Hercolano2: Requiem For Royal Rife

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Requiem For Royal Rife

Requiem For Royal Rife - Part TwoThe Hubbard Interviews - Part One Robert Page Interview with Robert Page by John Hubbard and Christopher Bird Abridged, edited, and annotated by Shawn Montgomery By Shawn Montgomery 3-30-7 Interview with Ben Cullen by John Hubbard Abridged, edited, and annotated by Shawn Montgomery From a transcript of a talk with Ben Cullen recorded sometime in the 1950's in which Cullen describes how he befriended Rife: "...Rife liked to come down to my garage and play his French horn, play his guitar and mandolin and cello. Believe me, he sent the visitors into seventh heaven. Rife started one day playing his French horn. He played operas like Rigoletto and Il Trovatore perfectly. All of the people on the block came down to hear Rife's music in the garage. There must have been 100 people there before he quit. Rife's eyes were just running water because he put his whole heart and soul into his playing. From that time on we became very fast friends. I followed Rife every night. I went out to work with Rife. There was so much we could talk about in each other's language that we communicated well. I was a journeyman and tool and die maker from England and Rife was 100% Scotch. I made a steady pilgrimage to Rife's garage where we set up a shop with machinery to build his microscopes. Rife began to become deeply involved in bacteriology. We would discuss microorganisms. We began to install (in his workshop) equipment tools and machines. I bought a pretty nice little centrifuge. In 1933, we began to build Rife's third microscope, the big Universal Microscope. Rife also developed the Rife Ray Machine. He had purchased many electronic instruments and was in close contact with Coolidge and Steinmetz of General Electric Co. They shipped Rife thousands of big x-ray tubes, radio tubes, and parts for his instruments. Dr. Lee DeForrest, inventor of the radio tube worked with us weekends to help put the circuits together..." From a letter dated May 16, 1977 to journalist Christopher Bird from John Hubbard reporting on his just completed research trip to California: "...Of course the high points of my trip were the personal visits with Benjamin Cullen, and Henry Siner, and Bernard Gross... what I did first was to go visit with Benjamin Cullen. He is indeed a most remarkable man to me. I taped nearly two hours of an interview with him and I believe he is the most vigorous octogenarian I have ever known. His speech was swift, although the voice was not a strong one. He is incisive and could make recollections stretching back into the distant past or into the very near recent past with equal facility, almost. He was quite busy also. He talked with me for over two hours at his home, and the next morning was flying to meet one of NASA's physicists in the south-west for some discussions on parapsychological phenomena. The following week, when he came back to town he drove in to meet Henry Siner and myself at the Imperial Bank. I have never known a man in his late 80's to drive an automobile. Then again I have never known an 86 year old man to have a 35 year old wife, which Cullen does..." The following interview was recorded in April 1977 at Ben Cullen's home in Spring Valley, California. Hubbard: Do you remember that picture of the spore? [The tetanus spore in the Smithsonian Institute report - Ed] That is the one which is particularly important. And you were telling me the last time we talked (on the phone) that Rife had split a baby's hair in four parts - did he try to put the spore - the tetanus organism - in like THIS in the four parts? [making clasping motion with three fingers and thumb simulating baby hairs] Cullen: You see what happened was this: first he took the hair and mounted it into a matrix - erect, to hold it straight. Then he mounted in a micro-dissector with a very fine, sharply honed blade. And he used a portion of a safety razor blade with which he had cut and honed it down very, very thin. To look at a razor blade ordinarily, it looks like this, [tracing jagged line in the air with finger] even though it is a good edge to shave by. He had to have it so thin that it was almost so thin that he had to be careful not to move it either this way or that way or it would bend. Blown up on a microscope - that is, one of these reflectometers or something like that - it was a very, very rugged edge, but nevertheless, by moving it back and forth it cut down through (the hair). First, he removed all the outside excess mounting wax that he had. And of course, you can call it a matrix if you wish, holding the hair - it was held in a special vice, a small vice - and he came on down through, and sawed down until he got down to 1/4 of an inch of the hair cut down. And then he cut this through and removed that half, which then you have a half round condition for 1/4 of an inch. And then he turned that sideways and split that right down from the top to the area where it was cut away to make a half of a hair. Then he fared that off very carefully so as to have no sharp edges, and also, you know, in any machined condition, whether its a hair or a piece of steel or anything else, you have to have a radius. And how he put that radius in was very, very interesting indeed. He contrived a very, very fine hair with some very extremely fine dust, which he called, let's see... it was something like "rouge," and he held this half-hair in the matrix. He worked this back and forth with a little reciprocating frame, like this, so that the hair with the impregnated - something like diamond, only he said it was a type of "rouge" - gradually he was able to produce a radius right in at the cut of the hair. Then he feathered the entire balance of the hair off to a point so that there would not be a sharp sudden break-off. Then he turned the hair over, after of course he recovered it from the wax, and turned it over, and with some very fine pairs of tweezers. He used about a 12-power glass. He mounted that in a very small chuck - the type of chuck that you can twist to collapse the interior three gripping surfaces so he could get it into a center, something like the old-fashion carpenter's brace or any other type of drill-holding chuck - but it was very, very small. He did a splendid job on that. I think he first tried Tobin bronze and he found it was too porous so he went to... he couldn't use titanium because he didn't have then the tools to work titanium. I think he was able to get, at that time, some annealed chrome molybdenum and he was able to use it so that he could make up a very fine chuck... and so he turned it up in the lathe. He had a jeweller's lathe. In fact he had several lathes. And that little chuck was made up so that the hair could be entered in that chuck and closed up so as to hold it. Now the trick, of course, was to hold it so that the two pieces of the hair, as it was spread... as it was pushed down it would spread... and of course this is the top side, the rounded side, this is the flat side under here [motioning]. And as it was pressed down, like this, it would open. Now the reason was because the hair naturally has some spring-back like any material, and he found that they were sufficient to bring about a gripping of these tetanus bacilli. He tried it with a hookworm bacillus first, and the hookworm, I know he laid a dozen of them in a row, and it was quite interesting, and then after that of course he was working with the tetanus bacillus. So that's what he did. In picking it up after he had put this down, first he had the thing mounted in a very fine multiple-leverage manipulator - in other words, by moving his main lever, it would be like a very, very fine vernier, he could move it with say a 1/2 inch and get just a couple of thousandths, or 1/2 a thousandths of movement on this little chuck here. Hubbard: (Laughs) Yes, OK. Cullen: And then he laid it down like this and opened it. And then he had a means of moving the whole framework like that to the bacillus, and then as he raised it up the two ends of the hair closed on the bacillus but there was insufficient power to crush it. It picked it up but it didn't crush it. Then of course by manipulating the whole thing it laid on a slide until he had enough of them on a slide, and then of course put it on the microscope and took his photographs. Hubbard: How much time was he working on this project? Cullen: You mean the entire project? He started when first I met him in 1913... Hubbard: No, just on this bacillus. Cullen: Oh the bacillus... oh, it took him a full ten days, because, for a long time he would say, "I've got to see the entire project in my mind first." So he would go to bed and leave a pad and pencil by his bed. He had an ability, which, you might understand, to call on the same as Beethoven did to get his music - from the other side. At eleven, twelve or one o'clock, he would wake up with some information and put it down. And by the end of about two or three days, he'd called me up and say, "Ben, I got a lot of information. Come over and see it." Of course, I always spent more time than I should have, because I always had to get up at six a.m. in the morning. I never got to bed here until about twelve or one a.m. in the morning. I lost a lot of sleep on that deal. You see he was on Point Loma and I live right out here. I've been out here for 46, 47 years now. Then so, I would go over and it mechanically looked very good. So then he started, and after he had it all fixed up, first there was a micro-dissector. He did another little trick too - he dissected... in fact he took a very small (human) embryo that had been a miscarriage, and he cut it in very fine slices and was able to study so much, and that is another project. (Returning to the tetanus bacillus)... After he had them all laid out, there wasn't one of them that was mashed in any way, shape or form. Of course, at first, he tried different types of hairs and some of them were too powerful. Two quarters as they came together would take and squash the bacillus. Finally, he said, "I think if I can find a young lady, or a baby that had golden brown hair, I am told that that hair is quite tough and yet very springy and yet very fine." So it happened that my daughter Sylvia had that kind of hair. So I took some of it over to him and he used that. So after that of course, he was wrapped up more, not so much in his micro-manipulator as he was in the development of the microscope and also development of some type of ray of very high frequency current which would annihilate any types of cancer virus in his work. And so, he worked a great deal on that. Hubbard: Did he every make any other very thin sections like this section of the tetanus bacillus? Cullen: The hookworm and the embryo are the only other two that I remember. Hubbard: Do you recall how big this embryo was? Cullen: It was, I would say about 5 mm long and stretched out by 2 1/2mm, including the overall size of the body, 5 1/2 to 6 mm long. It was very small, in fact, he was so astounded that such a small embryo would be so perfect. The fingers were formed, and the whole thing. Quite often you find, in an embryo that's aborted, it would be Mongoloid for some little time. But this was perfectly formed. In fact there were stools in the bowels and food in the intestinal tract and the stomach. Hubbard: At 5 mm or 5 cm? Cullen: I guess I 'm talking centimetres right now, yes, because it had to be big enough of course, to handle. Hubbard: [gesturing] This is 5 cm right here. Cullen: It would be about double that size. That 5 cm would be double the size of the baby. Hubbard: 2 1/2 cm. Cullen: Yes, I know because I saw it laying out there. My remembrance of measurements was not too bad. I used to have a great deal of work in fine-menturation in the factories. Hubbard: Do you remember what year, approximately it was that Rife cut the section of this tetanus spore? [Recall here that Hubbard is referring to the Typhoid Bacillus photos published in the 1944 Smithsonian and Franklin Institute articles -Ed] Cullen: It was 1928 and '29, somewhere in that area. Hubbard: 1928 or 1929. He made this picture then, not with his big Universal microscope but with one of his earlier microscopes, didn't he? Cullen: Yes he did. Hubbard: Oh, well. Cullen: It was because that Universal microscope was magnified too large for anything like that. You see, he worked in an area the size of a pinhead, and that was large enough to have to play with when it came to the filterable forms. He used one of his earlier microscopes, he had several microscopes. He had one of course that magnified 5000 times and one that magnified 10,000 times. In fact he made several 10,000-magnification microscopes and one went to Dr. Patterson. I think it was in England through the help of Henry Siner. Hubbard: Was it Patterson or...? Cullen: I may be wrong. It was a Dr. Gonin, who was the physician to the Queen at that time, and Dr. Patterson was in that deal, and I can't recall other names too well [Cullen is mis-remembering the name. It is not Dr. Patterson but a Dr. Parsons to whom he is referring - Ed] Hubbard: I see. Cullen: The difficulty is that they have all passed on in one way or another. Hubbard: Has Mr. Siner been out to see you recently? [Henry Siner was another assistant to Rife who worked primarily with the microscope. Siner ventured to England in 1938 to assist a British Group of doctors (mentioned above by Cullen) in establishing overseas a laboratory using Rife microscopes and beam ray machines - Ed] Cullen: I haven' t seen Henry for quite a long time. He has been more wrapped up in high finance. He has been Chairman of the Board of the Siner Paint and Glass Co. and a couple of other activities. We have more or less separated because I remained, in his idea, just a little bit too much of a church-mouse to be bothered with. Hubbard: Well, they may not be quite accurate. Cullen: It may not. Henry is a very fine fellow. I liked Henry very much. I have known him of course for many years and during the last World War it was possible for me to turn a great deal of business to him through what we call outside production or outside order - materials for Convair. You see we had cost plus ten, which was of course was a very, very easy way to do anything. We had lots of money. And I could suggest that much of the work that we were scrambling to get together could be produced outside. And Henry got many, many orders for all sorts of chromes and paints of every conceivable description. And as a consequence, Henry made quite a bit of money. And of course their glass company built rapidly after that and then he seemed to be spreading out, and of course had a large number of agencies established in the county and other counties. And then I lost contact with him. Hubbard: Well, coming back to the microscopes... this picture here is unusual in that now we have confirmation from the electron microscope. This picture here [gesturing to the Smithsonian typhoid bacillus photograph]... the dimensions - you see the spacing between these lines here - this corresponds with our so-called "unit membrane." And there is space out here - this is the "nuclear membrane." Well the distances between these three components here, the distance between these, corresponds exactly with what we know since about 1950-60. Cullen: Between the lines? Hubbard: Yes, between the lines, you see. Cullen: What significance do you attach to that? Hubbard: Well, you see, the significance is that the methods - the instrument that produced this - was able to produce a resolution which we were not able to obtain except with an electron microscope many years later. Now then, I would like to see this microscope re-constructed, recovered, the principles of it determined - because we would probably be able to work with material that is still has water in it. We could work with living material. Now we would still have problems of sectioning. Notice that this typhoid bacillus here, this is complete, this is not sectioned. You cannot see as much detail in this as you can in this because this is a thin section. [Hubbard is referring again to two of the photos from the Smithsonian article comparing the Typhoid bacillus organism photo to the sectioned Tetanus spore photo - Ed] But this has resolution down in the neighbourhood of about 20 angstroms, at least, and nobody had ever been able to do that until the electron microscope came along and until they had methods for making thin sections. Now this, Ben, is the Xeroxed copy of the article in the Smithsonian Institute Report. I had our photographer make a smooth glossy copy of (the photomicrographs) and this merely will show you what the legend was in the original and you can compare it. Well you see, all you have to do is a little arithmetic - the object size, or, the size of the specimen, times the magnification, is equal to the image size. So if we have the image size we can do the arithmetic and we can go back and figure out what the object size was. Now then, independently, we know what the diameter of tetanus spores are, from both the light microscope (the conventional light microscope), and from the electron microscope. So by going back and checking the arithmetic from that source, we can confirm that this is the correct dimension. We also have - that is, we now know independently - the thickness of the spore wall here and the interior of the spore. We can compare this distance with this distance and we get a ratio, which is exactly comparable to what we know from modern electron microscopy. I know that this microscope - even though I've got only three pictures to look at, and only this one can I make correct measurements from - I know that this was an extraordinary microscope and I want to get it rebuilt. I have known about this microscope since 1947. I found this report in the Smithsonian Institute report and I wrote to Rife back in 1949 but he never answered me. I kept asking and sending letters and so forth... Cullen: At that time, it was just exactly ten years from the time he started drinking and he was mentally pretty well in shock. I couldn't get him to do hardly anything. I tried to get him to provide us with closed-circuit television in Lion Aeronautical. I tried to get him to provide us with information and help in our laboratories over at Convair in regard to metallic crystallography and stuff of that sort. And he could have made a lot of money that way. But every time I got him closeted with a group of engineers and he would start to outline his thoughts and what he could do and they were all sitting on tender hooks - he would excuse himself and go outside. By the time he got back he would be waddling. He had to have that liquor - which of course was the fault of the advice and council he received in 1939 during the final windup of our case where we were accused by the AMA of doing something they did not like in regard to the application of the Rife ray for cancer and so forth. And of course that was all a mistake. Of course they had the right kind of help, medical men of repute. But by that time when Rife came on the stage and on the witness stand to testify he went all to pieces. Hubbard: And this was in 1939? Cullen: Yes. Hubbard: Now, I went down to the courthouse and copied all of the records on that trial and I read them on the projection machine, they have them on microfilm down there, and I was just surprised. There would be times when they would want Rife to come to court and from the record there - he wouldn't show up. Cullen: No he wouldn't. Hubbard: Was that because he would be drunk, or what? Cullen: No it wasn't. Rife was a tremendously capable man as long as he could manipulate what he was working with. When it came to being in a court of law, where you're right down to dog-eat-dog, why, that just unnerved him and he couldn't stand it. Hubbard: What kind of questions would they ask him that would unnerve him? Cullen: It wasn't that any questions would be asked to unnerve him - but here he was a man who had spent his lifetime in doing things that others had told him were wonderful - just simply marvellous - his lenses and stethoscope, and his guns, so many, many things that he did. All this he was told by many men from England and from Germany and other places that he was an excellent man in his field. Possibly I am not using the correct nomenclature and verbiage that I should use, but nevertheless, he absolutely felt on top. And when he got into court he became a simple, plain human being. And anything he might say he was afraid might incriminate him - although there was nothing at all that the trial could find that he would be at any time considered culpable in any mistake at all or anything that might have been done. It was all done of course through our corporation: The Beam Rays Corporation. Now, Rife felt completely frustrated because he could not do anything in court except say "yes" or "no" - and he knew what to say and he was not allowed to say it. If he was allowed to enlarge the least little bit, why, the Prosecution would cut him right off and there would be a fight as to whether it should be entered in the record or stricken from the record or what. It so unnerved him that he was just simply scared to death. He was not at all conversant with law. The only law he knew was the law of research and investigation. Hubbard: Was there a transcript of this trial ever made, a typed transcript of the testimony in the Judge's chamber? Cullen: I wouldn't be able to tell you that. Bert Comparet would be the man to tell you that. Do you know who he is? He was our attorney at that time. Let me see if I can get his telephone number. Hubbard: All right, thank you. Cullen: His telephone number is 284-2666, and the address is 4930 Mansfield, and his name is spelled C-o-m-p-a-r-e-t, B-e-r-t-r-a-n-d. He is of French extraction. Hubbard: He was the attorney for Rife? Cullen: Yep, and for all of us. Actually we hired him. Rife you see wasn't accused of anything. He wasn't indicted. He wasn't anything. He simply was a witness and in spite of the fact that they had nothing against him and never did find anything against him, he simply went to pieces. Hubbard: That is very, very strange. How old was Rife when his father died? Cullen: Strange as it may seem I have no knowledge of that. Hubbard: Did he ever speak of his father? Cullen: He never spoke of his father in the whole time I had known him from 1913 until 1950. Hubbard: That's very strange. But he did speak of his mother quite a bit didn't he? Cullen: Not to me. You see he was married to a very lovely Chinese woman, her name was Mamie. She was a member of the Ah Quin family here. She was a very splendid person and of course I am rather partial to Chinese. At one time I must have been Chinese. Perhaps you don't believe in reincarnation, I don't know what your ideas are. [Rife's father in-law was the wealthy and famous Ah Quin, the "unofficial mayor of San Diego's China Town." His daughter Mamie was one of twelve children who were born and raised in Canton, Ohio and San Diego - Ed] Hubbard: I don't have any really. But go ahead. Cullen: And so Mamie was a very fine person and everybody just loved her and he always spoke very highly of her. But I never heard him talk of his mother or father in the whole time. And we were together an awful lot, goodness, we were together often times week after week. Every night after I would get away from my work here at the house - first I would come in from factory and then after I did what I could do around the house I always slipped in to do what could be done at the lab. In fact my wife often claimed that she was more a widow than she was married. We were together so much and in that whole time I don' t recall that he ever once mentioned his father or mother. Hubbard: Did you ever hear him speak anything about his boyhood? Did he ever talk about any of the friends that he had or any fights or any athletics or anything like that? Cullen: Very little. He was so much more interested in optics and also to get all he could in optics he studied all he could from the Chinese development in optics, plus Zeiss in Westlar, Germany and others. Carl Zeiss. Hubbard: But Carl Zeiss was not at Westlar, that was Ernst Leitz at Westlar, Carl Zeiss was at Jenna. Cullen: That is strange because all was referred to Zeiss as being in Westlar. However, I saw much information, much correspondence from both places. Hubbard: From both places. Did he ever mention the name Hans Lukal to you? Cullen: Yes he did. Hubbard: And this was one of the people that he studied with? Cullen: Yes. Hubbard: Do you remember if this man was at Zeiss or was at Leitz? Cullen: I understood he was at Leitz. Hubbard: Do you remember the optics which the microscope objectives which Rife used? Did he use both Leitz optics and Zeiss optics? Or did he only Leitz optics? Cullen: As far as I could find, he used only Zeiss in this Universal Microscope. Now I'm not going to say he used only Zeiss completely because he ground many of his own lenses. He developed a system of grinding his own lenses and I watched him do it. He mounted them, of course, in this 21-bend microscope, which is his Universal. I was hoping to work with John Crane who has the microscope skeleton now, and have him let me have it. Hubbard: Have you talked with him? Cullen: I have talked with him a great deal. Hubbard: What does he say? Cullen: Well at first about a few weeks ago he said he would let me have it and I would polish it up and get it in shape. And then I said, "I would like to have you plan to have it exhibited in the Hall of Sciences." He said he thought of that too. Then he casually mentioned that he was going over to Japan... and today is the 20th... and I expect he has been over there now for about ten days. Hubbard: Oh, he did go to Japan then? Cullen: Yep, and I haven't tried to find out whether he is home or not to check up on it. I could, of course. Hubbard: Well I'll call him Ben, that's all right, just go ahead... but he was going to Japan? Cullen: Yes to finance one or two of his items. He (Crane) has a type of microscope that he invented himself. It's a rough and ready looking thing to me. But he can throw, of course, on to a screen, a magnification of up to over 400,000 times. But then the resolution is not good. And he says he is going to improve it. Now, he is quite jealous. When I went over the last time, he said, "Yes, I will let you have it." Now, I called him on the phone and I told him I was about to have our biggest car - which is an lmpala - overhauled, and it would be tied up for some time. But before I did, I could come over and pick it up because it had ample room in the trunk to bring it over here. He said, "I'm not going to let you have it, I won't be doing anything about it until I get back from Japan." I said, "When do you expect to get back?" He said, "I don't know." So that was the way we left it. I just simply felt, well, there is nothing that I could help anybody with as long as I can't get the microscope because I could help whoever was still in optics. I could outline the types of lenses and prisms and the way that whole thing was worked out through magnification and through interposition of lenses between prisms so as to prevent any spherical aberration at high magnification - or to prevent the crossing of the light rays, which of course they'll do when you get to around 120mm of focal length. And so I've had so much else to do in other ways so I began to think, "Well, what's the use." I just didn't feel that I wanted to continue. Hubbard: Well, now Ben I know that there are problems here. I came out here a year ago to see John Crane. I'm just being very patient with him and I am going to try to do one step at a time. I am going to try to be here through next Wednesday. I have to go back to New York on Thursday. I am hoping that I will be able to contact John before I leave. But let's not be discouraged now if this thing doesn't get firmed up immediately. John has had these microscopes now for about twenty years and he hasn't done anything with them really. Cullen: He has a mind that is very fertile but doesn't complete anything he starts. He has a very fine system of monorail high-speed transportation but he simply doesn't push one particular thing long enough to realise its value or to get it into operation. He just scatters his fire and so he has so many things that are going up at the same time. Now with Rife, he would concentrate on a microscope and bacteriology, but to rest his mind he would pick up his French horn and play the most wonderful music - or he would just go out in his racing shell and go out and ride and row rapidly - or his fast bicycle and do six miles or ten miles on his bicycle, something like that - or he would study this multiple engine that he developed which was able to take wonderful photographs at 10,000 feet after sundown. And many things like that that he did. But he always came back to his one love and he completed that to the best of his ability. Hubbard: Now, Ben do you know of the whereabouts of any laboratory notebooks or any records that Rife made of the work that he was doing? Cullen: John Crane had them all. Hubbard: The story that he (Crane) has given to me is that the Food and Drug people removed those records from his home there at the time he was involved in some court actions. Cullen: Well, I have very little here, I thought I could find some considerable information, but I have very little here. What I do have originated from Crane. I did have a lot of information but after I married Jeanne we were quite busy taking care of this other place and doing many things that ties up my activities now and as a consequence whatever became of the stuff I don't know. I may come across it sometime because I have a lot of storage outside, but I simply have to make a living. My living comes from counselling and so forth. And I have developed a capacity - that is, scientific hand analysis and graphology, scientific handwriting analysis also - and all the means wherein I can advise and counsel people. And I always put everything on tape and that becomes a permanent record for that person for the rest of their life. It is a very important record and a document they should always take of and if possible transcribe it from tape to typewritten form. And of course I have been doing this now for the last 25 years. And this of course happened to be something that provides me with a little additional remuneration. Social Security couldn't take care of my expenses, not by 1/4. Of course I am 86 years of age and I have been retired quite a little while. Hubbard: Well, my father...you're are just about almost as old as my father. My father will be 89 in this November. He is still working. Cullen: What day in November? Hubbard: 5th of November. Cullen: I was born the 2nd. Hubbard: Well we have got the same birthday then. I was born on the 2nd of November 1922. Cullen: I wondered why you were so persistent. I said you couldn't be a Cancer, you couldn't be Gemini. You could be a Leo, but then I was wondering. Hubbard: Well this is very interesting. Let me switch... I am not going about this in the order that I should but... you would of course recognise Rife's handwriting, wouldn't you? And any laboratory notebooks that he had? Do you remember Alice Kendall or Mrs. Alice Callaway, Dr. Kendall's daughter? Cullen: I remember the name, yes, I remember Alice Kendall. But I didn't know her very well. I knew Dr. Kendall, he had a Chair in Northwestern. Hubbard: Yes he was Dean of the Medical School there for a while and Chairman of their microbiology department. Cullen: Yes, he certainly was well up on microbiology and bacteriology. Also I met Dr. Rosenow too. He came up here. But Kendall was a splendid man because he knew so much, And he used of course, Kendall Medium, K media, to maintain comparative tissue life and for anything we were doing with lung tissue section and any kind of excise material from animals like rats or guinea pigs. Hubbard: Where is Rife buried. Do you know? Cullen: I guess Bob Beck could tell you that. Hubbard: Bob Beck could tell me? Cullen: You know Bob Beck don't you. Hubbard: No, I don't, but I'll find out. Cullen: Well, his wife is the one that has the telephone number and I don't happen to possess that right now. I know just where he lives and that is something I can't give you right now. Bob is a very bright man in many respects but he is a man that indulges himself terribly with smoke in his lungs. He likes to keep his lungs loaded with tobacco smoke. And I have given him about just about another five years before he will pass on of emphysema or lung cancer. I've seen quite a bit of lung cancer working with Rife you know. Rife did quite a little job for the Cancer Institute at one time, and took two years analysing a massive lung tissue section and that's where I learned all about lungs and stopped smoking. Of course I never did inhale, in the olden days you didn't inhale you just puffed, you got some of the smoke in your lungs, but not too much. It was more or less you lived with the atmosphere pretty well, but when you take it in from the cigarette or cigar or that sort, why its pretty rich. Hubbard: Let me ask you some questions. If I were to show you some drawings, whether you could give me any clues as to a parabolic surface on any of these prisms. When we first talked over the telephone, you indicated that some of these prisms... that Rife had made some parabolic curves on them. Cullen: I know what I said, yes, he actually had figured out the parabolas and then ground the lenses to those parabolas. I would have wracked my brain considerably to be able to guarantee what I would see because at that time of course I studied them - but you know several things have happened since. Hubbard: I thought I had brought my drawings, copies of drawings John Crane gave me when I was here a year ago and these might possibly help you recall. Now this is not Rife's own drawings, but it is a drawing which Crane signed Rife's name to, and his name to, and there was a Carl R. Brown attorney. Crane tried to patent this later. He told me that they were not successful in getting a patent but he had amended it and he has a patent pending. Now then, this is one of the drawings he gave me. Now, do these prisms bring anything back to your mind? Do you recall if there was a parabolic surface cut on this area here? Cullen: This is not for the Universal Microscope, it doesn't look to me like it's for the Universal Microscope because he had prisms located at each corner of the bend from one side to the other and they interposed between these lenses, because the prisms themselves, as I recall it, did not magnify. Hubbard: The prisms themselves did not magnify? Cullen: Did not magnify, simply they carried the image through from one magnification to another on up through from the objective lens to the oculars. Hubbard: Now this does not then look like any of the prisms systems in his early microscopes either does it? Cullen: It doesn't. There are lenses here that indicate certain types of magnification, but he always interposed a lens between two prisms at each end and the... I can 't tell you right now for absent father as to what each lens... whether it was a convex or concave lens and what the parabolas were of each lens. Actually I was more taken up with the mechanical side. I did what I could to help in doing machine work on any parts that he needed. He had a very nice little machine shop there which I loved very much and I helped of course to do all I could there. When it came to preparing, for instance, for the tube, which was used to propel the Rife ray and to do any therapeutic work, then I of course was quite interested. I made up all that sort of stuff. And the basis for the tubesS analysed the types of gases that we should use to exhaust the atmosphere and interpose the inert gases, and so forth. That was my side, so actually I can't say that I would recognise that lay-up at all. Hubbard: Well now Ben, let me ask you, as soon as your hand is good enough that you can draw again, I would very much like to have from you a sketch giving your recollection of what the prism system and the lens system was that Rife had in his Universal microscope as best as you can recall. And then I'd also... I'd like to have your sketches on that section of what you did with tetanus bacillus. Now they don't have to be artistic, but if you could make approximations going step by step. Because, you see, it is not only important that this microscope is an unusual thing, but his making the sections, there was nothing like this to come along for at least thirty years more. Cullen: Well, I can't promise you when I can do this. (Summary of abridged passage): A long talk by Cullen about his (Cullen's) religious beliefs. Then... Hubbard: (continuing)...Was Rife very religious? Cullen: Not too much, no. He was very psychic. He could draw from the ocean of mind - which I call it, another side - information about many things he couldn't have in his conscious state. As I told you, when he wanted an answer he would put his pad and pencil by his bedside and between 11 and 2 o'clock he always got his answer. (Summary of abridged passage): A long talk by Cullen about his (Cullen's) family history. Then... Hubbard: (continuing)... All right, well let me ask you a few more questions. What motivated Philip Hoyland to bring that suit back there that destroyed that company and destroyed everything? What was Philip Hoyland like and where is he now? Cullen: Philip Hoyland was an English Jew. Now, I am very fond of Jewish people, but Philip was definitely the very grasping type - and very cunning. I noticed his cunning when he was working with me. I was turning out all the stuff and of course was also Executive Vice-President (of Beam Rays Corporation) for quite a while, and Philip had some sneaky ways about him. When the Khan Realty Company brothers came down here from Los Angeles at the behest of the head of the AMA - his name was Morris Fishbein - when they came down here to see if they could find out something about us at the direct request of the head of the AMA they found quite a good deal with Dr. James B. Couche, who was a very fine physician and surgeon and had been a Fellow of the College of Surgeons for twenty years... and Philip was in the office with us, and when they had found what we were doing they said, "Well we would like to buy into this corporation." Well I said, "This happens to be a closed corporation, we haven't requested the Commissioner of Corporations for the privilege to issue stock. That would take a long time if we did. At the present time we are not in a position to actually do that." So one of the brothers acted a little bit belligerent, and he said, "Well you ought to do something about it." And I said, "Why?" And he said "It would be good for you, it might be healthy for you." So I thought, "That is strange." And so they left finally. Hubbard: These two brothers? Cullen: These two bothers of the Khan Realty Company. Hubbard: The Khan Realty Company was in Los Angeles? Cullen: Yes, Los Angeles. They were a German Jewish Realty Company, their name was German-Jewish. And they met Philip Hoyland. I noticed that Philip was showing considerable appearance of friendliness toward them and I didn't think much about it until later I had found out that they had gotten hold of him and bribed him with a $10,000 check. Hubbard: Did you ever see the check? How did you find out about the $10,000 check. Cullen: I didn't see the check but I do know this... that it came from many sources and from his own lips later that they paid him $10,000 and he had wished to God that he hadn't ever accepted it. But just like Judas Iscariot who betrayed Jesus, as soon as he got that $10,000 check then he kicked us into the courts on... not on bankruptcy but something similar to that. Hubbard: He wanted to get the directors changed. Cullen: Yes, he wanted to get the whole thing changed. But what happened was this Aaron Sapiro came out from Chicago, the Prosecuting Attorney - paid by the AMA. Hubbard: How do you know that Sapiro was paid by the AMA? Cullen: Because he made that statement to Bert Comparet and to others, and of course I was often times in the group and I heard what was said. Hubbard: This would be interesting to go to Comparet. Comparet could probably tell me a lot about this, couldn't he? Cullen: Yes he could. But there is an Irish Judge in that picture. If I recall right it was Judge Rodebaugh. I knew Judge Rodebaugh quite well from another connection. The case ran a year and three days in court. Hubbard: I have seen at least two different Judge's names down there in the courthouse. The last Judge was a man by the name of Kelly. Cullen: Yes, Judge Kelly came out here suffering from tuberculosis and moved to Ramona. Judge Kelly I think was the one who issued the final judgement. Hubbard: Then there was a Mundo, a Judge Mundo. Cullen: Yes Judge Mundo did sit in sometimes, but it was mostly Judge Kelly. Kelly was also a pretty fond of "John Barleycorn." I found that sometimes Judge Kelly was under the influence. Of course, I met him up there in Ramona but he came out here with tuberculosis before I even got acquainted with Rife. In fact, when I was living in Ramona and just doing mechanical work to kind of keep myself going... the story is too long to go ahead and tell you why I came out here... except I was hired to go down to Mexico to run a gold stamp mill for a gold mining company. But, so I met him up there and got acquainted with him and he knew me of course quite well. The same as Rodebaugh did. But I smelt liquor on him so many times, and I hesitated sometimes to know what to say to him. I didn't know whether he was under the influence of liquor when he was on the bench. So that is the situation there about that. Now, Sapiro was a very cunning man. In fact I think he did what's his name... Belliwell, this wonderful criminal attorney. Hubbard: I don't know anything about criminal attorneys. Cullen: That guy is known quite well in the west here... but he (Sapiro) was giving him quite a run for his money. [Presumably Cullen means in a trial previous to the Beam Ray trial - Ed] However, (in the Beam Ray trial) Judge Kelly saw that Fishbein was trying to cause trouble when there was really no trouble there - because, actually, all the information that was brought out in the case was pretty well corroborated by the various doctors: Dr. Johnson, Dr. Rosenow, Dr. Gruner, Dr. Arthur Kendall, and Dr. Couche... and so the case simply fell by the wayside. And I praise God it did because they would have given me about ten years for being the one who was doing all of the organisational work and so forth. It was my corporation to start with. [Here Cullen is either exaggerating or he is simply paranoid. At no time was he or anybody looking at serving any prison time due to the Beam Rays trial - much less "ten years." Their business manager C.R. Hutchinson, was found at the trial to be a dishonest businessman that had engaged in illegal stock transfers within Beam Ray Inc. It was suggested that the Corporate Securities Commissioner had a case to against Hutchinson and if pursued (in a new and different court case) he might be successfully prosecuted. These charges against Hutchinson were never pursued. Ben Cullen was involved with Hutchinson in some of these questionable activities. Perhaps his statement (with its evident paranoia) is founded upon this. Cullen, who was not a Director at the time of the lawsuit, was not a defendant and did not appear as a witness at the Beam Rays trial (though he did provide a deposition and was the topic of much of the testimony of others) - Ed] Hubbard: So Philip Hoyland really was the tool, in your opinion, he was an agent of other people who were trying to get in and make some money? Cullen: To get control of the corporation at the request of Morris Fishbein. Yes. You see, Dr. Hamer was another doctor. We supplied him with two instruments, down at National City. He passed a large number of cancer cases through that office with two operatives, each was using an instrument, and they simply recovered from cancerous conditions. And of course, what precipitated the whole thing was this old gentleman. I wish I could remember his name: 82 years old, he had a "butterfly." You know what they are, it is a superficial cancer, nothing but a malignant cancer of a papilloma-type and it looked like a piece of gory red liver. He was in a terrible mess. Dr. Hamer treated him, and when I saw him before he went back to Chicago there was just a little scab on this side (of his face) over here, which eventually Dr. Hamer said would fall off. When the AMA sued us - Dr. Hamer was one of our best surgeons in the Paradise Valley Sanatorium at that time - he closed his office and moved up to the Mill Valley up in Upper California. And when anybody asked him about the Rife Ray he didn't know anything about it. He didn't know anything about bacteriology at all. He wasn't a microbiologist, he didn't know anything. Hubbard: Well now, this is not the trial of 1939? This is later, wasn't it? Cullen: No this is the trial of 1939. Yes, Dr. Hamer had two of the instruments that we built. Hubbard: Originally? Cullen: Absolutely, the original. Hubbard: Ones that Rife himself had built? Cullen: Had helped to design and we had them rebuild them. Hubbard: Do you know where any of those original instruments are of Rife's? Cullen: I wouldn't know doctor. Hubbard: There would be no way for us to get a hold of the original records or anything? Cullen: I have no idea what John Crane would have now. Hubbard: Here is the thing Ben: Just in the same way that I found that this photomicrograph of this tetanus spore corresponded with what we learned thirty years later - in the same way, some of this material on the treatment of tumours and bacterial diseases may... now I don't say that I know it yet, I don't, I do not know it - but I suspect that there were some genuine cures in this that we could recognise today and I would like to be able, not now, but in a couple, two or three years, I would like to follow through on this. I would like to see what the records show because if there were biopsies... you see I am a pathologist and I can take a look at some human tissues and very, very frequently I can tell whether it is really cancer, or what kind of cancer it is, or if it isn't a cancer. If it is a benign tumour I can tell what type it is. I can tell a lot of things... if I can just get the evidence. But getting the evidence is going to be rather difficult. Cullen: That is a problem because, you see, that work was done so long ago. When Benjamin Henderson brought his wife to Dr. Couche to treat. She had one of the worst cases of breast carcinoma I have ever seen. In fact her breast was almost all sloughed off. It looked terrible. But Dr. Couche, with the original laboratory instrument, cleared it up. Hubbard: The original laboratory instrument? The one Rife himself had built? Cullen: Yes. Hubbard: All right. Cullen: Then he had a number of cures, oh, a large number. Hubbard: What was the name of that doctor now? Cullen: Dr. James B. Couche. I think he died when he was 84. Hubbard: You see it makes a great deal of difference to me, Ben, as to whether Rife himself built a radiation device and a doctor used it, or whether it was one that Hoyland built. Cullen: You see, everything that Hoyland did was also being done by all of us at the request and under the supervision of Rife. You see, we simply transferred from the laboratory instrument to the instruments that could be made up into one cabinet. And we had to have Rife's OK with everything we did. Roy worked with us all the time. Hubbard: But after Hoyland came in there he didn't work with you all the time, did he? Cullen: Not all the time no. Philip Hoyland was given the responsibility of calibrating every instrument, of the oscilloscope and oscillograph. The instruments were calibrated but when we shipped two instruments over to Great Britain, and Henry Siner went over to demonstrate the instrument, Hoyland by that time had simply scuttled the very valuable calibrations and they didn't do any good. Hubbard: Yeah! Well, I saw Gonin's letter, I saw the original, and Gonin complained that the instruments were not even wired up properly. Cullen: Now, that was all Philip Hoyland's fault. Hubbard: All right. Cullen: Gonin came over you know, I got acquainted with him. He pronounced his name Gonin. Yeah, in some languages you have a long i in the pronunciation. The laboratory instrument, I had it here one time. My first wife had a growth on her back right down the spine and it was then considered a superficial cancer that was spreading and so I treated it and it dried up and fell off. Now she was in Judge Kenny's Court at the time that John Crane and John Marsh were there as criminals (1962), as the case was being heard, she was put on the witness stand and Bert Comparet asked her... at that time also he was again the attorney for the defence... he asked her, "I understand you had a growth on your spine?" She said. "Yes." He said, "What was it?" She said, "The Doctor called it a superficial cancer." He said, "What was done with it?' She said, "My husband used the Rife ray laboratory instrument and treated it and it dried up and fell off." And the Judge struck that out, wouldn't allow that to be shown in the testimony. That was when Crane was in for the criminal trial. Hubbard: Did you go to Crane's trial any Ben? Cullen: Yes, I was there several times. Hubbard: What do you think was really the cause? Why did Crane really go to jail? Cullen: Because first he had started to build small, what they call, little black boxes: two little grips to be held in the hands and treat conditions... to change the condition of the bloodstream so that if a person had cancerous virus in the bloodstream, why, it would tend to clear up that condition in the person suffering from that type of cancer. It would be cleared up. Now, he (Crane) got into a very ridiculous situation. He decided to go ahead and demonstrate and lease and sell these boxes without benefit of medical council. He organised a group and started selling them. He would sell them to different people. Supposedly he was only leasing them, which of course, is what we did with the earlier instruments. They were definitely large instruments and he was advertising it. He got a group together one day in the Grant Hotel down in the basement assembly hall... and where he picked up this guy I don't know but he picked up somebody that tried to make people believe that he had come from Venus. Hubbard: For heaven's sakes. Cullen: His name was... it's a peculiar name... Samason or something like that... and he was trotting around with a regular military uniform with a Goodwill, well-tailored jacket with a sand brown belt, Stetson hat, polished brown leggings and knickers, trotting around all over the place, going to various churches and claiming he was direct from Venus. Prince Neason his name was. And so I went down to this meeting to see what was going on at the Grant Hotel. At the time I was working for the outfit called Norncar Manufacturing, which is now Ritiker Corporation, manufacturing various types of large receivers, benches, and so forth, or big dishes like 60-foot dishes and 100-foot dishes, and so forth, for various types of signalling devices like they used over here at the Naval Air Station on Point Loma. And so, I was called up on the stage by John Crane. There was about 50 people, one man was making same notes and I definitely picked him out as a deputy District Attorney. And this Prince Neason made the most outlandish statements I ever heard. He was just simply a charlatan and simply trading on the gullibility of this fellow John Crane. And so after I left there, Crane put me on the spot about asking me certain questions about Rife, which I could say without any more than just simply plain statements of fact. After I left there and went back to my office in this factory here in La Mesa, I simply wrote out my resignation and called him up and told him it was in the mail. And of course, not very much longer before that happened that the District Attorney's office made a raid on his property there without a search warrant and took a lot of stuff away. Hubbard: The District Attorney did? Or was it the Food and Drug Administration? Cullen: No it was someone to do with a... who would it be... a constable or police or who... I can't be certain. [It was the jack-booted-thug division of the State of California Food and Drug Administration - Ed] Anyway it had to do with the police authorities and they took a lot of his equipment away. And I think I will include one more item however, they did it without benefit of a search warrant. And he tried to sue them but because Mahity.... definitely Judge Mahity has always been a very, very poor Judge... always done a great deal of cow-tying to the District Attorney's office. And whenever he, the District Attorney, or the Prosecuting Attorney would request the testimony would be stricken from the record, why, he always upheld the District Attorney. This is a tiresome thing also. In the last day of the (1962 Crane/Marsh) trial I was in there at ten a.m. in the morning and it went on through to dinner and lunch, and after dinner we finished up in the evening. They had in there, as a witness, a man who was working for the police department as the Chief Dispatcher and also their electronic engineer. He also had been used by Dr. Couche to keep the laboratory instrument in calibration. And he knew all this work because I had met him long before, oh many years before, up at the laboratory at Point Loma. I wish I could tell you his name. Bert Comparet could tell you. Now, he went on the witness stand and the prosecution asked him some questions about this black box. They asked, "Was it any good?" He said, "No, it was not any good, it was just a fake." And the whole thing went through that way and this of course is what threw both of these men into a ten-year sentence at San Quentin. But of course we got them both out after three years. Hubbard: John Crane was sentenced to ten years? Cullen: Yes, ten years, along with John Marsh. And so, let me see, so this man, as he came off the witness stand, I beckoned him over to me, I said, "For goodness sakes, now you knew the value of those little black boxes. They were properly calibrated for certain conditions." I said, "Why did you lie that way?" He whispered to me, "I have a job to protect." And I said, "For goodness sakes alive, you mean to say you would lie and send a man over the road, to protect your job?" He said, "I have a family." I said, "I don't wish you any hard luck, but I can't see you living too long. I 'm not threatening you. I'm saying that I'm afraid that your perfidy and your unfairness will sneak up on you." And in two years he was dead. A strong, healthy man. Now ask Bert Comparet what his name was if you can. He was a man who was a dispatcher, his voice came over the police radio dispatching various patrolmen and prowl cars and so forth, and also did a lot of electrical work for the Police Department down at the foot of Market. [This man's name, which escapes Cullen, is Verne Thompson - Ed] Hubbard: What about Milbank Johnson? Do you remember Milbank Johnson very well? Cullen: Yes, he was a big, tall, handsome gentleman - very, very knowledgeable and extremely interested in Rife. He wrote a very fine letter one time after he had seen the work that was done at Miss Helen Scripps home on the treatment of a boy with papilloma. Around the neck here a cancer had eaten through so you could see the sinews and see the neck bones, so much of the flesh had dropped off around here. He had to be held up on this side all the time and held down so he could move his neck. Now Milbank Johnson, and Kendall, and Rosenow were there at the time that this work was done and they saw the tremendous value of the Rife Ray instrument because it actually cured that boy's papilloma up to a point where he had some scar tissue for some time but he definitely was saved. He did not die. He was healthy and able to go back to work. Hubbard: How old was he? Cullen: About 21. Hubbard: When did Milbank Johnson die? Cullen: I don't know. Hubbard: He was on the faculty at the University of California Medical School here in San Diego? Or was it Los Angeles? Cullen: At the time I knew him he was a head physician for the Northwestern Insurance Co - or Great Western - I really and truly am a little bit hazy, but both those names should be considered. Hubbard: All right, that gives me a lead. Cullen: Well, Doctor I wish I could stay for a long, long time. Hubbard: Well, Ben I'll stop now. End of Cullen Interview ____________________ Analysis of many of Cullen's assertions in the above interview can be found in the linked article entitled "Deconstructing Beam Rays Incorporated: Searching for the AMA." Next: The Hubbard Interviews: Part Three - Bertrand Comparet On the Beam Ray Trial, the John Crane Trial and Things in Between Copyright 2007 All Rights Reserved Shawn Montgomery is a freelance writer, researcher and producer. His video documentary series "The Rise and Fall of a Scientific Genius: The Forgotten Story of Royal Raymond Rife" can be found at www.zerozerotwo.org ==================================================

Requiem For Royal RifeThe Hubbard Interviews - Part Two
Ben CullenOn Methods of Genius, AMA Madness,
and John Barleycorn's Hold On Rife 8-10-6

Robert Page grew up near Dr. Rife's laboratory. He became Rife's friend and confidant.

From a letter to John Hubbard from Chris Bird written prior to this interview:
"This guy Robert Z. Page is a real find. He is a long-time Navy expert on pest-control and knows his parasitology, microbiology etc. Has lots of awards for his work on the wall of his den. He is also a captain USNR. I hope to spend some more sessions on what he knows and has experienced."

Christopher Bird is visiting Page (age 57 at the time if this interview) at his home in Springfield, Virginia. They are together when John Hubbard telephones from Buffalo, New York. It is spring 1976.

A ringing telephone is answered.

Hubbard: May I speak with a Mr. Robert Z. Page, and is there a Mr. Christopher Bird there please?

Page: Mr. Bird is here and I'll put him on this phone and I'll go upstairs and take another one.

Hubbard: Oh, you're Mr. Page?

Page: Yes.

Bird: Hello John. Well I've learned a lot already. Well, this guy really knows his onions, and he'll get on the phone here in a few minutes and say a few words to you about what he has been telling me - but one of the KEYS to the whole (Rife microscope) thing is the method of illumination. And he (Page) has patented the same (as Rife's), or a very analogous method, and for the last ten years he has had absolutely no success in marketing it because of pressures all over the place.

Hubbard: Well, that's strange. That's very odd.

Page: Well anybody that wanted to could make that thing and put it up for sale. If you were dependent on any of the existing companies that produces for anything that you need: any of the companies like Bausch and Lomb, or American Optical, or Zeiss, or any company that exists because they make and sell microscopes - then you are out of luck. If you have an optical company that can give you what you need without doing that, then you are ok. If you have a company that makes lenses strictly for cameras and not for microscopes then they would probably make it for you. One thing this won't do is show you very much in a section of tissue, well, it does to some extent.

[Page is speaking of his own patented microscope color-illumination system (which
is based upon Rife's monochromatic approach to illumination).
Note: The term "monochromatic," which will be used throughout this interview,
means: a singular color of light. White light is full-spectrum light and contains all
colors simultaneously. Monochromatic light is narrow-spectrum light and contains
any one color of light singled out - Ed]

It works beautifully well with particulate matter. What I have done with it is to add some features in addition to the monochromatic oblique illumination that Roy Rife used, to make it a more useful thing. You can widen out your band of light, take something beyond monochromatic, and it looks green, or it looks red, or it looks violet, but it's a much wider beam and it doesn't give you this resonant frequency which is akin to spectroscopy on a microscopic scale

(Summary of abridged passage): Page slips into a disjointed bout of technical description concerning adaptations that can be made to his patented system. Then a lengthy technical discussion concerning different microscopes that have been patented, but that are not produced because they threaten the market. Then

Page: (continuing) Now I don't know whether you remember the pictures in Life magazine back in '51, late '51. Roman Vishniac? He had a color system for microscopy and he refused to tell anybody what it was all about because he was a professional photographer and he was afraid somebody would find out how he took these pictures. If they could take pictures he wouldn't be able to sell his. But it was a several page color spread. He used light from oblique angles to color his specimens with phase contrast.

Bird: You made the point (in an earlier conversation) that after Rife solved the illumination problem, he then solved the problems of spherical and chromatic aberration, would you tell us a little more about that?

Page: Well yes, to get away from spherical aberration, which is the worst offender there, ordinarily, you go to parabolics. Again, no more circle of elimination.

Hubbard: He built parabolic lenses?

Page: Yes sir, he learned to grind them himself.

Hubbard: Oh. Who did this?

Page: Rife.

Hubbard: (Emphatically) He built parabolic lenses?!!

Page: Well, you know, an awful lot of astronomers grind their own (lenses).

Hubbard: Yes, I know, but, did Rife say that there were parabolic lenses in his illuminator?

Page: Well, he told me that he had learned how to grind parabolic lenses and if that's the way he solved his no, not in his illuminator, in his microscope.

Hubbard: In his microscope.

Page: Not in the illuminator, no. That's a fairly simple, straightforward thing.

Bird: (To Hubbard) And Mr. Page told me that Rife went to Holland and he learned how to grind parabolic lenses in Holland.

Page: It may have been Germany.

Bird: Germany then. [It was Germany - Ed] OK, so he got rid of that aberration that way, and the other aberration he got rid of with mirrors?

Page: First he went to quartz like everybody does, and he wasn't satisfied with he told me he wasn't satisfied with quartz. And so he solved his problem. And I said, "You used mirrors, huh?" And he gave me a funny look, and then he laughed

Hubbard: (Interrupting) Well now, when did you first meet Rife?

Page: Oh I don't remember. It was years ago in my childhood. I don't even remember.

Bird: Well now John, getting that part of the story, I already have an hour of it on tape, so why don't we just stick to the technology and ask him the questions while he is on the phone, and I'll send you the other part of it with everything that Mr. Page can recollect.

Hubbard: Well, I'm particularly interested in how Mr. Page got introduced and what did he do?

Page: My parents knew him (Rife) for a number of years. For a while I lived across the street from his laboratory.

Hubbard: Oh, I see.

Page: This goes back years and years and years, and I was a child.

Hubbard: All right, now, did you personally look through his number three
his big universal microscope?

Page: No, I never looked through it.

[Rife produced a series of five different microscopes - identified by numbers 1 through 5 in the order of their construction - the Number 3 Rife Microscope is the Universal Microscope (the "big" one) completed in 1933 - Ed.]

Hubbard: Did you personally look through his number four microscope?

Page: No.

Hubbard: Did you yourself see any pictures, which Rife had made with the big
microscope?

Page: Yes. A bacillus coli is a huge thing. It was "B. coli" back then, and it was
a huge sausage, and inside it were all kinds of structures, and he was
telling me what he thought they did. But they were not in any books any
place, they were never in anybody else's illustrations. Nobody else had
seen them.

Hubbard: Now, did he tell you when he made these pictures of the typhoid bacillus? What year did he make the picture in?

Page: Well, the particular that I was talking about was not a typhoid, it was a bacillus coli, most of us carry that around (in our intestines). He had a number of pictures. I think he had one of the typhoid bacillus, but it wasn't as interesting, and it was a little bit smaller, as I remember. He had a bunch of these hung on the walls in the hallways in his laboratory: pictures of a number of things.

Hubbard: All right, now then, have you personally looked at the report in the Smithsonian Institute where Seidel shows a picture that was reported as a typhoid bacillus?

Page: No.

Hubbard: You haven't.

Bird: I can make that picture available to him and I shall do it before I leave for the mid-west.

Hubbard: All right. I would like for you to tell me then later, Mr. Page, if this is what you think is the same image of what you thought was the bacillus coli?

Page: Well, he probably had some, he had photographed a great many things, and this particular one though he said this was the B coli. He was telling me what the differences in some of these new structures that he had seen were - based on their chemistry.

Hubbard: Let me ask you this, had there been a fire? Had there been a fire in his laboratory in the time that you were around?

Page: Fire? Fire? It doesn't ring a bell.

Bird: What the Professor is asking, Mr. Page, is that there are no pictures left and he made movies as well - and all of the pictures, and all of the movies have gone, and disappeared, or been stolen, or been burned, or been something or other.

Page: Well I don't think they were lost in a fire. Now there may have been a fire because somebody wanted a Fire Sale - that sort of a thing. This I don't know. Or possibly to destroy something. His laboratory was not burned down. It was used after. In fact he sold it, and the person that was using it was a chemist who worked for the outfit that makes Southern Comfort whiskey. The guy was working on essences. And that's all he worked on - the man that was in the laboratory that was bought for him from Roy Rife.

Hubbard: Well now, let's go back a minute. You say you were a child across the street from Rife's?

Page: No, I wasn't a child living across the street from him. I knew him when I was a child, but I lived across the street from his laboratory, not across from his house. His house was on another street, sort of diagonally through a couple of vacant lots. They are not vacant lots now of course, but that was after World War Two. My parents bought part of the Bridges estate when it was put on the market.

[The "Bridges estate" was owned by the wealthy Amelia Timken-Bridges, Rife's main benefactor. Rife's first laboratory was located "above the garage on the Bridges estate." Rife's second laboratory, built near the Bridges estate, is the one to which Page is referring - Ed]

I helped my folks build a home there after World War Two. My wife and I helped them weekends and evenings while I was going back to school and as soon as the second bedroom was finished we moved into the house. That's when I was living across the street from him for the second time.

Hubbard: What I am trying to get at Mr. Page, is as much as possible of the history of the photographs that were made with this microscope. This is crucially important. So as far as you know then, there was no fire destruction in Rife's laboratory up until the time you met him?

Page: Well, I met him when I was a child, and he had a lot of these pictures then.

Hubbard: A lot of them. Do you mean ten? Or twenty?

Page: Oh gee, I don't know. He had, well, just in his hallway there was probably, oh, a dozen and a half, something like that.

Bird: And these were blown up just to put on the walls of the hallways.

Page: Yeah. But there were other pictures too, in some of the other rooms. I remember one room in which he had one pretty good-sized area, but there was something in there: racks for storage batteries. But that has nothing to do with the microscope.

Hubbard: Let me ask, when did you leave the neighborhood where Rife's
laboratory and his home were?

Page: Oh, let's see, '47. Then, I never really came back to live there anymore - but I guess because my folks lived across the street from him there, it was their home, where I lived for a short period of time -I'd stop to see him every time I'd come into town.

Hubbard: When is the last time you saw him then?

Page: I guess the last time I saw him was when I was back as a hospital patient. I'd come back from Korea and I was a hospital patient in San Diego. That was pretty much '52.

Hubbard: Had Mr. Crane joined Rife at that time?

Page: I don't associate that name with anything specific. But the last time I saw Roy Rife was at his home on Zola street. He opened his garage and showed me some of his units - that had nothing to do with microscopy - that he was selling for junk parts for radio hams to come pick up the parts and use them. He had the ghosts of three of them left at the time that I saw them. That's the last recollection I have of seeing Rife.

Bird: Those were the ray devices.

Page: Yeah. They looked like small diathermy cabinets on wheels and

Hubbard: He was taking them apart and selling them?

Page: Well he preferred to sell whole units. If somebody only wanted part of one, why then he would cannibalize one that had already been cannibalized to some extent. He was just trying to get the money off them. His eyes were shot - he couldn't see much of anything anymore. He had already gotten rid of his microscope, and all the equipment and everything else, and he sold his laboratory, and he was running out of money to live, and he could hardly see what he was doing.

Hubbard: He could hardly see. And this was in 1952?

Bird: You remember Professor that he was going to (Dr.) Heisner there to try to get his eyesight back.

Hubbard: Yes. So, the time that you last saw him Mr. Page he was really not alert and able to work was he?

Page: He couldn't see. His eyes looked red and they were a little runny. He told me how much trouble he was having with them. The light outside bothered him. When we went out the door and down the steps he had a little problem with the steps, and we got out to the garage and he showed me the units and I said I wanted to buy one.

Bird: Mr. Page told me, Professor Hubbard - and this comes directly from Ben Cullen - that he would work for hours and hours without moving, getting these things to illuminate.

Page: He used the big microscope on a hydraulic device. It was a barber chair without the chair on it.

Hubbard: Oh! Which scope?

Page: That was the big one. The eyepieces came straight out from the top of the thing - and then he had one above that for photography. The only way he could rest his back or his neck was to jack this thing up or down a little bit. He would sit there for hours and hours at a time taking one picture. That's why I was kidding him one time: I said, "Why didn't you drive those things?" - you know. And he thought for a while and he said, "I don't know, I never thought about it."

Hubbard: Having a motor drive on his focussing unit?

Page: Right. And that was right after he told me that he was the brightest man in his whole generation and probably two or three generations each side of it.

Hubbard: He said what now?

Page: It was just less than a minute after that, I think, that he had told me that he was probably the brightest man the most brilliant man, in his generation, and perhaps a generation or two each side of his. (Laughs) I said, "So why didn't you ever think of driving those things mechanically?"

Bird: It was not just driving the microscope but also the prisms.

Page: Yeah, that it was, the prisms to illuminate it because he would spend hours he'd turn one prism just slightly, revolve it just slightly, and then he would slowly go through 360 degrees with the second one. Then, he'd move the first one again, very, very slowly. Anytime he would come to anything that would light up suddenly under the microscope he would stop.

Bird: When he rotated the prisms, he'd get a certain kind of monochromatic light, depending on where the prism was, and then he could light up not only a specimen, but part of a specimen, to reveal something in it that no one had ever seen.

Hubbard: Well Chris, this is what is most important for me to find out from Mr. Page. On the big universal microscope there are two sets of facing prisms that were rotatable through an axial cable to the right

Page: Well I thought each of those one set was immediately above another?

Hubbard: One set was immediately above another.

Page: I didn't know he had sets of prisms, I thought he only had two prisms.

Bird: You may be talking about another microscope?

Page: Well this cable device and all, that you are talking about, yeah, he had the simple knobs out in front, that took him hours and hours to rotate these things.

Hubbard: This is the universal microscope that I am talking about. Was this the one he was looking through?

Page: A very large barrel? Stainless steel? A beautiful looking thing

Bird: I think it's the number five (microscope).

Hubbard: Well, number five was in England.

Bird: No, it didn't go to England 'till 1940.

Hubbard: What year are you talking about now Mr. Page?

Page: Oh gee, um, well, I could have been looking at the thing before the war and talking about it afterwards.

Hubbard: Well if he was looking through the microscope before the war, it could have been the Universal. If it was after the war it could have been the number four, or number five before the number five went to England. But I think that number five went to England in 1940 - so that would mean that it would either be number three: the universal, or number four.

Page: Well the last one that he had, that I saw him with, was a very large barreled, stainless-steel housing - and that's what made me think of mirrors because it looked like a short section of a telescope barrel.

Hubbard: Did he have numerous attachments on the side?

Page: No this one was fairly simple.

[At this time Hubbard had already been to Crane's house and had examined the Universal (number three) and the number four Rife microscopes - Ed]

Hubbard: OK, now then, let's go back then. So now we are dealing with number four then. Now the number four only has but one set of prisms on it - between the illuminator and the sub-stage condenser there is one set of prisms. The prisms rotate in opposite directions to one another.

Page: Yep.

Hubbard: And that set of prisms is only about as thick as your finger. Do you remember? There are some numbers on the sides.

Page: A finger and a half.

Hubbard: A finger and a half. OK. Now, there was some numbers on the side of that prism. But you say he would rotate this prism very slowly?

Page: Yes, by turning the knobs out front. It was way back in the back of this thing, he couldn't reach around to it.

Bird: He rotated the prisms John, in order to get the monochromatic illumination, to shift through the spectrum and select what he wanted, to illuminate the specimen whatever it was.

[This was the key to the unique illumination system in Rife's microscopes. He used light to stain the sample (to illuminate structure) instead of the dyes and stains of standard light microscopy. The result was that instead of looking at dead microbes (normal microbiology), he was able to image them (at much higher resolution) while they were still alive and functioning - Ed]

Page: To slowly shift all the way through the spectrum you'd turn one prism just a touch, and then you'd go through the other one, slowly, 360 degrees. You'd turn the first prism a touch more, then go through the other one 360 degrees. And do it again and again and again. It would take him hours.

Hubbard: That would be very time consuming. If he was using number four, he was using the rotation of the prisms below the sub-stage, and then he may have been rotating the stage itself.

Page: He had other controls for the stage. He could move his stage, yes, but that wasn't directly related to this. But what he was doing with those prisms was just going through the spectrum.

Bird: That was the key to it.

Page: It was just like spectroscopy on a microscopic scale. You use oblique illumination, and you shift through the spectrum. And that's all he was doing. And that's why he could hypothesize as to what the particular structures that he saw were doing, based on their chemistry.

Hubbard: How did he relate chemistry of the organisms to the spectrum?

Page: Spectroscopy.

Hubbard: But you can relate certain elements, and you can, with infra-red microscopy, relate molecular structure but with visible light, you can not make deductions about chemical structure with except for elemental analysis, with visible light.

Page: Well, I don't know, but that's what he was doing. I've had no experience in spectroscopy, but that's what he was doing completely. Now, he had put an awful lot of organisms with an awful lot of internal structures under his microscope, and he had a pretty good idea what some of those structures were doing. And they lit up in a particular part of the spectrum, and something else lit up in that same particular part. He was basing it on that.

Hubbard: Do you know whether he ever mentioned ultra-violet emission from his tungsten illuminator?

Page: Well, he had gotten away from tungsten.

Hubbard: What was he using as an illuminator when you knew him?

Page: He was using carbon arcs. He built his own rods. He was not happy that he had to build his own carbon rods, but he said that he could not find good, clean carbon rods. They were all contaminated and they were all ruining his research. And he gave up on using tungsten long before that.

Hubbard: Now, Chris, I could not find, when I was out there, ["there" being John Crane's house in San Diego - Ed] I did not see any carbon arc machines.

Bird: That's why you are talking to Mr. Page.

Page: He (Rife) showed me some of his rods and he said he built them. Now is the man a charlatan, was he lying? I don't know. Eventually he completely sold me, because it was not just the microscope, there were an awful lot of things involved. It involved the Rife Ray and some physicians that had worked with him at the time. Two different ones who happened to be very good friends of my parents.

Bird: Who were they?

Page: A couple of doctors in San Diego. They are both dead at the present time.

Bird: Was one by the name of Couche?

Page: I don't know anybody named Couche out there in San Diego. No. They had both been contributing some of their own time at the Paradise Valley Sanitarium.

Bird: Oh, that was Dr. Hamer, was he one of them? He was head of the Paradise Valley Sanitarium.

Page: That's not one of the ones that I recall. They were not there permanently, they were giving some of their time. Paradise Valley, as I remember, was a free clinic and they had so-called hopeless cases of syphilis and TB and probably some other things. They were sent there to die. If they couldn't afford to die in a regular hospital some place, then they'd go to Paradise Valley. It was sort of a charity clinic more or less at the time. And they were donating some of their time there and they got involved in some tests.

Hubbard: Well, Mr. Page, let me come back now you never really got to spend much time looking, yourself, through one of Rife's microscopes at any specimens, did you?

Page: I told you, I never did. I could understand what he was doing. But never when I was there visiting him, was the scope being used.

Hubbard: It was not being used when you had visited him?

Page: No, there were other things going on at the time, but there was never any scope being used. Now, I just handed two gentlemen a copy of a patent but I am not using the illuminator at the present time. But it exists.

Hubbard: How old were you, in your early teens, your middle teens, or your late teens when you first met Rife?

Page: Oh, before my teens I am sure. My folks had known him for years.

Hubbard: So you were a child really.

Page: Yes sir. He was one of these people you would see off and on and off and on and off and on.

Bird: What's your age now Mr. Page?

Page: 58, I'll be 58 in June.

Bird: So in '53 you were a young man graduating from college, or out of the Navy.

Page: In '53, well, I got out of the Navy the first time in '43. I had been recalled to active duty. The Navy caught me working for the Army at Fort Benning, Georgia, and the Navy sent me out with the Marines as punishment I guess. (laughs)
(Summary of abridged passage): A bit of personal history from Page.
Then, (below) back to Rife in a discussion about "microtomes," which are the slicing machines pathologists use to "section" tissue samples - similar to the cold-cut slicer at the deli. Being a pathologist, Hubbard is particularly interested in Rife's specimen preparation techniques, which are believed to be among the most inventive ever devised.

Hubbard: Let me ask you some other questions Mr. Page, did Dr. Rife ever look at red blood cells, white blood cells? Did he ever look at any leukocytes? Or did he ever look at any algae when you were there?

Page: He had looked at algae, we had discussed it. We discussed insects. We discussed fungi. I can't say that he had looked at red blood cells. He gave me a bunch of slides that had sections, very thin sections of different types of cancer.

Hubbard: How did he make his sections, his thin sections you say?

Page: As I remember he had a huge sledge microtome.

Hubbard: A huge sledge microtome?

Page: Yeah, the old sliding blade, you know, it looked like a straight razor but it was much larger than that, a great big heavy thing.

Hubbard: Now Chris, this is important. That is one of the most important new observations that we have gotten.

Page: I remember it was huge. It was much bigger than the sledge microtome I used in college and I used the biggest one that San Diego State had at the time. It was the department head's pet.

Hubbard: Now the sledge microtome that I am thinking of - that is huge, the blade moves in the horizontal.

Page: Yes, dropping downward very slightly as it moves in the horizontal, on a slight angle downward, not perfectly horizontal. Is that the size you are talking about?

Hubbard: Well, pretty much so, was the blade about a foot long?

Page: Let me see. I'd say longer than a foot. I'm guessing about 14 or 15 inches.

Hubbard: Was this a microtome that you had ever seen used to cut sections of brain?

Page: Well I don't know that it would cut across a complete human brain. No. It wasn't in one slice. If you were cutting from the top down you would have to have a very thin section that you would have cut off the top because the thing, on a slight angle, would have had to have been longer than I believe it was. If you just took a block of the brain tissue, then yes, this would probably do a real good job. But I don't know what he used for embedding media.

Hubbard: You don't know what he used for embedding media?

Page: No sir, I don't know. He may have used paraffin with rubber in it. Latex?

Hubbard: Let me ask you, did you ever see him using a microtome, actually cutting with it?

Page: No sir, I have never personally seen him doing any of the things that he claimed to have done. I have only seen him when he was relaxed, or when he was unrelaxed but unhappy about something. I'd never seen him at work in his laboratory. I have visited his laboratory but he stopped what he was doing to talk with me for a couple of hours at a time. But I wasn't watching him work at the time. I have been in his laboratory several times with a white coat.

Hubbard: Let me ask you, as a child now, do you remember if there was a woman working there in his laboratory who was the daughter of a Dr. Kendall?

[Renowned bacteriologist Dr. Arthur Kendall worked with Rife for several years beginning in 1931. Together, they developed a technique that revealed nascent life cycles of the typhoid bacillus. They published their findings in California and Western Medicine (medical journal). Commentary on their article was titled, "Has a New Field Been Opened in Bacteriology?" It is believed that Kendall's daughter worked in Rife's lab for a short period, and confirmation of this is what Hubbard is getting at - Ed]

Page: No sir, just off hand, I don't recall.

Hubbard: Do you recall any women working there in his laboratory?

Page: There were people. I have seen a woman in the laboratory. There were three or four other people sometimes when I was there. Now, I guess she must have been working there. But I can't swear to that.

Hubbard: This was as a child that you saw these people working in his laboratory, didn't you?

Page: Yes, pre-teenage, and early teenage, and I don't recall seeing people in there in my late teens. I just don't recall. I could have.

Hubbard: Were there any people working around him when you were in your late twenties?

Page: My late twenties let's see there was somebody around there, yes sir. A man, slightly built, rather thin, taller than Rife

Hubbard: Did you know a Dr. Kendall?

Page: No sir.

Hubbard: Did you ever see any notebooks or records, which Rife was keeping of his observations?

Page: Yes sir. One very thick notebook was placed in my hands, and I put it on a little table in his garden.

Hubbard: Chris, can you show Mr. Page your copies of those frequency data sheets that I copied? I wish you could show them and see if he can identify those as being in Rife's handwriting.

Bird: But I can't do it now because they are at home and I am down with Mr. Page in Springfield.

Hubbard: At a later time then Mr. Page.

Bird: Could you identify Roy Rife's handwriting Mr. Page?

Page: I doubt it. It was very small. It was rather precise in that he would make every letter very clearly. Now, it seems to me that there were two or three letters which he made differently from most people, but very quickly you started reading and you can follow it right along and it becomes routine and familiar to you.

Hubbard: But Rife did keep notebooks?

Page: Oh yes sir. He kept one very convincing and very complete notebook and he handed it to me and said, "This is my life, my whole life, right here."

Hubbard: Now Chris, if we could get a hold of that notebook.

Page: That would be interesting wouldn't it. You see I had it, he was giving it to me.

Hubbard: He gave it to you?

Page: Yes sir, he gave it to me. And then I made a mistake. It's one of the mistakes that I regret more than any other I've made, and I've made a lot of them. I'll cut this story very short Do you remember hearing in the 40's, reading in the newspapers, about some flying saucers, or something, coming over from Russia?

Hubbard: Well, I remember flying saucers have been in the newspapers at various times

Page: Well, this started a flying saucer scare - whether they were flying saucers, or low flying rockets - but they were controllable. People from the little villages in some of the free countries in western Europe - they were a few miles from the Russian border and they would interview everybody in the village, you know, and their stories were all almost alike. There would be just enough differences to account for human fallibility. But these things would come over, they would fly in formation, they would loop and turn and so forth, and then they would go back into Russia. And there'd be stories in the newspapers. And it was a nice pleasant day and I was sitting out there in Rife's garden, and we had some tea that his wife made for us. And he was telling me, "Don't put sugar in it, it's not good for you," and I was putting it in anyway, 'cause I don't think it's very good without it. I don't like it without it. But, this was after he had given me the notebook, and we were sitting there chatting, and he kept asking me about them (flying saucers),

"What do you think about these?"
"Well, the papers say they are Russian, I don't know."
"Well, what do you think they are doing?"
And I said, "Well, I don't know, maybe they're spying on us."
"Do you think they might have weapons underneath?"
And I said "Well, they might not have the bomb yet, so..."
"Do you think they could probably get it someday?"
"They probably could, if we've got people smart enough to build one, they could build one. But maybe they put something else in it."
And Rife said, "Well, what else would they put in it?"
I said, "Well, they might put the Rife Ray in there."
And he just beamed all over, you know, and he said, "Why, that would be wonderful!"
And I said, "Yeah, you could fly around a city, you know, just circle a city."
And he said "That would be wonderful, we could heal everybody!" He was almost trembling, like a little child - so elated.
And I said, "Yeah Roy, we could tune it to hemoglobin"

[Hemoglobin is a main component of red blood cells. Page was jokingly suggesting to Rife that the Beam Ray Machine could be used as a beam weapon to kill human beings by targeting red blood cells (with their determined specific resonant frequency) instead of targeting the designated pathogenic organisms for which the machine was designed - Ed]

And his face kinda went blank, and then he got kinda grey, and he began to tremble and shake, and he ran over, and he was screaming at me, "You can't do things like that to people!! Don't you know that you can't do things like that to people!!" And he picked up a rake and started after me. And I vaulted over the wall. And he told me never to come back and he was shouting at me. Somehow I think he ought to have been swearing at me, but I don't think I had ever heard Roy swear. I went back later but I was never able to get my hands on it - I never saw the notebook after that.

Hubbard: This is very strange. This is the only time you ever saw Rife get so upset, wasn't it?

Page: I have seen him become provoked when he would start to talk about these idiots in the medical profession and in the universitiesbecause they couldn't repeat the things that he had done, as precisely as he had done them then they didn't believe that they had really been done (by him). He would become upset with people but this is the only time I had seen him really become emotionally violent.

Bird: How could they possibly repeat the experiments if they didn't have the equipment?

Page: Well, they would come in and work with him, he would tell me, and he would tell them to do this and this and this and this - some of them could do it while they were in his lab. Then they would go to some place else. And he said. "Well, they were always sloppy." He said, "I distill all my water seven times... and I do this and I do that and I do the other thing." And he said "They are sloppy, they don't use pure chemicals." And he would go on and on. But, ahh that was the only time I had seen him really angry.

Hubbard: So, after this peculiar reaction to your comments about the use of widespread (Rife) radiation and you had to climb over the fence to get away from him?

Page: I didn't climb over it, I bolted over it. (Laughs)

Hubbard: And he was after you with the rake. He wasn't just joking, he was really angry?

Page: Yes sir. He was not joking. He was smaller than I was, I thought I could have taken the rake away from him, but I figured that it made a lot more sense to just get out of his reach.

Hubbard: But he offered to give you his notebook?

Page: He had handed it to me. I set it down on the table.

Hubbard: And when you saw him again, did you ever ask him for that notebook?

Page: I asked him for it. I asked him where it was, but he said, "somebody else has it."

Hubbard: He said somebody else has it?

Page: That was it. He didn't apparently want to discuss it very much.

Hubbard: Gee, that's a very peculiar reaction.

Page: I could tell some long stories about that notebook and what might have happened to it, and what's happened to me because of it, and a few things that involve the FBI and military intelligence, but I'm not going to go over it.

[Comments: Page's most loaded of sentences! Page's interview is important because it forces us to ask the oddly overlooked, but very large question:

Would the so-called Military Industrial Complex (MIC) be interested in Rife's work/inventions/know-how? Or, more to the point: HAVE they been interested in it, and, ARE they interested in it? Serious contemplation of this idea forces many other questions: Would the MIC be interested in acquiring advanced optics technology - something that would provide an extreme advantage and strategic superiority in espionage operations vis-à-vis advanced telescopes, spy-satellite camera optics, and forensic microscopes?

Would the MIC be interested in acquiring an advanced energy weapon (apparatus and concept)? Would the MIC be interested in a device that can selectively kill any species of microorganism with an invisible, tuned "ray" that can be fired from any distance and cover a variable target area? Wouldn't that sort of thing be kind of useful as a defense against a bio-warfare attack? Anthrax, no problem tune up the machine poof, poof, poof no more anthrax.

Would the MIC be interested in the above-described device if it could also double as the ultimate weapon against enemy personnel? Instead of tuning and targeting the device to kill microorganisms, it (theoretically) can be power-and-frequency-modified to attack vital cellular structure within the human body. Anybody under the ray suffers the fate of their red blood cells exploding, or their hypothalamus turned to mush in an instant, or their central nervous system fried like a transformer blowing up or any other collapsible physiological system could be targeted. Have the MIC sat around tables and thought about all the awful things one could do with such a weapon both viscerally and economically? Have they thought it through and decided it's for them? "Let's develop it before the enemy does (or in case the enemy does). Let's use it secretly and be miles ahead of everyone without them even knowing it." Or, have they decided to put it on the stack in the room in the warehouse in the storage facility where they keep all the scary stuff that the world isn't ready for - the stuff that threatens the COMPLEX part of the Military Industrial guy's crazy world of "hawks and doves," "mine's bigger than yours," and "I'm not tellin'."

The main question is: Once appraised of the potentials available with Rife technology, both optical and beam ray, would the MIC be able to resist either exploiting it, or at the very least, controlling its exploitation?

In the early 1950's, Robert Page was engaged in the Navy as a scientist tackling the problem of pest control, a very large and multi-faceted dilemma for the armed forces. They had been having no success in several quarters, and finally, exasperated and desperate, he turned to Rife who he thought could help vis-à-vis the Beam Ray Machine: the ultimate pest control device. In a letter dated November 3, 1953, Page implores Rife to lend his expertise and technology to their cause.
After a long explanation of their problem and a lengthy begging of Rife's association and help, Page writes:

"Would you be willing to help us? Would you furnish the basic design or the one used in the small cabinets that you had in 1946-1947, and give us some of the frequencies we need to test the equipment?

There is little that I can offer in return for your help, but I will make three solemn promises. First, that I will do all I possibly can do to keep the Rife Ray from being used as a weapon to destroy man. Second, I will do all I can to insure that if there is any financial gain that it will go to you, or to a Royal Rife Ray Research Foundation. Third, that I'll do everything that I can to insure that you get the credit for the development.

You are in a unique position. You can offer a second time a wonderful gift to your fellow man. We need you. Please help us.

Bob."

End letter.


Rife was a drunk by the time he read this plea, if he read it at all - Ed]

Hubbard: (continuing) Well, look Chris, you'll follow up on that angle, won't you?

Bird: Well, whatever Mister Page wants to say... I'll listen.

Hubbard: Well, look, I'll leave that part of it with you to follow up on getting the notebook. Mister Page, it's extremely important... let me tell you now... everything hinges on these pictures which have been published in the Smithsonian Institute report. There is so little left, if we could get a hold of his original notebooks, if we could get a hold of...

Page: I could tell you some of the things that were there in the notebook, now, not the specific details of how he did what, but Are you at all conversant on the subject of his charts? They were like the periodic charts for elements - his charts were for microorganisms. Have you heard about them?

Hubbard: No I haven't.

Bird: Nor have I.

Page: He built a chart that was sort of like the periodic chart and there was even seven or nine or thirteen families, it was either nine or seven, I believe... all the pathogens fit into one or another of these columns. All the pathogens getting down below worms and so forth... viruses, bacteria of various types, and fungi of various types, and on up through an evolutionary-type ladder. And, he claimed he could breed the mutations or, not mutations that he could breed changes by changing the media, and other growing conditions in addition to the media.

Bird: That we have.

Page: But, all human pathogens fell onto this chart. And that the key to each of these columns - which would have a very small virus at the bottom and a pretty good size fungus at the top, that within that column there was a single T-protein.

Bird: And these pathogens in a single column could transmute one into another depending on the medium?

Page: But they remain true to this one protein, they always had this one protein in them. Now this is what he saw with his microscope. Now if you take a step beyond this - and of course all the time he was looking for a cure for cancer that his mother died of when he was a child - but if you take a step beyond this thing then he could tell himself... "well, gee, if I could just destroy seven proteins (or nine proteins or whatever it was) without hurting the human body, then I could wipe out all disease."

Hubbard: Let me ask you also Mr. Page, did Rife have any interest... now Chris, this might seem very strange, but I have reason for it... did Rife have any interest in paintings? Visual art? Did he ever buy any paintings? Was he ever in contact with any artist?

Page: You are tickling something way back in the back of my head but I can't bring it forward... sorry.

Hubbard: Did he have any interest in watercolors or oil paints?

Page: Well back at this particular point in my life I could be confusing it with one of my aunts having an interest in this. I can't say yes, I'm afraid.

Hubbard: As far as you know did Rife ever have any contact with a painter, an artist painter?

[In the interests of scientific rigor, Hubbard is here trying to eliminate the unlikely possibility that the photomicrographs published in the Smithsonian Institute article might be fraudulent - possibly paintings - Ed]

Page: If I knew I don't recollect. I know that he liked nice things. His home was always very neat and very nice.

Hubbard: The photographs of the organisms that he had... did he have those enclosed in picture frames?

Page: Yes sir.

Hubbard: He did? All right.

Page: With glass in front.

Hubbard: With glass in front of them, and frames on the sides?

Page: Yes.

Hubbard: Did he have most of his microphotographs so enclosed?

Page: Well, the ones that were hanging on the walls, in the hallway and in some of the rooms.

Hubbard: You have no idea whatever happened with those, do you?

Page: No sir, I don't. Now, all of the ones that I saw were black and white. There were none in color. One reason I was particularly sorry when he had gotten rid of his microscope was, because, when, I had been kidding him about the thing you know..."why didn't you ever drive it mechanically?"...

(Summary of abridged passage): Suddenly Page is distracted by a rustling of papers and a murmur from Bird. He begins referring to a diagram. Followed by Page digressing with a somewhat confusing story about a crude system for projecting colors from black-and-white film that his father had shown him. Then Bird suggests another story for Page to tell to Hubbard

Bird: I want you to tell the story to Professor Hubbard that you told me, right over again. There's a reason for this.

Page: Which story was that?

Bird: The company that you took the equipment to in Washington.

Page: To make a long story fairly short, I went to visit this company, I called them first and they suggested I bring this (illuminator) unit out. I took my microscope and my illuminator out. And I showed them the illuminator. There were three gentleman there that owned this small company, one was the president, the other one maybe both others were, I guess, the vice-presidents. They were all three optical engineers. The recollection that I have is that each of the three of them had at one time worked for Bausch and Lomb and had, at another time, worked for American Optical. I could be wrong, maybe not all three of them had worked for both companies.

Hubbard: Do you remember their names?

Page: I've got the names of one or two of them written down in my correspondence. I took the unit out. They were very much interested. I was out there several times. I was interested in getting a fairly inexpensive medical unit, make it available. I'm talking just about the illuminator. All you needed if you had a clinical microscope is a sub-stage condenser that will take a dark-field stop, and then you are in business. If you can't use it for true monochromatic light you can at least use it for what amounts to interference coloration and for phase microscopy. You can use a field of any color you want with contrasting illumination. You can see things that you can't see without it. You can see living tissue without having to stain it. You can see inside the cells. You can see all kinds of things. You don't have to have a phase microscope or an interference coloration microscope. I was interested in seeing this unit get into clinical laboratory use and also to get into schools. In schools you could have a relatively cheap student unit made out of plastic, after all, my unit is made out of plastic, parts of it. I made it myself. And there is no reason why something like this couldn't go on the market fairly inexpensively. And it was either the second or third time that I was out there they told me that they had decided that the first unit that they would like would be a very expensive research unit, the optics would be all quartz.

And I forget now what they were going to charge then, but that was a number of years ago, eighteen or nineteen I guess, and at that point in time they were going to charge what I thought was a terrible price. They said, "Well, it would be a pure precision instrument. It would be a wonderful thing for the whole research society, and the world at hand." And they could recoup all their costs of design and manufacture. Then, in two years or less they promised me that they would then be ready to start production of the clinical units and to be followed very quickly by the production of the very inexpensive student units. I was thinking of the student units in particular there because I thought, "Well shoot, if I decide it could work for the government well, then as a hobby at least, I could start producing an awful lot of pictures and selling them - because students in various courses in microbiology and parasitology And I would like to have these because they can see structures and no one they really are they can see organisms really for the first time. Or they can see life in full color. This is a fascinating thing.

You can see a rotifer sit there and try and gobble up an algae cell. I just like to watch them for hours. Anyway, the cells sell the pictures - if they are pretty good pictures. But, the guy called me up, oh I guess it was less than a week after I had been there the last time, and they had been discussing it. One of them kept saying, "They won't let us make this. They will not let us make this." Finally I said, "Who is it that won't let you make this." Well, "Bausch and Lomb won't let us make this." And the other two were saying, "If this was American Optical they would stop us, but Bausch and Lomb won't stop us, they are not that kind of people." Well, the bread and butter item that this company produced - I don't remember what it was - but I do remember that it contained a small telescope tube of some kind that Bausch and Lomb manufactured and if they had to go to another producer to get this, they would have to go to an awful lot of expense. They would lose their market in the meantime, and so forth, and they might go bankrupt. Well, they never told me that Bausch and Lomb stopped it. The man called me up and he said, "I'm sorry but we can not make your microscope." And I said, "Did they stop it?" And he said, "I'm sorry, I can not answer that."

Hubbard: Hmmm

Page: Those two companies got a great deal of their money from the sale of microscopes. Right in this immediate area, everybody worth his name as a researcher has three microscopes. He's got a research/clinical- type scope. He's got a good interference coloration scope. He's got a good phase microscope. And two of those came from one of those producers and the other came from another one. Or maybe one of them is a Zeiss, or maybe one of them is from Nippon Kogaku or something, but at least two out of the three came from those two American companies - and both of those companies they told me are run by their sales division.

Hubbard: Oh, I am sure if this. No American manufacturer of microscopes is going to put anything out on the market, which would cause it to lose money substantially. That's for sure.

Page: With this, if you have a good research medical type scope you do not need to have a phase microscope to go along with it. You do not need to have an interference coloration microscope.

Hubbard: Well, now Mr. Page, for me to form any opinion about your illuminator or
any system of microscopy you have, I would have to examine it and preferably I would want to use my own specimens

Page: Well, Professor Hubbard, I'm not trying to sell you on my microscope. I was simply using this to explain the Rife unit, its basic thesis of illumination, is one that other people can use. If someone wants to use my illumination system they can make it themselves. I have told a lot of people how to make it. I don't keep it secret. It is patented. The patent is about to expire if it hasn't already.

(Summary of abridged passage): Discussion dealing with Page's patent, the number, the time until expiry, his intent on what to do with it. A lot of paper shuffling. Most of the documents and data they are referencing can be found at rife.org in the related patents section. They continue

Hubbard: The question that I am trying to resolve for myself is the lateral resolution that is shown in these photomicrographs in the Smithsonian Institute report. The lateral resolution here on that section of the spore is nothing short of fantastic, nothing short of fantastic - in the most strict sense of the word: fantastic. That is how I would have to describe the resolution seen there

Page: The only thing you've seen like that is in electron microscopy, isn't it.

Hubbard: It's better than the electron microscope.

Page: OK, I'll go along with that.

Hubbard: Now, the whole thing for me is whether or not there could have been some fraud involved in the production of these photographs. Let me ask you, was there ever anything as a child, or in your associations out there with Rife that would have made you even suspect that Rife would have been fraudulent?

Page: No sir. Now, he was either one of two things. He either was as he saw it: one of the greatest minds of his time, or he was a complete charlatan. And if he was a complete charlatan he was even more brilliant.

Hubbard: He certainly was fooling a lot of people for a lot of time if he was a charlatan, wasn't he?

Page: He couldn't continue to do this. So he would have had to be even more brilliant because he would have had to fool everybody.

Hubbard: Now, Mr. Page, I will, of course, be interested in reading your patent. And Chris I will probably be in touch with you and Mr. Page at a later time after I get to digest and work over a few more things here.

Page: I gave Chris two other patents also, just to bring out a point. There are many ways to use this type of illumination, which Rife had. These other two pertain to - I've given all three of these to the Navy - the other two pertaining to the quick detection of pathogenic organisms, in the air and in the water. These also require the use of the so-called resonant frequency that we talked about, the resonant light frequency that would illuminate the particular dominant processes in them. Everything I had was taken away.

Hubbard: What's that, everything you had was taken away?

Page: Yes, taken away and locked up and after that I couldn't even talk to people about it. And finally a friend of mine up in Fort Dietrich pulled some strings and got it shaken loose. Now a co-inventor on one of these, he was a Naval Reserve Officer also, we both made Captain at the same time, he was in the Civil Engineer's Corp and I was in the Medical Services Corp. We figured this thing might have some value in the brewery industry but it was never used.

Hubbard: This is a very strange story Mr. Page.

(Summary of abridged passage): Another exchange of patent numbers and dates for the other patents. They continue

Page: Now when I say that all of these papers were taken away from me, those other two devices, they said they had potential use in biological warfare detection equipment.

Hubbard: Were you developing any of the work in a Naval laboratory or was this in your own personal laboratory?

Page: In my home.

Hubbard: (Incredulously) In your home?!

Page: The early one, the microscope one, I built not even in this house but in an apartment where I lived.

Hubbard: And you did all of the research work on this biological detection system in your home for these patents?

Page: I have a bunch of other patents too.

Hubbard: But let me make it very plain and to the point: You did certain work, you did all of this work, exclusively in your home, with this Jack Terrill, developing a biological detection system, and subsequently after you made the patent application, or was it after the patent was granted, that the papers were taken from your home?

Page: The papers were not taken away, we had to deliver them. We were told, "Bring 'em in. Bring 'em in, this is classified"

Hubbard: Who told you to do this?

Page: The Navy.

Hubbard: The Navy told you to do it.

Page: And we were happy to comply.

Hubbard: Well, you were on active duty, or were you inactive?

Page: No, we both worked for the Navy as civilians.

Hubbard: And what type of work were you doing at that time for the Navy?

Page: Biology.

Hubbard: Microbiology?

Page: No, I didn't say micro.

Hubbard: Just as biologist.

Page: I have worked as a microbiologist sometimes for the Navy but I am doing about the same thing I was doing then, ummm

Hubbard: Now, let me ask you this, in your opinion, could it be legally claimed that the inventions that you and Mr. Terrill worked on, that these inventions came out as a result of your professional activities for the Navy?

Page: Well, generally yes, we gave them to the Navy.

Hubbard: Well now, the thing is Mr. Page, what I am trying to get to is whether or not the inventions were really a consequence of your association with problems encountered in your work with the Navy.

Page: That was with my work at that point in time, my work in uniform at some other time.

Hubbard: It is customary, of course, for many corporations to require employees to sign over rights for patents.

Page: Well that's not why this was given to the Navy. This was given to the Navy in the hope that they would go for the patent and it wouldn't cost us the money. The Navy works in three different ways here. If somebody is working in a Navy laboratory, they are assigned to work on a particular thing, they can work on it, they make an invention and the invention is patented. The invention is the property of the Federal Government. It is always issued to an individual, so the inventor's name appears on it, but the individual has to sign all rights over to the Federal Government. If a person works in a government laboratory, and they come up with an idea all their own, and they go to their boss and they say they'd like to work on this, and he says, "No, we are too busy on project XYZ."
"Can I come in at night and work on it?"
"Well, that's up to you, if you want to then you've got a key."
"Well, can I use any of the facilities here?"
"Well, yes, you'll be using the building."

Now, depending on how this is interpreted, if he uses materials, as well as electricity and so forth, then they may require that it becomes the property of the Federal Government. On the other hand, they may be a little bit lenient, and they may say that he may have it, that they will obtain the patent, that it will be in his name, but that the Federal Government to use it, or to buy it, royalty free. That is still a public service-type patent but it does not preclude the patent owner, and in this case, the individual who owns the patent, it does not preclude this owner from charging royalties to other manufacturers, or users. But the Federal Government may use it royalty free. Or the Government might buy something on a royalty free basis. Now, the third system is, if somebody is working on his own and has no connection with the Federal Government, he doesn't have to be an employee of the Government, but if he has something that he thinks is a value to the Government, he may take it then to the Government.

And in this case I was not only a Navy employee, and one of the people at the Patent Branch of the Office of Naval Research was a friend of mine, he was in my Research Reserve Unit, so I took it to him, and several other patents later on. But, in these cases when the patents were issued they were to me. Now I would not have to have been working for the Government, I could have been a total stranger taking this to some patent branch place like O and R. But I think this would be of some value to the Federal Government. I think that for the Government this should be a royalty free patent, and to the Federal Government, I'd like to retain rights of my own "Does the Navy have enough interest in this to go for a patent?" Then it's up to the Navy to say "Yes" or "No", to study the thing and say, "Yes, we have enough interest in this, we'd go for a patent, and we will do that - just sign all of these papers." So those are the three different systems they use in Government inventor instance.

[Interested readers should look up what the Military Secrets Act allows "Government" to do with NON-Government inventors who come under their radar Ed]

Hubbard: Mr. Page, let me go back to Rife. Did you ever hear Rife say that any of the prisms had been stolen from his big universal microscope?

Page: Well, the only prisms that I know of he had on the far side of it and those are the ones that you get at with those little knobs with the cables, the cable mounts.

Hubbard: But he never said anything about any of the contents of the inside of his microscope being stolen?

Page: No sir. I would sure like to have had it though. I hope to build one something like that someday but with considerable modifications to it. A bit smaller and twice the diameter, and one that would change that resolution by shifting. Now what I had designed may be precisely what he had. I don't know what he had inside that big barrel.

Hubbard: Do you remember whether there was a big glass case enclosing his microscopes?

Page: There was a case called "the gun-cabinet". It's going to be here in this house in two or three weeks, but it will have shelves in it. He had some microscopic equipment in there, I don't remember just what, in there at one time, and another time he had some guns in there.

Bird: Why is the case going to be in your house? Did he give it to you?

Page: No, he didn't give it directly to me. He gave it to my parents, and my dad put shelves back in it.

Hubbard: Is your daddy alive?

Page: No, he's dead.

Hubbard: Is your mother alive?

Page: Yes sir.

Hubbard: Ahhhh, did she know Rife?

Page: Oh yes.

Hubbard: Did she ever go over to the house?

Page: Oh she's been there a few times. I can't tell you how often.

Hubbard: She never had any interest in Rife's inventions did she?

Page: No, she didn't understand it. My older brother understood him. He's dead also.

(Summary of abridged passage): A discussion about which of Page's family might have known Rife, and when. Goodbyes are said.

Epilogue

This interview continues with Hubbard (absent Bird) in a follow-up phone-call to Page at a later date. (recorded)

In the meantime, there was a letter exchange. In one handwritten letter to Hubbard (excerpt below), Page addresses the issue of Rife's apparent numerous personality faults as contributing factors to his (professional) demise. When the AMA reportedly engineered a lawsuit against Rife's company in 1939, Rife, a former teetotaler, took a stiff drink to calm his nerves prior to his subpoena dates (doctor's orders) and thenceforth indulged alcohol to ruinous proportions for the rest of his life. Once an alcoholic, he became ineffectual as a scientist and his twenty-five year run at laboratory research came to an end.

Aug 14 1976
Robert Page addresses John Hubbard in correspondence. Toward the end of the letter he writes this:

" John, Royal Raymond Rife was expert in several fields and ahead of the pack in some of them; and this can never be taken away from him. He deserves to go down in the pages of history as one of the great, or at least one of the near great minds of our century. But he will not get this reward because of a personality fault or several of those. 1) I've often had the feeling that he divided all humanity in two groups: those he could trust implicitly, and those to never be trusted. 2) He had nearly complete contempt for the mental abilities of 99.9% of the members of the medical profession (and particularly if they were as you are involved in the teaching of medical students. (I think this particular attached to the schools more than to faculty members as individuals). He often expressed complete and utter contempt for research faculty types. They would visit his laboratory but could repeat his work only if he stood behind them telling them how and when to take each new step. His contempt for some highly renowned scientists was, I had thought, so widely known that men of small stature would be out to shoot him down. 3) He never checked up on people he should and shouldn't trust. 4) He was never emotionally prepared for any reversals, because he never expected any and couldn't really accept them when they came. 5) His basic philosophy in life was to help people (through his giant intellect given him for this reason), and when "people" were ready to jail him for his acts (good or bad legal or illegal), he fell apart.

Roy enjoyed adulation and don't we all! One way to get it is to do things no one else can do or do things better. I always felt that Roy needed this more than most people do. He got this in varying degrees and from various people for various accomplishments, AND THIS WAS 90% OF HIS LIFE. And when this was changed to condemnation, it was more than he could take.
You spoke of alcohol as Roy's escape. I heard of stronger materials, but I have no real knowledge of this. Certainly he had access to whatever he wanted, through his in-laws, and otherwise.
With all of his good points he was only a man and not perfect. He liked drama! He lived to be a little bit mysterious. If he knew that he could create (design, build, write whatever) some one thing better than anyone else could, he was in seventh heaven. He would turn this into a drama. And if he could show up the medical profession (the research part of it), he was happy.

John, I've mentioned the medical profession several times in re Rife. I shall hasten to tell you that several M.D.s thought a great deal of Roy of Roy the scientist and of Roy the humanitarian. My parents were in a bridge club that included 5 or 6 M.D.s as well as quite a few members of other professions. Some of those M.D.s thought the world of Roy. They saw his "Ray" completely "Cure" nearly hopeless cases of TB and syphilis. By "cure," they meant only destruction of pathogens, not regeneration of tissue"
(End letter passage)

["Stronger materials?" - Ed]

End of Part One: Robert Page

`````````Next:
The Hubbard Interviews: Part Two Ben Cullen
On Methods of Genius, AMA Madness, and John Barleycorn's Hold On Rife.


Shawn Montgomery is a freelance writer, researcher and producer. His video documentary series "The Rise and Fall of a Scientific Genius: The Forgotten Story of Royal Raymond Rife" can be found at www.zerozerotwo.org

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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Requiem For Royal Rife

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