Someone over on Discord was reading 2011’s Map of Bones, by James Rollins, which features something called “monoatomic gold.” Searching for it online, they turned up plenty of other examples of this material—some of which, they noted, seemed to have been taken straight from the novel. Naturally, they were curious about whether the novel originated the idea.
And: no. It did not. But obviously I am not going to stop here, so stick around and let’s spend the afternoon learning about what in God’s name (perhaps literally?) this stuff is.
Monoatomic gold—aka “white gold” or “ormus gold”—is what is known as an “orbitally rearranged monoatomic element,” or ORME. And by “known as,” I do of course mean “known as by cranks,” because it is pure woo. It boosts your immune system. It promotes a healthy sleep cycle. It improves your brain functions and nervous system. It increases the production of semen, although no clarification is provided here about whether or not you need testes first.
Oh, also, monoatomic gold “has been shown to stimulate the pineal gland,” in case you were concerned about the proper functioning of your third eye.
Anyway. The Internet, always a reliable source, tells me that the Ancient Egyptians used monoatomic gold for its spiritual and healing properties. This is one reason we know it must predate Map of Bones, surely. It was, indeed, well-established in crank circles by the mid-2000s, with all of its existing trappings of rearranged elements and exotic atoms.
This thread from 2003 contains plenty of discussion; crackpot Biblical scholar Laurence Gardner’s 2004 Lost Secrets of the Sacred Ark: Amazing Revelations of the Incredible Power of Gold makes the claim that the Ark was used for producing it as some kind of elixir.
Before that, the reptilians piloting David Icke compelled him to write about it in 1999. Before that…
Well. Okay. The upside, here, is that it’s possible to fix the date of monoatomic gold’s emergence into the public consciousness. On the other hand, it’s definitely not Biblical, although it does hail from a desert prophet. Something like monoatomic gold may have been floating around beforehand, but a good year of origin is: 1996.
That’s fine, actually, and probably what we’d expect. This date puts monoatomic gold in the heady realm of mostly post-Cold War sci-fi-inspired tinfoil hattery that gave us Bob Lazar’s ununpentium, oxyhydrogen, and red mercury. The interesting catch is that, while Element 115 allows flying saucers to levitate, and HHO lets you run cars on water, and red mercury lets you build pure fusion nuclear devices, monoatomic gold is different.
It’s alchemical.
When the topic came up, monoatomic gold sounded familiar to me, and I thought that I might have run into it as a weirdo conspiracy-loving kid growing up. Possibly from my weirder relatives—love ya, Oregon—who, when they took a break from watching for black helicopters, also taught me about ununpentium and red mercury. And FEMA concentration camps. And the secret submarine base under Las Vegas.
But now I’m not sure, because spiritual conspiracy theories were never my thing, and David Hudson was not the kind of crackpot to show up on my radar.
According to public records, David Radius Hudson was born in June, 1947 and is, so far as I can tell, still alive. For the first half of his life, he was an (apparently) unassuming farmer in Laveen, just outside Phoenix, Arizona. In the mid 1970s, however, he appears to have learned that there was gold in them there hills freakin’ everywhere.
He didn’t know that at first, of course. What he knew was that he had discovered an “unusual white powder” on his farm that, when exposed to the sun, melted into liquid that further analysis revealed contained copper, iron and, most excitingly, gold. Indeed, while Wikipedia says that “second- and third-row metals are invariably low-spin,” Hudson pioneered the discovery of high-spin examples of gold, iridium, rhodium, palladium, and platinum.
I began this by noting the abundant health benefits of monoatomic gold. This is salient. It’s salient because in early August, 1996, the Arizona Board of Osteopathic Examiners met to consider what to do about one Dr. David Payne, of Phoenix, regarding a patient he treated in 1994, Leslie Burroughs. Burroughs had undergone artificial insemination, carried out with semen which—unbeknownst to her—was HIV positive. And, well, here’s the nut graf:
Payne’s critics say he was wrong to inform Burroughs about a mysterious substance, developed by a Laveen farmer, that had not been approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration.
On February 12th, 1994, Burroughs took the stuff—“discovered by Laveen farmer David Hudson that Hudson manufactured in a building on his farm”—intravenously. The first symptoms appeared within two hours. She lapsed into a coma and died on March 24th, 1994, without regaining consciousness.
According to Payne, he did not prescribe anything. He had merely acted as an intermediary between Hudson and Burroughs. On the other hand, in his defense, he said that he had previously given it to two other people without side effects, and “tested it on a dog so ill with valley fever that it could not get up.”
”We gave him that stuff, and the dog was running around like a puppy,” Payne said.
So you can see why the Board might’ve been skeptical, especially since:
Hudson has declined to reveal specific details about his substance but refers to it as “orbitally rearranged monoatomic elements,” primarily iridium and rhodium.
In any case, rather than take drastic action, they put Dr. Payne on probation for five years. David Lavon Payne—who first entered the public record in 1973 when he sued the University of Arizona for not letting him into medical school, which is I admit an interesting move (he lost, incidentally)—continued practicing up until a few years ago.
A complaint of some sort was filed in 2017—I do not know the circumstances but I assume it didn’t involve injecting something fresh from a farmer’s market into the gravely ill and desperate—which brought him back before the Board of Osteopathic Examiners. After two years of stonewalling, they concluded he “appears to be unregulatable in that he has refused to participate in the Board’s proceedings” and moved to formally revoke his license; Payne, who claimed to already be retired, rendered the matter moot by dying in 2021.
This raises a question, I think, namely: how serious was Hudson? By 2002, a lecture at UNC Greensboro explicitly promised a discussion of “the superconductivity and alchemy of Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements,” and he definitely seems to have leaned into the alchemical nonsense side pretty early.
A 1998 article in Skeptical Inquirer adds a bit more context to this, by skipping over the bullshit health claims and talking about the broader category of “non-assayable” gold, which Hudson at the time referred to as “ghost gold.” This gold cannot be detected by normal means, but a spectroscopic method “developed at the Soviet Academy of Sciences” reveals their presence.
Hudson can produce monoatomic gold in another way, by thermal decomposition of AuH, which is called “oride.” It loses 4/9 of its weight in the process. This is due to the high-temperature superconductivity of monoatomic gold, which interacts with the magnetic field of the earth.
According to the Skeptical Inquirer, Hudson’s “main themes are like old familiar songs from a chorus of vanished prospectors.” Indeed, the idea of ghost gold was apparently so common at the time that the New Mexico Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources put out a pamphlet explaining that there is no such thing, with the aim of steering people away from fraudulent assayers.
Hence the drawing that headlines this article. “At present,” the Bureau admits, “the prospect of seeing them out of business, or better yet behind bars, seems improbable.” It is at no point clear in any of these articles how monoatomic gold—explicitly “non-assayable, non-recoverable”—would work, given that, like neutrinos, it does not appear to interact with the real world and that ghost gold cannot easily be turned into the Shiny Gold beloved of magpies like myself.
Perhaps faith is sufficient. “It all goes back to a man called Hermes Trimesgritus,” Hudson tells us. One assumes that, as we are intended to read “Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union” for the non-existent “Soviet Academy of Sciences”—and I suppose “auride” for “oride”—he means Hermes Trismegistus, one of the fathers of alchemy.
Except.
Except that in 1989, Hudson filed for a patent—in the UK, not the US, for some reason—and that this patent seems to be… well, less overtly crazy?
Along with a great quantity of charmingly hand-drawn graphs, Hudson discusses the preparation of his ORMEs, and his theory of their existence. He describes the behavior of monoatomic gold in bizarre but not mystical terms:
The G-ORME will not react with cyanide, will not be dissolved by aqua regia, and will not wet or amalgamate with mercury. It also does not sinter at 800°C under reducing conditions, and remains an amorphous white powder at 1200°C. These characteristics are contrary to what is observed for metallic gold and/or gold cluster salts.
So perhaps what we have here is closer to a polywater or n-ray situation? Some apparently strange science—maybe due to contamination or some other mundane cause—but not an attempt to be explicitly fraudulent?
Or, at least, perhaps it began that way. Because, a few years later, his claims had spun completely off the rails:
A superconductor can see your thoughts in your brain. Different parts of your brain lights up when you eat something sweet or something sour -- it’s a superconductor that sees it.
When it goes to the white powder and loses 4/9th of its weight, it’s flowing light within it, in response to the earth’s magnetic field. And it flows so much current that it levitates 4/9th of its weight on the earth’s magnetic field. A human hand has sufficient amperage, that if you pass it under the sample, the material floats. It’s that sensitive to magnetic fields. All the 8 precious metal elements can do this. Also Copper, Cobalt and Nickel.
And, immediately thereafter, we get the bridge between How It Started and How It’s Going, in the form of this anecdote:
In 1990, my uncle showed me the Time-Life Book, Secrets of the Alchemist. I was not interested in Alchemy; I wanted credibility in physics and chemistry. The book talks about a “white powder of gold”. The goal of the alchemist had been to make a “white powder of gold”. To make “the container of the light of life.” If you stand in its presence, you don’t age. If you partake of it, you live for ever. I begrudgingly agreed to read the book.
I have since read some 500 books on alchemy, alchemy history, and it all goes back to a man named Enoch. Thoth, Hermes Trisgetimus [sic, again]. Same man. Ascended by partaking of the white drops. He never died. Ascended because he was so perfect.
For those of you keeping track, the sequence of events here is that Hudson revolutionized chemistry, patented his discovery, read a goddamned Time-Life book about alchemy, and was sufficiently convinced by it to start mixing up a magic powder in his barn for sale to AIDS patients.
I do not, for the record, recommend reading Hudson’s thoughts linked above, but if you want to, I challenge you to not hear Alex Jones’ voice telling you things like:
Over 5% of the brain tissue by dry matter weight was Rhodium and Iridium. But no one knows it, because it can’t be directly measured. The elements are flowing the light of life in your body. The elements are in fact what the light is.
or
There are four papers by the U.S. Naval Research, that they have proved the cells communicate with each other by a process identical to superconductivity. But they can't figure out the physical mechanism.
or
I haven’t achieved everything yet, but it miraculously has cured every disease that we’ve tested on thus far. Started with very incremental amounts of 2 mg (32,000 mg in an ounce), and have gone up to 50 mg -- 50 mg over a period of 60 to 90 days, cures cancer, Aids. It’s the light that corrects itself. You all know this.
or
It is the stealth atoms.
By the turn of the millennium, when Icke had glommed onto it, the whole idea had been dissolved—as if with aqua regia—into a constituent soup of messy conspiracy. The 2003 Fortean times thread includes the question:
After delving into David Hudson’s biography, I discovered that he has strong Masonic / Templar connections. Could there be some kind of Illuminati conspiracy taking place?
To which the answer, obviously, is “no.” And, to their credit, the FT folks are a little less credulous than usual—another commenter even jokingly asks: “Is this a ‘white gold’ to match ‘red mercury’?”
Not that it mattered. Monoatomic gold, and ORMEs generally, were firmly fixed in the woo-woo sphere, and you can readily find people hawking them to this day. A thread over on the “alchemy forums,” because that is a thing, claims that Hudson “sold his rights to his ormes research to a Taiwanese billionaire industrialist,” and that his disappearance has led to the florescence of such Internet scam artists.
Ormes are real. IMO, the common internet claims about ormus, WPG or monatomics is commercial fluff meant to profit off the gullible. I believe a small community knows how to make real Au and PGE ormes, but, for their own reasons, hold that information secret.
Which might take us to one last question, namely: is any of this real? Is there an AuH you can turn into high-temperature superconducting gold? Well, in 2017, Martin Rahm, Roald Hoffman, and N.W. Ashcroft published “Ternary Gold Hydrides: Routes to Stable and Potentially Superconducting Compounds” in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The abstract begins:
In a search for gold hydrides, an initial discouraging result of no theoretical stability in any binary AuHn at P < 300 GPa was overcome by introducing alkali atoms as reductants.
300 gigapascals is up there in the pressure range at which water refuses to be anything other than Weird Forms of Ice, so it’s kind of obvious why this would be discouraging. I am, as you know, not a chemist, and the paper contains a great number of graphs that were not drawn by hand, and which have headings like “3D Convex Hulls for Selected Ternaries” that are designed to scare people like me off.
But Rahm, et al. do suggest their work provides “a realistic route to gold hydrides at P = 1 atm.” The abstract further mentions “superconducting symmetrically bonded AuHAu sheets,” and while I had hoped “AuHAu” was the sound they made on discovering this, the paper itself clarifies that this is projected to occur at 120 GPa, and to be superconducting at 0.3K.
Also, there is no mention of Enoch, Hermes Trismegistus, or the Ark of the Covenant. So, you know. Who are you going to trust? The man with the white powder that gives you superpowers when you take it, obviously.
…Or not. Please don’t.