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Bertrand Comparet
Bertrand Comparet

 

John Hubbard Interviews Bertrand Comparet in the 1970's

The Bertrand Comparet Interview is given courtesy of Shawn Montgomery www.zerozerotwo.org who transcribed it from the original recordings.


1. COMPARET: And Rife began wondering, might there not be some other frequency that would have a selective action killing diseased tissue without damaging the healthy tissue, and of course experiment could show whether it was so. Well, back in those days you couldn't buy much in the way of electronic equipment, oh there were a few odd parts, but mostly you had to assemble what you wanted. And Rife told me that to make what he wanted he had to make some of his own material himself: wind the tuning coils for example, for this thing. However, Rife never did have the knowledge of the electronic part of it sufficient to do much with it and he didn't want the overhauls and monkey wrench part of the thing anyway, he wanted the scientific investigation. So, he did make his own instrument (Rife Machine), and he had often talked of Point Loma, in the hills at the west of the harbor here, he had his own laboratory there which the Bridge family, related to the Timken’s, of Timken Roller Bearing Company, they had given him a lab there. So he was working there and Ben Cullen who was helping with some of it in those early days. Among others there was a Dr. Arthur Isaac Kendall and a doctor from McGill University in Canada, I can't remember his name (Dr. Gruner). I'm trying to think of his name, I had a mild stroke during the summer and let my high blood pressure get out of control and memory for some of these names isn't as sharp as it was. This doctor developed a blood test for cancer and he was out here working with Rife at the laboratory for several months.

2. HUBBARD: Well, go ahead; I've made a note of that.

COMPARET: He proved to his own satisfaction, killing test slide specimens, that certain frequencies would kill certain bacteria. Now Rife never had the belief that there was one universal frequency for all this sort of thing, but for such bacteria as might be subject to this, to be proven experimentally. Each bacterium would have some one particular frequency that could be deadly to it, and the frequency had to be practically exact because it was a resonance quality, in other words, if you weren't on the right frequency you weren't getting the resonance to build it up. So, then, there came a necessity to see whether you could kill the disease germ without harming the patient and there he had to have the assistance of M.D.s on that. Now, I don't know how many other M.D.s may have been involved in that, one was a friend of mine, a Dr. James D. Couche. He died about ten years ago. And, somehow or other, they got Dr. Milbank Johnson interested. Now Dr. Johnson had given a million dollars to USC (University of Southern California at Los Angeles) Medical School prior to that and in those days a million dollars was money. So, when Dr. Milbank Johnson said he wanted some experimental work to be done at the USC medical school, why, nobody argued with him. (Milbank Johnson was living in Los Angeles at the time). Now, this doctor friend of mine, Dr. Couche, became interested in that experiment. Now whether he had been called into this thing before it reached the USC medical school stage, I don't know, but, at any rate, he (Couche) was conducting, as the M.D. in charge, some of the experimental work done there at the USC medical school and hospital. I don't believe that Milbank Johnson did anything beyond finance the work, giving them the opportunity to work there at USC medical school and hospital. I think he was too busy a man to carry it beyond this.

3. HUBBARD: And Couche was doing this work back in the early thirties?

COMPARET: Yes. Now he (Couche) told me of some remarkable results that he had accomplished there. There was one man; he had on the side of his jaw here, a cancer, oh roughly the size of an egg. And under this treatment it finally just simply sloughed off and left no very serious scare. A good normal healing when this cancerous material died and fell off, now, how long a period of treatment I don't know, there was no other treatment being applied that I know of.

4. HUBBARD: Would Dr. Couches’ family have his personal records?

COMPARET: No, Dr. Couche died about ten years ago and I don't know anybody who might have any of his records.

5. HUBBARD: His wife predeceased him?

COMPARET: I think so; at least she was quite elderly and would be dead by now.

6. HUBBARD: And he has no surviving children?

COMPARET: I wouldn't have any idea where to locate them.

7. HUBBARD: OK. I can look up his will. He must have had a will. I can check on the Probate of that will.

COMPARET: James Buxton Couche. He lived in San Diego and his will would be probated in San Diego.

8. HUBBARD: Ok, go ahead.

COMPARET: So, they did work there. Well, the instrument (Rife Machine) occasionally needed repair. Something had burned out or something of the sort and that was probably beyond Rife's capacity, and anyway, he didn't want that phase of the work. So he called in a little radio repair shop man from Hollywood named Philip Hoyland, and he did the repair work, and in fact I think Hoyland in those early days made up for Rife about three experimental instruments (Rife Machines. You see there was one in use there at USC hospital, and then, while that was going on Couche had another instrument to use in his practice here in San Diego during some part of that, so that would be one of the Hoyland instruments. So, of course the American Medical Association standard required of course that there be at least five years of successful operation before it would be recognized as a possible treatment for this sort of thing, so time was passing and everybody was getting impatient. Now, they did have problems, I don't know if you remember the early days of radio.

9. HUBBARD: Yes. I was an electronic technician in the Second World War and I know of the instability of some of the circuitry.

COMPARET: Well, as they (the Rife Machine) warmed up they'd shift frequency.

10. HUBBARD: Yes. Yes.

COMPARET: Now, whether this was Hoyland's inability to do better, or whether it was just inevitable in those days, I don't know, but Hoyland's devices (Beam Ray Rife Machine) did have that frequency shift as they warmed up. So, they had their problems. Now what Couche did, see, he would have cases where he would get an instantaneous cure, like that, and other times when the treatment just didn't produce any results, because of that frequency shift. So he would start in, he had from Rife a set of frequencies for several different diseases and he would tune it deliberately to one side of that frequency and then gradually tune it across to the other side making sure that somewhere in the process he crossed the correct frequency, even if the instrument wasn't exactly in tune anyway. Well, when they hit the exact frequency they got amazing results. So, Rife was getting impatient, here was something with remarkable possibilities for humanities sake, and he wanted it in use to heal people. And then Hoyland, he had taken Hoyland into the thing, as a partner with him, and Hoyland wanted some financial returns. So that led to the organization of Beam Ray Incorporated. Now, a third man came into the picture and I am trying to think of his name. He was a corporation promoter in the offensive sense of the word. Umm. Hutchinson was the man. Hutchinson the promoter, well, Hutchinson had organized a little corporation for the purpose of running a correspondence school and I guess it was Hoyland who drew him into this thing. So Hutchinson said, "Well now, I can save you vast sums of money. It'll cost you a fortune to organize a new corporation. But now I have one already organized that we can simply use for this, just change the name, call it Beam Ray Incorporated, and use it to manufacture these devices." Well, they (the correspondence school) had substantially no records, all this came out in the trial. God alone knew how many people owned shares of stock in it, or what contracts and liabilities he had outstanding. So, when this poor Rife walked into this in all his innocence, he said “All right” and they formed a three-way partnership on this thing. Rife put into it his knowledge of this radiation device and he was to be with them as their scientist/experimenter to perfect the thing. Hoyland was to be with them as the man who would make the devices and keep them in repair. And I guess Hutchinson was in it merely as the man who would plunder it. Well, although as I say, God alone knew what shares of stock were outstanding, they issued, under Hutchinson's direction here, they issued some more shares of stock to raise money and eventually I was called into it to represent some of these share holders whom I happened to know. Well, Hoyland made a number these devices, and they were in use. Now, a Dr. Yale in San Diego got a number of them, and he was doing quite a business with them. Then, I believe it was through Dr. Couche, who was English; that they got in touch with some doctors over in England who became quite interested, who wanted to buy an instrument or two for their own test purposes and then secure the British Isles commercial rights to manufacture and sell them. So, either two or three of these instruments were made up by Hoyland, and this young man as I say, today he is the manager of San Diego Glass and Paint company, Henry Siner, he was with them in those days. And he was sent over to England with them, to take instruments over and demonstrate them.

11. HUBBARD: Do you remember how long Henry Siner had been with Rife before he went to England?

COMPARET: No great length of time. Some few months, because they had trained him in the use of these things, well, nobody was ever sure whether Hoyland deliberately sabotaged the machines that they sent to England, or whether he was just an incompetent bungler. But at any rate, now, these English people had bought and paid for their machines, and they were entitled to something that would work. And Siner got over there, and he knew how to operate the machines, and he just couldn't get any results out of them.

12. HUBBARD: I have seen Dr. Gonin correspondence on them. He complained they weren't even hooked up. He said the components weren't even wired together properly.

COMPARET: Yeah. Our own suspicion at the time was that it was deliberate sabotage because Hutchinson and Hoyland already were planning to take over the thing for themselves and you see they had it figured out, if they could ease Rife out then they would have time steal from each other at their leisure later. But the first thing to do was to get rid of poor, unsuspecting Rife.

13. HUBBARD: Let me ask you this Mr. Comparet, I suspect what you are telling me is probably true but did you ever get any tangible evidence to support this supposition? Were there any letters or any aaah, how did you arrive at this deduction?

COMPARET: Well, needless to say, people who are conniving cheats rarely write you letters telling you about it. But, there began to be trouble because, oh, I guess there were ten or fifteen instruments made and in use among doctors here, and there was too much trouble coming in from them. Now, any competent mechanic should have been able to put these things together so that, within the limitations of radio devices of that time, they would work.

14. HUBBARD: Sure, sure. I know they should have. I am personally quite aware of the state of the art at that time; it is inconceivable that they could have had that many instruments that were non-functional. Essentially, what the Rife frequency generator was, was a radio frequency generator, a variable radio frequency generator, which could be modulated with a super-imposed audio frequency. This is essentially what it was, with very narrow band pass filter. Now, that's a relatively simple device to make, even back then it was a relatively simple device to make. Stability though, that's another matter.

COMPARET: And which was why no patent protection was possible because even if you could invent a new frequency generator, those already in use could do the same thing. So, they had to keep the thing secret. And the only secret they had, naturally, was which were the frequencies that were useful.

15. HUBBARD: But even that could not, really, legitimately, be kept secret if they were going to use it as a therapeutic modality generally available to the public. That could not be done, even then.

COMPARET: Well, they did what they could. Now of course even John Crane, when he was putting out his instruments, he put on a new dial merely graduated from zero to a hundred, not in terms of frequency, but just from one end of the thing to the other. And you would be told that for your instrument, why, for typhoid fever you would use, say, 87.2 on the dial.

16. HUBBARD: (Laughs) I've got the picture now Mr. Comparet.

COMPARET: So, this thing was going on, and then Hoyland and Hutchinson, as I say, were conspiring to get rid of Rife and take the thing over themselves. I’m sure each one planned to cheat the other also, given the opportunity later, but first was to get Rife out of there.

17. HUBBARD: Why did they want to get rid of Rife do you think? 

COMPARET: Well, Rife had assigned the corporation his rights, including possible patent rights or anything like that, as a process patent possibly, in the use of this frequency to heal. So, once they had this they didn't need Rife around anymore and they didn’t want to have Rife there, available, to demand his share of the profits. So, when they started trying to break up the thing, these people who had money invested in these shares, came to me to represent them, and that's how this came to me.

18. HUBBARD: (looking through court papers) I see your name and Hillier and Bowlman, that law firm.

COMPARET: Both of them are dead now, I was at that time working with Hillier and Bowlman but this was my own separate practice. When I went to work for Hillier and Bowlman I brought this thing in as work I had on hand at the time, but I associated them so if I were ill or absent a day, they could go to court and ask for a continuance or something.

19. HUBBARD: How did you happen to connect them to get into this lawsuit?

COMPARET: Well, some of the shareholders were acquainted with me and they came to me and asked me to represent them. Now, Dr. Couche I had known before that time and as far as I can recall Couche was not a stockholder in this. Well, we had the lawsuit. And they got the very high-powered attorney Sapiro in.

20. HUBBARD: Was he from Los Angeles?

COMPARET: I think he even came in here from the east, Chicago maybe.

21. HUBBARD: Who was paying his attorney's fees? He wouldn't be doing that for charity.

COMPARET: Well, he would undoubtedly be expecting a contingency fee, a percentage of what he could help them swipe.

22. HUBBARD: He would have to have been a very wealthy attorney to have taken this on a contingency fee basis for such a very long period of time.

COMPARET: He was a man of considerable ability and he made considerable money by it, no question of it.

23. HUBBARD: You have no idea if he is still alive or not do you?

COMPARET: I would be inclined to doubt it. He was an older man than I, and I am 76 today.

24. HUBBARD: Well, you can never tell, he might be like Benjamin Cullen, who is very, very alert. Well, go ahead. So Sapiro came down, and Levinson was also an attorney?

COMPARET: Yeah. Levinson was the local man.

25.HUBBARD: He was the local man, so it may have been that Levinson was the one that got in contact with Sapiro. Do you have any idea where Levinson might have known Sapiro before? Was Levinson a very young man or was he an old man?

COMPARET: Oh I would say he was in his middle thirties at that time.

26. HUBBARD: Middle thirties, so he might be alive still.

COMPARET: Now there were two of the Levinsons, they were both attorneys, one of them is dead, the other Levinson is still a Superior Court Judge in San Diego.

27. HUBBARD: Ah ha. That is interesting. I believe it was Eli Levinson who was the attorney. And you think Levinson might have wanted a proven, older man in because he thought the case would benefit more?

COMPARET: Yes, he undoubtedly felt the need of reinforcements. Well, anyway, we won the lawsuit. However, by that time they were broke. What publicity there was of course, naturally, got only unfavorable effect from the medical profession. Here was something that was not orthodox. Besides, we had to admit that the machines were not performing laudably, if you asked an M.D. to risk his own standing on an unreliable machine why…

28. HUBBARD: Was it brought out in court however that the circuitry at that time was inherently unstable?

COMPARET: Well, none of us knew enough about it. Now, I remember at that time Rife saying that Hoyland had not used a simple straight forward circuit as Rife had used, but he thought he had a short cut, through use of harmonics and so on, and Rife had no faith in Hoyland's circuit.  Now it may have been that heat instability that was a problem in those days. I don't know if it was really Hoyland's fault, or if it was just one of those things. So, at any rate, we finished, we were in charge of the corporation, they had tried to take it over, and we defeated that, we were in charge of the corporation, we had some instruments, oh, a dozen or fifteen sitting in the store room which we couldn't sell because we couldn't tell anybody they were reliable, and, well, there was just nothing to go forward on.

29. HUBBARD: Well now, let me ask, at this time, had the Bridges' maintained any interest in what was happening with this corporation?

COMPARET: No. Rife was a very strange man. A brilliant genius, now, he had been employed by the Bridges family as their chauffeur. They had a beautiful big home up on the crest of Point Loma here on the west side of the bay and they knew of his interest in scientific things, and being wealthy, they sponsored him on some of these things. Originally he did this work over the garage in the Bridges home. Later they gave him, across the street from the big Bridges estate they had a several acre park and a big home and everything out there and later they gave him this beautiful concrete laboratory and he continued work there. He had some of these other doctors, including this one from McGill University, Kendall was one of them, and Rosenow. I can't remember the Canadian doctor, (Dr. Gruner M.D.) I know for years they still had his little nameplate on the door of the room in laboratory where he did his work.

30. HUBBARD: Is that building still Intact over there on Point Loma?

COMPARET: It probably has been demolished to make way for subdivisions and development there.

31. HUBBARD: Yes, go ahead.

COMPARET: This man from McGill was working there and Kendall and Rosenow were working at the laboratory...

32. HUBBARD: Before the lawsuit?

COMPARET: Before the lawsuit, yes. By the time I got in it these other men had been there and gone. Their work was finished and they went on elsewhere. So, the thing fizzled out. Now, as I say Dr. Yale, finally took over, oh, a dozen or so of these instruments, which he continued to use up until his death, some years later.  Dr. Couche had two of them. Now the original instrument had a tube, like an X-ray tube. That was the way in which Rife developed it. You see, all the X-ray work necessary was done with a beam projected from a tube. So Rife worked on the same basis. Now later when John Crane came into the thing, Crane has a pretty good analytical mind all right, he is as stubborn as hell and he is his own worst enemy but he has a good mind. Now, as part of the defense of John Crane, on criminal charges, Rife was still living then, down in Tijuana, and we took his deposition. And I asked Rife, because I thought Rife would certainly say that the way Crane was working on it then was still using the Rife principal, but he indignantly denied it.

33. HUBBARD: Aahhh, very good. I suspected this. I suspected it all along.

COMPARET: Now, Crane said "Well now look, Rife himself admits that no matter how much tube and ray, and so on, you have, you can't get any results unless you've got the right frequency. Therefore the real clue to the thing is the frequency and not the means by which you deliver it.

34. HUBBARD: Let me interrupt you. Do you have any copies of depositions of Rife or was there a transcript made of the trial, of the attempt to take over the Beam Ray corporation, was any transcript of that made?

COMPARET: No, no there wasn’t a transcript because nobody had the money to appeal it. It was a long several week trial.  

35. HUBBARD: And what happened to the stenographic notes, do you have any idea what happened with those?

COMPARET: Well, they were kept with the court reporter until lost at the time of his death undoubtedly.

36. HUBBARD: So, for practical purposes, I was over at the court house Monday and Tuesday and they told me that after five years they destroy the court reporter notes. So for practical purposes there's no way, there would have been several court reporters on this case wouldn't there, since it lasted for such a long time?

COMPARET: Well, no, normally one reporter would follow it through from day to day. Now, if you needed a transcript, he had somebody in his office to make up the transcript while he was spending the day in the court taking more notes.

37. HUBBARD: So you think there was just one person taking notes on this case?

COMPARET: Yes.

38. HUBBARD: And it is very possible that the person who took the notes on this case could still be alive and still have his notes. This must have been a very famous trial here, wasn't it?

COMPARET: Yeah. On the John Crane thing, there might be some possibility of something still preserved there.

39. HUBBARD: A transcript of that trial was made for appeal and there is a copy of that in Washington.

COMPARET: Now, neither side introduced the deposition of Rife at the time of the trial so it wouldn’t be in the transcript on appeal.

40. HUBBARD: All right, I see. But, getting back, you say that Rife was very indignant, that the machine that Crane was building was really his (Cranes) idea. I suppose he did not compromise on that, did he?

COMPARET: Oh no, he just blew up.

41. HUBBARD: All right, All right. I suspected that all along.

COMPARET: Now, here was an X-ray type of tube, they even made their own tubes out of, let's see, one type is Irwin Meyer, and what's the other, the flask with the flat bottom?

42. HUBBARD: Well, the Irwin Meyer is a cone type flask, and it has a flat bottom.

COMPARET: Yeah that's what they used. They got those and made their own tubes out of it. Well...

43. HUBBARD: But this deposition was not used... (Laughs)

COMPARET: It was not used. I was trying to show, you see they had accused Crane and the people with him of conspiracy to cheat and defraud and I was trying to show that what he was doing was following the best information he was able to get. It was a perfectly honest attempt to produce what he was claiming. So, when Rife let us down on that, I didn't introduce it, and the other side didn't introduce it either, so that never got into the record.

44. HUBBARD: Oh, the other side had a copy of Rife's deposition?!! I'm surprised about that, I didn't know that if you took a man's deposition that the opposing attorneys had a right to read the deposition whether it was introduced in court or not.

COMPARET: Oh yes, they had the right to be there and cross-examine at the time the statements were taken.

45. HUBBARD: Were they there?

COMPARET: Oh yes.

46. HUBBARD: Oh, how interesting. Go ahead. This is very interesting.

COMPARET: Now, I'm not betraying any confidences here, because I'm telling you things that all came out at one time or another in the court proceedings, either the original Beam Ray case, or the John Crane case. Now, when the work was being done on John Crane's development of the thing, Crane called in a man whose name I can't recall (Verne Thompson) at the moment, he was the radio repair man who kept the San Diego police department radio in repair. So, he was called in to monitor the thing (AZ-58) and see if it was always operating perfectly, and Crane said that we were not using an X-ray, although it was a tube similar to an X-ray tube. But Crane had said that of the various wires going into this tube, one was left disconnected, which prevented the ray from being an X-ray. Now this other man said, "No, we were using a soft X-ray," and he said, "The way I know it is, when I wanted to test for strength, I put a piece of photographic paper on the table and lay a key on it and then put my leather wallet on top of it and make a shadowgraph picture through that, that shows it had to be an X-ray." Well, anyway, they started out duplicating Rife's experiments. (Dr. Robert P. Stafford had tests done on the Ray tube before he would use it on any patients. The scientific tests that he had done proved that there was no X-ray coming from the ray tube)

47. HUBBARD: You mean trying to duplicate them with Crane's machines?

COMPARET: Well, Crane originally was, with more modem techniques, duplicating the Rife machine, tube and all for early experiments. And, as I say, he came to the conclusion that you just weren't getting anything additional by the use of the tube. If you didn't get the frequency, you could run the rest of it indefinitely and nothing happened. So, what Crane did, he got an audio frequency generator. Now, you could make them up yourself by an awful lot of work, or you could buy a Heathkit audio frequency generator and get all the same results with a lot less time and effort. So he was using these Heathkit generators. Now instead of a beam projected from a tube, a ray, he simply had two wires, I think they were aluminum knobs on the end of them, which would be used, they would be put on the body in such a position that the natural flow of the current from one to the other would go through the diseased area, and he got astonishing results. Now, the judge who tried that case, nobody ever accused that man of knowing even the slightest amount of law. It was the usual political appointment as a judge, and the poor stupid bungling oaf was doing the best he knew how, which was very little. So, the basic rule of evidence is that anything that really sheds any light on subject is admissible unless there is a rule of law that says no. But all this poor guy knew was that he had heard that there was some rules of evidence that didn't allow certain things in so therefore unless he knew it was admissible as evidence, why, there was nothing doing. So we had plenty of available evidence that he never allowed us to put in. Now, there were many people there who had been treated unsuccessfully by M.D.s. Now, naturally, whatever sickness they had was diagnosed by that M.D. and he had not been able to cure them.

48. HUBBARD: Fair enough.

COMPARET: So, trying to get something done, they had stumbled onto this thing of Crane's. And treatment with the Crane instrument, I don't know how many failures he may have had, those we didn't bring out, but here was case after case of remarkable success where they had had long unsuccessful treatment by M.D.s and by treatment with Crane's device they were healed. Well the objection was raised, of course, “Well, this patient, he isn't a qualified medical expert to diagnose that he did have dandruff or hangnails or whatever it was." So, the objection was made, "Well, he can't testify as to what sickness he had and was cured of." Now, the M.D.s, some of them were in other states. Well, the M.D.s are rather cynical about the attorneys who bring malpractice suits, with some justification, and any attorney who has had any experience with the medical profession is extremely cynical about the ethics of the medical profession, and I speak from experience. Now, If you called any M.D. to the stand and tell him, “Now ahhh, you've diagnosed this particular case with such and such a disease? And he'll say "Yeah." "And you weren't able to cure it?" And he says "No." "But somebody else, using a method not approved by the AMA has cured it." He will swear up and down that his original diagnosis was wrong! So, there was no point in pursuing that part of it any further in the Crane case. Well, I don't know any place that you would probably find today one of the original Hoyland Beam Ray machines in existence if you wanted to look it over.

49. HUBBARD: And you don't know where any of Rife's original equipment would be?

COMPARET: John Crane and Ben Cullen would know of that.

50. HUBBARD: Let me ask you this. Crane told me his house was entered without a search warrant and that records and instruments were removed.

COMPARET: That is right.

51. HUBBARD: Now then, do you know what agency removed these records and instruments?

COMPARET: The Food and Drug people, State not Federal.

52. HUBBARD: The State Food and Drug people?? Ohhh. The State of California?

COMPARET: Yes. Now, what they did, they went in like plain plundering thieves and took whatever they thought the man might want and they could thereby deprive him of, and then put the thing in the state's museum of so called quake devices. Now for example, one of the things John Crane had was a Hewlett Packard frequency-counter, which reads out numerically. Now, that device wasn't used to treat anybody, that was simply used by him to calibrate his own devices and it was utterly unlawful for them to seize that. But they took it on the theory: "Well, we've got public money to defend it; you go sue us at your own expense."

53. HUBBARD: You are absolutely sure that this was the State of California's Food and Drug people and not the Federal Food and Drug people?

COMPARET: Right. State of California.

54. HUBBARD: To your knowledge the U.S. Department Food and Drug people had nothing whatever to do with this?

COMPARET: Well, there may have been some behind the scenes conferences between them, I don't know, but the actual dirty work was done by the State of California.

55. HUBBARD: All right, well, this is a correction of a mistaken impression I had. So that means then that very likely all of these records and instruments are still here in California, doesn't it?

COMPARET: Oh yeah.

56. HUBBARD: Now, when was this action taken against Crane, the seizure?

COMPARET: It would be in the middle of the late sixties. I closed my law office in ‘68 due to failing health, so I'd say it was, oh, in the neighborhood of '65. (Correct date 1961)

57. HUBBARD: Now, Mr. Comparet, I am not positive yet that a relationship can be established between modern knowledge of modern radiation and modern bacteriology comparable to what I showed for this one picture between modern electron microscopy and Rife's microscopy of the section of the tetanus spore. I do not know yet that I can establish a similar relationship, but I strongly suspect that the relationship does hold that the radiation effects that Rife observed can be demonstrated again, and if this is so, then, this becomes a practical interest of where Rife's records are. I want to get a hold of them. I want to examine these records.

COMPARET: John Crane had some things that were not found at the time that the State's people plundered his house. What he still has of that I don't know.

58. HUBBARD: I visited him last year and made copies of as much as I possibly could of everything that was still there. But he told me that they had removed these things. Well, I cannot, living in New York; it would be very difficult for me to have any primary legal status for an action here in California. I don't know how I could bring, or influence, a legal action, but there are other people here in California who might take legal action or a legal interest.

COMPARET: Probably some of that could be taken on behalf of John Crane.

59. HUBBARD: Well, I am going to try and contact John Crane this weekend. I'm doing my homework though before I go to see him again.

COMPARET: Now, you have a problem here. There is what is called the Statuette of Limitations based on the theory that if you are going to have a lawsuit, go ahead and have it before all of the witnesses are dead and memory has failed and so on. The Statuette of Limitations may stand in the way of even John Crane recovering these things that, too much time has passed.

60. HUBBARD: As of last year when I talked with him he had a court action going, and if he still has that action going then the Statuette of Limitations would be in abeyance, wouldn't it?

COMPARET: Yes.

61. HUBBARD: All right. Well, you have corrected me on a very important point. I was all set to go down to Washington to the Food and Drug Administration down there, but since this is all a State of California action, there's nothing I can do down there.

COMPARET: No, I don't know of anything that would wind up in Washington on this.

62. HUBBARD: Did you ever have any contact with Milbank Johnson yourself?

COMPARET: No.

63. HUBBARD: And he had no role in these trials, did he?

COMPARET: No. The work that he had sponsored at USC had all been done and was all over with before we reached this stage.

64. HUBBARD: When did Milbank Johnson die, do you remember approximately?

COMPARET: Oh I would say probably in the neighborhood of 1940 - 1945. (1944)

65. HUBBARD: The names of the people who actually made this seizure of John Crane's property, the names of the agents who did this, they are known, aren't they?

COMPARET: Oh yes, they would be in the record, the court minutes which show that they came and testified.

66. HUBBARD: And the name of the authorizing officer who told him to go there, that would also be known, wouldn't it?

COMPARET: I think the man was working pretty much under his own direction. A general office policy is that whenever you can harass somebody like this, go ahead and do it.

67. HUBBARD: And you think that these seized materials might be in a museum? Here in Los Angeles, or San Diego, or…?

COMPARET: Or possibly, State Capital Sacramento, They wouldn't be in San Diego definitely, they might be in Los Angeles or more likely Sacramento, a possibility also is San Francisco because there are some state offices in San Francisco to escape the unpleasant heat of Sacramento.

68. HUBBARD: Do you think there is any likelihood that these records and instruments might be destroyed if they began to think that there was a real probability of a very serious counter legal action?

COMPARET: That's one of those things they shouldn't do, but… (Laughs)

69. HUBBARD: So maybe the first thing to do would be to try to locate if they are in existence before showing your hand that you are getting ready for a legal action. All right, all right Mr. Comparet. I want those notebooks. Because I think there may be in them somewhere some optical data on the construction of Rife's microscopes.

COMPARET: Well, yes. None of that came out in either of these two trials, but it was Rife's papers that they'd seized. You see, Crane had taken this over to carry on Rife's work and Rife had put a lot of this in his possession.

70. HUBBARD: All right, I'm getting a much better picture. Now the name of this doctor at McGill, you still haven't brought it back to mind yet, haven't you?

COMPARET: Um, well, cancer was definitely part of it because he had worked this out: he had devised this test, apparently it was a microscopic test, that a sample of blood is taken and allowed to clot, and the way the cells clump together and so on, will be different if you do have cancer than it will be if you don't have cancer.

71. HUBBARD: Let me ask you about Rife's deterioration, his alcoholism,

COMPARET: Well that began with this: Rife was one of those men who shouldn't have any alcohol at all at any time. Now, when this case came up, we knew of course that as part of the testimony to be taken in the case would be Rife's statement that he had devised this method and employed Hoyland to do the work, that all Hoyland knew was what Rife told him, it was his life's work. So, I had a talk with Rife. Now, so many people have an exaggerated fear of being on the witness stand and Rife had that to a very high degree. Well, I assured him that as far as giving away the secret of the frequency was concerned, we were as much interested in preserving the secrecy of it as he was, that we would not ask for anything in that, but simply show that it was through him that this knowledge came in and that was all that Hoyland had. Well, he began drinking and from then on, he was an alcoholic.

72. HUBBARD: Did anyone aid and abet this alcoholism to your knowledge. Did anyone want him to be an alcoholic?

COMPARET: No, I don't think that ever entered into it. At least we never suspected it at that time; in fact it was a while before we learned that it was becoming serious.

73. HUBBARD: How long a time before you knew it was serious, after 1939? The trial was Dec 6th…

COMPARET: Filed December 6 '39, well that would take it on into 1940. And, oh I'd say as the time for trial approached we began hearing that he was drinking too much.

74. HUBBARD: As the time for trial approached. So he began drinking actually before the trial began?

COMPARET: Oh yes, it was his worry over having to appear as a witness and be badgered and brow-beaten by attorneys and so on, and that's what got him started drinking.

75. HUBBARD: I see, so he was already an alcoholic before the trial started?

COMPARET: Yeah.

76. HUBBARD: Now when you say the trial started, you mean the actual hearings?

COMPARET: Yeah.

77. HUBBARD: There were motions being filed back earlier in the year of '39, January and February and so forth, weren't they?

COMPARET: (Referring to document) Well this is the Findings of Fact and Conclusion at Law, this came at the end of the trial, so it was in 1939 then rather than '40.

78. HUBBARD: So, to your knowledge, his alcoholic problems began before the actual formalities of the trial?

COMPARET: While it was just anticipated...

79. HUBBARD: While it was just being anticipated he began to drink.

COMPARET: In other words there was something pending in the court but it hadn't t reached the stage of trial.

80. HUBBARD: I see, so there was something potentially worrying Rife.

COMPARET: Yeah

81. HUBBARD: And do you remember about Rife's behavior when he would be on the witness stand, whether there would be any class of questions or any type of question that would worry him or bother him?

COMPARET: No I couldn't see any difference there.

82. HUBBARD: His behavior on the witness stand was not then unusual?

COMPARET: Oh no. He didn't come to court intoxicated. He didn't want to appear in that condition. But he would drink afterward and get into Queen Dimes and so on.

83. HUBBARD: But, to your knowledge, before this lawsuit was filed he had never been a user of alcohol?

COMPARET: I didn't know him well enough to know anything about that at that stage. Somewhere between 1929 and 31 or somewhere in there, was where I first saw him when he gave that lecture on the microscope and then this other came up you see, oh, ten years later.

84. HUBBARD: So far as you could tell there were no premonitions of legal action on the part of Hoyland before the summer of 1938? There were no threats of any legal action or anything?

COMPARET: No, now there was friction developing in the company, they wanted a saleable instrument and Hoyland was making junk. Hoyland was complaining that they weren’t bringing in money by selling these things, and they were complaining, "We can't sell these things so they will stay sold." Which eventually led them into court?

85. HUBBARD: (Referring to documents) Now then, Judge Kelly left it open here at the Conclusions of Law: "that Plaintiff Philip Hoyland shall take nothing by his said complaint and that the defendants, and each of them, should have in recover of said Philip Hoyland their costs and disbursements herein incurred."

COMPARET: We never got a penny.

86. HUBBARD: It wasn't worth trying to recover anything?

COMPARET: We didn't know where we could locate any assets.

87. HUBBARD: What about Sapiro, would there be any possibility of malpractice on Sapiro's part here?

COMPARET: No, he merely came into it as an attorney. And what advice he may have given them privately I don't know. But his work in the courtroom was strictly within ethical limits.

88. HUBBARD: I see, all right, that's good to know. All right, I get a better picture now. There was really a plausible matrix for unhappiness in this understanding here. It was just not wisely resolved, very unwisely resolved.

COMPARET: Yeah. Now, there are things that you can judge for yourself and you will often make very serious choices in life on the basis of it, and you can say, "Well now here it is right here, here is the proof of it." We had reason to believe, we felt and we did believe, that this period of developing trouble was being brought on by Hoyland as part of a scheme to freeze out the others, and which must have had some cooperation from Hutchinson.

89. HUBBARD: Well, I wonder if Levinson would talk about this now. I'll try to get in contact with him. Really, of course, that isn't necessary for my principle purposes which are really medical and scientific, although I have a friend, Christopher Bird, who is a journalist through whose article I originally, as I told you before, came in contact with locating Crane. He is interested in historical aspects of this. You have shed a lot of light here this morning on some of these problems, and of course well, I'm always as any responsible citizen should be, interested in justice. Also, I want to avoid an improper partisanship in a conflict of which I am really not a party to. And yet, I want those original notebooks of Rife's and I want to get those drawings, anything he left on at microscope.

COMPARET: Now, I should give some further explanation of the John Crane case. Crane had assembled a number of these frequency generators, which were not radio frequency, they were audio frequency. The whole secret of the Rife thing was the audio frequency (audio gating of the RF M.O.R. frequency) because Rife, way back in the old days, way, way back, Rife told me that the way he used to tune his instrument, which in those primitive days was, I guess (garbled). He would hook up headphones and turn the thing. He had a very keen music sense of pitch, and so on, and he would tune it in his head phones until he got the right pitch, and that was the frequency. So, here were these instruments and unfortunately John crane fell into the hands of a man, there are some unfortunate people who simply lack the capacity to be honest, ahhh, what s his name? Well Crane was doing the assembling and the adjusting, and this other man was doing the selling. Marsh was the man’s name. When anybody is apparently giving the medical monopoly a hard time, they go after him. So they put their people out to pick up whatever they could. They had some harmless looking housewives who were hired for this job, and fitted with wireless microphones, and down at the end of the block here were the State men there in a van with their recording equipment taking it down. So I remember one tape: here was Marsh in his own voice, clear as could be, saying, “This instrument will not only cure every known disease, it'll cure some we haven't yet discovered.”  (To be fair to Marsh, John Crane was making the same type of claims, but he just didn’t get caught.)

90. HUBBARD: (Laughing) well, that would certainly be damning evidence wouldn't it!

COMPARET: Yes. Well, they charged Marsh and a woman who was working with them as a salesman, they charged them with theft: obtaining money by false pretenses and violation of the Medical Practice Act by giving medical treatments by a person not licensed. Well, on appeal, I got the theft charge reversed because we had so much evidence that we were legally entitled to, that this stupid Judge wouldn't allow in. It just couldn't stand up at all. But on the other charge, why, they had to admit: here was a woman who was dying of cancer, they were poor people they couldn't be bled for any more money so their doctor wouldn't bother with them anymore, he just told the woman, "Well, your case is hopeless, go home and stay there until you die."

91. HUBBARD: Certainly, did he actually say that in effect?

COMPARET: Yeah.

92. HUBBARD: Would he admit that in court, did he admit it?

COMPARET: I don't remember whether they called him as now, but the patient said that in court. Oh, that's standard routine in the cancer creed. So, the doctor having giving her up as a hopeless case, trying to find something, they stumbled upon this John Crane thing. Now Crane never got a penny out of this, but, these were ignorant people. You couldn't simply hand them the instrument and tell them, you go home and use it. They didn't have brains enough. So Crane went there with his instrument and operated the thing himself to make sure it would be done correctly, and the woman's condition picked up a great deal. She shown very marked improvement until finally they told her she should go to the county hospital and get a blood transfusion. And she came back from that in very much worse shape and died a week or so later.

93. HUBBARD: After her blood transfusion.

COMPARET: Yes. But here he had to admit on the stand himself, he and Marsh had gone there and operated the instrument to give the treatment, and neither of them had an M.D. license so that was that. That's why John Crane served his time.

94. HUBBARD: That was what he was really convicted for?

COMPARET: That was what he was really convicted for. The other was set aside on appeal.

95. HUBBARD: And they didn't really need the materials that they seized in his house to obtain that conviction?

COMPARET: Oh no. A great deal of it, a truckload of it, was never brought to the court at all.

96. HUBBARD: A truckload! It was close to a truckload?

COMPARET: Yeah. Now, they did bring in this Hewlett Packard frequency counter and one or two other things to make an impressive showing of: “Here is all this crank stuff”, although, as I say, anybody who knew anything about it, and the State people themselves knew, that that Hewlett Packard frequency counter had never been used for any purpose except calibrating the instruments. Honesty is an exceptionally rare quality and among bureaucrats practically ten thousand percent absent.

97. HUBBARD: Did John Crane ever pay you for your final services?

COMPARET: Well, when I was first called in we didn't know what it was going to develop into, and he did pay me for a little work done there. Then it became clear that this thing was going into a long drawn out trial, and he couldn't afford to pay me more. His wife worked as a teacher and that's the only real source of income.

98. HUBBARD: Why did his wife divorce him, or leave him, because of his prison sentence?

COMPARET: Well, John Crane is a man that nobody can get along with married to or otherwise. He has this stubborn streak.

99. HUBBARD: I've met him and I know what you are talking about.

COMPARET: Well so, anyway, I applied to the court for compensation through the court because six weeks or so of trial, without a penny coming in, I could go broke too.

100. HUBBARD: Let me ask you this Mr. Comparet. What do you see as possible appropriate legal maneuvers to recover or to examine, is there any way that I as an outside citizen can go and examine these records which the State has seized.

COMPARET: Well, I think you probably could, showing and interest in these things. You are an M.D. doctor, aren't you?

101. HUBBARD: That's right, I'm an M.D., I'm a Pathologist, and I'm associate Professor of Pathology at the State University in New York, Buffalo.

COMPARET: Well, I would say that they would be probably glad to show you these things as examples of the horrible things these unlicensed people are doing.

102. HUBBARD: You have no further interest in pursuing this matter have you Mr. Comparet.

COMPARET: I wouldn't be able to, I have high blood pressure. I had a stroke, but even before that I had reached the point where, I still have no aches or pains, but there is just no steam in the boiler, that's all, I just don't have the energy to do any of that any more. So I let my legal license go to the inactive stage, in other words I am not allowed to practice law now unless I reinstate my license as active, which I wouldn't do because I don't have the strength.
A discussion follows about where and how to obtain Crane court documents.

103. HUBBARD: This is a very, very tragic event Mr. Comparet, the loss of Rife's work; it was several decades ahead of time.

COMPARET: It was. Well, his microscope was on a new theory. The instrument, I've seen it before, the central column was about eight inches in diameter, but through that the light, from down here, the ordinary turret with objective lenses was down there. Then they had prisms in here, reflecting the light from one to another, bending it and extending it. His theory, as I understand it is this: When light is finally allowed to cross at that focal point, there is where you ultimately get your troubles, and, he had worked out a way to keep extending the light path so that it never was allowed to reach the point where it crossed, and thereby, instead of losing everything in fuzziness he could use 2,800 power optical microscope and get a clear, sharp image. Now, there is article that was published in the Smithsonian Institution, how much detail there was in that I don't. He was a generation ahead of his time in that alone. Now, one thing he did was he used polarized light to optically color the specimens so he didn't even need to put a chemical dye in there.

104. HUBBARD: What do you think of John Crane's chances of getting anything on this illegal search, without a search warrant?

COMPARET: Well, I don't think John Crane's chances, being John Crane, are good on anything because he will stubbornly set himself on what he wants to do and if somebody says, "Look, there is a better way to do this," well, he hasn't had the money to afford legal counsel in carrying on these things, and he has always been wanting to sue somebody who brought the case against him there, so he has been in the courts, off and on all these years here doing it himself, and never of course getting anywhere on it because he hasn't knowledge of how to do it. And I couldn't afford a lifetime of carrying on what was John Crane (laughs).

105. HUBBARD: Do you know the legal basis that John Crane has for the Rife materials? I did not look to see whether Rife has a will probated. I probably should look and see about that, whether there was a will. Do you know if there was a bill probated of Rife's?

COMPARET: I don't know; Rife died only a few years ago. I don't know whether the will probated since then or not. Now, as far as Crane is concerned, those things were probably turned over to him by Rife during his lifetime, so that it's a question of whether it was as a gift or merely for safe keeping.

106. HUBBARD: And you never heard Crane give or Rife either give any uhhhh, there is no testament or documentation on that point is there.

COMPARET: None that I know of.

107. HUBBARD: So all we would have would be Crane's word that those materials were his, wouldn't we?

COMPARET: Yes. Well now, Rife was a strange little man, he might have weighed 98 pounds dripping wet, yet, among his hobbies was a collection of elephant rifles, and that sort of thing, which, by the way, he himself fired very, very accurately. He finally had to sell his laboratory on Point Loma because the Bridges people left him nothing after their death. They had given them this expensive laboratory but he didn't have money coming in after that.  So, those rifles were put in Crane's possession for safekeeping.

108. HUBBARD: What happened to them?

COMPARET: I don't know. They were valuable articles indeed.

109. HUBBARD: What I am wondering is really whether, the materials that were seized there at Crane's house, whether they were really his materials. How can he prove that they were his?

COMPARET: Well, I think you have got a legal principle here that a man who actually has something in his possession has a better right than somebody who simply steals it from him with no right at all.

110. HUBBARD: So, one must presume that because he had custody of the materials that he had title to them, since he had custody for so many years, and if we do not find a will of Rife's in probate, then that would strengthen the supposition that Crane does have legal title to these materials.

COMPARET: Yeah. That's right.

End of Comparet interview.


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