BABALON WORKING - The Occultist, The Scientologist, & The Rocket Scientist Who Founded NASA's JPL

🚀🔥 EPISODE 9 — "Babalon Working" — PART 3 OF THE SPACE SERIES 🔥🚀

🎃 Halloween night, 1936. A canyon outside Pasadena, California. A 22-year-old self-taught chemist named Jack Parsons leads a group of Caltech graduate students into a riverbed to test a primitive rocket engine. He calls his team the Suicide Squad. He chose that exact location because he genuinely believed it was a portal to Hell. 🔥

The test works. ✅

That moment is the founding of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA's largest robotic space exploration center. And the man who started it — Jack Parsons — would spend the rest of his short life building the rockets that took America to the moon, while running an occult lodge out of a Pasadena mansion, performing sex magic rituals in the California desert with a former Navy officer named L. Ron Hubbard. 📿

Yes — the same L. Ron Hubbard who would later steal Parsons' girlfriend, his life savings, and start the Church of Scientology. ⚓

Tonight: 👇

🎭 The wickedest man in the world — Aleister Crowley and the religion of Thelema.

🏛️ The Parsonage — naked rituals on Millionaire's Row.

📿 The Babalon Working — what really happened in the desert.

🐀 The con Crowley spotted from across the Atlantic.

🚨 The FBI files. The revoked security clearance. The Israeli rocket job.

⚰️ The 1952 explosion in Parsons' home laboratory. Last words: "But I'm not finished yet."

🌑 A crater on the dark side of the moon, named after a man whose name JPL tour guides reportedly are told not to bring up.

⚖️ Every fact in this episode is documented. Three serious biographies, declassified FBI files, peer-reviewed religious studies scholarship, NASA's own archives. The government didn't hide Jack Parsons. They just stopped talking about him.

This is Part 3 of the Space Series. Episodes 7 through 10. Operation Paperclip, Walt Disney, Jack Parsons, and Apollo. 🚀

I'm Elizabeth Stanton. Thanks for killing time with me. ☕

📧 JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com

📍 Recorded in Derby, Kansas

🎙️ Listen everywhere podcasts are found

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Halloween night, nineteen thirty-six. In a dry canyon outside of Pasadena, California, a group of graduate students and self-taught chemists from Caltech are carrying a primitive rocket motor down into a riverbed. They call themselves the Suicide Squad, and they earn the name. They've blown up a couple of laboratories already. They burned through walls. They've sent rockets sideways into things rockets weren't supposed to hit. Tonight, they're gonna try again. The guy leading them is 22 years old. His real name is Marvel Whiteside Persons. Yes, Marvel. His mom picked it. But everybody calls him Jack, and he's handsome the way old Hollywood is handsome. Dark eyes, easy smile, the kind of face that makes you want to believe what he's telling you. He never finished college. He taught himself chemistry out of library books and pulp science fiction magazines. The people who actually worked for him will tell you he was one of the most naturally gifted chemists alive at that moment in America. He's also, on this Halloween night, about to run his first successful rocket test at a site he chose partly because he believes, and I mean genuinely, sincerely, with the full conviction of somebody who's been studying the occult for years, that this canyon is a portal to hell. The test works. And on that Halloween night in that canyon, at that portal, the jet propulsion laboratory was born. JPL is now NASA's largest robotic space exploration center. It put rovers on Mars, it guided Voyager 1 and 2 out past the edge of the solar system. It is by any measure one of the most prestigious scientific institutions on the planet. And every year, on Halloween, yes, you are hearing that correct. On Halloween, JPL holds an open house celebration. They call it Nativity Day. With mannequins of Jack Parsons and his team in the canyon at the portal. They named the birthday of the lab Nativity Day. On Halloween, at a site the founder believed was a doorway to hell. And I'm not making any of this up. The American space program gets stranger the closer you look at it. Last episode we talked about Walt Disney and Werner von Braun and the propaganda machine that sold America on space. 42 million people on a Tuesday night watching an SS officer with a falsified war record explain how we were gonna fly to the moon. Tonight we're gonna go further back. Before Disney, before Von Braun's rockets even fired in this country, before NASA existed at all. Tonight we talk about the man who co-founded the laboratory that builds the spacecraft that drive on Mars, who invented the rocket fuel that put every American astronaut into orbit, who has a crater named after him on the dark side of the moon, the side we can't see from Earth. The man whose name JPL Tour Guides are reportedly told not to bring up. The man who spent his nights summoning the goddess in the California desert with the future founder of the Church of Scientology. The man who died in a mysterious explosion in his home laboratory at 37 years old, under circumstances his colleagues said made no sense. Welcome to episode 9 of Just Killing Time. I'm Elizabeth Stanton, and this is Babylon Worky. Nothing about the space program is going to look the same to you after tonight. You are listening to Just Killing Time, a true crime conspiracy and stories that keep us up at night. Quick housekeeping note before we go in. Everything in this episode is documented. Most of it's pulled from declassified FBI files, peer-reviewed academic work on thalomat and Scientology, and at least three serious biographies of Jack Parsons. I'm not making things up. The government didn't hide Jack Parsons, they just kind of stuck talking about him. So tonight we are going to start talking about him again. So let's get into it. John Whiteside Parsons was born October 2nd, 1914, in Pasadena. As I mentioned, his actual first name was Marvel, Marvel Whiteside Parsons, like a comic book character. And his mom always called him John, and Jack came later. The family lived on Orange Grove Boulevard, what Pasadena had called Millionaire's Row. Old money houses, the kind of address that meant something, you know, at like a dinner party. And then the depression hit and the money disappeared more or less overnight. Jack Parsons grew up in a house that remembered being rich without being rich anymore. Which, if you've ever met someone from that exact background, you know, does a particular kind of thing to a person. He got obsessed with what he could build himself. He taught himself rocket science from library books and pulp science fiction magazines of the late 20s. Jules Verde, H. G. Wells, amazing stories, the same magazines that had captured Robert Goddard back in Massachusetts, the same Buck Rogers hunger for the stars that had basically every American rocket scientist of his generation. But he never finished college. The depression that shut Stanford down for him. Caltech turned him away as a student because he didn't have like the credentials. And then through pure force, the personality, pure talent, and pure stubbornness, which you know gets you everywhere in this world, he ended up doing more foundational rocket scientists, sorry, rocket science than most of the people Caltech had actually admitted. So according to Wikipedia, Parsons was admitted to Stanford University, but left before graduating due to financial hardship during the Great Depression. In 1934, Parsons, Foreman, and Frank Melina formed the Caltech-affiliated Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory. That's uh the acronym was Galset. So G-A-L-C-I-T. And then the Rocket Research Group. The group worked on jet-assisted takeoff, so JATO, for the U.S. military and founded Aerojet in 1942 to develop and sell JATO technology during World War II. The Galsett Rocket Program research group became JPL in 1943. So here he is. He's a Stanford dropout, no degree. He's the co-founder of the JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He's co-founder of AeroJet. And this is the part that generally gets me every time. The inventor of the castable composite solid rocket propellant, which is the technology that decades later would power the space shuttle's solid fuel boosters and the Minuteman ballistic missiles, and basically every solid-fueled rocket in American inventory. The guy with no college degree, working out of a borrowed corner of Caltech in the 1930s, invented the propellant that put the space shuttle into orbit while also on the side running an occult lodge and performing sex magic rituals in the California desert. I just wanted you to hold all of those facts in your head at the same time because this is the real Jack Parsons. And any version of him that flattens out one of those things is missing a point. So I want to say something about the Suicide Squad, the name that they gave themselves. They were five young men. They borrowed um, you know, equipment in the corner of somebody else's lab. They were blowing things up and trying again. And the other Caltech students called them the Suicide Squad as a joke, mostly. And the five of them, they just took that name and ran with it. They wore it like a name tag because that's who they were. People who understood that some things are just worth being slightly insane about. That if your ambition is bigger than your credentials, you have to be willing to blow stuff up and keep showing up the next morning. Naturacity, that's what Jack Fursen's was the most extreme version of any idea I've ever read about. He was the guy who blew things up and kept going in every single area of his life: rocketry, sex, religion, ambition, all the way to the end. And the end of him is, I think, the saddest part of the story. So, according to Atlas Obscura, which they wrote From Heaven to Hell, a visit to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Devil's Gate, where they're citing the JPL history. On Halloween 9th of 1936, Jack Parsons and his suicide squad completed the first successful rocket test in Arroyo Setco, California. Now was the day the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena was officially founded. Now, according to the occult encyclopedia, the location of JPL near the site of Devil's Gate Dam in Pasadena was supposedly selected by Parsons due to his belief that the location was a portal to hell. So here's the geography of this. The JPL campus today sits about a quarter mile from Devil's Gate Dam. The dam takes its name from a rock formation in the gorge that once you see this, you can't unsee it. It looks unmistakably like a devil's face in profile. There's a horn, there's a hollow eye socket, the mouth is the open arch of the cliff itself. The local Tongva people had stories about the place going back generations. They said it was a thin spot, that's how they describe it. A place where the spirit world would come close to the surface where things would come through. And Parson, he read those stories. He chose this canyon, and he chose Halloween for the very first test. NASA still does an open house celebration at JPL every year on Halloween. They call it Nativity Day, birthday of the lad, with mannequins of Parsons and his team set up in the canyon on Halloween. At the spot, Parsons chose because he thought it was a portal to hell. I'm honestly not sure what to do with the fact except hand that to you. Is it ironic? Is that oblivious? Or is it intentional in some kind of weird, quiet way? I don't know, but Nativity Day on Halloween at the demonic portal is the kind of phrase that ought to at least raise an eyebrow. Because it kind of sounds sacrilegious to me. According to a cult encyclopedia, Parsons invented the first rocket engine to use a castable composite rocket propellant and pioneered the advancement of both liquid fuel and solid fuel rockets. He is regarded as among the most important figures in the history of the U.S. space program. He has been the subject of several biographies and fictionalized portrayals. But by the late 1930s, the Suicide Squad had real federal funding. The Army wanted JATO, the jet-assisted takeoff, the system of strapping rocket boosters to aircraft so they could lift off short runways. In 1942, the team founded Aerojet to commercialize that technology for the war. And in 1943, Galsett research group officially became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as I said. So Jack Parsons had no degree, no institutional pedigree of any sort, and he co-founded all of these organizations, and he was 29 at this time. And he was about to meet Alistair Crowley. Edward Alexander Crowley was born in 1875 in Royal Leamington Spa, England, into a wealthy and intensely religious family. His father was an heir to a brewing fortune who had basically given it all up to become a traveling evangelicus. So Crowley's whole childhood was saturated in the most extreme version of evangelical Victorian Christianity you can imagine. And he rejected every single bit of it. Dramatically, theatrically, with what I would like to recognize today as a really impressive commitment to the bit. By the time he was an adult, he'd renamed himself Alistair. He joined a bunch of esoteric orders, he climbed mountains in the Himalayas, traveled the world, studied yoga, and tantric practices in India, and arrived at what he was convinced was a brand new spiritual revelation. According to Wikipedia on Alistair Crowley, in 1904 he married Rose Edith Kelly and they honeymooned in Cairo, Egypt, where Crowley wrote down the Book of Law, a sacred text that serves as the basis for Thelema, which he said had been dictated to him by a supernatural entity named Iwis. The book announced the start of the Aeon of Horus and declared that its followers should do what thou will. So do what thou wilt, was the decree. And to seek to align themselves with their true will via the practice of ceremonial magic. So I was it's I was, it's pronounced I was, and it's spelled A-I-W-A-S-S. That's the entity that he was communicating with. And then, of course, you know, the eonophoris was Crowley's term for the new spiritual age he believed he was beginning. So Cairo, 1904, his new wife, Rose, enters a trance state. And so she's in this trance, and she tells Crowley that the Egyptian god Horus wants a word with him. Crowley, who at this point had been studying everything from the hermetic order of the golden dawn to Hindu meditation, he sits down and goes into his own trance. And for three days, by his own account, he hears a disembodied voice and he writes down everything it says. Is this not super creepy? Like it blows my mind. So the book that comes out of those three days is named The Book of the Law. And the central command of the whole thing is that one line, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. And that's Alistair Crowley's The Book of Law that he wrote in 1904. Now, this is important because it gets misunderstood constantly. Do what thou wilt was not in Crowley's framework, a whole pass to do whatever you felt like at any given moment, even though that's what it seems like, right? It was meant to be as a command to find your true will, the deepest authentic purpose of your existence, the thing you specifically were put on earth here to do. And uh, you know, that's what he did. He pursued it absolutely without compromise, without waiting for permission from a church or a government. The British press, though, when they read that, they read it as a permission to do whatever you want, and Crowley got branded the wickedest man in the world in tabloid headlines. And he loved it. He actually started calling himself Beast 666. He ran rituals involving drugs, sex, and the invocation of entities he claimed lived on planes of reality humans normally couldn't perceive. So this is, you know, this guy's dealing in some really dark, heavy, material black magic. According to Britannica, the death of a young follower in Sicily allegedly after participating in sacrilegious rituals led to denunciations of Crowley in the British popular press as the wickedest man in the world and to his expulsion from Italy in 1923. So let's talk honestly about Alistair Crowley. He's one of those historical figures where the legend has just completely eaten the actual person. He was not a Satanist in like conventional sense, he didn't worship the devil, he didn't really believe that Christian devil existed as a literal entity, apparently. What he was doing was more complicated, and he was building like a philosophical, like spiritual system that pulled from Egyptian mythology. He um pulled from the Kabbalah Eastern mysticism and a real sincere belief that human beings um ought to pursue their authentic nature instead of just falling in line with whatever institutional morality they were handed. Whether you find that fascinating or terrifying, probably says something about, you know, the way we view the world. But what I can tell you is that it attracted brilliant, unconventional people. And one of them was a young rocket scientist in Pasadena who would chant Crowley's poems before his test launches. The Ordo Templi Orientis. Okay, so the Ordo Templi Orientis was a quasi-Masonic occult organization that occasionally came out of Germany. Or originally, it's not occasionally, originally came out of Germany. Uh, because the Ordo Templi Orientis like got me so tongue-tied. Um, that's a tough one to say. So it originally came out of Germany, and Crowley took it over later in his life. So he took over that quasi-Masonic occult organization, and he made it the primary institutional vehicle for thelema. By the 1930s, it had lodges across Europe and a few in America. The California branch was the agape lodge. Agape is the Greek word for unconditional love, and in January of 1939, a 24-year-old rocket scientist from Pasadena walked into his first Gnostic mass at their meeting space on Winona Boulevard in Hollywood. According to Wikipedia, in January 1939, John and Francis Baxter, a brother and sister who had befriended Jack and Helen Parsons, took Jack to the church of Thalema on Winona Boulevard, Hollywood, where he witnessed the performance of the Gnostic Mass. Parsons was intrigued, feeling both a repulsion and an attraction. Parsons continued to sporadically attend the church's events for a year. So repulsion and attraction, both at the same time. And that's how he described his first reaction. And of course, he kept going back, and that's always how it goes. So in by 1941, Jack Parsons and his first wife, Helen, had been fully initiated into the Agape Lodge, and Parsons threw himself into Thelema. I I'm probably really mispronouncing that Thalema, I think is how it's pronounced, Thelema, with the same kind of manic. All-consuming intensity, he brought to literally everything. He gave almost his entire salad glory to the lodge, and he spent his evenings doing ritual work and he started recruiting colleagues from the JPL. According to Wikipedia, Parsons had also attended lectures on theosophy with his first wife, Helen, but disliked the belief system's sentiment of the good and the true. So during rocket tests, Parsons Buffman recited Crowley's Crowley's poem, Hymn to Pan as a good luck charm. And he took to addressing Crowley as his most beloved father and signed off to him as Thy Son Joan. So picture this. Nobody in the science crowd took the occult part seriously. But Parsons, this is important, Parsons took it completely seriously. In 1942, Crowley promoted Parsons to lead the entire Agoth Bay Lodge, and Parsons, with the money rolling in for an aerojet, went and bought a huge old mansion in Orange Grove Boulevard back on Millionaire's Road. In the same neighborhood he'd grown up before the family money disappeared. He opened it as a boarding house. So according to Supercluster, the occult history behind NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, this is what they said. 30 years old, unemployed and without a college degree, Parsons used the proceeds to purchase 1003 Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena. This property turned into a hump of occultist fanaticism and homegrown rocket science, with rooms rented out to bohemians, artists, musicians, atheists, and anarchists. So we've got bohemians, artists, musicians, atheists, anarchists, gay men and women at a time when they that could get you arrested. Parsons just welcomed them all. He nicknamed the house Parsonage, which is partly a pun on his name and partly a flat acknowledgement that what he was running was officially and functionally a church. A neighbor's wife once described showing up to the party and of course at the parsonage as walking into a Pellini movie. Another neighbor called the police because, and I want you to picture this exactly the way it gets reported. There were naked, pregnant women jumping through fire in the backyard. The cops came. Parsons told them the OTO was quite quote dedicated to the freedom and liberty of the individual, and was anti-communist and anti-fascist, which in 1942 were the magic words that made the police lose interest. They couldn't find anything to charge anyone with. They left and the fire jumping continued. How nuts is that? So Frazier McDonald wrote this: Escape from Earth, a secret history of the space rocket cited in Pasadena. He said the libertarian spirit of the OTO made it accommodating home for persons in the days when homosexuality was illegal and an ethos of permissiveness was not merely a lifestyle at the OTO, but part of their religious practice. Parsons, who oscillated between playing same-sex attraction and revulsion, found the scene intriguing. Well, this is where we just need to pause for just a second, because I think this gets lost in the version of the story where Parsons is just a weirdo cultist. In 1942, in Pasadena, he was running a house where gay people, atheists, anarchists, black artists, and people of every flavor of unconventional life were openly, genuinely, and equally welcome. And that's not a small thing. This was the McCarthy era warming up. This was the moment in American history where being gay could destroy your entire life, where being an atheist could cost you your job. Where living outside the norm was not just socially dangerous, it was sometimes legally dangerous. The parsonage, among many other things, was a place where people could just be themselves. And that doesn't excuse some of what eventually happened there, but it's part of who Parsons actually was. He wasn't only a cultist, he was someone who genuinely, sincerely believed in individual freedom in an era when believing that was a radical political act, and he paid for it later, they all did. So Parsons and Crowley, they communicated by mail across the Atlantic. And Parsons wrote constantly, long-devoted, almost worshipful letters, signing off as Thy Son John. And he said, Crowley, money. Lots of money. He reported back on what the lodge was doing, and he described his ritual experiments in detail. Now, Alistair Crowley, by this point in his life, was holed up in London. He was sick with asthma, addicted to heroin, basically frail in his last few years. And he wrote back with a mix of admiration for Parsons and what comes through pretty clearly as exasperation. According to Wikipedia, although there were many arguments among the commune members, Parsons remained dedicated to Thaloma. He gave almost all of his salary to Boutio while actively seeking out new members, recruiting the JPL mathematician, Barbara Canwright, and financially supporting Crowley back in London. So while he was doing that classified rocket research for the United States military, Parsons was also recruiting his JPL co-workers into the Agape Lodge and personally bankrupt Alistair Crowley's life back in London. With his salary for the U.S. government's rocket program, um I just want to make sure you understand that connection. And the FBI, of course, they predictedly noticed as well. So Space Safety magazine cited this. The U.S. Air Force advised the FBI that the USAF had been monitoring persons and his relationship with Crowley, and had observed that a religious cult believed to advocate sexual perversion was organized at Subject's Home at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena, California, which has been reported as subversive. So the Air Force, they're watching Jack Parsons, and the same Air Force that depended on his JATO technology to get heavy aircraft off of very short runways. That same Air Force, whose missiles were going to use his solid fuel research, they knew about the lodge, they knew about the rituals, and they knew about the Bohemian boarding house. And they kept giving him security clearances and military contracts, anyways, because they needed his rockets more than they were freaked out by the religion. Sound familiar? So last week was about how the U.S. government capped Werner von Braun, in spite of his SS record and his concentration camp connections. Remember, he procured all of those people to work in the tunnels. Because they needed his rockets. The pattern's consistent. The American government will tolerate just about anything in a rocket scientist as long as the rockets keep working until suddenly they won't. We'll get to that part. So August 1945, Jack Parsons is introduced to a former Navy officer and pulp science fiction writer named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard. Hubbard is 34 years old and he shows up wearing dark sunglasses, walking with a cane, and he claims both are war injuries. They are not. Per his actual military records, which were declassified later, the only medical issues Hubbard suffered during his service were mild arthritis and conjunctivitis. That's great. So Pink Eye. He had not been war hero. He'd been blinded by the sun, and he had not, contrary to his own stories. Um where did that one supposed to look? The conjunctivitis got me. Oh, he had not, contrary to his own stories, spent weeks adrift on a raft after his ship went down. So he lied about that. But the man could talk, and by every account, he was ferociously choremy. According to Space Safety Magazine, Parsons was taken in by Hudbird's charisma, and he saw him as an equal in his magic circle. Writing to Crowley, Parsons said of Hubbard, I deduce that he is in direct touch with some higher intelligence. He is the most thalamic person I have ever met and is in his complete accord with his own principles. So the most thalemic person he ever met, in direct touch with some higher intelligence. That's how Parsons described the guy after a couple of conversations. Parsons invited Hubbard to come live at the parsonage, and Hubbard accepts immediately and he moves in. Crowley on the other side of the Atlantic, he's, you know, 70 years old, ill, and with 40 years of running occult organizations behind him. He gets Parsons' enthusiastic letters about this incredible new magical partner he's found, and he writes back with one of the most greatest single-line verdicts in the history of human correspondence. Here's what he says. Alistair Crowley strongly criticized Parsons' actions, writing Suspect, Ron playing confidence trick. Jack Parsons, weak fool, obvious victim prowling swimmers. So he didn't pull any punches. The wickedest man in the world, the guy who'd spent four decades writing elaborate spiritual operations of his own, he looks at Del Ron Hubbard, sight unseen from across the Atlantic and immediately calls it confidence trickster, weak fool, obvious victim, prowling swindler. Parsons, he did not listen. And I love this detail more than almost anything in the entire story because Alistair Crowley, a man whose following newspaper headlines, called him the wickedest man in the world, a man who'd been running essentially a spiritual con on rich hero punes for 40 years, a man who had been demanding money and devotion from his followers since before the First World War, looked at L. Ron Hubbard and instantly just clucked him. This is a fraud. Your friend is a weak fool. This is going to end badly, and he was, of course, completely right about every single piece of it. Crowley was a lot of things, but after a lifetime of running the same kind of operation, apparently he could spot a fellow scammer from a continent away. So from January through March 1946, Parsons and Hubbard performed what Parsons called the Babylon Worky, a series of ritual nights performed in the Mojave Desert outside Pasadena. They were designed in Parsons' theology to summon her, they were summoning the Thalamic uh goddess Babylon into actual physical form. To find the woman who would eventually become her earthly avatar, and then through sexual ritual uh practice with that woman, they wanted to conceive a kind of spiritual bee, what Crowley called a moon child, a new kind of consciousness for new age. So Parsons documented all of this in his diary in extraordinary detail. He and Hubbard would drive out to the desert at night, they chanted in Enochian, the language that John D., the 16th-century English alchemist had claimed had was given to him by the angels. So I don't know if you've ever like watched the TV show Supernatural, and they use all of this language and things in it, and so I thought that was kind of interesting to see it actually show up here in real life. So they chanted an Okian, and Hubbard was he was assigned the role of scribe, which meant he was the one channeling the message from the goddess while Parsons performed the physical components of the ritual. According to Wikipedia about L. Ron Hubbard, Hubbard and Parsons collaborated on Babylon Working, a series of stex magic rituals intended to summon an incarnation of Babylon, the supreme goddess in Crowley's Panthenon. According to religious studies scholar Hugh Urban, Parsons' own account of the period, the Book of Babylon, describes the workings as occult ceremonies based on Crowley's teachings, requiring a woman to take part in sexual rites meant to bring about the birth of a spiritual being sometimes described as Thalamic literature as a moon child, a spiritual offspring mightier than all the kings of the earth. Hubbard's job as a scribe included describing the goddess in her own voice. Parsons preserved his entries, and Hubbard channels Babylon as, I'm quoting here, the flame of life, power of darkness, who feeds upon the dead of mid. That's the kind of thing the future founder of Scientology was writing in 1946 in the desert. When the first round of rituals concluded, Parsons drove home to the parsonage, and the next day, a woman showed up at his door. According to Space Safety Magazine, as soon as the first set of rituals had been completed, Parsons encountered a woman by the name of Marjorie Cameron. Marjorie was something of a free spirit, and she had moved to Pasadena after receiving an honorable discharge from the Navy. Parsons immediately became infatuated with her and her scarlet red hair. And he saw her arrival as a sign of the successful ritual that he had completed. And in short, Parsons believed that he had summoned Babylon, the scarlet woman. So Marjorie Cameron with her red hair just discharged from the navy, she showed up at the parsonage the day after those first rituals were concluded, and Parsons was instantly convinced that this was the woman he had summoned, the scarlet woman of his ritual, the earthly form of Babylon. Whether she actually was is a question between you and your theology. What's documented is that she existed, she had red hair, and she walked up to his door the day after the working, and Parsons believed it. He believed all of it. So I'm just gonna lay this out and you make of it what you want. This man, he performs that ritual, the occult ritual, to summon a red-haired woman. The next day, a red-haired woman shows up at his house. Is that a coincidence? Is it confirmation bias? Would Parsons have found his, you know, quote unquote sign in basically anything that had happened next? I don't know. I mean, like, we just this is what we've got. I'm a true crime podcaster. I'm not a theologian. And what I can tell you is that Jack Parsons believed it was real. He believed he had actually done the thing, and he carried that belief into every decision he made for the rest of his short life, including, unfortunately, the decision to trust L. Ron Hubbard with his money. So after Babylon working wrapped up, Parsons, Hubbard, and a young woman named Sarah Northra, who was Parsons' girlfriend, but who Hubbard had also started sleeping with, because of course, they formed a business partnership. Why wouldn't they? And they called it Allied Enterprise. The plan on paper was that Hubbard and Sarah they would travel to Florida and they were going to buy a fleet of yachts and then sail them back to California and sell them at a profit. Parsons put up almost all of the capital. According to Wikipedia, Parsons, Hubbard, and Sarah, they invested nearly their entire savings. The vast majority, of course, was contributed by Parsons in a plan for Hubbard and Sarah to buy the yachts in Miami and sail them to the West Coast to sell for a profit. Hubbard had a different idea. He wrote to the U.S. Navy requesting permission to leave the country for the purposes of collecting writing material. In other words, undertaking a round cruise. That was his idea. Now Hubbard, it turns out, had a different idea. He quietly wrote to the Navy asking permission to leave the country for what he called collecting writing material, which was Hubbard's for I'm taking that world cruise. And then he took that money and he took Sarah and he bought the yachts and he left. So Parsons, unfortunately, he figured out what was happening a little too late, and he tried to get a legal injunction against them. He also, this is in his diary, performed a magical working specifically designed to stop their boat from leaving port. He wrote afterward that he had called down his store. So here he is, he's performing these magical occult workings, is what they're calling them. I mean, I guess we would call it modern day witchcraft. But here's what's interesting. Just like how he saw the red-haired woman show up at his door the next day, this happened as well. A storm did, in fact, force the boat back to port. Make of that what you will. The injunction didn't hold up in court, and Hubbard ended up paying Parsons the settlement of two thousand nine hundred dollars, basically pennies on what Parsons had put in, and dissolved the partnership. Parsons came home by his phone description shattered. So according to Supercluster, the occult history behind NASA's jet propulsion laboratory, Hubbard ran off to Miami with Parsons' ex-lover Sarah and $10,000 of Parsons' life savings with a new wise and cash to spare. Hubbard bought three yachts and went on to found Dianetics and Scientology. So here's the picture, L. Ron Hubbard, the man who participated in Stex magic rituals in the California desert, who channeled the voice of a goddess named Babylon. He stole his ritual partner's girlfriend and life savings and went on to found one of the most successful and financially powerful new religious movements of the 20th century, the Church of Scientology. Millions of members, billions of dollars, and a celebrity following that includes some of the biggest names of Hollywood and the founder's formative spiritual experience, the thing that made him who he became. It all happened in a mansion in Pasadena in a ritual circle with a rocket scientist and the wickedest man in the world. And I'm not making a doctrinal argument that the Church of Scientology here, I'm just laying out this is the documented historical record of where it came from. And the documented historical record says it came from the parsonage. So by the late 1940s, the Cold War paranoia that was eating America was eating Jack Parsons. His FBI file was getting thicker. His Marxist sympathies from the 1930s, which honestly a lot of intellectuals had flirted with in that era, were now in the file. The occult practices were also in the file, as was his sex life. They were also in the file. So names of people he was associated with, they were also in that file. And the US military, which had previously been giving him top secrets clearances across the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, was finally starting to ask some harder questions. About time, don't you think? So Wikipedia says the review board still considered Parsons a liability because of his historical Merxis affiliations and investigations by the FBI. And in January 1952, they permanently reinstated their ban on his working for classified projects, effectively prohibiting him from working in rocketry. Ashes on air, Jack Parsons' rocket ritual, and the shadow rate citing those declassified FBI documents said this. Parsons' FBI file described him as a potential subversive, not for communist sympathies, but because the Bureau feared his knowledge might be passed to foreign powers such as Israel and the Soviet Union. The subject's unorthodox beliefs and practices combined with his access to sensitive military technology made him a security concern. So he's permanently banned now from classified work at the age of 37. The man who co-founded JPL, whose propellant invention would go into the space shuttle solid fuel boosters, whose name would later be put on a crater on the dark side of the moon. He was banned from the field he built because of the rituals, because of the lodge, because of an FBI file that had been growing since 1942 when the neighbors first started complaining about what's going on in the parsonage. So I want you to hold that in comparison to last episode. The same United States government that falsified the war records of Nazi SS officers to give them security clearances and rocket programs in Huntsville, Alabama, that same government revoked the clearance of an American citizen who founded JPL because he ran an occult lodge on the weekends. Werner von Braun, SS major, signed procurement requests for concentration camp labor. He falsified records, security claims granted, full rocket program funded. But Jack Parsons, who was an American-born, no criminal convictions, co-founder of JPL, practiced what was then perfectly, I'm gonna say, a legal religion. His security clearance was permanently revoked, banned from rocketry. The American government, their moral arithmetic gets really interesting when you put the two cases side by side like that, don't you think? So without his security clearance, Parsons couldn't do rocketry anymore, and he went to work doing pyrotechnics for Hollywood instead. Explosives for movie sets, thaw machines, uh fake gunshots. He was 37 years old, the co-founder of NASA's primary robotics laboratory, and he's making bangs and flashes for B movies. And he started looking for work outside the country. He got a job offer from Israeli Rocket Program, and he was getting ready to move to Israel with his second wife, Marjorie Cameron. You remember the red-haired woman from Babylon working. But on June 17, 1952, one day before he and Marjorie were going to leave for Israel, he got a brush order from a movie production for a batch of explosives. And he went down to his laboratory in his home and he started mixing. Wikipedia says, a day before their planned departure, Parsons received a brush order of explosive on film set and he began to work on it in his home laboratory. An explosion destroyed the lower part of the building during which Parsons sustained mortal wounds, and his right forearm was severed, his legs and left arm were broken, and a hole was torn in the right side of his face. Despite these critical injuries, Parsons was found conscious by the upstairs lodgers. He was alive when his housemates found him, his right forearm was gone, his face was destroyed, and somehow he was still conscious. And he tried to communicate with the ambulance crew when they arrived, and he died about thirty-seven minutes after the explosion, and he was thirty-seven years old. His mother, when she got the news, took a fatal overdose of barbiturits that same day. Multiple sources said this. The official insta investigation of the Pasadena Police Department concluded that Parsons had been mixing fulminite mercury in a coffee can, which he accidentally dropped, causing the explosion. The official conclusion was an accident. He'd been mixing fulminate mercury, one of the most shock-sensitive explosives in all of chemistry, in a coffee can, and he dropped that coffee can, and the can went off. The explosion then ignited everything in that room. Now, several of his colleagues immediately said no, not the way Jack Parsons would do it, not even close. Pasadena now and look back at Jack Parsons on the 70th anniversary of his explosive death, citing the Los Angeles Times in June 21st, 1952. This is what they said. George St. Meyer, a chemical engineer who worked with Parsons on a Naval Ordnance Department research project, he told the LA Times in 1952 that someone else had put quantities of explosive refuse into an exposed trash and garbage containers because it would be completely out of character for Parsons to handle the dangerous explosive waste material in the way that the police said he did. For Parsons to have disposed of such materials in that manner would be in the same category as for a highly trained surgeon to operate with dirty hands. His last words, though, according to the report in the JPL archive were, but I'm not finished yet. But I'm not finished yet. Those were his last words. A man one day away from leaving for a new country, a new beginning, a chance to keep doing the only work he had ever wanted to do. And then a coffee can or someone else's explosive waste in his lab, or something else entirely. The case got closed as an accident in 1952 and it has never been reopened. The theories, though, have never gone away, and some people say it was suicide. Some say it was murder, possibly by Howard Hughes, whose documents Parsons had reportedly handled carelessly. Some say it was federal agents who didn't want him taking American rocket technology to Israel. And some say it was a ritual gone wrong. The truth is we don't know, but what we know is the man who co-founded one of the most important scientific institutions in American history died in a mysterious explosion in his home laboratory at only 37 years old with an FBI file, hundreds of pages thick, under conditions that his own professional colleagues said made no sense, and the case was closed. I mean, I had my thoughts on it, and I'm sure you do too. So, according to Bice, crawling back to the alleged hell portal of NASA's occult origins, this is what they said. Twenty years after his passing, the International Astronomical Unit, Astronomical Reunion named a far side moon crater 37N171W, after Parsons, in a nod to his pivotal contributions to solid fuel rocketry. The crater on the far side of the moon, the dark side, the hemisphere that always faces away from us, the one we can never see from Earth. It was named after Jack Parsons. There's a long-standing joke inside the aerospace community about this. JPL doesn't stand for Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The joke goes, it stands for Jack Parsons Laboratory. Or the more pointed version, Jack Parson Lives. The human exception, the Jack Parsons biography, wrote, in the aerospace industry, that's where I got this info. JPL was nicknamed as standing for Jack Parsons Laboratory or Jack Parson Lives. That's a joke that's been circulating in American aerospace for 70 years. The engineers actually working at JPL know who founded the place. They know what he did in his evenings, and they know about the parsonage and the Otimo and the Babylon workey. And they say basically with a wink, Jack Parsons lives because his technology lives, and his solid fuel propellant is in every booster that's ever lifted. His founding vision is alive in every Mars rover, and his belief that the human spirit should be constrained by what's currently considered normal, the one lives too. In a culture of an institution that sends spacecraft to the edges of the solar system, whether anything else of him lives, that's between you and your own theology. While you can count on viewing planetary rovers and checking out mission control, don't expect any official mention of persons on campus. So that's what happens. The JPL tour guides are reportedly knocked, they are told not to bring persons. The official institutional history of the lab starts with the technical achievements and quietly minimizes the person who started it all. While it is a pattern of this whole series, isn't it? The American government, they hire people they need and then they suppress the parts of the story that get inconvenient. Bon Braun's SS records that were falsified. Walt Disney's FBI informant status was classified, and Parsons, the American who founded JPL, who invented the propellant, he gets quietly left off the campus official tour.

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Ron Hubbard, he took Parsons' money and his girlfriend to Florida in 1946, and he used some of that money to start working on the ideas that would become Dianetics. He published Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health in 1950, and then he incorporated The Church of Scientology in 1953. This is when Business Insider citing Sarah Northrup's personal writings as reported in the HBO documentary Go In Clear. They said, according to Northrup's recollections, Hubbard had said to his wife, the only way to make any real money was to have a religion. That's essentially what he was trained to do with Dianetics. Get a religion where he could have an income and the government wouldn't take it away from him in the form of taxes. That's my Labrador. She's whining to get out. And you're gonna have to sit down and just be quiet for just a second, Miss Boira. Let me finish this story. So the only way to make any real money it was to have a religion, and he reportedly said that out loud to his wife that he had taken from Jack Parsons. And after performing all those sex magic rituals in the California desert. Meanwhile, Crowley died in September of 1947, about a year after Babylon working. Parsons died in June of 1952. Hubbard then died in 1986, and he was reportedly surrounded by a small inner circle, having spent his last years living incognito to dodge various legal proceedings. The Church of Scientology, though, it continues millions of members worldwide, billions of dollars in assets, and its founder's formative spiritual experience was Babylon Working. And it was performed in desert with that rocket scientist. While they were truly believing that they were opening a portal, a gateway to hell. So all three of these episodes that I've now given you, they uh put together for this moment because the pattern kind of matters. You know, in episode seven, they we talked about how the Nazis built this space program with their falsified war records of the government knew. Episode eight, that dream of space that Americans absorbed in the 1950s was constructed by an FBI informant and delivered with that same man with the SS credentials on Walt Disney's primetime television show. And tonight, the laboratory that built the spacecraft that drive on Mars was co-founded on Halloween at a site chosen because the founder truly believed it was a portal to hell and by a man who spent his night performing rituals with the future founder of Scientology. So I'm just pointing out that this is a pattern. The pattern says the history of the American Space Program is not the story that we get told. It's much stranger, it's much darker, and it's much more complicated, more interesting than any version that ends with Neil Armstrong planting a flag. The story doesn't end there, but it starts there. And here's what I find about Jack Parsons that I think is fascinating, and I think it connects this story to things much older than the space program. Parsons believed with the same conviction he brought to chemistry, with the same rigor he brought to engineering rocket fuel, that there was something above, not the sky, not orbit, not Mars, something beyond, a level of reality that the physical universe was only one face of, the entities that existed in dimensions rockets were never going to reach, planes of being you couldn't access through engineering, only through will, ritual, and the deliberate desolution of the self into something larger. And that's why he chanted he chanted Crowley's hymn to pan before a rocket test. He genuinely believed that the rocket was pointing in two directions at once, up towards the physical sky and inward toward whatever lay beneath the surface of things. So, Science History Institute, the Sex Cult Antichrist who rocketed us to space, hosted by Sam Keene, says Parsons saw rocketry and the occult as two sides of the same coin. Both offered a chance to slip off the bonds of Earth and roam free. Rocketry freed your body to roam while the occult freed your mind and your soul. Wow. And the question Parsons was actually asking, the question this whole series keeps circling from different angles in different episodes, is the oldest one there is. What is above? What is the sky? What is beyond? Ancient people asked that question and they built whole cosmologies around the answer. They described a firmament, a vault, a dome, a boundary between the inhabited world below and a divine realm above it. The Bible describes it in Genesis: a firmament separating the waters below from the waters above, a structure that made the boundary. NASA describes the universe as roughly 93 billion light years across with no boundary, no firmament, no dough, and no waters thumb. And Jack Parsons spent his entire life trying to punch through something with rockets, with ritual, with a complete, unwavering conviction that boundary between what we can know and what we is actually real, that could be preached. He never quite said which direction he was actually pointing, though. What the Bible actually says about the affirmament, what civilizations uh from Egypt to Babylon to ancient Israel understood about the structure of the heavens that NASA tells us today is just empty space. And I want you to hold Jack Parsons when you think of all those things in your mind when we get there. Because Parsons, he was a working scientist, a chemist, a man who understood physics better than just anyone alive in his moment. He believed that there was something above the sky that rockets were not going to be able to reach. He believed that on the night he founded the JPL, he still believed it in the morning he died in that lab. And I'm telling you, he was asking the right question. And I'm telling you that the question, what is above, what is the sky, what is beyond the boundary is the question this whole series is about. Okay, time killers. I've got a question for you. The first one is Have you ever heard of Jack Parsons before tonight? Because if the answer is no, honestly, you're like most Americans, and I want you to know that. So, you know, just tell me whether you knew who he was or not. And the second one, I want you to really think through. Parsons believed in rocketry and the occult. Those are two halves of the same project he was working on. Two ways of trying to reach the sky beyond. Do you believe there's something beyond the physical sky? Something that science can't reach? The answer is your own. So send me your time killer file to just killing time podchemist at gmail.com and let me know your thoughts. Yes. So again it was Halloween night, 1936, in a dry canyon in Pasadena, a rocket test, a portal, depending upon who you ask. And a young man genuinely believed the universe had a boundary that he meant to breach. He spent his days inventing the technology to punch through the sky in his nights, performing rituals designed to reach whatever lay beneath the surface of those things. Last words. But I'm not finished yet. Jack Parsons is not finished. His rockets are still flying, his laboratory is still operating, and his question is still answered unanswered. What is a buff? I'm Elizabeth Stanton. This has been Just Killing Time. Thank you for killing time with me tonight. And Jack Parsons lives.

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Alexa, what is a chemtrail? Chemtrails. Trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.