"Reg Presley, who has died aged 71, was lead singer with The Troggs, the pop group which notched up seven huge hits in the mid-1960s, notably Wild Thing; in later years, he became an idiosyncratic philosopher and student of intergalactic travel.
"Towards the end of his life he became fascinated by the possible benefits of ingesting powdered gold: a substance which belongs to a family known as ORMEs (orbitally rearranged monatomic elements), and for which extraordinary claims continue to be made on numerous websites devoted to modern alchemy. Presley believed that white, powdered gold could have been “fed by the Egyptians to the Pharaohs. I tried to manufacture it myself. You need the temperature of the sun to make it. So I went down to the iron foundry in Andover. You zap the gold at the temperature of the sun. Then you look in the crucible and there is only white dust left”."
