There’s no doubting the creativity on someone who can come up with the phrase “Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Element.” And that creativity has allowed modern-day alchemists to attach all manner of miraculous properties to these elements, including the ability to cure fatal disease and attain superconductivity at room temperature. It has also allowed them, for 40 years, to convince some people that the elements exist without producing them or offering any other evidence.

These proponents insist the ORME are precious metals existing as lone atoms and forming no bonds in a not-quite-explained state of matter. Besides curative and superconductive properties, they are said to repair DNA, emit gamma rays, pass through solid objects, disappear and reappear, levitate, rejuvenate cells, read minds, make dreaming more lucid, regrow missing appendages, and increase psychic awareness.

The first prominent modern-day alchemist was David Hudson. He claimed he had discovered this alternate state of matter and resultant magic, but that the ideas were dismissed when he introduced them to Cornell University chemistry professors. That’s the one claim of his I find believable. I’m less charitable to his insistence he can cure late-stage cancer with dirt and some abracadabra. He also claims his coming was prophesied in the Bible, as part of the Davidic bloodline. Hey, his name is David, what more proof do you want?

To fund his research, he found some investors, although he has yet to repay them in transformed powdered gold or any other currency. If Hudson did any genuine research, he has not explained his methods or detailed any attempt to test, falsify, or replicate it. He has vaguely insinuated that the power is too great to risk falling into the wrong hands, but has otherwise said little about his lack of verifiable results.

Hudson argues that volcanoes millions of years ago saturated soil in the Southwest with precious metals. What’s more, they have concentrations of hundreds-of-ounces-per ton, exponentially more than the traditional yield from platinum group metals. As to why Arizona farmers are wasting their time harvesting corn instead of palladium, Hudson explains that the metals are in a mysterious form undetectable by normal science. Only he has the ability to recognize and derive them. That explanation leaves unanswered why Hudson is not the world’s first trillionaire.

Hudson has tapped into a knowledge known by ancient cultures, according to a blogger identifying herself as Lucy S6. She tells us, “The ancient Egyptians knew about it, but today’s knowledge is suppressed by dark and powerful sources that are trying to prevent our true evolution to a higher consciousness.”

It was also known to the ancient Babylonians, which Lucy S6 says is why George W. Bush invaded Iraq. Once there, U.S. agents went straight to the Museum of Antiquities and stole Nebuchadnezzar’s treasures, which are bursting with ORME goodness.

And here’s what Bush is getting, according to Lucy S6: “These elements resonate with the primal energy, the zero point from which all life originates and which is a quantum potential of possibilities.” I have no idea what that means, but it means the same if you rearrange the words thusly: “The potential of quantum possibilities resonate from the zero point from which these primal life energies originate.”

For the rest of us who never served as a head of state, the dark lords keep us sick and ignorant by controlling our food supply. Insects instinctively know to eat these foods in order to protect mankind, so the overlords created pesticides, which they learned to manufacture while making nerve gas in World War I. All this leads to an ORME deficiency (I’m all the way down to zero), which makes us ever sicker. This in turn drives us back to the corroborating doctors and Big Pharma. Eventually we are told we have cancer, with the disease actually being delivered to us in the form of chemotherapy, which is a form of mustard gas.

If you’re like me, you have a headache after reading all this. Must be the ORME deficiency.