Everything has its limits, they say, and Jack Parsons seems to have crossed (at least) one too many. Even though he is one of the fathers of the US rocket programme, NASA does not give him much mention in the small print, let alone credit for his pioneering role in the development of rocket propulsion. Apparently, his lifestyle was indeed so debauched and unusual that even the genius of his mind did not outweigh it for him. But it was truly special: Parsons was as committed to the occult as he was to science, which he believed in without a shadow of a doubt.
In truth, at that time, shortly before the Second World War, there was hardly any difference between the dream of man’s conquest of the universe and the belief in ghosts. For serious scientists, rocket-powered craft were science fiction, and Jack Parsons found the idea for them in science fiction. As a child, he literally devoured science fiction literature, especially stories from the magazines Astonishing and Amazing.
He had more than enough time to read. His mother Ruth was not an ordinary woman, and she divorced her husband Marvel Sr. as soon as she found out he was cheating on her, although that was quite common at the time. Even that didn’t stop her giving birth to a son, Marvel Junior, just a short time earlier, on 2 October 1914, only she could no longer call him by his first name, but she changed it to John, although later everyone called him Jack, Jack Parsons.
My mother’s wealthy parents were also special people. As soon as their daughter filed for divorce, they came to California, bought a house in an upscale Pasadena neighbourhood and helped her raise her daughter and son. Nevertheless, he was more or less lonely until he got a bit beaten up by his classmates at school and was rescued by the slightly older Edward Forman.
The two boys became friends and remained so for life. They were both crazy about science fiction and both were interested in rockets, so they started making and testing them in their backyard with ingredients they found at home. Neighbours and parents could hardly breathe for fear, and the two teenagers were enjoying themselves, full of themselves.
Jack picked up some chemistry skills in high school and some at Hercules Powder, where he worked with a number of explosives while at school. But the more he knew, the more it became clear that without theoretical knowledge he would not be able to achieve his dream of space exploration.
He and Ed didn’t move, even when they attended college in Pasadena and briefly corresponded with eminent experts in rocket science. Needing something more tangible, in 1936 they calmly sauntered off to lectures at the famous California Institute of Technology, or Caltech. They pricked up their ears and soon sensed that graduate student Frank Malina might be their test case.
Suicidal lunatics
The trio got together and formed a group, which the students soon called the Suicide Squad. They persisted in their attempts to destroy the Institute’s inventory and endanger themselves, but at the same time they were so interesting that they soon found new collaborators, although they were the laughing stock of most scientists.
When Frank Malina asked the eminent physicist Fritz Zwicky for help, Zwicky calmly explained that “I’m a bloody fool and I’m trying to do something that is impossible because rockets won’t work in space”. Jack Parsons, a college drop-out with only a formal high school education, did not even want to look at Zwicky.
More open-minded was the legendary aeronautical engineer Theodor Von Kármán of the Aeronautical Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology, or GALCIT for short. He allowed Malini to write his PhD thesis, which was to investigate the launching of liquid and solid fuel rockets. Now Malina was able to set up his own rocket research group at GALCIT, and this meant that the boys from the Suicide Squad had finally become a formal part of the scientific community.
Of course, they immediately got into trouble. One rocket went a bit wrong, and they were evicted from the main premises of the laboratories. Then they managed to decorate a nearby wall with a piece of steel in an open courtyard, but they were chased out of there to avoid beheading or injuring anyone. They landed on the edge of Pasadena, in the remote Arroyo Seco canyon, near the so-called Devil’s Gate embankment.
They did what they wanted there, but in 1938 they had a moment of peace. The US Army issued two tenders: one for research on ice on aircraft windscreens and the other on rocket engines for smaller aircraft. The famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, grabbed the first project, leaving the second, which smacked of fiasco and ridicule, to the GALCIT boys.
Jack Parsons has blossomed. His first tests failed because the rockets were too unstable, but then he remembered the “Greek fire” or incendiary weapons of the Byzantines. It gave him the idea that even when mixing the chemical ingredients for jet fuel, he could use some kind of binder, and after many experiments, he had just got a fuel that he could put safely in a can.
The US Army thought it might be of conditional use, so it supported the group with a little money. The $1,000 it gave them at the time to develop the rocket programme, which was also the first money in history that the US government had ever given them, went mostly to repair a building that the boys had destroyed while they were still working at Caltech.
And they carried on as they were used to until they invented what we now call JATO, short for Jet-Assisted Take Off. They gave the military what it wanted: a propulsion system that could take off even if the craft were too heavy or did not have a long enough runway.
It was 1942 and the army wanted 60 jet engines on the new liquid jet fuel immediately. The boys had to set up a company to do business with the US Army, and Aerojet Engineering Corporation was born.
Former fools have become the most prominent scientists, and a once non-existent branch of science is becoming increasingly important. In November 1943, the government renamed GALCIT’s rocket research group the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was abbreviated to JPL. The staff immediately started joking that this stood for Jack Parsons‘ Laboratory.
In fact, he acted as if it were his own, because by 1943, despite his lack of formal training, he had really established himself in rocketry. But by then he was equally distinguished in another field: the occult.
With orgies to spiritual revelations
He was about 21 years old when he started researching the occult and devouring the books of Aleister Crowley, the English occultist, drug addict, chess player, mountaineer extraordinaire and the world’s most evil man, as the British media called him. But in 1938, the then 24-year-old Jack Parsons went from reading to action.
He began to attend the Thelematian Church founded by Crowley and entered the Ordo Templi Orientis, or OTO, which was based on the Thelematic precepts. These basically taught that everyone should do whatever they wanted, and that it should all be sex-related. The idea that during an orgy you are stepping towards a higher consciousness resonated with the young scientist, but he nevertheless tried to explain it with quantum physics.
Well, he didn’t bother with it during the services, especially not during the night Gnostic service. There was an altar on a black and white stage, decorated with carved hieroglyphs. On it were candles and an upright coffin covered with a thin curtain. When the congregation was assembled, the ritual leader stepped out.
The congregation began to read songs in a monotonous trance-like fashion, swords appeared in the air, kisses appeared on women’s chests … The atmosphere of the mass was charged with sexual energy, which was supposedly enhanced by wine and cakes enriched with menstrual blood.
But Jack did not enjoy the Gnostic services alone. He was also with Helen, whom he met at a church dance before he became obsessed with the idea of the Antichrist. He married her at the age of 21 and now explored with her the concept of religious freedom, which worshipped radical individualism and self-fulfilment, and also talked about sex magic, which was said to carry a tremendous energy.
Young Parsons was attracted to Crowley like a bee to honey, except that Parsons was not just anyone. He worked in a programme that was closely monitored by the FBI, especially after the boys also started to formally cooperate with the US government.
His colleagues looked down on his double life as a distinguished scientist by day and occultist by night. Most found him a little displaced, but not so much so that it made them forget how exceptionally bright he was. So they didn’t care that every time he recited the Hymn to the Lord, written by Aleister Crowley, before the rocket was launched.
But it was slowly ageing in England. He was looking for a successor. Jack Parsons, with his attempts to explain the occult with quantum physics, seemed ideal, and Parsons was so committed to the idea that he steadily worked his way up the ranks. Before he knew it, he was already leading the OTO Order on the West Coast of America, and now he was the one jumping out of the coffin in the middle of the night and going through sex rituals with his followers.
He did all this at home. Thanks to his business with the US government, he was now a wealthy man who could afford a lot financially, but he had done hedonistically much earlier.
In 1941, his wife Helen returned home from a trip to find her younger sister, 16-year-old Sarah Betty Northrup, in her clothes. The teenager calmly explained to her that she was now Jack’s wife and no longer Helen.
Her husband confirmed: ‘That’s the way it is and I can’t help it. I’m a better match for her temperamentally – we get on well. You are superior. You are the better man. I doubt if she will put up with me the way you are, or support me the way you do.”
Time has proved him right, but fortunately this has not been to Helen’s detriment, even if she was initially not enthusiastic about her new living arrangements. The church did encourage sexual relations between members, but not emotional connections, and Jack fell in love with Sarah. So Helen had to withdraw, but was soon comforted by the embrace of Wilfred Talbot Smith, then head of the American branch of the OTO.
Where are the limits?
To prove how free-spirited they are, the four of them move into a giant wooden house that Jack Parsons bought with money he earned from rocket propulsion. They were not alone in the house. Parsons invited eccentrics of all kinds, religious people, famous actors, writers and many others to his home in Pasadena, which the newcomers called Parsonage. But they didn’t come to him as guests. They lived with him, they lived well, and they lived at his expense.
Neighbours regularly called the police. Every time the police showed up at the door, Parsons explained to them how respectable a scientist he was and that there was really nothing going on at his house that would be of interest to the police. And what was going on? Drugs were rolling around like sand, women were walking around naked in the garden, nobody knew who was sleeping with whom because everybody was sleeping with everybody.
“It was a huge wooden house. Really huge, full of people. Some wore masks, some wore costumes. The women were dressed strangely. It was like walking into a Fellini film. Women were walking around in see-through togas and with weird make-up on their faces, some dressed as animals,” recalled Frank Malina’s wife years later.
When she mentioned her observations to her husband, he just shrugged and said, “Jack is interested in all sorts of things.” People generally liked Jack. Ray Bradbury, author of Farnheit 451, found him “wonderful” when he enthusiastically told him about spacecraft, the novelist Jack Williams found him “a strange enigma”, and the science fiction writer Sprague de Camp said of him that he was the only “originally mad genius he had ever met”.
His scientific colleagues agreed with the latter in particular. He was still a genius at making fuels and mixing chemicals to produce something that was highly explosive, yet completely controllable. They did not forget that it was his dream of space that had given rocketry its impetus, and that it was also thanks to him that it had grown from a laughable obscurity into a powerful scientific branch, but … Jack Parsons was just too weird and eccentric to continue working with.
Slowly, he was getting on everyone’s nerves. He reportedly kept harassing secretaries and inviting them to orgies in his home. He welcomed visiting scientists at his front door with a snake writhing around his neck. He was late for work. He turned the Jet Propulsion Laboratory into his sandbox.
Now Fritz Zwicky, the eminent physicist who once told Malina she was crazy for thinking about rockets, was also working there. He now had a better opinion of them, but he still despised Parsons, who was still technically a high-school student. He found it even harder to accept his lifestyle.
“We kept telling him that fantasies about Zoroaster and voodoo and all that were all right. We dream, too. But let him keep them to himself. Don’t let him impose them on the poor secretaries. I mean, he had a whole club there,” he later chuckled, also explaining that he found Jack simply dangerous at work.
He and Ed Forman, a childhood friend, would shoot each other in the foot and compete to see who could twitch first. When Zwicky wanted Parsons to test a fuel he didn’t like, Parsons simply lifted it into the air. The explosion was such that it “blew up half the company”, Zwicky later exaggerated a little.
Jack Parsons was 29 years old, but he still acted like a teenager making innocent jokes to annoy his annoyed neighbours, only now he was in a business that was as serious as they come. Eventually, the FBI declared him dangerous and in 1943 Jack Parsons was forced out of the branch of science he had helped to create.
He was offered $20,000 for his stake in Aerojet. It was not a small sum of money, but it was not the sum that persuaded him to leave quietly, but the painful realisation that his colleagues had also turned away from him. At the age of 30, he took the money, said goodbye to the rocketry he had grown up with and set up a new company, Ad Astra Engineering Company, with Ed Forman. He entered a new phase of his life.
A weak fool
Previously, science had been the balance of his personality, but now that it was gone, he became so obsessed with witchcraft, voodoo, ghosts, black magic and the Antichrist that even his fellow members of the Order of the OTO began to worry about him. He was completely overwhelmed by the idea that he had to create something.
As if on cue, L. Ron Hubbard, a war veteran and charismatic science fiction writer, crossed his path at the end of 1945. He had a remarkable gift for storytelling, and not only did he have women lying at his feet, but he also had many men kneeling before him. He is said to have watched his interlocutors sharply with his blue eyes, checking whether they believed him or not. Many did not. Jack Parsons did.
In a house decorated with daggers and swords, they swung swords, discussed magic and performed rituals together. Parsons was so impressed by Hubbard that, after only a month of acquaintance, he invited him to move into his home. In February 1946, he wrote to Aleister Crowley that Hubbard was a true gentleman and that women were powerless before him.
On 22 May 1946, Crowley, instead of Jack, sent a telegram to a member of the OTO: “I suspect Ron is playing the confidence card – Jack Parsons a weak fool – obvious victim of a lurking con man.”
But he didn’t want to overlook Jack. He found in Hubbard the perfect companion to pursue his ideas, and it didn’t bother him that Hubbard not only slept with almost all the members of his household, but also with his mistress Sarah. His wife Helen had moved out with her lover a long time ago.
With Hubbard, now a member of his inner circle, he set about Creating Babalon. Babalon was a goddess, but the idea of the ritual was for Parsons to attract a female partner to assist him in sexual magic rituals.
He had to use the rite of the VIII level of the OTO, which was masturbation. He did not masturbate alone, but in the company of Hubbard to make the ritual more effective. So, adorned with charms and accompanied by classical music, most often Prokofiev, they masturbated over a magic board, Hubbard carefully recording his observations.
Then they upped the game a bit and tried to open the door through which the goddess Babalon would enter in human form, using the supposedly extremely powerful sexual energy of the IXth level of OTO, or sex magic. Incarnated as a woman with scarlet hair, Babalon would become the companion of the Antichrist, who Parsons later declared himself to be.
But he and Hubbard were engaged in strenuous rituals that day, and only broke them off when they wandered into the Mojave Desert together. There he sensed an incredible tension. He knew immediately that the ritual had succeeded. He and Hubbard rushed home in curious anticipation. What would they find there? Jack saw a tall, red-haired woman, Marjorie Cameron. Babalon incarnate.
The former war photographer, who was referred to Parsons by a friend, of course had no idea that she had unwittingly become part of Jack’s ritual, and she had no objection to landing in his bed immediately.
They did not leave the bedroom for two weeks, during which time Marjorie unwittingly assisted in his sexual rituals, the ultimate goal of which was the birth of a magical “moon child”.
In the grip of the FBI
Crowley had written about it, and now Parsons was all excited to tell him that the ceremony had been a success. He hailed it as the greatest achievement of his life and was completely euphoric until he sent Crowley another letter in July 1946.
In it, he told his mentor what he had known all along: that L. Ron Hubbard is a fraud. He ran off not only with his mistress Sara, but also with his money, $20,000.
To the ageing Crowley, it all seemed embarrassing now, especially when he heard how the scam had been pulled off. With Parsons no longer working regularly, Hubbard came up with the idea of setting up Allied Enterprises with Sara and starting a yacht resale business. To start with, they would buy three yachts on the East Coast of the US, sell them at a higher price on the West Coast and split the profits.
The naive Parsons gave Hubbard and Sarah almost all of his savings, but it became clear too soon that he would never see them or the money again. Now all he could do was listen to Hubbard happily sailing on the yacht he had bought with his money, in the company of the mistress who had once been his.
Besen cast a spell to bring the cheat to justice, and then sued him in the most mundane way. Hubbard was so shocked that his former mentor, who had never served his apprenticeship, had taken legal action against him that he wrecked the boat.
However, Parsons had to withdraw the action. Sara threatened to report him because he had slept with her when she was a minor. He got some of the money back, but not most of it.
Hubbard and Sara kept the boat and got married, and Jack Parsons fell into depression. He lost everything – his place in science, his religious naivety and his love. True, he was now married to Marjorie, trying to make her his muse and dedicating songs to her, but she was not his goddess.
He was left alone. He took solace in the belief that sex magic had transported him to the biblical village of Korazin, but he could not find oblivion in scientific work, even though he still excelled at it. He found it increasingly difficult to get work on national rocket projects.
The Cold War was already in the air, and with it the American communist witch-hunt frenzy. The FBI’s dossier on Parsons was quite thick. It contained documents with remarks like “potentially bisexual”, but also those that talked about communism.
Parsons had no interest in communism since he became aware of the occult, but early in his career he met some young communists at Caltech. Combined with his current lifestyle, this was enough to make him conditionally unreliable and he was banned from sensitive information. In practice, this meant that he could no longer participate in important state projects.
Now he clings even more to magic. In 1949, in a letter to a friend, he wrote: “If I have been so brilliant as to lay the foundations of the American jet propulsion, to found a multi-million-dollar corporation and a world-renowned research laboratory, then I think I should be able to transfer that genius to the field of magic.”
Falling to the bottom
But at the beginning of the 1950s, he really didn’t have many other options. After losing all his money, he earned a living as a car mechanic, but not enough to finance his wife’s “artistic” flashes and his occult experiments. His wife quickly fled to Mexico and ended up in a commune, leaving him alone.
He used his exceptional knowledge of chemicals and explosives to create special effects for Hollywood films and make money from it. He also sometimes helped the local police.
He started visiting prostitutes. He hoped that sex would transport him somewhere else. In seven years, if he lived that long, he would be the Antichrist, he was sure.
Yet he was not so carried away by the occult that he did not fight for the lifting of the ban on access to classified information. He still had enough connections to succeed, and he got another chance, this time in Israel’s missile programme. It was set up by pro-Israeli scientists and Jack was to help them plan the facilities for building the rockets.
He was in favour, even though at the time he was working with the tycoon Howard Hughes and his airline company. It is not clear why he took some business documents from his business premises, but in any case he was immediately reported to the FBI by a furious Hughes. Jack Parsons is an Israeli spy, he revealed.
The FBI immediately pounced and Jack Parsons found himself out of favour again. The charges were later dropped, but by then his career was truly dead. Now he could only make a living in the film industry.
Or perhaps he could join his wife Marjorie in Mexico, who had just returned home and was urging him to come back together? Yes, he will go to Mexico! He and his wife packed their things and prepared to set off for a new life on 18 June 1952, when an urgent message arrived: they needed explosives in a film and they needed them immediately. On the night of 17 June 1952, Jack set to work in his home garage, where he had his own laboratory.
Shortly afterwards, neighbours heard a loud explosion. They ran to the garage and saw Jack Parsons inside. He was alive, but without his right arm, with his left arm and leg broken and a huge hole in his jaw.
The pain was desperate, but he managed to utter his last sentence: ‘I’m not finished.’ He was rushed to hospital, but there was no help for him: 37 minutes after the explosion, he died, aged 37.
Police officers broke the tragic news to his mother Ruth. The same day, she emptied a bottle of sleeping pills and fell asleep for good. But she did not rest with her son in eternity. Marjorie Cameron scattered her husband’s ashes across the Mojave Desert, where two of the most powerful lines of energy are believed to have crossed.
When the police searched Parsons’ home, they found a box with a film in it. It showed a sexual encounter between Parsons and his mother Ruth.
The newspapers were full of news of the unusual death. One was kind: “Often mysterious to his friends, he had lived a double life … In one he was diving deep into the scientific field of speed, sound and the stratosphere, in the other he was searching for the universe that man had been trying to reach for centuries, weaving science, philosophy and religion into a utopian existence.”
Others were a little less kind: “John W. Parsons, the attractive 37-year-old rocket scientist who was killed in a chemical explosion on Tuesday, was one of the founders of a strange, semi-religious cult that flourished here 10 years ago.”
Others did not bother with the niceties and wrote about “sexual perversion”, “black dresses”, “holy fire”, “intellectual necromancy” and the like. Friends, however, were wondering: what really happened? The police claimed that he was shaking mercury into a can when it fell on the ground and exploded. My friends didn’t believe it. Jack Parsons was too skilled in handling explosives and too cautious for such an accident to have happened to him.
Who killed Jack Parsons?
A number of theories have been put forward about his death. Filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who was introduced to the occult by Jack’s wife Marjorie Cameron, the only “real witch” he has ever met, believes that Howard Hughes killed him. “Howard Hughes wanted Jack to work for him, but Jack didn’t want to. Howard Hughes was the kind of man you didn’t say no to. If you did, you felt the consequences.” For Anger, the consequence of Jack’s death was that he lived with his widow for the next two years.
Another theory is that he committed suicide. Since he was deceived by L. Ron Hubbard, left Sarah and lost his scientific future, he has reportedly been depressed. When he had to face the fact that he was alone with Marjorie and that from now on he would live in Mexico, far away from the rocket programmes, he reportedly could not accept it. He allegedly committed suicide to escape the life he did not want to live.
A third theory has brought extraterrestrial beings to light. According to this theory, Parsons was involved in a project linked to the US Air Force’s secret Area 51 base, where the conspiracy theory claimed that captured extraterrestrial beings were being held and unidentified flying objects were being stored. As UFO sightings skyrocketed after his death, the idea was born that the rocket scientist was involved in something extraterrestrial and paid for it with his life.
Another version of this theory is that Parsons and Hubbard opened a door to another dimension during the Creation of Babalon. Unfortunately, they were no longer able to close this door, and extraterrestrial beings have been coming to us freely ever since. The conspiracy theorists prove this theory by the fact that the first UFO sighting was in 1947, not long after the Creation of Babalon.
Another theory is that Parons’ spectuacular death was the result of black magic. In recent years, he had not only delved into the occult, but had also become increasingly obsessed with witchcraft. He developed his own vision of the occult, and as part of this, he reportedly began to create a mythical miniature man. The experiment was a failure.
Whatever the reason for Jack Parsons’ death, he was certainly one of the more unusual scientists in his lifetime, so unusual that he has disappeared from historical memory.
