The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) began in the 1920s as an aerodynamics testing facility under the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in California Pasadena.1 By the mid-1930s, Jack Parsons and his associates were testing home-made rockets in Devil’s Canyon, on the land where the laboratory now sits.2 The laboratory was founded on 1936-10-31 at a rocket test in the Arroyo Seco area of Devil’s Canyon, a creation credited primarily to Theodore von Karman,3 and JPL still marks that Halloween test as its birthplace, re-enacting it as a nativity scene every year.4 By January 1945 the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, Caltech, had become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.5 No jet engine of any kind was ever tested or produced there; it was always strictly a rocket laboratory.6 The laboratory had deep Army ties through its initial Jet Assisted Take Off (JATO) contracts,7 and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) later acquired its services from the Army.8 An Army/JPL team placed the first successful US satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit on 1958-01-31.9 In July 1969, following the Apollo 11 crew’s liftoff from the Moon and rendezvous in lunar orbit, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)’s television unit relocated to JPL in Pasadena to cover the remainder of the flight.10
Jack Parsons went on to be one of the founders of the laboratory and of the Aerojet Corporation;11 rocket scientist Qian Xuesen also helped establish it.12 According to Dark Mission, the magic practised by Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard in Southern California in the 1940s, as the laboratory was being born, had its roots in ancient Egypt and involved the invocation of Osiris, Horus and the rest of the Egyptian pantheon.13 Jacques Vallée said that Parsons is linked to the same process of extraterrestrial-superiority belief as Hubbard, who went on to found the Church of Scientology.14
Michael Malin, a former JPL employee, was the person selected to build, point and control the camera for the Mars Observer mission.15 Jim Dilettoso was working at JPL as a contractor during the Voyager flyby of Saturn in 1980, where he met Richard C. Hoagland, then covering the mission as a magazine reporter.16 Malin was still at JPL when Dilettoso contacted him, but was planning a move to Arizona to take up a position as a professor and scientist in a geology department;17 he later moved his company, Malin Space Science Systems, which held the Mars Observer camera contract, from Arizona State University and JPL in Pasadena to San Diego, over 480 kilometres south of JPL.18 By 1992, Stanley V. McDaniel used political and academic contacts to press NASA and JPL to explain why Cydonia and the Face on Mars could not be specifically targeted, ahead of the Mars Observer launch that September.19 Hoagland said that after consulting mission planners at JPL, he and McDaniel found there would be more than forty chances to target the Face during the craft’s two-year science phase.20 Hoagland said that Lynn Bondurant told him JPL had learned of his “Hoagland’s Mars” series and had raised objections about it at NASA Headquarters.21
A selection committee run by JPL chose Malin’s camera for Mars Global Surveyor over the rival Clementine instrument.22 When the first post-Mars-Observer Cydonia image was released on 1998-04-06, Malin and JPL navigators positioned the spacecraft to capture the Face on Mars nearly dead centre of the image swath.23 Within an hour of that release, JPL employees speaking informally to news media pronounced the Face to be a natural landform, while insisting they were not speaking for NASA or JPL;24 NASA and JPL took no official position on the image.25 Ahead of a second imaging opportunity, Hoagland’s team decided to look at the sky over JPL, reasoning that the laboratory controlled the image release and hosted the servers providing the images, and used astronomy software to predict the release’s timing from star positions.26 The team calculated that at 6:55 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on 1998-04-14, Sirius would be passing through 33 degrees altitude over JPL, opening a ten-minute window in which Orion’s three belt stars would also cross that altitude, as part of what the team called its Ritual Alignment Model.27 Reasoning that a public prediction could alert JPL and allow it to delay the release to scuttle the test, Hoagland’s team decided against publishing their prediction openly,28 instead e-mailing it to specific researchers and members of the press.29 At exactly 6:55 p.m. on 1998-04-14, as predicted, the new Cydonia image link appeared on JPL’s main website,30 with a second copy appearing on JPL’s mirror site ten minutes later.31 Some months afterward, NASA and JPL revised the posted release time to 6:30 p.m., placing it outside the predicted window;32 Hoagland maintains the image was in fact released at 6:55 and 7:05 p.m. as his team had recorded, contradicting NASA and JPL’s revised timestamp.33
On 1999-09-23, JPL lost contact with the 125-million-US-dollar Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) as it passed behind Mars during its final orbit insertion burn.34 JPL scientists were unable to re-establish contact when the craft should have re-emerged from behind the Martian disk, and a navigation error was subsequently determined the likely cause, similar to the earlier loss of Mars Observer in 1993.35 The Lockheed Martin navigation team had transmitted acceleration data in imperial units, while JPL controllers assumed the data was in metric units.36 Hoagland said that Alnilam, the centre belt star of Orion, was at a 19.5-degree tetrahedral altitude over JPL at the moment the fatal burn was initiated,37 and that five minutes later, as the orbiter slipped from view, the star Mintaka had assumed the same 19.5-degree position over JPL.38 Hoagland likewise said there was a significant stellar alignment over JPL, with Regulus positioned on the horizon, at the moment the de-orbit burn command was sent to Mars Polar Lander (MPL), which then disappeared.39 Following the loss of both spacecraft, NASA director Dan Goldin appointed a commission headed by Thomas Young to investigate the Mars Polar Lander failure and the Mars programme at JPL.40 According to Dark Mission, days before the report’s release, former NASA debunker James E. Oberg published a story accusing JPL employees of knowing the lander was doomed by landing-leg software problems from early in the mission, an accusation JPL employees denied as “bunk,” “complete nonsense,” and “wacko."41,42 The resulting Young Report attributed the shortfalls at JPL to Goldin’s “faster, better, cheaper” management philosophy, according to Dark Mission.43 In response, Goldin appointed a new “Mars Czar” at NASA Headquarters to oversee future Mars exploration, removing that authority from JPL.44 On 2000-03-29, Goldin flew to JPL to address its personnel following the two damaging weeks that included Oberg’s accusation and the Young Report’s release;45 according to Dark Mission, his prepared remarks acknowledged Admiral Bobby Inman, head of the JPL Oversight Committee at Caltech.46
During the Viking landing on 1976-07-20, Ron Levin was a newly graduated high-school student assisting his father, Gilbert Levin, at JPL.47 According to Barry DiGregorio’s book, the first colour image from the Martian surface appeared on JPL’s monitors showing a light-blue sky and Arizona-like landscape,48 before a technician went from monitor to monitor changing it to a uniform orange-red scene two hours later;49 Levin reset the monitors to their original appearance and was chastised by Viking project director James S. Martin, Jr., who warned he would be thrown out of JPL for good if he tried it again.50 Gilbert Levin later found the technician had been instructed by the Viking imaging team that the Martian sky and landscape should be shown as red,51 and questioned the physics of the change, arguing that if atmospheric dust were scattering red light rather than blue, the surface should have appeared more blue, not more red, in direct sunlight.52 Discrepancies were later found between the original live television transmissions of Mars Pathfinder’s 1997-07-04 landing and the image versions JPL subsequently released on the web.53 According to Dark Mission, JPL’s web-released Pathfinder images contained compression artefacts, assembly errors and colour registration problems,54 and JPL adjusted the Martian sky’s colour to the pink seen in Viking imagery rather than the Earth-like blue forecast by concurrent Hubble Space Telescope imagery.55 Hoagland considered the discrepancies evidence that JPL was trying to hide something in the images.56 Unlike the Mars Global Surveyor camera, the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera on Mars Odyssey was not directly controlled by Malin and JPL.57 According to Dark Mission, the Society for Planetary SETI Research (SPSR)’s semi-official position was that the Catbox image had been deliberately degraded by JPL to protect its own funding,58 reasoning that admitting the truth about Cydonia would inevitably lead to a manned Mars mission that would leave JPL out of the funding loop.59