On June 17, 1952, a boom rocked Pasadena, Calif., an explosion at a coach house on the old Cruikshank estate, a plot of land on Millionaires Row where a large manor once stood.
The interior of the house was torn apart by a science experiment gone wrong. Amid the debris were strewn-about pages covered in symbols such as pentagrams and text written in unfamiliar languages. On the floor was the body of a man, in a pool of blood, whose face was half-ripped off and body shattered.
The man was 37-year-old John “Jack” Whiteside Parsons: the father of modern rocketry.
Without Parsons, Neil Armstrong may have never set foot on the moon, and American military power might be a fraction of what it is today. But Parsons’ global significance was overshadowed by a juicier pastime — he was a leader of a black-magic sex cult, of which Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard was once a member.
Parsons is the subject of a new CBS All Access series starring Jack Reynor called “Strange Angel.” It’s based on the 2006 book of the same name by George Pendle. The author, who’s also a journalist, unexpectedly stumbled upon Parsons while doing research in 2002.
“I was doing [a story] on a guy called Kenneth Anger, an avant-garde filmmaker,” Pendle told The Post. “And there was a footnote [in a biography] which said, ‘Marjorie Cameron, an actress, had been married to an eccentric rocket scientist, Jack Parsons, who had interest in the occult.’ And I was just like, ‘Tell me more!’ ”
There wasn’t much more available, so Pendle had to dig. He discovered that Parsons was one of the founders of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, at Caltech, where the first rocket experiments were conducted in 1936. But as Pendle’s curiosity about Parsons grew, so did his roadblocks. More than 70 years later, Parsons’ involvement was still a sore subject for the JPL.
“When I tried to interview people [there], they were just not interested,” Pendle said, adding that the general consensus was, “He’s not the sort of person we want to talk about.”
But a librarian at the JPL named John Bluth had been quietly exhuming moldy old papers belonging to the innovator that were being used to fill cracks in walls. Combing through the information, Pendle found a man of many contradictions — the creator of a whole new science who believed that rocketry could be a boon to mankind just as strongly as he felt he could summon mystical beings to Earth using explosions and magical rituals.
“What better forefather to have than this guy who was a crazed genius?” Pendle said.
As a kid in Pasadena, Parsons was obsessed with traveling to the moon, and he devoured Jules Verne novels. That curiosity extended into a love of explosives. The 12-year-old budding chemist would scrape the black powder from fireworks and pack it tightly into casings to fashion rudimentary rockets.
It was also around this time he first dabbled in the occult — by attempting to contact the devil in his bedroom.
Scientology’s whole structure is based on this cult that Parsons was part of.
- George Pendle
His bizarre passions worried his mother, Ruth, whose wealthy family made its fortune in the manufacturing business, so Parsons was sent off to San Diego’s Brown Military Academy for Boys to straighten him out. The plan didn’t work.
“He used to blow up toilets in the whole damn place,” Jeanne Forman, the wife of one of Parsons’ childhood friends, told Pendle.
He enrolled at Pasadena Junior College in 1933 hoping to study chemistry and physics, but the Whiteside family money had dwindled precipitously, and he was forced to drop out. He was accepted at Stanford, but that, too, was out of his price range. Parsons, who wasn’t very good at math, never earned more than a high-school diploma.
But he went on to meet like-minded friends, and in 1936 they managed to convince Caltech, a Pasadena academic institution, to let them use their facilities, but not funding, to “study, create and fly” rockets. The young men had impressed Theodore von Karman, director of GALCIT (Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology), with their boldness and determination. On campus, the group swiftly became known as the “Suicide Squad,” because the pals narrowly escaped death during several experiments. All this happened when Parsons was just 23.
Thus, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, first called the GALCIT Rocket Research Group, was born. It was a major achievement for a field whose practitioners were once labeled “crackpots” during a congressional hearing, and mentioned in the same breath as alchemists and magicians — like Aleister Crowley.
It was Crowley, an outlandish English society figure who preached a blend of magic, sex and spirituality, who attracted Parsons to the world of the occult.
Ordo Templi Orientis, a religious secret society led by Crowley, “offered very similar things rocketry does,” said Pendle. “Expanding one’s arena, pushing mankind to a greater level, of leaving the Earth for a new metaphysical world, just as rocketry said you could leave the Earth for new planets. And I think for him, there were really close parallels between occultism and rocketry.”
Parsons attended one of Crowley’s OTO masses, led by “magicians,” in LA in 1939, and became enamored with the odd leader’s beliefs in hidden dimensions and the religion’s unique sexual freedom. Participants were encouraged to swap partners — three decades before the sexual revolution.
Two years later, Parsons and his wife, Helen, were members of the OTO. The group was a strange blend of actors, opera singers, scientists, German expats and others who subscribed to Crowley’s teachings — particularly the no-strings-attached canoodling.
While Helen was on a trip, Parsons began an affair with her half-sister, Sara “Betty” Northrup. This infuriated Helen, despite the freewheeling teachings of the OTO. Crowley called marriage “a detestable institution,” and Parsons used that rationale to explain his unquenchable sexual desires. Eventually, Helen began her own affair with Wilfred Smith, the head of Agape Lodge, the group’s California chapter. She later divorced Parsons and married Smith.
In 1943, Crowley, who wanted Smith to step down, declared Smith “a god,” ordering him to tattoo “666” on his forehead, abandon Agape Lodge and wander the desert making no contact with OTO members. Parsons was installed as Agape’s new leader.
At this point, Parsons was at his peak: He had convinced the government that rocketry could be useful in wartime and formed a successful business called Aerojet. In 1943, the US Army ordered 2,000 rockets from the company.
It was not to last. A year later, Parsons was removed from the JPL and Aerojet for his associations with the lodge, which had relocated from LA to Pasadena, and had drawn scrutiny for its unusual practices. His work with rocketry wasn’t over, but it would never again be on so grand a scale.
Around that time, Hubbard, then a science-fiction writer, showed up and entranced the OTO members with his extraordinary charisma, wit and impossible tales. Parsons was taken with Hubbard, writing: “He is a gentleman. Red hair, green eyes, honest and intelligent and we have become great friends.”
But that changed when Hubbard seduced Betty, Parsons’ girlfriend. Soon, the two became an item and Parsons was overcome, for the first time, with jealous rage. Hubbard ran off with Betty, taking with him not just Parsons’ squeeze, but a lucrative idea.
“Parsons showed Hubbard a way — a kind of format for forming a religion,” said Pendle. “Crowley came up with this kind of structure of a mystical society. A hierarchy where you move your way up, and each time you move up a level, you find out more, but you have to pay to move up those levels. And so, I feel like Scientology’s whole structure is based on this cult that Parsons was part of.”
With World War II at an end, and unable to devote himself to his beloved rocket research, Parsons took solace in an increasingly outer form of magic — blending voodoo and witchcraft. Some OTO members believed he was using spells to try and summon a demon to kill Hubbard. In reality, he was trying to conjure a being to replace Betty.
His rituals often involved pentagrams, obscure scripture and masturbation, and would last more than two hours while Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto played in the background.
It might have worked. His future wife, Marjorie Cameron, arrived at the lodge in 1946. She was insatiably curious about the group and its mad-scientist leader. The pair went into Parsons’ room, where they performed “sex magick rituals” and barely emerged for two weeks. They were married in less than a year.
But things became dire for Parsons. In 1951, while he was working for Hughes Aircraft Co., the FBI revoked his security clearance because of his associations with possible Communists. They began an investigation into his “subversive” behavior. Making rockets for the government is impossible without some access to classified information. Parsons eventually regained clearance, but was later accused of espionage for taking documents from Hughes, and again was investigated by the FBI. He was found not guilty, but his science career was over.
Once a titan of his field, Parsons spent his final days working for the Special Effects Corp., making small explosives for films. That’s what he was doing on June 17, 1952, when, some have speculated, a chemical slipped out of his hand and sparked the explosion that took his life.
“It’s a tragedy,” said Pendle. “But it’s strangely fitting that the very thing which he loved killed him.”
There was no funeral for Parsons. His mother killed herself with an overdose of pills just hours after hearing of her son’s death, causing a tabloid frenzy. And the scientist’s reputation deteriorated into obscurity until Pendle wrote his book. The writer hopes the new TV show will help continue to salvage the reputation of a complicated, but hugely impactful man.
“I really hope that his science and occultism will be brought out of the shadows,” Pendle said. “That he’ll be seen as this fascinating American figure that pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, created a whole new science, discovered his own path and lived the life he wanted to lead.”