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Mark Yagnon
You probably know that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory helped put humans on the moon. Good luck and Godspeed, man. On the moon. And maybe you've heard of Operation Paperclip, where the United States government and NASA actually employed Nazis and Nazi scientists to use their jet propulsion technology. But what you probably don't know is that one of its founders spent his evenings trying to summon ancient goddesses in his backyard. Yes. That is not a joke. His name was Jack Parsons, and he was both one of America's most important rocket scientists and one of its most dedicated occultists. This isn't a story about NASA secretly being run by magicians or whatever. It's about how one brilliant, complicated man helped launch us into space while living a life that was stranger than any science fiction that he read as a kid. Let's start at the very beginning. This message is brought to you by Abercrombie and Fitch. 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My name is Mark Yagnon and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating historical figures and events that shaped our world. Today, I'm joined by my dear friend, Gabrielle Reyes. What's up, Gabe? What's going on? All right, all right, all right, all right, guys, we have no time to waste because today we're talking about one of the most important and fascinating scientists. You know, rocket aerospace engineers and occultists in American history. Guy by the name of Jack Parsons. Or is it? Let's start at the very beginning, all right. With a gentleman named Marvel Whiteside Parsons. He was born in 1914 in Los Angeles. And this kid would grow up to help put humans on the moon. And as we'll see. His childhood experiments were just the beginning, because the same curiosity he had as a child would eventually help him invent the rocket fuel that powered America's space program. Jack's life was messy. Before he could even walk, his parents had one of those whirlwind Hollywood romances that ended just as quickly as it began. His father, Marvel Sr. Was supposedly this charming, charming car accessories salesman. But he had a serious problem keeping it in his pants, if you get my drift. Jack's mother, this woman named Ruth, discovered her husband was messing around with a local prostitute, and she divorced him, cut off all contact, and decided she never wanted to hear his name again. This meant that Baby Marvel became John overnight, though everyone would call him Jack. Ruth, his mother, moved back in with her wealthy parents on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena street so fancy that they called Millionaires Row essentially the Beverly Hills of the early 1900s. And Jack was what you'd call an unusual child. He struggled in school, probably due to undiagnosed dyslexia, but he would spend hours buried in books that most kids his age couldn't even pronounce. While other kids were playing with toy trucks, Jack was reading Jules Verne, you know, his famous book from the Earth to the Moon, and devouring every issue of Amazing Stories. This was like a pulp science fiction magazine that, you know, would cost a quarter and would basically teleport every child to an adventure on a distant planet. But here's what's important to understand in 1920, right? Talking about rockets going to space was like, I don't know, talking about, like, Game of Thrones being real. The Wright brothers had only flown their first airplane in 1903, just 10 years before little baby Jack was born. And most scientists thought space travel was just like a fantasy, right? Maybe it happened in a thousand years. But Jackson read these magazines, and he didn't see fantasy. He saw blueprints. So When Jack was 13, he met a kid named Edward Foreman. And this friendship would change both of their lives. Foreman was two years older and was apparently very protective because Jack was getting bullied pretty regularly. And they bonded over something that most parents would find terrifying. They both wanted to build rockets. Their laboratory was Jack's backyard on Millionaires Row. So picture this. Two teenagers are mixing gunpowder from, like, cherry bomb fireworks with aluminum foil or whatever household chemicals they could scrounge up, then trying to launch these contraptions into the sky. The results were about what you would expect. And the Parson family lawn looked like a war zone. And of course, mom was pissed. Jack's mother sent him to Brown Military Academy, probably hoping that some discipline or a strong fatherly force in his life would straighten out her explosive, obsessed son. And instead, Jack took his experiments with him. One story says that while at school, he decided to test some of his chemical mixtures in the school bathroom. And the explosion was so powerful, it basically destroyed the toilets and got Jack permanently expelled. The military school's report doesn't specifically say explosives in a bathroom, but it does say misconduct involving explosives. His mother was mortified. Ruth, I mean was. Was so pissed. But Jack had just learned something crucial. He had a real talent for making things go boom. That talent landed him a job at 18 with the Hercules Powder Company in Los Angeles. So while most teenagers were thinking about college or, you know, getting behind the wheel, driving, falling in love, Jack was working with industrial explosives and gaining hands on experience with dangerous chemicals. His co workers probably thought that he was crazy, but they couldn't argue with his results. The kid had like, this prodigious understanding of how different compounds behaved when you mixed them together. Then 1929, the stock market crashes and Jack's grandfather dies, and suddenly the family fortune is basically gone. Jack had to drop out of Pasadena Junior College and work full time to help support his mom. Most people would see this as the end of their scientific dreams, but Jack kept experimenting. In his spare time, he and Foreman would drive out to the desert on the weekends, setting off rockets that probably violated every safety regulation ever. So by 1934, these two self taught rocket enthusiasts had a problem. They'd learned everything that they could from trial and error, but they needed real science, real expertise to go further. So they did something that took serious guts. They approached a gentleman named Frank Molina, a graduate student at Caltech who was actually studying rocket propulsion in an academic setting. Molina later said he was impressed by their enthusiasm and their practical knowledge, even if their methods were unorthodox. So here are two guys with no formal education in chemistry or engineering who had managed to build working rockets in their backyard. When Melina agreed to work with them, they formed what would become known as the Suicide Squad. And that nickname wasn't a joke. Their experiments were so dangerous that other Caltech scientists complained about the noise, the smoke, and the damage to the university buildings. But Theodore Von Karman, one of the most respected aerodynamicists in the world, saw something special in these crazy kids and gave them official support. So Jack Parsons was 20 years old. He had no college degree and was working with explosives that could kill him, even if he Made the smallest mistake. He was about to help invent the technology that would eventually carry humans to the moon. Yes, the weird kid who blew things up in military school bathrooms was becoming a rocket scientist. And he was just getting started. What Jack didn't know yet was that his curiosity about the universe would take him down a different path. So by 1936, the suicide squad had another serious problem. They kept blowing things up on campus, and other professors were getting really tired about the noise. So they moved their operation to a remote canyon where the explosions wouldn't bother anyone. The Arroyo Seco Canyon. This canyon sits behind Caltech, but its rocky walls provided enough support to not disturb the school. They set up shop in some iron sheds that had no ventilation and looked like they had been there for years. It wasn't glamorous, but it was theirs. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because you own a small business, or maybe you work for a small business, and I am about to make your life so much easier. Let's say, hypothetically, you own a little, you know, furniture business, right? 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And I'm sure you're thinking, okay, if this is going to make my life easier, give me more free time to spend with my friends, family, and playing softball and make me more money. It must be crazy expensive. This is the good news. Listeners of this program are going to get a 14 day free trial. That's right. You get two weeks with Odoo completely for free when you go to odoo. That's right, odoo.com use the promo code camp and you will get 14 days for free just to try it out, see if you like it, if it's not for you. You don't need it. All right. But Odoo is going to make your life so much easier. Everything you need all in one place. Save time, make more money. Let's get back to the show. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Knowing you could be saving money for the things you really want, like that dream house or ride, is a great feeling. That's why the State Farm Farm personal price plan can help you save when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. She's made up her mind to live pretty smart Learn to budget responsibly right from the start she spends a little less and boots pouring through savings keeps her blood pressure low and credit score raises skirting debt right out of her life. She tracks her cash flow on a spreadsheet at night Boring money moves make kind of lame songs but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet. BNC bank brilliantly boring since 1865. So while Jack was busy inventing the technology that would take humans to the moon, he was also discovering something that would change his life forever. A religion that most people thought was maybe even weirder than his obsession with rockets. But let's talk about the rockets first, because this is where Jack's genius really started to show. Anyone can make something explode, right? I mean, just ask me with a firecracker. But making something explode in the right way, at the right time, with the right force, that is where things get complicated. And Jack had again, this really profound ability to mix these chemicals and proportions that shouldn't work, but somehow they did. He'd combine different powders and liquids, creating fuel that would burn hot enough to launch a rocket, but controlled enough to not just blow up in your face. His colleagues watched him work like he was doing magic or something, because half the time they couldn't understand how he knew which combinations would work. The breakthrough came in 1939 when the National Academy of Sciences decided that maybe these crazy guys in a canyon were onto something. And they gave the group funding to work on something called jato Jet Assisted Takeoff. The idea was simple. Strap rockets to heavy military planes to get them airborne faster. The execution was anything but simple. Think about what they're trying to do here, right? Military planes loaded with bombs and fuel are too heavy to take off from short runways, specifically aircraft carriers. It's just a very short Strip of takeoff, but you need to get them up, but they're too heavy. But if you could give them a rocket boost for just a few seconds, you could get them airborne almost anywhere. The trick was creating rocket fuel that would provide massive thrust, burn consistently, and not explode when you didn't want it to. So Jack's solid fuel formulation that they called Galcit 27, meaning, you know, they had tried 26 other versions that all exploded. This was exactly what the military needed. It was, you know, ammonium nitrate, cornstarch, and some other compounds bound together with glue and some blotting paper. I mean, it was really rudimentary, and it sounds simple, but getting the chemistry right requires a kind of understanding that you usually comes from years of formal education. But Jack just figured it out. So by 1942, Jack's backyard rocket club was now a proper aerojet corporation. It was building engines for the US Military. Just a year later, the research effort was formalized into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also known as the jpl. And if you ever watched a NASA mission to Mars or something similar, you've seen JPL's fingerprints all over it. They're still around today, still launching spacecraft deep into space, all built on the foundation of Jack and his crew. But even as Jack was becoming one of America's most important rocket scientists, his colleagues started to notice some strange habits that he had. So before each rocket test, Jack would recite this poem called the Hymn to Pan by a British guy named Aleister Crowley. Now, it has been brought to my attention from our last episode. A lot of people pronounce it Crowley. I've always said Crowley. So I'm just going to switch it up and say Crowley for the duration of this episode. Okay, so he's doing this Hymn to Pan. And his teammates thought that it was just Jack being his usual kind of eccentric self. And their boss, Theodore Von Karman, called him a delightful screwball. And everyone knew Jack would read weird books and had these strange interests. What they didn't realize was that Jack wasn't just reciting poetry. He was performing what he believed were actual magic rituals, calling on ancient gods to bless their experiments. So to Jack, there was no contradiction between rigorous scientific method and mystical practices. They were both just different ways of understanding the hidden forces of the universe. Some people say the location that they chose for JPL wasn't random either, but that Jack specifically wanted their facility near what was called Devil's Gate Dam, not because of the geography or the communists, but because he believed this particular spot was a portal to supernatural realms. And this might sound completely insane, but it's documented in his personal writings that Jack chose this location for its occult significance. Think about that. One of the founding sites of America's space program may have been selected partially because some rocket scientists thought that it was a gateway to another dimension. His colleagues didn't know it yet, but Jack was living in two worlds in his head. During the day, he was pioneering the technology that would eventually carry humans into space. And at night, he was studying ancient texts about summoning deities and performing rituals designed to contact the supernatural. These two sides of Jack's life were about to collide in a way that would change everything. So in 1939, while Jack was busy convincing the military that rockets weren't just science fiction, he stumbled across a book that changed his life. The book was called Conks Homm Pax, and it was written by a man that we mentioned earlier, Aleister Crowley, a man the English newspapers had already branded the wickedest man of the world. Crowley had founded something called Thelemo. And this wasn't quite a religion. It wasn't really a philosophy. It was something kind of in between. The whole system was based on one central principle. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Now, before you think this is just an excuse for people to do whatever they want, Thelema was a little bit more complicated than just that. So according to Crowley, everyone has something called their true will, basically their ultimate purpose in life, stripped of all the social conditioning and, you know, desires that society puts on you. And the goal wasn't to do whatever felt good in the moment, but to discover what you were actually meant to accomplish and then pursue that completely. So for Jack, who had always felt like an outsider, you know, kind of carving this strange path, this philosophy made complete sense. So Jack devoured Crowley's writings the same way that he'd consumed, you know, those science fiction books when he was a kid. Here was a system that treated magic very seriously and almost as seriously as Jack treated chemistry, with instructions, procedures, measurable results. Crowley called it the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will, which kind of just sounded like chemistry or engineering to Jack. So By January of 1939, some friends took Jack to a Thelemic gathering at the Church of Thelema on Winona Boulevard in Hollywood. What he saw there probably looked like the weirdest church service ever. They called it the Gnostic Mass, and it involved robed figures, symbolic sexual imagery, and rituals designed to achieve what they called higher states. Of consciousness. So just imagine this, right? A black and white stage with an altar covered in hieroglyphs and Egyptian writings, candles everywhere, and an upright coffin covered with gauze. The leader would emerge from the coffin wearing a cape, and then there'd be poetry readings and sword ceremonies and sex rituals. Wine was also consumed along with, like, this cake that apparently contained menstrual blood. Though that may have been more symbolic, no one really knows. It was basically an inversion of, like, the Christian or Catholic mass, and it was their gnostic ritual. So for most people, this would have been either terrifying or just funny and absurd. But for Jack, it was fascinating. Here was a group of people taking these ancient mysteries seriously, applying the same systemic approach to spiritual development that he applied to rockets. Jack and his wife Helen, officially joined the agape Lodge in 1941. The lodge was the California branch of Crowley's sort of of, you know, magical order called the Ordo Templi Orientis or the oto. These weren't just, you know, weekend, like, hobby occultists. They studied these magical texts and performed these ceremonies and corresponded with practitioners around the world on a regular basis. So by 1942, Jack had impressed the lodge leadership enough that Crowley himself appointed him as the new leader, replacing a guy named Wilfred Talbot Smith. This meant that Jack was now responsible for running the California headquarters of what was essentially this international magic organization. Jack moved the Lodge's operations to his mansion on Orange Grove, the same millionaire's row that he'd grown up blowing up things in his backyard. He converted the place into what everyone called the parsonage and became one of the most unusual homes in all of Pasadena. The parsonage was part science lab, part occult temple, and part like boarding house for anyone interested enough to catch Jack's attention. He rented rooms like artists and writers and musicians and different bohemians who couldn't afford to live anywhere else in that fancy neighborhood. And the place attracted all sorts of people. I mean, Hollywood actors and science fiction writers and various characters who were drawn to Jack's, you know, scientific credentials and his mystical interests. And Jack decorated his and Helen's bedroom with a statue of Pan, the Greek God of wild nature and sexual freedom. Many people believe that the current modern Christian depictions of Satan actually come from these ancient depictions of Pan. We actually did an episode on this, on religion camp that you guys should check out. So he has this statue of Pan in his bedroom. And while the garage is a chemistry lab where Jack continued his rocket fuel experiments, the basement is now a full temple where the lodge performed Their ceremonies. The neighbors were not happy about this. Right. Pasadena's wealthy elite weren't prepared for the type of parties that he was going to throw. I mean, there was loud jazz music that went until the early morning and fire dancing in the garden. Some reports of naked pregnant women performing rituals under the moonlight. The police, Police were there all the time. But here's where Jack's scientific reputation saved him. Whenever officers showed up to investigate noise complaints or strange activities, Jack would just show up. He'd greet them at the door in a respectful manner and casually mentioned his work at Caltech and how he's building rockets for the military. He'd explained that he was working on these vital projects and that these gatherings were just intellectual discussions amongst colleagues. And his charm and credentials usually worked. The police would kind of show up and look around and see what appeared to be a well educated professional in a, you know, regular social gathering. Decided that there was nothing worth investigating. They had no idea that the basement contained a fully equipped temple where Jack was performing these daily rituals that he believed would contact these entities. Jack's thelemic practices became as much a part of his routine as his scientific work. He made daily adorations to the sun and performed these ritual magic acts designed to banish negative influences, and studied Crow, Crowley's incredibly complex magical text, with the same intensity that he studied chemistry. He also began corresponding regularly with Crowley himself, who was living in England at the time. Jack's letters to Crowley were written in the formal style that Crowley demanded from his students, addressing him as most beloved father and signing off as thy son John. For Jack, this wasn't just, you know, fan mail. He genuinely saw Crowley as a teacher whose magical knowledge was as valuable as anything he could learn in a Labor. What Jack didn't realize was the FBI had actually started to track him. They were concerned about reports of sexual perversion and black magic coming out of the parsonage. But they were even more concerned about Aleister Crowley, who they thought might be a British spy or just an agent of chaos. The idea that an important American rocket scientist was corresponding with a possible foreign spy. This was an issue that obviously attracted national security attention. The surveillance was pretty low key, the early 1940s, just agents taking notes and filing reports. But as Jack's magical activities became more elaborate and his science work became more classified, that attention would intensify. Okay, so this is where things get really interesting. By August of 1945, there's this Navy officer who gets discharged and now he's a struggling science fiction writer. And his name is L. Ron Hubbard. Ever heard of it? He shows up at the parsonage looking for a place to stay. Jack had met him through the Los Angeles science fiction circles where Hubbard had a reputation as this fast talking guy who could spin amazing stories. But he never really seemed to have the money to get things off the ground. The magic ritual Jack performed with L. Ron Hubbard was supposed to bring about a new spiritual age for humanity, but it ended up costing Jack a lot of money and his girlfriend and possibly his sanity. Let me explain. Jack was fascinated with Hubbard, who claimed to have extensive experiences with magical practices. And a letter to Crowley. Jack wrote that Hubbard was, quote, the most thelemic person I've ever met and seemed to be in direct contact with some type of higher intelligence, possibly his, quote, guardian angel. This was high praise coming from someone who'd literally been talking and studying Crowley's work for six years. Hubbard had a gift for making himself seem more knowledgeable and experienced than he actually was. He told Jack stories about magical training and his Navy adventures and his understanding of occult principles. But what Jack didn't realize was that Hubbard was kind of a con man who'd learned just enough occult terminology to sound convincing. The parsonage was already a strange place, but Hubbard's presence made it even more intense. Jack's marriage to Helen was falling apart. They'd grown in different directions as Jack was more obsessed with thelemic practices. Meanwhile, Helen's younger sister Sarah had moved into the home, and both Jack and Hubbard became interested in her. Helen Parsons was Jack's first wife. And when their marriage fell apart, things got messy. Jack didn't just move on. He started dating Sarah, Helen's half sister. I mean, this guy is psycho, right? That's. That's an insane thing. You don't date your girl. S. Whatever. By late 1945, Jack was ready to attempt something he had been planning for months. A major magical operation designed to incarnate the thalamic goddess Babylon in human form. According to Crowley's teachings, Babylon was the divine feminine principle, the sacred whore who represented liberated sexuality and spiritual freedom. Jack believed that bringing her into physical manifestation would bring upon this new spiritual age for humanity. So Jack and Hubbard began what they called the Babylon working in January 1946. The rituals were based on Enochian magic, a complex system supposedly revealed to the magician John Dee by angels. They set up an elaborate magical temple in the parsonage, complete with ceremonial weapons and magic tablets and all sorts of different carefully arranged symbolic elements. Again, if you're Hearing this and you're like, this is so goofy. This is like LARPing. Or they're doing like a Renaissance fair fair. You know, that's, that's reasonable. But to these guys, they really truly believed it. And if you believe this stuff and you think it's possible that people could be, you know, getting in touch with supernatural entities or perhaps Satan himself, then this should be a cause for concern. The ceremonies involved Jack performing what can only be described as sex magic while classical music played in the background, specifically Prokofiev's second Violin Concerto. Hubbard acted as the scribe, taking notes and supposedly communicating with the entities on the astral plane. The idea was that Jack's sexual energy, properly directed through magical techniques, could create a kind of spiritual opening that would allow Babylon to enter the physical world. This went on for 11 nights when Jack became increasingly convinced that they were achieving real results. He reported strange phenomena in the house. Poltergeist activity and orbs of light, disembodied voices and even weather changes that seemed to respond to the rituals. After three days of intense ceremonies, something happened. A red haired artist named Marjorie Cameron showed up at the parsonage looking for a room to rent. She was exactly the type of independent artistic woman that Jack had been trying to magically summon, right? This beautiful, creative and with the kind of fierce personality that matched his visions of what the Babylon should be. Jack was convinced this wasn't a coincidence. Here was proof that his magic had worked. He performed rituals to manifest the goddess Babylon and now this red haired woman who perfectly matched his vision is at his door. He began calling Marjorie the scarlet woman and became completely infatuated with her. A scarlet woman is essentially like the magical muse or priestess who helps manifest the spiritual power through these sex magic rituals. Jack Parson believed that his partner Marjorie Cameron was his scarlet woman. But not everyone was impressed with Jack and Hubbard's experiment. When Crowley heard about what they were doing, he was alarmed. In letters to other OTO members, Crowley wrote that he was, quote, fairly frantic when I contemplated the idiocy of these louts. He thought Jack and Hubbard were attempting magic far beyond their skill level and potentially unleashing forces that they couldn't control. This criticism from his mentor should have made Jack rethink what he was doing. But he was too caught up in what he believed was the greatest magical achievement of his lifetime. And he continued in Babylon working with his scarlet woman, Marjorie Cameron, convinced that they were participating in cosmic events, that it's going to transform consciousness. So while Jack was focused on the spiritual significance of these rituals, Hubbard had been paying attention to more practical matters. He noticed that Jack had money. A lot of it, actually. I mean, from his rocket work and his patents. He'd also become interested in Sarah, who was young and attractive and seemed impressed by his stories of adventure and knowledge. So in 1946, Hubbard makes his move. He convinced Jack to invest in a business venture called Allied Enterprises, which was supposedly going to buy yachts on the east coast and sail them to California for resale. And it sounded like a legit business, right? And so Jack contributed $10,000 of his life savings to the enterprise. Then Hubbard and Sarah disappeared. They'd run off to Florida together, used Jack's money to buy a yacht called the Diane and had no intention of ever returning to California. When Jack realized what had happened, he was devastated. The man he considered a brother, a magical partner, had stolen both his money and the girl he liked. But instead of just calling the police or hiring a lawyer, he decided to use magic to get his money back. He performed elaborate rituals designed to invoke spiritual forces that would stop Hubbard and retrieve his stolen funds. And just a few days later, Jack heard that Hubbard's yacht had run into serious trouble during a storm off the Florida coast. The boat was damaged, and Hubbard had to go to the port for expensive repairs. Jack was convinced that his magical rituals had caused the storm, and this proved his occult powers were real. Of course, Hubbard kept the money anyway. He and Sarah got married and moved on with their lives, leaving Jack to deal with the emotional and financial damage. The great magical working that was supposed to usher in this new age had instead introduced Jack to the oldest con in the book, this charming sociopath who figured out exactly how to exploit a brilliant but naive true believer. Jack's faith in magic remained the same, but his trust in people had taken a serious hit ever since L. Ron Hubbard, the same man who would later found Scientology, had just given Jack a very expensive education in the difference between genuine spiritual seeking and manipulation. 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The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp bank and a pursuant to license, my Mastercard International Incorporated card may be used everywhere. MasterCard is accepted. Venmo purchase restrictions apply. If you went on a road trip and you didn't stop for a Big Mac or drop a crispy fry between the car seats or use your McDonald's bag as a placemat, then that wasn't a road trip. It was just a really long drive at participating McDonald's. Now this is where things take a turn. The problems start at jpl, this jet propulsion lab, and Aerojet, where Jack's colleagues were getting tired of his enthusiasm for the occult bleeding into his professional life. He'd show up hungover and sleep deprived from these late night lodge activities, explaining complex magical operations with like the same genuine intensity and excitement that he brought to rocket fuel. He started trying to recruit co workers into Thelema, handing out Crowley's writings and inviting people to these ceremonies in the parsonage. Theodore von Karman called him this crazy screwball. But military contractors were way less impressed. When you're bidding for classified government projects worth millions and millions of dollars, having key employees who run what neighbors describe as a sex cult becomes a little bit of a liability. The executives at Aerojet started nudging Jack out the door. They tried to get rid of him, finding reasons to exclude him from important meetings, and gradually just reduced his responsibilities. So by 1944, Jack was basically ousted out of JPL and Aerojet, the organizations that he created. He sold his stock in the company and Used the money to purchase his mansion on Orange Grove Avenue, converting it into the parsonage, officially where his occult activities would just continue going without any type of corporate oversight. But the FBI is still watching and they've been tracking him since the 40s and their curiosity keeps growing. At first it was, you know, about his ties to the Marxist colleagues at Caltech. You know, again, this was basically the beginning of the Cold War and anyone with left leaning friends was going to raise flags. But the deeper they dug, it got weirder, right? The agents are building their files in the case against Jack and they're less concerned with the politics and more on the occult rituals and the sex magic and the crowds that he's gathering in his home. So the FBI describes the Agape Lodge as advocating for sexual perversion. They thought that Jack was potentially bisexual and a political subversive. And at that time having any type of, you know, non heterosexual orientation was seen as some type of threat within specifically government circles. Their reports detailed the strange rituals at the parsonage and the complaints from the neighbors about naked dances and rituals and things like that. And obviously his correspondence with Aleister Crowley, who they thought was a spy. So in the paranoid atmosphere of the 1940s, a rocket scientist who performed sex magic and corresponded with foreign agents was exactly the kind of security threat that made them track him. So when the Red Scare really took off in the late 40s, Jack lost his security clearance entirely. There is this thing known as the House UN American Activities Committee that was investigating anyone with suspected communist sympathies. And many of Jack's former colleagues found themselves blacklisted from government work. But Jack's case was kind of special. The FBI stated reasons for revoking his clearance included his past association with Marxists, his membership in the subversive aclu, and his leadership of what they called a religious cult believed to advocate sexual perversion version. Think about what this means for, for this guy at this time, right? His entire career was built on classified military research. And without the security clearance, he can't work on rockets. He can't access his own research that he already has done. He couldn't even visit the facilities that he helped create. The man who'd invented the solid fuel tech that would eventually power the space shuttle was now unemployable in his own field. Jack fought back the only way that he knew how, right? Through a mix of legal appeals and rituals, both of them literally, in 1949, he managed to secure a hearing before the Industrial Employment Review Board. There he made his Case Thelma, he argued, wasn't political. It was anti fascist. It was anti communist and rooted in personal freedom, the same freedom that every American should love. Do what thou wilt, he claimed, wasn't a threat to American values. It was American values. So to Jack, it was the purest form of individual liberty, not some dangerous foreign ideology. And remarkably, this worked. The board ruled that there was insufficient evidence that Jack had ever had genuine communist sympathies, and they reinstated his security clearance. And this allowed him to get a job with Hughes Aircraft Co. Designing chemical plants and working on aerospace projects. So for a brief moment, it looked like Jack was back on track and able to rebuild his scientific career. But his problems were far from over. In 1950, he was connected with the American Technion Society, a Zionist organization that supported the newly created state of Israel. They offered Jack a job with the Israeli rocket program, a chance to help build a space program from scratch in a country that desperately needed the advanced military tech. Jack decided to take the job and began preparing to emigrate to Israel. He asked a secretary at Hughes Aircraft to type up a portfolio of technical documents that he planned to submit as a part of his application, essentially some blueprints that he created. It seemed like a reasonable request. He was getting information for a legitimate employment with a US Ally. But he didn't have the same level of security clearance as he once did. So his secretary reported Jack to the FBI, accusing him of espionage and attempted theft of classified company documents. From her perspective, this was a guy with a history of occult activity and questionable associations, and he was trying to steal military secrets and flee the country. The FBI investigated, and it was swift and thorough. They interrogated Jack, fired him from Hughes Aircraft immediately and began examining every document he tried to take. Jack insisted that, hey, I was trying to be peaceful and, you know, I was just simply, you know, trying to get some stuff to apply for this job, yada yada, and that it was simply just an error in judgment about which documents required these special handling. So In October of 1951, the US Attorney decided that the contents of Jack's report didn't actually constitute state secrets. So he wasn't guilty of espionage. But the damage was done. The Industrial Employment Review Board permanently revoked his security clearance in 52, effectively banning him from working in the rocket industry for the rest of his life. Jack then found himself in a terrible situation. At the age of 37, he was unemployed, blacklisted from his profession, and running out of money. The man who'd helped launch America's space program was now pumping gas at service stations and repairing cars to pay his bills. Eventually, Jack managed to find work creating pyrotechnics for some Hollywood films. Which is kind of some crazy irony, right? The rocket scientist who developed technology would eventually carry humans to space was now making fake explosions for Hollywood movies. He was still working with chemicals and no controlled explosions. But instead of pushing the boundaries of knowledge, he was, you know, helping actors and directors pretend to blow things up. The FBI continued to keep tabs on Jack even after his career had been wrecked. Surveillance files showed that agents monitored him through 1952, tracking who he was talking to, where he went and how broke he was really getting. Jack's fall from grace was complete, but the story isn't over yet. The same crazy curiosity that made him this rocket scientist and a dedicated cultist was about to lead him to one final fatal experiment. By June 1952, Jack had finally found a way out of his situation. A Mexican company had offered him a job establishing an explosives factory, so he accepted. Here was a chance to use his expertise in a country that didn't really care about his occult activities or his FBI files were a security clearance. So he and Marjorie Cameron, the Scarlet woman, had packed their bags and planned to leave from Mexico that evening. But what happened in Jack's home laboratory on June 17, 1952, remains a mystery to this day. Jack was working in his converted laundry room laboratory thing, preparing a rush order of pyrotechnics for this film project. He needed to finish this batch before leaving for Mexico and the money would help him get established in his new life. The laboratory was cramped, but it was well organized and filled with all sorts of chemicals and equipment that made Jack famous in the rocket world and unfortunately, notorious with his neighbors. So around the house, life was still normal. Several tenants were upstairs. Artist Sal Gancy was on the phone. Model Joanne Price was in her room. And the Fashog family was going about their evening routine. Jack had warned them about the dangers of his work and Gancy had jokingly told him, hey, don't blow us up, before heading upstairs. Jack's response was typical. Don't worry about it. At exactly 5:45pm A massive double explosion ripped through the ground floor of the house. The blast was so powerful that it broke windows in neighboring mansions throughout Millionaires Row. The tenants upstairs were thrown around and Gancy was lifted up off his couch while still holding the phone. A piano collapsed, a chandelier crashed through the floor. Everything that had been hanging on the walls fell down simultaneously. But miraculously none of the upstairs residents were seriously injured. Jack was not so lucky. When the first rescuers reached him, they found him still conscious despite injuries that would have killed anyone instantly. His right forearm was completely severed, both legs broken. His left arm was mangled, and a massive hole had been torn in the right side of his face, exposing the skull beneath. The explosion had essentially destroyed the lower half of his body while leaving him awake and aware. These horrific injuries were so gruesome. But in spite of that, it's said that Jack remained conscious and coherent enough to direct his own rescue. He methodically told rescuers how to move him safely and remained alert as they loaded him into the ambulance. His reported last words were, but I'm not finished yet. But that's, of course, not officially known. Jack died at Huntington Memorial Hospital at 37 years old when he never regained consciousness after an emergency emergency surgery. The police investigation concluded that Jack had accidentally dropped a container of fulminate of mercury, an extremely unstable explosive that detonates on impact. The official ruling was accidental death, a tragic case of an expert who made one fatal mistake while handling dangerous materials. But several of Jack's colleagues questioned this explanation. George Santmier, a chemical engineer who'd worked with Jack on Navy projects, told reporters that it could be completely out of character for Jack to handle explosive waste materials carelessly. He compared it to a highly trained surgeon operating with dirty hands and insisted that Jack was exceptionally cautious and brilliant with his lab work. J.H. arnold, superintendent of the Burmite powder company where Jack had been working, agreed. He described Jack as extremely safety conscious, who worked carefully, had a thorough knowledge of his job, and was scrupulously neat. These weren't casual observations from people who barely knew him. These were professional assessments from experts who watched him handle dangerous chemicals for years. The alternative theories range from plausible to just outright bizarre. Some people suspected suicide, pointing to Jack's financial troubles and his career and a lot of recent emotional turmoil. Others theorized murder, with some suggesting that Howard Hughes had ordered Jack killed in retaliation for stealing company documents. Though no evidence ever supported this claim. The tragedy was even worse for Jack's mother, Ruth. When she had learned of his death, she was so distraught that she committed suicide just hours later. The double tragedy made the story even more sensational for the press. The newspapers had a field day with Jack's death death, but not for his rocket science. Instead, they zeroed in on the strangest parts of his life. Headlines like Slain Scientist Priest in Black Magic Cult and things like linking local blast victim with Weird cult Rights splash across the front pages. Reporters dug deep into the wild stories, the parsonage parties, the Babylon working, his letters to Aleister Crowley to the public. Jack wasn't a pioneer of space travel. He was an eccentric occultist who blew himself up in a cloud of mystery and scandal. The press seemed fascinated by the contradiction of a rocket scientist who practiced magic. But they treated it as a curiosity rather than trying to understand how Jack had reconciled these seemingly opposite things. Within days, reporters were writing about sexual perversion and black robes and sacred fire and intellectual necromancy, all sorts of crazy things. And the coverage was so sensational that that it kind of overshadowed any serious discussion of Jack's scientific legacy or even the real circumstances of his death. And the scientific establishment. And their response was telling. Rather than defend one of their pioneers or investigating these suspicious circumstances, they did nothing. Jack's occult activities had kind of made him an embarrassment, and his death provided a convenient opportunity to just write him out of the official history. So Today, more than 70 years later, we still don't know exactly what happened in that lab. The official explanation might be correct. Sure, some experts make fatal mistakes. That happens. But the questions raised by the people who knew Jack and his working methods have never been fully answered. What we do know is that Jack Parsons died the same way he lived, surrounded by mystery, controversy, and the kinds of dangerous experimentation that defined his entire career. The man who helped launch humanity into space had conducted his final experiment. And this time, the explosion couldn't be contained. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the life of Jack Parsons. Fascinating guy. I mean, I'm always struck by these guys that are simultaneously brilliant in their own field, but also fascinated with the occult. I think Isaac Newton is another one, if my memory serves me correctly. I mean, just a brilliant guy that invents calculus at a young age, but also, you know, is, you know, kind of marred by his fascination with, like, the occult and alchemy and different people dispute different things. That's actually an episode that we should do in the future, matter of fact. But I'm curious what you guys think. Part of me again, Gabe, this is just the part of me that's like, you know, if I was talking to my mom, this is like, what my mom would say. She'd be like, look, this guy was learning about all this stuff because of his connection to the occult. He was doing these satanic rituals and these occult rituals, gaining this knowledge that no one else could know or should know know. And it made him, you know, prodigious in his field. But it came at a cost. And basically, in the ritual, an entity appeared to him and said, hey, we're going to make you rich. We're going to show you everything. We're going to give you all the information that you need, but you got to pay us back. And he goes, I'll do whatever it takes. And they go, great. And then what happens? He himself gets destroyed. His marriage gets destroyed. His finances become, you know, know, destroyed. His career gets destroyed. And then he kills his own mother, the single mom who raised him and took care of him for her entire life. I don't know. It sounds like a Faustian deal, if you ask me. Right? Sounds like the apple, right? A little bit. Wait, what do you mean? Oh, like, Adam and Eve are like, oh, you're going to be so wise, but it's going to ruin your entire life. That's what I'm saying, dude. That's what I'm saying. I don't know. It's an interesting idea. That's what my mom would say. For me, I'm less. I don't know, I'm more grounded in sort of like the most likely thing, that this was, like an eccentric genius. And many geniuses are eccentric or just outright crazy. And, yeah, with his genius acumen for understanding or pioneering this whole field, he also was drawn to other things. I mean, look at, like, Kanye West. He was like a genius producer, but also has some pretty controversial racial ideas and conducts himself in a pretty atypical way. And I think that's the case with most geniuses. You know what I mean? Steve Jobs was one of the geniuses of our time. Developed an iPhone, developed a thing that changed the way human beings communicate, but also wasn't the best dad. And he lived in a house with no furniture and was just sort of a crazy guy. And that's the nature of being a genius. You know what I mean? If you're crazy, congrats, you might be a genius. And if you're really neat, organized, and put together, you're probably not a genius. Sorry, but that's just one of those things, I think. I think that's probably the most likely scenario. But who knows? Maybe he was communicating with supernatural entities that offered him the deal of a lifetime for the price of his own mom. What do you think? It's crazy. It's crazy, man. You think he was talking. Talking to the devil? Oh, for sure. All right. For sure. Fall more in the line of your thinking, similar to your mom. Yeah, dude, that's Santeria, bro. You gotta watch out for it. What do you guys think? Drop a comment below. I would love to know what your thoughts are. I read all of them, so please be nice. YouTube, Spotify, wherever you want to talk to me, I will see it. Maybe we'll read a couple of them on the next episode. As always, this has been an episode of History Camp. Thank you guys so much for tuning in and I will see you guys next time. What's up people? Quick announcement. If you are a fan of Camp Gagnon or Religion Camp, I have great news because we're dropping History Camp. That's right. This is the channel. We're going to be exploring the most interesting, fascinating, controversial topics from all time throughout all history. Right? You probably know about Benjamin Franklin, I don't know, Thomas Jefferson, Nikola Tesla, interesting figures from history and you probably learned about in school and they were pretty boring, but not here. Now, as you know, I was raised by a conspiracy theorist. So I'm going to be diving deep into all of the interesting, strange, occult and secretive societal relationships that all of these famous, influential men from our shared past have. So if you're interested, please go ahead and subscribe to the YouTube channel. It will be pinned in the description as well as the comments. And if you're on Spotify, this doesn't really apply to you, but these episodes will be dropping as well. Just go ahead and give us a high rating because it really helps the show. Now let's get back to it.