William J. Beaty
(billb@eskimo.com )What do we see?
(The answer in the question from N1/96)
If orgone bions of Wilhelm Reich actually do exist, and if they dance in the air, then they will be very difficult to observe. This is not because we cannot see them. This is because we also see the White Blood Cells (Leukocytes) of the retinal blood vessels which dance and gyrate, and leave little V-shaped wakes as they move through the tortuous capillaries in front of the retina.
While I was still a student, I worked as a Research Assistant at the Center for Visual Science in Rochester, NY. At one point I had an opportunity to visit a vision research laboratory in Boston MA, where I had an opportunity to observe a device which was used to make these moving leukocytes VERY visible. It was a de-focused laser which was aimed into an eyepiece. It was violet in color, with a frequency chosen which is absorbed by hemocytes. When I looked into this eyepiece, I saw a uniformly illuminated field of light, of violet-white color. In this field I saw several hundred moving yellow dots. If I recall correctly, each dot seemed to possess a V-shaped "wake" like a speeding boat makes upon the water. (this supposedly comes from stimulation of the retina's edge-detector neural computation, and all moving objects have these "wakes.")
The dots are leukocytes which move along through the blood-filled capillaries. I noticed that the velocity of all of these dots was varying in synchronism with my heartbeat. As my blood pressure changed during each heartbeat, the dots moved fast and slow. The moving dots seemed to wander randomly, yet many of them executed a typical maneuver: a wiggling, sinusoidal trajectory. Apparently there are many capillaries on the retina which have the shape of a snake, a sine-wave, and when a leukocyte travels through that channel, it executes a sinusoidal "wiggle" motion.
The capillaries are said to be normally invisible because they are full of hemocytes (red blood cells), and these hemocytes are too close to each other, and too far away from the retina to create individual shadows.
Therefor, like the capillaries themselves, the retina "edits" the blood out the view perceived by the brain. On the other hand, the leukocytes (White blood cells) are large, and they act like gaps in the columns of blood which fill the capillaries. These "moving holes" in the blood are made visible when we stare at a uniformly illuminated surface. Even better, stare at a point-source illuminator (laser, or light passed through a single glass fiber) which has been extremely de-focused by a powerful lens (such as a telescope eyepiece.) Doing so is an improvement, since as a result, the light rays behave as parallel lines at the place where they strike the retina, and so the shadows of the leukocytes will be very sharp. (They actually will be ring-like diffraction patterns.) If instead we star at the blue sky, then the light rays behave as "diffuse light" at the location where they strike the retina, and the shadows of the leukocytes will be fuzzier and more difficult to notice.
Do airborne "bions" exist? I do not know, because if they do, they would be almost impossible to see, because we observe them through a crowd of wiggling leukocytes. Obviously, this fact can be used by "Skeptics" to dismiss reports of observed Bions.
I suspect that the "bions" in the brightly lit sky do not exist, and we are just seeing retinal leukocytes. But this does not mean that, in other situations (in darkness, for example, where no shadows are projected on the retina), visual observation of "bions" are not accurate.
SOME OTHER MUSINGS:
When I am observing the moving dots, I can concentrate my attention upon one small region, and I notice something interesting. A moving dot will repeatedly pass through the same region, and it always takes the same path. This clearly is not random. Instead, a row of dots is marching along a single "highway", and the shape of the "highway" determines the path.
Sometimes a sudden motion of my body causes the wiggling dots in the blue sky to become very visible. Perhaps when I suddenly lay down upon the ground? Or suddenly rise from a chair? For a few moments, my entire field of vision becomes filled with the tiny moving dots , and it is very obvious that the speed of all of them is synchronized with my heartbeat.
The whole population of dots moves fast-slow-fast-slow-fast. Then it vanishes again. I ascribe this event to sudden rises of blood pressure in the capillaries of the retina.
If I close one eye, de-focus and relax the other, then if I move my head, the pattern of the dots follows my head movements, and it does not remain stable in the outside world. The pattern of dots is associated with the interior of my eye.
A separate issue: the so-called "floaters". These are detritus in the vitreous humor; the liquid adjacent to the retina. An old article in Scientific American magazine states that they are probably composed of stacks of red blood cells connected together (SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, in The Amateur Scientist: "Floaters" in the eye, 1982 April, pg 150, 1982 September, pg 206).
As a child I often observed these "floaters." They appear much larger than the moving leukocyte-dots in the capillaries. They appear as ringlike bright/dark patterns, although some "floaters" are huge and misshapen. They almost look like amoebas viewed through a microscope. If I move my eyes quickly for a moment, and then keep still, the "floaters" will move upwards, stop, and then drift downwards. They follow the motions of my eyeball. They are the same whether I view them against the sky or against a sheet of bright colored paper. They are part of my eye, they follow the motions of my eyeball, and obviously do not exist in the outside world.
There is no question in my mind that these phenomena are blood cells in the capillaries or tiny objects in the vitreous humor. After all, Nature has designed the human eye in a silly way: with blood vessels running across the surface of the retina, blocking the light! Also, the older we grow, the more "floaters" seem to appear. There is an accumulation of debris in the liquid within the eye.
The researcher who wishes to search for "bions" should take time to learn the characteristics of these moving blood cells very well. We must learn to ignore them, in the same way that a biologist ignores the images of the eyelashes and the moisture patterns of the cornea when looking into a microscope.
Also, we must learn to recognize mysterious objects which do NOT resemble nor behave like the "wiggling" blood cells and the "floaters." If there are mysteries in the world, and if they vaguely resemble the white blood cells or the "floaters", then the skeptic will wrongly ignore them, while the openminded and perceptive researcher will perhaps discover something important.