Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Welcome to lessons from the helpful dead, where you'll learn the world is not what it seems, and you are much more than you think you are. Here you'll learn about positive and reassuring messages from supposedly dead people whose main purpose is to help us find out what happens after we die, why we're here, how we got here, where we're going, and discover that you are really a powerful eternal spirit. I'm Dan McEnany. Today we'll continue with stories from the remarkable book the Secret Life of Plants, which was a best seller in the early 1970s. And I'm relating these stories because they had also relate to and sometimes explain why the things that Seth taught us are actually true, despite the fact that they seem very strange. Now, today's story relates to pesticides, which are a problem for us today. We rely heavily on them in order to produce a lot of crops that are resistant to disease and pests. But a recent study in Canada, for example, found out that 84% of the infants born there had some form of the roundup pest killer inside of them. Apparently, the roundup got into the oats, and the oats got into the babies, and that was the result. So today we're going to talk about two Princeton graduates back in 1951 and the company they founded called Uko. One of them was Curtis Upton. He was a Princeton trained civil engineer, and his father had been a partner of Thomas Alva Edison, who invented the light bulb and many other things.
[00:02:16] So Upton had an engineering mind, and it led him to wonder whether the strange device that was used to cure affliction that had been invented by a doctor, Abrams, decades earlier, whether that strange device might not be applied to pest control for agriculture.
[00:02:41] I'll get back to Abrams in another episode, because that's a story in itself. It was in the summer of 1951 that Upton, together with his Princeton classmate, a man named William J. Knuth, who was an electronics expert from Corpus Christi, Texas, they drove into the cotton fields of the 30,000 acre cortera Marana tract near Tucson, Arizona.
[00:03:12] They then unloaded from the back of their truck a mysterious box like instrument that was about the size of a portable radio, which were larger in those days, complete with dials and a stick antenna.
[00:03:28] They would attempt to affect this field they were in, not directly, but through the medium of photographs. Now, their process was like this. An aerial photograph of the field was placed on what was called a collector plate that was attached to the base of the instrument, together with a reagent, a chemical known to be poisonous to cotton. Pests so the dials were set in a specific manner, and the object of the exercise was to clear the field of pests without recourse to the physical chemical insecticides.
[00:04:11] The theory behind the system, which, of course, was considered way out and impossible by many, the theory held that the molecular and atomic makeup of the emulsion on the photograph would be resonating at the identical frequencies of the objects they represented pictorially. Now, if you remember, in earlier episodes, we talked about matter being an arrested frequency and how different material objects really exist at their own individual frequency, as explained by Betty White and other dead spirits.
[00:04:57] Now, Upton and Knuth didn't know it, but the same thing had been discovered by a man named Bovis in the 1930s.
[00:05:07] Regardless, by affecting the photograph with a chemical known to be poisonous to cotton pests, the two Americans believed that the cotton plants in the field could be immunized against the pests. And because the amount of poisonous chemical used was infinitesimal compared to the number of acres photographed, it was thought to act in the same way that trace dosages of dilution function in homeopathic medicine.
[00:05:39] Now, since many of you might not know about homeopathic medicine, we'll take a little side detour and explain that. Now, homeopathy, as the practice is called, it's a method of treatment founded by Christian Samuel Hahnemann. He was a respected physician in Saxony in 1755, but he was also a chemist, a linguist, a translator of medical works, and the author of a comprehensive apothecary's lexicon. The apothecaries were the druggist. Now, he got himself into serious trouble with what was then the equivalent of the FDA by his discovery that small doses of what can cause the symptoms of a disease can also cure them. Now, that original discovery was made by chance.
[00:06:30] The Countess of Sinchon, the wife of the spanish viceroy to Peru, was relieved of malaria with an infusion of bark from a local tree, which produced symptoms in her identical with those of malaria.
[00:06:43] Thereafter known as sinchon bark, the remedy was sold by monks in Spain.
[00:06:49] They sold it to the rich people for its weight in gold, and they gave it away to the poor for nothing.
[00:06:55] Now, spurred on to this novel approach to medicine, Hahnemann made a methodical search for plants, herbs, barks, or actually any substance, including snake venom, that could produce symptoms similar to those of a known disease.
[00:07:10] And by administering those in small doses, he produced some near miracle cures. He found that belladonna, for example, was a good remedy against scarlet fever.
[00:07:23] Pulsatilla was good against measles and gelsominium against the influenza. Now, these were extraordinary discoveries in and of themselves.
[00:07:35] But even more extraordinary was his next discovery. And that's this. The more he diluted a remedy, the more potent and effective it became, even if it was diluted to an infinitesimal 1 billion to one ratio. Now, one noted scientist, a man named Rudolf Hauschke, he explained the phenomenon. He suggested that since matter is a condensation of cosmic forces, and of course we already know that it's arrested frequency. So that's another name for the crystallization of cosmic forces, these forces would naturally revert to being more powerful when they were liberated from their material casing.
[00:08:22] That's an interesting theory, but only a theory.
[00:08:25] Now, Hahnemann was a very careful chemist and so he would start by diluting the tincture of some bark or root or resin or seed or gum with 99 parts of pure alcohol. This would give him what he called a one centesimal potency. He'd then dilute that one part into 99 parts of something else that he diluted it with. And the third time around, he would have a tincture that was only 1,000,000th of the strength of the original solution. Now the result, which was mysterious to him and to anyone else for that matter, was that this weakened solution was far more potent than the original.
[00:09:05] And it was explained by Hauschke as being in the rhythmic mathematical fashion in which Hahnemann shook his delusions, the rhythm having the same effect as it has on the humans, freeing the spirit from the clutches of the body at death and out of body experiences. Once again, that was Hausger's explanation. An interesting theory, but just that. Regardless, the authorities made short shrift of Hahnemann, the apothecaries, the equivalent of modern day druggists. When they saw the threat to their profits from the sale of drugs in such minute quantities.
[00:09:52] They made sure that what was called the guild of apothecaries was out there bad mouthing Hahnemann.
[00:10:02] And they made sure that he was brought before a court, found guilty and forbidden to dispense medicine, and he was compelled to leave town. Now, today, of course, we know that there was a hospital in Philadelphia that was named after him and the practice of homeopathic medicine is still practiced. Alright, so that's the end of the detour explaining about homeopathy. So let's return to our two Princeton graduates.
[00:10:32] They repeated the process that was described earlier. They repeated that same process with aerial photographs that covered the entire 4000 acres owned by the Cortero management company, which was one of Arizona's biggest cotton growers.
[00:10:49] So the company executives were gambling, hey, if the twelve varieties of pests that normally attack their million dollar crop, if that they could be kept at bay with a simple device like this one, they could save up to 30,000 a year in operating costs, quite a sum in those days by eliminating the use of insecticide sprays.
[00:11:08] In the fall, the Tucson Weekend reporter ran an illustrated two page spread that was headlined, million dollar gamble pays off for cotton man. The article stated that a buck Rogers type of electronic pest control had allowed Cartero to achieve an almost 25% increase in per acre yield of cotton over the state average.
[00:11:31] Now, the president of that company stated in an affidavit that the treated cotton also seemed to have about 20% more seed.
[00:11:41] He said this may possibly be the result of not destroying the bees, he said, upon which the radionic process seemed to have no effect. He further remarked that his hoe hands out in the field, they had noted an almost complete absence of snakes in the areas that were subjected to this very strange treatment. Well after that, on the east coast, another of Upton's Princeton classmates, a man named Howard Armstrong, he'd become an industrial chemist. He had a lot of inventions to his credit. He decided to try his friend's method in Pennsylvania. And after taking an aerial photograph of a cornfield under attack by japanese beetles, he cut one corner off the photo with a pair of scissors and laid the remainder together with a small amount of rotenone, a beetle poison that's extracted from the roots of a woody asian vine.
[00:12:45] He put that on the collector plate of one of Upton's radionic devices, and after several five to ten minute treatments with the machines, dials set to very specific readings.
[00:12:59] A meticulous count of beetles revealed that almost 90% of them had died or disappeared from the corn plants treated through the photo.
[00:13:09] Now, the untreated plants in the corner cut away from the photo remained 100% infected.
[00:13:17] After witnessing that experiment, a man named Rockwell, who was the very influential director of research for the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau Cooperative association in Harrisburg, he said this to control insect pests at a distance of 30 miles, with no danger to man, plants, or animals, would perhaps be an accomplishment heretofore unrivaled in the scientific control of insects injurious to vegetation.
[00:13:44] To an individual with 19 years experience in the research field, this feat appeared unreal, impossible, fantastic, and crazy. Yet careful counts by the writer of the treated corn plants and unpredicted corn plants indicated definitely that the kill ratio was ten to one in favor of the treated plants. Well, with that testimonial and so much proven success, the three individuals, Upton, Knuth, and Armstrong, they combined their talents.
[00:14:18] They used the first letters of their names to form the company UkCo, Ukaco, and their goal was to relieve the farmers of unwanted pests by their new method, as unexplainable as it seemed to be. And they also received the backing of one of the Harrisburg's most distinguished citizens are General Henry M. Gross. So they were on their way. In the west, Upton and Knuth contracted with 44 artichoke growers to treat their crops against plume moths, and the contracts were written on the basis of no control, no pay.
[00:14:55] All the growers paid the service charge of $1 an acre, a tiny fraction of the cost of conventional spraying.
[00:15:03] And in Pennsylvania, Rockwell stated, since farmers usually do not pay for a service unless there's value received, this is the best testimonial for the UKCO process, which has come to my attention.
[00:15:16] Now, convinced that a radical new development for controlling pests was in the offing, Rockwell, that's the director of research in Pennsylvania, remember, for the Farm Bureau cooperative, Rockwell arranged contracts with his fellow farmers to run a long series of experiments under his supervision. And in 1949, at their camp potato in Potter county and at the Fairview farmstead in Easton, potato crops treated by the UKO process yielded 30% more than those fields sprayed seven times with conventional insecticides, and the saving in chemicals greatly added to the value of the crop. Now, the following year, the farm Bureau's research division operatives, they learned to operate the UKO equipment themselves, and they got yields 22% greater than in the insecticide treated fields. Insecticide treated fields and tests at the Hershey estates farm, the bureau's own poultry farm, a pair of cornfields showed, by actual count of corn stalks, 65% control of second brewed european corn borers, which were, of course, they ruined the corn. So that was an efficiency never approached with any other treatment. Now, down in Eatonville, Florida, the director of agriculture for the Hungerford School for Boys, he was a graduate from Tallahassee University, and he majored in agriculture. He successfully used the UKO method to eliminate pestilent worms from the school's cabbage patch and flea beetles from its turnip plants.
[00:17:04] So now, at this point, the new insecticideless method of treating crops piqued the curiosity of the United States Department of Agriculture's research station at Beltsville, Maryland.
[00:17:16] Uh uh oh. The federal government's getting involved, and we know what happens when the federal government gets involved in things. So we're going to stop that story today right at that point, and we'll continue in the next episode. Once again, I'm Dan McEnany, bringing you lessons from the helpful dead.
