Narrator / Host (16:31)
In the early 20th century, even some of the most respected physicists believed rockets wouldn't work in space. One of them, Caltech's own Fritz Zwicky, the man who coined the term supernova and theorized dark matter, dismissed the idea as nonsense. They misunderstood Newton. They thought rockets needed something to push against, and in the vacuum of space, there would be nothing to push on. Even the New York Times mocked the idea in a 1920 editorial. So when people like Jack Parsons pursued this, they weren't solving a hard problem. They were chasing what many thought was a delusion that makes what they achieved all the more remarkable. They believed in the impossible, then figured out how to build it. And Parsons, as we'll see, believed in more than just exotic propulsion. At Caltech, his raw intuition led to breakthroughs in both solid and liquid fuels, more powerful and reliable than anything that had come before. Before, the tests were chaotic and dangerous, but soon the military took notice. Parsons developed a solid fuel booster, or what would later become the first stage of a rocket, to help heavily loaded aircraft take off. They called it jet assisted takeoff, or jato. They avoided using the word rocket because it still sounded too much like science fiction. The first successful JATO flight was in 1940. By 1942, the US military was ordering 20,000 units per month. But just as JPL was taking off, the FBI came knocking. Because Jack Parsons wasn't just a rocket scientist. He was also a practicing occultist. He was a devoted member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, or oto, an esoteric order led at the time by the infamous Aleister Crowley Thelema. Their belief system combined ceremonial magic, Eastern mysticism, and tantric techniques into what Crowley called sex magic. That's magic with a K. To distinguish it from stage tricks, Parsons wasn't just a casual participant. He led the local chapter from a Pasadena mansion where he lived with a rotating cast of artists, intellectuals and magicians. The rituals were elaborate, invoking gods, spirits, and forces said to reside in higher dimensions. The most infamous of these was the Babylon, Working an attempt to summon the divine feminine archetype known as Babylon. Inspired by Crowley's novel Moon Child, the ritual aimed to recreate a magical child through spiritual and sexual practices. Not literal birth, but transformation of the self. Kind of a weird extracurricular for a guy who became known as the father of the American space program. These weren't acts of fantasy to Parsons. He believed the rituals had real power, that they could raise consciousness, open doorways and make contact with non human intelligences. He wasn't alone in thinking this way. Gnostic Christian sects, early mystics like Clement of Alexandria and tantric traditions in India and China all described sex as a vehicle for divine communion, not lust, but willful transformation. Parsons believed he was continuing that lineage. But it gets weirder. His ritual partner for the Babylon working was a man named L. Ron Hubbard. Yes, that L. Ron Hubbard. Before founding Scientology, Hubbard helped Parsons conduct the ritual series. But soon after, he ran off with Parsons girlfriend and a chunk of his money. Parsons, furious, attempted a magical counterattack, invoking the spirit of Mars Bartzabel in a Miami hotel room. Magic or not, Parsons got his compensation. Hubbard's yacht would promptly encounter a storm and a court later forced the him to pay Parsons back. After that, some began to wonder if the Babylon working had actually succeeded, if it had opened something up in 1946. Because in the years that followed, reports of unidentified aerial phenomena began to skyrocket. Parsons himself believed he had made contact. He said he was being guided by a non human intelligence. That idea surfaces in Diana Pasulka's work, as well as the notion that visionary scientists may have been receiving messages, insights or downloads from something beyond. It also is a prominent theme in Professor Ximena Canalis book. Bedeviled about the history of demons in science, Parsons wasn't alone in this belief. Pythagoras, Newton, and even Edison spoke of mystical inspiration or communion with unseen forces. Edison, near the end of his life, actually tried to build a device to communicate with the dead. So even if we keep our skeptic hats on, we're left with this strange pattern. Many of the people responsible for scientific breakthroughs, people we call geniuses, didn't see themselves as inventors, they saw themselves as receivers. In Parsons case, he believed he was building technology to carry humanity into space with the help of something else. He would sometimes recite Crowley's hymn to Pan during rocket tests. According to legendary French UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, there were rumors of a ritual in the Mojave where a blonde woman appeared and claimed to be from Venus. If true, this would have been the first recorded encounter with with a quote unquote Nordic or tall white non human entity, predating similar contactee stories by years. Eventually Parsons occult lifestyle, strange house guests and growing paranoia led to trouble. He was pushed out of JPL. In 1952, he died in an explosion in his home laboratory. Officially it was ruled an accident involving volatile chemicals. But some found the circumstances suspicious. Parsons left a crater on Earth, but also one on the moon, literally. A lunar crater now bears his name. And at jpl, some insiders still call it Jack Parsons Laboratory. Others just say Jack Parsons lives. Now. You might be thinking, sure, there was one eccentric rocket guy with a thing for ritual magic. Maybe he laid the groundwork for ICBMs and Apollo. But that doesn't mean that the whole field was weird. Maybe longtime viewers of this show will know we've covered evidence linking the Third Reich to UFO technology before. From reports that Hitler knew about the 1933 Magenta Crash, to rumors of Nazi saucer tests in modern day Czechoslovakia, to the post war absorption of German rocket scientists experimenting with exotic propulsion. But what often surprises people isn't just the tech. It's the fact that the highest level of Hitler's regime were obsessed with the occult. This wasn't just Hollywood fantasy. Sure, Indiana Jones gave us Nazis hunting for the Ark of the Covenant. But the truth is stranger. In 1945, near the end of the war, American forces uncovered a hidden stash of Nazi documents in a cave in southern Germany. Among them were records revealing real state sponsored occult projects. Expeditions to Tibet to trace Aryan origins, searches for ancient runestones, pagan sites, and even a government backed quest to find the Holy Grail. A lot of this stemmed from Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and one of the architects of the Holocaust. He was obsessed with Germanic mythology, paganism and mystical power. He turned Wewelsburg castle into a ritual center complete with a black sun chamber beneath it and a roundtable for his SS knights. He also created the Ana Nurbe, a pseudoscientific institute devoted to proving that the so called Aryan race descended from Atlantis. And yes, they actually believed that the Nazi party itself was born out of the Thule Society, A volkish secret group that mixed Germanic paganism, Atlantis myths and Aryan esotericism. The Thule Society held seances and rituals meant to contact non human intelligences they believed were their ancient progenitors. Star beings from the far north but not beneath the polestar. They performed these rites at symbolic locations like the Hartz Mountains on nights like Walpurgisnot, a festival tied to witches, spirits and old pagan ceremonies. There are also claims about the Vril Society, a group said to have channeled anti gravity technology and psychic Powers from an ancient subterranean race. Now we don't have have to believe any of these occult theories themselves. But what matters is the Nazis did. And it didn't just stop at mysticism. The Nazis were also pioneers of actual rocket science. One of the key figures was Herman Oberth. Born in Transylvania. Inspired by sci fi writer Jules Verne, Oberth began theorizing about spaceflight as a teenager. In 1923, he published the Rocket into Planetary Space, a landmark book that laid out how a multi stage rocket could escape Earth's gravity. He was decades ahead of his time. He envisioned orbiting telescopes, spacesuits, weather controlling satellites, even missions to other planets. His ideas sparked a movement and When World War II began, Oberth was pulled into military, building rockets for Germany and later for Italy. After the war, Oberth became one of the few major scientists to publicly support the reality of UFOs.
