Jack Parsons was born on 1914-10-02, the same day the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ founder Charles Taze Russell had predicted would mark the beginning of the end of the world.1 He was named after his father, a philanderer whom his mother divorced soon after his birth.2 He attended the University of the State of California and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech),3 where he worked in the chemical laboratories developing explosives for the US government.4 In 1935 he was hired as Theodore von Karman’s chief experimental rocket scientist, a chemist and engineer credited with major advances in solid-rocket propulsion.5 By the mid-1930s Parsons and his associates were testing home-made rockets in an area of Pasadena known as Devil’s Canyon (Arroyo Seco), on land where the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) now sits,6 and on 1936-10-31 a liquid-fuel rocket test at Arroyo Seco involved key members of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (GALCIT) team, including Parsons.7 He and a colleague had early contact with German rocket pioneers Hermann Oberth and Wernher von Braun,8 and his circle frequently corresponded with Robert Goddard, then working alone in the deserts of New Mexico.9 Parsons pursued solid-fuel rocket boosters that he believed could be simpler, cheaper and more reliable than the liquid-fuelled rockets developed by Goddard and von Braun.10 He left Caltech to co-found the Aerojet Corporation with several GALCIT colleagues, including von Karman,11 and went on to be one of the founders of JPL as well.12 Aerojet continues to build many of the solid-rocket boosters used by NASA and the US Department of Defense.13 The two solid-rocket boosters flanking the Space Shuttle orbiter at each launch provided more than 80 per cent of lift-off thrust, at about 1.36 million kilograms of thrust apiece, and were described as a direct legacy of Parsons’ chemistry breakthroughs in solid-rocket fuels.14 According to Dark Mission, von Karman used to tell people that Parsons recited pagan poetry before each rocket test.15
Alongside his engineering career, Parsons had a long-standing fascination with magic and the occult and regularly held ritual sex practices at his mansion at 1003 Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena.16 In December 1938 he fell in with Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) at its temple in Los Angeles,17 and was initiated into the order in 1939, making a strong impression on fellow members including the actress Jane Wolfe, who had previously spent time with Crowley.18 He drew many of his occult ideas from Crowley, who had proclaimed himself the wickedest man in the world,19 and after several years as a member of Crowley’s Pasadena lodge, Crowley appointed him to head the OTO’s Southern California centre while he was simultaneously employed by Caltech to develop rockets for the US Army.20 By the early 1940s Parsons was a rising figure within the OTO, exchanging frequent correspondence with Crowley,21 and the two worked together to expand the Los Angeles lodge’s membership.22 Parsons recruited several of his fellow GALCIT scientists into the order,23 and was investigated repeatedly by local police over reports of public nudity and rituals at his mansion.24 Jane Wolfe wrote that she took Parsons to be the child who shall behold them all, a figure described in Crowley’s Book of the Law.25
Two of the most ardent OTO members in Los Angeles were Parsons, a propulsion engineer, and L. Ron Hubbard, a science-fiction writer,26 who would later found the Church of Scientology.27 Hubbard came to Parsons’ Pasadena mansion in 1945,28 and by 1946 the two had engaged in a series of magical workings, mostly sexual rituals intended to achieve short-term goals.29 They decided to recreate a series of seances performed by John Dee, the sixteenth-century Royal Astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I,30 and meditated in the California desert for eleven days in an attempt to conjure an elemental spirit.31 Hubbard was Parsons’ partner in the Babalon Working during a period when he was serving in naval intelligence during the Second World War.32 Following the ritual, Marjorie Cameron - a red-haired, green-eyed woman - appeared at Parsons’ mansion.33 She had resigned her position as secretary to the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington DC that year before moving into the mansion,34 at a time when Parsons was still legally married to Sara Northrup.35 In 1946 Parsons began the Babalon Working, his major magical project.36 Its rituals employed the Enochian calls, or angelic language, of Dee, and specifically required calling the Egyptian god Osiris,37 and its stated purpose was to give birth to a Moonchild, or homunculus, and to open an inter-dimensional doorway for the appearance of the goddess Babalon in human form.38 Parsons and Cameron failed to produce the Moonchild after several months of trying.39
Parsons and Cameron subsequently devised a scheme to buy yachts on the East Coast, sail them to California and sell them at a profit.40 Hubbard instead absconded to New York with Parsons’ money and his wife, Sara Northrup, before fleeing to Florida with the boat, the money and the woman.41 He ended up in Florida with Northrup - the sister of Parsons’ wife Helen Parsons, and Parsons’ own lover before Hubbard’s involvement - and a sailing boat named the Harpoon.42 According to Dark Mission, Parsons summoned the Martian god Bartzabel in an attempt to conjure a storm against Hubbard and Northrup as they fled to Florida,43 and the pair did encounter a fierce storm at sea, forcing them back to Miami, where Parsons had them arrested.44 Crowley wanted to remove Parsons as head of the OTO in America after the Babalon Working episode, but Parsons continued to lead the order for a few more years, owing to his strong support among its Pasadena members, before eventually quitting.45 Several members of the OTO and the Federation of American Scientists, including Parsons, lost their security clearances following the Hubbard-Northrup affair.46 According to Dark Mission, a hand-written memo obtained under the Freedom of Information Act indicates that Parsons’ occult activities had already come under the scrutiny of the FBI and the Office of Naval Intelligence as early as 1940.47
Parsons was killed in an explosion at his Pasadena laboratory in 1952, in circumstances that remain unclear.48 The blast occurred on the afternoon he and Cameron were due to leave for a holiday in Mexico.49 Parsons died at the age of thirty-seven, when one of his rockets exploded while he was experimenting in his garage.50 Diana Walsh Pasulka writes that a few months after Parsons’ death, there was a public sighting of UFOs over the White House, which his widow and friends attributed to his death.51
Accounts of Parsons’ occult activities have since been disputed. According to Mike Bara, members of the Church of Scientology sought to correct what they viewed as mischaracterisations of Hubbard and Parsons’ JPL connection in the book Dark Mission,52 arguing instead that Hubbard had been sent to infiltrate and disrupt Parsons’ activities at Orange Grove Avenue rather than being a willing participant in his pursuits within the OTO.53 Jacques Vallée linked Parsons to the same process of extraterrestrial-superiority belief that he attributed to Hubbard.54 Vallée also wrote that in 1945 Parsons met a “Spiritual Being” in the Mojave Desert, California, whom he regarded as a Venusian.55 Parsons himself said that he was in contact with extraterrestrial intelligences,56 and he launched his experiments on days he considered ritually significant, such as Halloween, preceded by rituals honouring the intelligences he believed himself to be in contact with.57 Most of the astronauts and NASA employees Diana Walsh Pasulka interviewed did not know of the history of Parsons and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s beliefs, or did not want to discuss it,58 though Tyler D. expressed admiration for the genius of both men while professing shock at learning of their beliefs and rituals.59 Pasulka places Edgar Mitchell within a lineage of esoteric cosmonauts and rocket scientists that she says includes Tsiolkovsky, Parsons and Tyler D.60 Separately, Richard C. Hoagland has said that during one of Parsons’ magical workings, he had a dream in which he saw the same hyperdimensional symbology that Hoagland says he later found on the Moon and Mars.61