eager to speak with Moise about Reich's claim to have "disabled" two UFOs, even insisting that Moise could arrive late in the day and the two men could "continue the conference after supper."

Travelling cross-country, Moise was concerned that accidental factors could get in the way of the meeting and confirmed his appointment with Watson twice. Still, by the time he got to Dayton, Watson was unavailable due to "unexpected important business."

Instead, a "Dr. W. H. Byers" and Harry Haberer greeted Moise at the base. Moise hated Byers on first sight, calling him "a man with a flabby handshake and eyes that don't look at you." As Watson had expressed concern that a group from the CIA would be visiting that week, it is a tantalizing possibility that Byers was a member of that delegation. Haberer, meanwhile, is known to UFO research as "a crack Air Force public relations man."

Moise refused to talk to the two men and instead waited until the next day, when he briefed the base's deputy commander, who reportedly became "excited" by the revelation of a weapon against UFOs. Haberer and Byers were apparently less impressed, but took notes.

According to Reich, the Air Force continued its tacit interest in his work, sending numerous jets to fly by his cloudbusting experiments but making no overt gestures because the spacegun was "hot because it wasn't official, and the reason it wasn't official was because it was so hot."

When his group arrived in Tucson from heavily-wooded Maine on October 19, they were shocked by the Arizona desert, which was apparently much more severe than it is today. "We were impressed by the bare ground, giving a general impression of whiteness, hardness," Reich wrote. "The river beds had all been dry for about 50 years . . . no prairie grass was to be seen anywhere."

Over the next few weeks, the party -- composed of Reich, his daughter Eva and son Peter, Moise and another assistant -- suffered almost immediately from dehydration, exhaustion and general discomfort, all of which they attributed to poisonous "deadly orgone radiation." However, harassment from UFOs was sporadic but persistent, leading Reich to theorize that the "thirsty" aerial phenomena were actively fighting his rainmaking efforts.

The researchers fought back throughout November, apparently encouraging a rich growth of winter prairie grass but no rain. Transportation difficulties had forced Reich to leave his supply of radioactive material behind at Orgonon, leaving the cloudbusters at a sharp disadvantage against the UFOs. Without the radioactive charge, Reich's team could only annoy the lights in the sky but not hinder their inscrutable activity in any real sense.

Meanwhile, the UFOs kept making the researchers miserable. One of Reich's assistants suffered a "breakdown" while training his cloudbuster on the sky, forcing him to return to his family for a month of recuperation. In his absence, Reich speculated that the man had drawn too much poisonous orgone from a lurking alien object.

By December 7, Reich decided it was time to strengthen his hand by sending for his radioactive hole card, two radium needles charged with orgone. After a plane trip marked by misadventure and bad weather, the needles arrived a week later.

Once Reich had his radium, he was ready to retake the offensive against the UFOs and the desert simultaneously.

"On December 14, about 16:30 hours, a full-scale interplanetary battle came off," he wrote. "A battle which would have appeared incredible as well as incomprehensible to anyone who knew nothing about the (UFO) problems or who adhered to the illusion" that neither UFOs nor orgone existed.

First, the Orgonon team had to shake off "a special kind of deadly orgone attack" that left them "in very bad shape . . . sick . . . dulled, somehow out of balance." A "tremendous black cloud, looking like smoke from a huge fire" grew over Tucson, eventually taking on an angry reddish-purple coloration and triggering readings of 100,000 counts per minute on Reich's geiger counter. All of the researchers "suffered from nausea, quivering, pain in the upper abdomen and discoloration of movements," while "about a dozen Air Force planes of various kinds" flew over the team's camp.

Matters of orgone, beneficial or poisonous, aside, Reich's description of the event is reminiscent of a nuclear bomb test: a strong military presence, radiation, smoke, queasiness. However, it is unlikely that the government would set off a bomb apparently targeted directly on Tucson, a thriving regional center of commerce.

Reich brought his radium needles into contact with the cloudbusters and started firing away at the cloud to dissipate its power. The operation took about 20 minutes, at which time the cloud had broken up and the geiger count returned to normal.

It rained three weeks later. In the meantime, Reich's journal is filled with dozens of UFO sightings -- "red-white-blue pulsations," "yellow pulsations," "silvery disks," "green-yellow steady" -- on which to train his spacegun sights. Most "grew fainter," were "extinguished" or "blinked out." The grass covering the desert grew to a height of "several inches to a foot deep," encouraging local ranchers to drive cattle into the region in herds.

After a brief side trip to Jacumba, CA, the team headed home to Maine at the end of April, 1955. "Our job in Arizona was done," Reich said.

He was dead 18 months later, and all available copies of his books were burned by court order. Only a few copies survived, forcing his scattered disciples to rely on private printings of his works -- including Contact in Space -- for direction.