Orgone Research

This essay originally appeared in the now-defunct Nose magazine issue 24 pages 42 and 43. The author is Tim “Zamora” Cridland, and includes two of my photographs.

Tales From The Crib

The Nose Crawls You Through the Sickening World of Medical Museums

By Tim Cridland

Photos by Matt Crowley

Herds of seedy traveling carnivals once roamed the U.S., offering staples like the girlie show, the “mitt joint” palm reader and the “ten in one” sideshow, which often included a “pickled punk” exhibit – carny slang for a dead baby in a jar. The most popular was the infamous two headed variety, “born alive!” the banners would proclaim, showing a happy baby in diapers, playing with its rattle, all four eyes beaming.

As any freak fan knows, there actually are two kinds of pickled punks: the real thing (preferred) and “bouncers,” or realistic fake rubber babies. As sideshow owners retired or moved on, collections were sold an exhibit origins became obscured; even the operators couldn’t tell the bouncers from the punks.

Pickled punks eventually became another archaic curiosity, seen only in odd books and postcards. But you don’t have to travel back in time to see the real deal. Pickled punks still exist, publicly displayed in cities all over the world. You just have to know who to ask.

Many gruesome and weird displays are kept in medical museums, often affiliated with medical schools or hospitals. If you’re lucky, you’ll see a real pickled punk (though that my not be what the label says).

Before you begin your quest for the two headed grail, keep in mind that medical museums are intended for the education of medical students, not for your entertainment. Some are open to the public, but others will require you to bribe a medical student or doctor into taking you. Play it low key. Hide that purple streak in your hair, Take out those lip piercings. Leave the Beavis and Butt-head T-shirt at home. Carry a note pad and try to look like a student. Don’t go in groups of more than three. For god’s sake, don’t blow it for everyone. Even if that Cyclops baby is demanding that you scream or giggle, try to stifle it. “Look at the size of that colon!” you may want to holler to your pal across the room. Internalize your commentary. Save the conversation for dinner.

Museum Vrolik, Amsterdam Medical Center

Where: Outside Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Getting In: Open to the public, but don’t flaunt your status as a layman.

A visit to Amsterdam might mean smoking some hemp and checking out the red light district, but don’t sell yourself short by missing one of the world’s biggest collections of malformed babies in jars. It’s not in any of the tourist guides, and not many locals know about it. Take a train several stops out of Amsterdam. The Medical Center is the only thing at the stop, so it’s hard to miss. Get off and follow everybody else into the main building. Keep going straight past the library, toward the back. Go into the main entrance. Act like you belong there.

Contents: A wall of deformed skulls, deformed baby skeletons, about 40 or so malformed fetuses, Cyclops babies, elephant-nosed babies, pinhead babies, two-headed babies, two bodied and one-headed babies, a blob of flesh with a face.

Most medical museums have a “No Photographs Allowed” policy. When Matt started clicking off some shots, a doctor started yelling at him in Dutch. Matt asked in English, “Is there a problem here?”

“It is you who have the problem!” the irritated physician retorted. Luckily, Matt snapped a couple of skeleton frames before he made us put the camera away. (see photos)

Mutter Museum, College of Surgeons

Where: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Getting In: The public is welcome.

No need to bribe a medical student; they encourage all comers. Their popular calendar features images by photographers like Joel-Peter Witkin.

Contents: Malformed skulls, things people have swallowed, old gynecological tools, deformed baby skeletons, a giant’s skeleton, semi-ossified skeletal remains, a soap corpse. Bonus freak point: Not only do they have the death cast of Eng and Chang, the original Siamese twins, they also have their preserved and still joined liver, which has yellowed over the years.

Fetus collection, Tulane Medical School

Where: New Orleans

Getting In: You are in a “restricted area.” Go there with a student.

Walk briskly into the building-don’t linger in the lobby. Tulane security is stationed there and may question you. If there is an open elevator, head straight to the third floor. If not, go for the stairs, on your right and go up four flights (there is a mezzanine between first and second). The exhibit is along the third floor’s hallways. At first, it appears to be a fairly mundane “growth of the fetus” display, but as you move along, the deformities are presented. By the time you reach the end of the hall, it’s freakshow time.

Contents: Pinhead babies, Siamese twin babies, two headed baby, no-brain babies. Freakshow bonus; Anomalous tiny “goat-boy baby” near the end, with strange horn-like things growing out of its head and hoof-like hands.

Tulane also features mirrors behind the exhibits for all-around viewing. My visit had an added bonus: four police officers showed up and ushered us to the exit.

Here are museums I have not visited but know people who have:

National Museum of Health and Medicine, Walter Reed Medical Center

Where: Washington D.C.

Getting In: General Public welcome.

The Walter Reed Medical Museum used to be right next to one of the Smithsonian buildings. Some suspect that people accidentally wandering into Walter Reed’s ‘elephantiasis of the genitals’ exhibit were the source of those “the Smithsonian had John Dillinger’s 20-inch penis in a jar” rumors. After moving across town, the Walter Reed Museum has reportedly tried to make their exhibits more family oriented, All the good stuff is now in the back room and you need special permission to see it. They apparently still have “conjoined twins” in a jar, however.

Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons

Where: London

Getting In: Bring a doctor. They are strict.

This is supposed to be one of the best and is reputed to contain the Elephant Man’s bones.

Here are some other museums of interest:

Morgue Museum

Room 601, Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York, New York City

Rumored Contents: Cyclops fetus, eight-pound heart, mummified babies, other atrocities

Wayne County Morgue Museum

Detroit Michigan

Rumored Contents: Shriveled heads and penises, gouged skulls, mummified hands.

Anatomy Museum (Anatomisch Sammlung)

Basel, Switzerland, Pestazzistrasse 20

Rumored Contents: Very old fetuses and skeletons

Kulturama

Zurich, Switzerland, Espenhofweg 60

Rumored Contents:

Painted and posed skeletons, preserved embryos and organs, birth-control display

Kunstkammer Section of St. Petersburg Museum

St. Petersburg, Russia

Rumored Contents: Collection of Peter the Great – One-eyed baby, four legged rooster, pickled child’s arm holding a human eyeball

Thanks to Ray Nelke and Collectors of Unusual Data International, Anneli S. Rufus and Kristan Lawson for Europe Off the Wall and Roadside America.

Postscript

I’m not sure what the publication date of the original Nose issue was, I suspect it would have been in the early part of 1994. Strangely, I hardly remember the trip to the museum, except for the encounter with the doctor that Tim mentioned! So much happened in so little time when I was on the sideshow that truly amazing things began to be taken for granted. Anyway, here are two photos that I took inside the Vrolik before being told to stop:

James Mundie was recently granted access to several museum including the Vrolic, and uploaded a number of genuinely outstanding photographs to his Flickr stream.

I’m fascinated with solid geometry, geodesic domes, and space frames. While Buckminster Fuller is often associated with the geodesic dome, few know that he is also the creator of a space frame design called the “octet truss”. The word “octet” is derived from “octahedron” and “tetrahedron”. You see, if you combine octahedrons and tetrahedrons in a 1:2 ratio, you get a space filling solid. Thus a framework that bounds these solids can fill space without gaps. Fuller was even able to get a patent on his design in 1961.

But wait, there’s more to the story! Note that the ratio of tetrahedrons to octahedrons is 1:2. Why is it specified this way? Fuller was obsessed with simplifying things, it’s possible to simplify this description even more. If you bisect an octahedron, you get Johnson solid number one, the square pyramid. Thus, the “octet” truss can also be thought of as a space-filling array of an equal number of tetrahedrons and square pyramids. Granted, “octet” is a great neologism, but is there a subtle bias at work here?

Fuller liked to claim the octet truss was “fully triangulated” and thus was totally stable in three dimensions. Indeed, if you look at photos of some of his original trusses, you always see the top and bottom surfaces of the array as forming triangles, or hexagons if you count the nodes as centers. Actually, within the octet truss, there is always a plane of squares. These squares come from the bases of the square pyramids. Most modern octet trusses orient the square lattice either at the top or the bottom of the array. The octet truss, while an outstanding space frame design, does not really fulfill Fuller’s claim of being “fully triangulated”.

More fundamentally, Fuller did not invent the “octet” truss! Credit for that goes to Alexander Graham Bell! Fuller was honest enough to acknowledge this, though. I’m really not trying to take anything away from Fuller; to independently discover, then successfully patent, such a thing is a significant accomplishment.

With that historical background in mind, take a look at the octet truss as art. Here in Seattle we have a large octet truss array located in front of Grand and Benedicts, a retail store fixture outlet, located at 3825 1^st Ave S. in Seattle.

On top of six concrete columns sits a steel octet truss that seems to be five ”layers” high. It appears to be fabricated from struts and hubs manufactured by the Unistrut company.  though when I look through the current Unistrut website I can’t find space frames that utilize this sort of bent plate hub arrangement. It looks like Unistrut still makes space frame parts that utilize other types of hub attachments.

This is all based on information I’ve gleaned from an old textbook entitled Space Structures. Davies, R.M., ed., Space Structures: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Space Structures, Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1967.

Chapter 94 of this book is entitled “The Basic Elements of the ‘Unistrut’ Space-Frame”, written by S.C. Hsiao. From the photograph I’ve included here from page 1084, we see a close match to the flange system used at the hub of the Seattle space frame.

There is no placard at the base of the Grand and Benedict sculpture to tell us who made it. Perhaps it was simply erected from parts made by Unistrut, and really has no “artist”.

Grand and Benedict also has a Portland location. When taking Amtrac down to San Francisco, I quickly passed a sculpture that looked very much like the one seen here in Seattle. I would guess this is the Portland Grand and Benedict location. If I can find out any more of the “back story” on this sculpture, I’ll post it here. I hope you enjoy this artwork like I do.

A similar, if not identical truss system is found in Seattle at Husky Stadium. Here is a truss that supports a small roof over the entryway to the stadium near parking area E-10:

Unlike the Grand and Benedict truss, which is clearly artistic sculpture, the Husky stadium truss is fully functional. The sides and bottom are flat planes at 90 degrees to each other, but the internal bracing is triangulated:

Here are close-ups of the flange-nodes:

Screeds and Essays

The Bangles Fallacy

I met Benjamin Radford literally seconds before this picture was taken:

I had just walked into the large hall at the 2006 Bigfoot conference in Pocatello Idaho. Craig Woolheater immediately insisted Radford and I looked alike and wanted a photograph.

The great problem with these conferences is that there are plenty of fascinating people to talk to, and plenty of “heavy” things to talk about, but you simply don’t have time to do so! I don’t drink, so I don’t end up at bars after these things end for the day. I’m usually drained after a full day of listening to these presentations and just go back to the hotel and crash out. I was able to speak to Ben briefly, we actually spent more time talking about the movies of William Friedkin than Bigfoot! I did pick up a copy of his book Lake Monster Mysteries. Lake monsters are not really my “thing”, but I couldn’t turn down a good investigative story. There are often parallels between different kinds of mysteries whether it be UFO’s, Bigfoot, Lake Monsters, or Mel’s Hole, and so it’s useful to be aware of a broad spectrum of extraordinary claims.

I liked Radford’s book, and felt he did a good job of investigation, especially with on-site assessment of the famous “Mansi” photograph. But my favorite part of the book, which made me actually laugh out loud, was a short aside on page 128 which reads “The assumption that ancient artwork represents reality is what I refer to as the Bangles fallacy, after the 1980’s band whose hit song “Walk Like an Egyptian” satirically assumed that real Egyptians walked as they were depicted in tomb walls” Though Radford’s book is about lake monsters, I immediately thought of the claims of the UFO advocates, who constantly put forth interpretations of old artwork as depicting UFO’s.

Thankfully, various level-headed art scholars have effectively rebutted many of these claims, as a great deal of medieval artwork was often heavily “coded” with religious symbolism, most of which is lost on the modern audience.

In fact you see the “Bangles Fallacy” all the time in those who make extraordinary claims. Why should we imagine that any particular piece of art is entirely representational unless the artist explicitly tells us so? If I had those kind of artistic talents, I sure as hell wouldn’t depict things as they are, I’d depict things at the very limits of my imagination!

Perhaps the most egregious example of the Bangles Fallacy that I know of is Erich Von Daniken, and his “Ancient Astronauts”. His books have sold millions. He relies heavily on funky looking old art and sculpture to buttress his ridiculous notions of ancient visitation. I remember seeing one old “delta winged aircraft” sculpture he presented. Well how do you know the artist wasn’t simply augmenting and stylizing an insect or a bird?

I found this cartoon in a local Missoula Montana newspaper called the Independent:

It’s the best visual treatment of the “Bangles Fallacy” I’ve yet seen. As you can tell, I think Radford’s novel term is great, being funny, direct, and sarcastically cutting. I think it deserves wider recognition, and I hope this essay is at least a start.

Screeds and Essays

Who first made “ball lightning” in the microwave oven? Bill Beaty links to an old Usenet posting here that takes us back to 1997. This of course was the dark ages, using birthday candles and charred toothpicks. Some time back, I discovered a reference to a microwave oven plasma from at least the 1960’s!

I remember reading Philip Klass’s UFOs Identified in high school. I think it appealed to my growing skepticism. UFOs Identified was Philip J. Klass’ first book, in which he explored the possibility that at least some UFO sightings could be due to natural or man made atmospheric plasmas. I don’t follow the UFO field carefully, but I understand Klass himself moved away from this hypothesis as time went on. Unfortunately, Klass is somewhat vague on details in his treatment of this event, but it suggests that microwave ovens were accidentally creating plasmas long before 1997!

The following is from Philip J. Klass UFOs Identified Random House 1968 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-22622 page 151-152:

“Next I called Dr. Finkelstein, who told me that a “synthetic kugelblitz” was being produced by Dr. James R. Powell at the Atomic Energy Commissions Brookhahaven National Laboratory in Upton, Long Island. The laboratory was using equipment originally built to enable bakeries to quickly defrost frozen bread, as well as for other industrial applications. How amusing, I thought, the AEC using bakery equipment to produce kugelblitz!

The equipment is a special type of oven whose heat is produced by radio-frequency energy supplied by a transmitter similar to those used in television stations. The “Macrowave Oven,” as it is called, is made by Radio Frequency Company, Incorporated, of Medfield Massachusetts. It is an aluminum box, nearly seven feet in each dimension, fed by the radio transmitter. The dimensions are chosen to be equal to one-half the wavelength of the radio waves, which serves to intensify the heating. In technical terms, the metal box is a “tuned cavity.”

One day, during the final tests of an oven, and engineer was amazed to see a ball of plasma suddenly form inside the oven. The synthetic kugelblitz, nearly a foot in diameter, hovered and floated mysteriously until power was shut off; then it collapsed and disappeared. The glowing plasma ball reminded the company’s president, Joshua G.D. Manwaring, of some of the UFO reports he had read and he later tried to interest several newspapers in the idea that similar natural plasmas might explain some UFOs. But no one was interested in the idea, Manwaring told me.

Seeking an explanation for the phenomenon, Manwaring finally got in touch with Dr. Powell at Brookhaven. The laboratory agreed to send up a cameraman to make high-speed movies of the plasma. When Powell saw the movies, he promptly ordered one of the Macrowave Ovens.”

We are not told what kind of material was in the oven when this event occurred. Could it have been bread that had become toasted then charred? We know that the early Usenet folks used charred toothpicks to initiate plasmas, could the same thing have happened with bread?

I’m going to guess the plasma was not contained. If you don’t contain the plasma, it will float up to the ceiling of your microwave oven and start burning it. Obviously no mention of that is given!

Screeds and Essays

I’ve decided to demonstrate the easiest way yet to produce microwave oven plasma.

Step 1. Impale a small (say 4cm by 3cm) rectangle of carbon fiber veil onto a bamboo skewer. You will need to cut the skewer to the length described in step two.

Step 2. Place the skewer into an upturned glass flower vase that you have purchased from Goodwill for two dollars so that the carbon fiber is suspended roughly in the middle of the vase.

Step 3. Remove the revolving glass plate and supporting lazy Susan from your microwave oven. Place upturned glass vase in oven, preferably one that has more than one thousand watts of power.

Step 4. Nuke. Don’t let the thing run for more than a few seconds. Even at that, the glass can get very hot. Let it cool, or wear oven mitts to touch it. It may break after repeated use. No biggie, go buy more at Goodwill.

A YouTube video that includes a clean microwave oven that demonstrates this is found here.