Paul Laffoley was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1940. He spoke his first word, "Constantinople" at six months, then remained silent until the age of four (having been diagnosed as slightly autistic), when he began to draw and paint. He has continued as a self-taught artist to the present. In his senior year at Brown University, he was given eight electric-shock treatments. He was dismissed from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but managed to apprentice with the sculptor Mirko Baseldella, before going to New York to apprentice with the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler. He formed the Boston Visionary Cell, Inc. in 1971. He has participated in over two hundred exhibitions, both national and international. In 1990, he became a registered architect. In 1992, during a routine CAT scan on his head, a metallic "implant", 3/8 of an inch long, was discovered in the occipital lobe of his brain. Local M.U.F.O.N. investigators declared it to be an alien nanotechnological laboratory.