Hundreds of years ago, if you told someone that one day, human beings would fly through
the air, they would assume you were talking about witchcraft.
And yet, in 1904, the Wright Brothers flew the first successful airplane.
One decade later, in 1914, Jack Parsons was born.
While most boys in his generation were still fascinated by airplanes, Parsons was already
two steps ahead.
He dreamed about building the first rocket ship that would take men to the moon.
Of course, back then, this idea was considered a total fantasy.
In the 1920’s and 30’s, characters like Buck Rogers popularized the idea that humans
could explore the expanses of space, but it was purely science fiction.
Flying an airplane is one thing, but no man could truly go to the moon, unless they had
magic powers.
Scientists and engineers from around the world said that the math simply didn’t add up,
and that mankind would never make it out of the stratosphere.
For Jack Parsons, the opinions of all of these experts didn’t stop him from trying to make
this dream a reality.
He studied the chemistry necessary to create a liquid rocket fuel that was, in fact, strong
enough to defy gravity...And, for good measure, he practiced a bit of real magic, too.
His work would become the basis of NASA’s modern-day space program.
But his legacy was tarnished by his involvement with the occult.
Instead of being in the limelight of history, the memory of his accomplishments were pushed
aside for years.
This is the story of the original rocket man, Jack Parsons.
Early Life Jack Parsons’ parents, Ruth Whiteside and
Marvel Parsons were originally from wealthy families in Massachusetts.
They moved to Los Angeles together in the early 1900’s.
In 1914, they gave birth to a son, “Marvel Whiteside Parsons”.
When he was very young, his parents got a divorce.
Ruth Whiteside called her son “Jack”, instead of “Marvel”.
Ruth purchased a house on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, California, which has the nickname
“Millionaire Mile”, because the streets are lined with mansions.
Parsons was a bookworm, and he enjoyed reading sci fi instead of playing outside and making
friends.
He was so fascinated by stories of magic, that he once tried to summon the Devil in
his bedroom.
Parsons wanted to grow up to build a rocket ship so badly, he was willing to do whatever
it takes, even selling his soul to Satan.
Nothing happened, of course.
He later called this experience a “magical fiasco”, and he never attempted to do it
again.
In Junior High, he did badly in school, even though he had a bright mind.
Growing up without a father, Parsons was awkward around other boys, and many people considered
him to be effeminate.
Another boy in his class, Edward Forman, was also being bullied for reading science fiction
books.
The two became close friends, and shared the dream of going to space one day.
When they were in High School, they experimented with fireworks and home made rockets in the
Parson’s back yard.
He was always trying to figure out methods to make the rockets go higher in the air.
Their back yard was full of large craters made from all of his attempts.
He was so hyper focused on this goal, that his grades continued to plummet.
Jack Parsons’ mother sent him to a boarding school called the Brown Military Academy in
hopes that it would straighten him out, but it didn’t work, because he was expelled
for blowing up one of the dormitory toilets.
Ruth Whiteside’s father had been supporting their lavish lifestyle.
So when he passed away in 1931, they had to move into a much smaller house.
Parsons was attending college to study physics and chemistry at the time, but he had to drop
out, because his family could no longer afford the tuition.
The chemistry classes he took in school were enough for him to find a job as a chemist
at the Hercules Powder Company, which specialized in creating gunpowder.
He earned $100 a month, which is more like $1,760 a month after modern inflation, and
he was learning so much-needed information about explosive chemicals.
He married Helen Northrup in 1935, when he was 21 years old.
He tried to save up money for tuition so he could transfer his credits to to Stanford
University, but it was simply too expensive.
The Suicide Squad Jack Parsons was still very close with his
childhood friend Edward Forman.
He and Ed attended public lectures at local universities to learn from some of the greatest
minds in the aeronautics industry.
They met a Caltech student named Frank Malina, who introduced them to his thesis advisor,
Theodore von Karman.
He allowed them to have access to the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, which had been abandoned
after the Great Depression.
Once they had access to the state-of-the-art equipment, they gathered a team of other graduate
students at Caltech to help them build their rocket engine.
As their experiments got bigger and bigger, they had to move out into the desert, in an
area known as the Devil’s Dam in Pasadena.
Their official named was the GALCIT Rocket Research Project, but around campus, they
earned the nickname “Suicide Squad”, because of all of their near-death experiences experimenting
with explosives.
The succeeded in building the J.A.T.O Rocket, which was rocket fuel-assisted takeoff.
Soon enough, the United States Air Force took notice to their rocket engine.
The government hired Jack Parsons and his friends to create the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Years later, this same laboratory would become the foundation of NASA.
He made so much money, he was able to buy a mansion in Pasadena, which he named “The
Parsonage”.
Secret Life, and The Babalon Working By day, Jack Parsons seemed to be a man of
science and logic.
Little did his friends and family know that he was leading a double life casting magic
spells at night, in hopes that the Universe would help his dreams come true.
He met the magician Aleister Crowley and became deeply involved with the Occult.
They believed in a belief system called Thelema.
Their mantra was “Do what thou wilt”, which was a way of manifesting their wants
and desires into existence.
Aleister Crowley had grown up in a strict Quaker household, where his parents raised
him to read the Bible on a daily basis.
Later in life, he was able to attend Cambridge University, where it became evident that he
had the IQ of a genius.
He wholly rejected the teachings of the Bible, and focused instead on secularism.
However, anything against Christianity was interpreted as being “Demonic”.
Crowley fully embraced this as part of his identity, calling himself the “Beast”,
and attempting to summon powerful demons to come to his aid.
From the time Jack Parsons was experimenting with rockets in his back yard as a kid, the
idea that man could actually go into space was still a fantasy.
Many people refused to believe that it could possibly be real.
And while it’s hard for us to imagine now, the mere suggestion that man could reach the
moon was considered to be sinful.
While Thelema has plenty of spooky and paranormal elements to their religion, their core belief
system was actually not too far off from many new-age beliefs, and modern-day publications
like The Secret, which calls this concept “the law of attraction”.
Practitioners of Thelema did, in fact, believe in magic, but it wasn’t just card tricks
and parlor games.
They practiced “sex magic”- which is exactly what it sounds like.
They believed that the intense feeling people have while having an orgasm opens a gate to
the universe.
They believed that in that small window of opportunity, it is possible for a human being
to perform a magic spell.
All they really needed to do to perform this spell was to focus on their intention while
having sex, and their wish would come true, because it was put out into the universe.
Jack Parsons became the leader of his own group, and they would have huge sex magic
orgies at his mansion in Pasadena.
Not surprisingly, Parson’s wife did not enjoy this sort of lifestyle, so she left
him.
He began to have an affair with his wife’s sister, Sara Northrup Hollister, who believed
very strongly in the occult.
Unlike her sister, she actually enjoyed participating in these orgies, and Jack Parsons was just
one of many men in the group that she would practice sex magic with.
While it may not surprise anyone, Aleister Crowley was addicted to sex, and multiple
orgasms in one day were no longer enough to satisfy him.
He experimented with drugs.
He eventually became addicted to heroin, which was his downfall.
At one of Jack Parson’s meetings, he and Sara Hollister met a science fiction writer
named L. Ron Hubbard.
If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Hubbard would go on to found the cult of Scientology.
But at this time, he was one of the very few sci fi writers who were writing in such detail
about the possibility of sending humans into space.
As a hardcore sci-fi nerd, Jack Parsons was thrilled to meet L. Ron Hubbard, and invited
him to join in on the parties as much as he wanted.
Parsons believed that he could summon a goddess named Babalon.
She is described as being the “Great Mother” of the Earth, and a symbol of a sexually liberated
women.
He asked his group of followers to participate in this project called The Babalon Working.
He thought that through all of these magical sex rituals, the “Scarlet Woman” would
come along to give birth to the “Moon Child”.
They believed that this child could be raised to aspire to travel to space, instead of holding
on to the comforts of Earth.
They never actually gave birth to a real baby, because they hoped that this would be more
of a symbolic gesture for future generations of mankind.
The Scarlet Woman was a symbol of “free love” throughout the world, so people could
have sex outside of marriage more openly.
In a way, you could say that this spell actually worked.
Just a few years later, the United States entered the “Space Race”, and the entire
world turned on their televisions to watch the first steps on the moon.
In the 1960’s, the hippies spread the free love movement that Parsons had hoped for.
Maybe, just maybe, the sex magic of the Babalon Working changed the world, after all.
His Last Years on Earth After discovering his ties to the occult in
the late 40’s, Jack Parsons was fired from his job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Since he was down on his luck, L. Ron Hubbard asked Jack Parsons if he would be interested
in partnering in a boat business in Florida.
Parsons gave Hubbard $20,000 to start the business, and Sara Hollister asked if she
could go, too.
After stealing his girlfriend and robbing him blind, Parsons realized that he made a
terrible mistake by trusting him.
At this point, L. Ron Hubbard truly did create a successful boating business, but he never
bothered to pay back the startup loan.
Jack Parsons had to go to court to get his $20,000 back.
Years later, L. Ron Hubbard would become the founder of his own religion, called Scientology,
and he used this boat business to create his Sea Org.
He borrowed much of the same principles taught by Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons about
setting intentions and being the best person you can be, mixed in his own fictional ideas
made up in his science fiction novels.
Even though Sara Hollister left Jack Parsons to marry L. Ron Hubbard, there were plenty
of other women in the group who practically worshiped him.
He met an actress and artist named Marjorie Cameron.
Just like all of his other intentions, he had put his ideas about an “elemental woman”
out into the universe.
So when he met her, he believed they were soulmates.
They were so intensely attracted to one another when they first met, they spent two weeks
straight making love in his bedroom.
He married Cameron in 1946.
Marjorie Cameron was more than a tad bit eccentric.
She claimed that she had visions of the coming apocalypse, and she created artwork about
her occult beliefs that would later become popular during the Beat Generation.
The 1950’s was the beginning of the McCarthy era, where the FBI was investigating anyone
under suspicion of having ties to Communist party.
They began to investigate Jack Parsons, due to the fact that he took documents home from
his new employer, Hughes Aircraft Company.
They suspected that he may be supplying the USSR with these documents on rocket engines.
After learning that he was under investigation, Jack Parsons voluntarily showed up to the
FBI offices in Los Angeles to explain that he took the documents home, because he wanted
to give examples of his past work to apply to a job in Israel.
The FBI thought that he could actually be a spy for the Israeli government.
He was fired from the Hughes Aircraft Company, and this was enough to blacklist him from
ever getting another aeronautical job again.
Declassified documents reveal that the FBI had been following Jack Parson’s movements
since 1948, because of his occult ties to Aleister Crowley.
They believed that this was a “subversive group” that they should consider to be dangerous,
and they were just waiting for a moment where he may slip up.
In 1951, Parson’s career was over, and his marriage to Marjorie Cameron was falling apart,
so they seperated.
Jack Parsons’ was no longer raking in huge paychecks.
He occasionally worked as an explosives consultant on the sets of Hollywood action films, but
those gigs were few and far between.
He had to work the night shift at a gas station, and he rented out the spare rooms in this
house for extra income.
In June of 1952, Parsons received an order from a film set to create several explosives
for a movie.
They asked him to hurry, because they were running on a tight schedule.
One of his tenants joke, “Be careful, or you’ll blow us all up.”
Parsons responded with a chuckle, and said that everything would be fine.
An hour later, the lab exploded.
He was still alive, with half of his face blown off from an explosion.
He was rushed to the hospital, and died from his injuries at just 37 years old.
His official cause of death has been ruled an accident, but many elements of the explosion
are surrounded in mystery.
He had so many years of experience mixing chemicals and creating bombs, people find
it hard to believe that Jack Parsons could have made such a careless mistake.
Some think that maybe, he was feeling so low, he wanted to kill himself.
But if Parson’s intention truly was to commit suicide, he would have known how to build
a bomb that would have killed himself instantly, instead of suffering in the hospital.
Some people speculate that someone wanted him dead, and they snuck into his lab to tamper
with his chemicals.
The idea that he was assassinated by the government is a conspiracy theory, of course, but it’s
one that makes a lot of sense.
It seems almost too convenient that Jack Parsons blew himself up at the start of the Cold War.
He knew plenty of government secrets about their fledgling space program, and he was
already showing signs of wanting to flee the country.
Parsons truly was a genius capable of building a bigger and better rocket than ones he created
by the U.S. government, and they may have feared that he would sell his services to
the USSR.
The fact that Jack Parsons credited his work with the occult for his success in rocket
science was an embarrassment to the rest of the aeronautic community.
If the public knew about this, it would completely ruin the credibility of the government’s
attempts to build a space program.
They were already having a hard enough time raising taxpayer dollars as it was, without
some guy chatting about sex magic.
Sadly, the program earned a lot more credibility after he was out of the picture.
After his death, NASA would name one of the craters on the moon after Jack Parsons.
Only, it was on the dark side that no one can see.
This is very much how they felt about his contribution to rocket science.
They want to give credit where credit is due, but many wanted to keep his memory out of
the limelight.
While he was alive, Jack Parsons’ ultimate goal was to have his rocket experiments succeed
not just for himself, but for future generations.
He wanted the whole world to look to the stars, and know that it was a reality, and not just
some fantasy written in a sci fi novel.
Whether you believe in the supernatural or not, Parson’s sex magic spells actually
worked, because all of his intentions that he set out into the universe eventually came
true.
Tragically, he did not live long enough to see NASA send a man to the moon, but if he
was watching from across the universe, he would surely be proud.