January 9, 2024 • 63 mins
Jack Parsons was a rocket engineer and rocket propulsion researcher responsible for astonishing breakthroughs in his field. However, Parsons had a double life -- a private passion for the occult that led him to eventually join Aleister Crowley's new Thelemite religion, attempt the Babalon Working and hobknob with L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Tune in to learn more about the rocket scientist and real-life wizard Jack Parsons.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh Man, Folks, in a world of conspiracy, there are
all kinds of names. It's easy to miss some of them,
but one name you should definitely remember is a guy
called Jack Parsons, a literal rocket scientist and a fascinating,
fascinating person. I still read about this guy. Actually, I
(00:23):
think there's something more to the story. But who was he?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Well, he was a rocket scientist, as you said, but
he hit some interesting associates and friends and people you
would hang out with and let's say, do very specific things.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Right, Yeah, besties with Alistair Crowley, who you may ever
heard of. Kind of a big deal in that occultic space.
But there's a lot of parts about this guy's story,
Jack Parsons story, that you probably aren't familiar with, And
if you haven't heard this episode, it's a good time
to dig in.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
So here we go with sex Hoults in rocket Science,
the Jack Parsons story, from UFOs to psychic powers and
government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can
turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want
you to know.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt and
they call me Ben.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
We are joined with our super producer Paul Decktt. Most importantly,
you are you, You are here, and that makes this
stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Today we bring you two worlds that will smash together,
the world of science, rocketry, physics, and the occult, the mysterious,
the the void.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Absolutely and that sounds maybe like a little bit of hyperbole,
but it's that's absolutely true. Today's episode centers on something
that the three of us find fascinating and we hope
you find it fascinating too. It's a little known cover
up that was quite successful for decades. It occurs in
(02:18):
the United States, and it does, as you said, Matt,
combine the bleeding edge of science with the hidden dare
we say occulted heart of the dark arts?
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yes? And how different are they really? We'll get into
that too. The exploration of mankind's abilities, that's really what
both of those pursuits are. What can we achieve either
with our hands or through our mind and through some
other plane that may be spiritual?
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Right, And this also calls to mind the old sci
fi quotation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
And there you have it. That is the end that
encapsulates this episode.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yes, let's start at the beginning. Marvel white Side Parsons.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, that's not a comic book character.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
It's his real name. Isn't that a great name?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
It is.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Marvel Whiteside Parsons is born on October two, nineteen fourteen,
in Los Angeles, California.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, he's also known as Jack. That's what he becomes
known as.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yes, Yes, And from his early childhood days, Jack has
an abiding interest in rocketry. At this point in the
early twentieth century, rocketry is still seen very much as
a science fiction thing.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah, that's where it exists in the pages of fiction,
of drawings of what a rocket could.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Be like, right, people landing on various lunar shores, weird
space rocks, and meeting you.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Know, martians, perhaps.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Martians, Yeah, some sort of some sort of alien that
functions as a stand in for whatever ideology the author dislikes. Yep,
there's a lot of There was a lot of communism
in space at the time. Gotta love allegory, Yeah, especially
when it's naked allegory. Yeah, you know what I mean.
But Jack swallows the stuff hook line and sinker. He
(04:22):
loves it, loves it, and I think a lot of
us can understand that feeling. Right. In nineteen twenty eight,
Jack and his friend, a guy named Ed Foreman, start
experimenting with rockets on an amateur level. Matt, have you
ever done this when you were a kid? Did you
ever make and launch those model rockets?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, and that's about the right time. When he was fourteen,
he was doing this. When I was in middle school
to high school, my friend Scott and I would spend
a lot of time in the backyard experimenting with chemicals
and with cardboard tubes actually, which is something that Jack
also did.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Hey, Paul, what about you? Were you a rocketman a
rocket boy? So conspiracy realists, fellow listeners, our super producer
Paul has asked us to relay to.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
You because he won't record his own voice.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Because he couldn't get him on MIC. He asked us
to relate to you that he, like many of us,
as a child, bought the model rocket kits, experimented with
them in the backyard, and noted there was an element
of danger to it.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, there's like there's an explosion that happens, and then
this thing goes up into the air really high, and
then usually at least in my experience, blows up to
some extent.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
And Jack Parsons to let the badger out of the bag. Here.
He is from a wealthy family.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
A very wealthy family, a very well.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
To do family, and he gets some leeway experimenting with
these rockets, something a lot of kids can maybe afford
to do, And even if they can afford to do it,
not many of them have the ingenuity, perhaps yeah, to
do this. So his parents' backyard is filled with craters
(06:12):
very soon after he begins experimenting with stuff, and his
neighborhood is littered with flaming bits of paper and scorched
cardboard tubes.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, and this is a year before the Great Depression hits,
by the way, in nineteen twenty eight. So everybody's living
the high life shooting off rockets in their backyard. Well,
at least Jack is right, right.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
And as Parsons and Foremen go to high school, they
become captivated with how ingenious is this? They become captivated
with the idea of creating a solid fuel rocket engine.
And this concept at the time is widely considered poppycock, nonsense.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
It can't happen. Why would you study that right now?
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Yes, what are you a poon? Yes, you know what
I mean?
Speaker 2 (07:02):
And to get on the liquid stuff.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
And if God meant rockets to travel to space, wouldn't
God have put them there already?
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (07:17):
One are those things. Yeah, but Parsons also as a kid,
has long, meandering teenage conversations. I'm sure we can all
identify with some of with those situations, like when you're
when you're a teenager, you often get involved in these
epic marathon conversations. You hang up, no, you hang up?
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Right, Yeah, So who is who is Parsons talking to?
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Uh, he's he's talking to someone who was born two
years before him, who was also a fairly young man
at the time, a man named Werner von Brown, Magnus
Maximilian von Brown. There's there's a lot more names in there. Yeah,
you might remember this fella. So he has kind of
become a name on this show. We talk about him
(08:04):
quite often. He's the former Nazi scientist who helped to
develop the V two rocket for the Nazi Party, and
then he was secretly brought over to the US via
that Operation paper Clip that we speak about, where over
sixteen hundred scientists were brought to the United States and
then you know, he went on to develop the Saturn
five heavy lift vehicle that was used in the Apollo
(08:25):
programs that took us to the Moon, as well as
the original rockets that started the United States space program.
And there's like, there's a whole other host of things
that he did for this country and for rocketry in general.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah, it's a little bit of an eye opener for
anybody who just started listening to our show to learn
that the NASA institution, as we understand it, would not
be capable of the feats it is capable of, yeah,
without Nazi engineering and ingenuity.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Yeah. Yeah, And again at this point, he's just a
young guy.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Yeah, and I feel, you know, I feel weird say
Nazi ingenuity. We do have to point out Operation paper
Clip was a genuine conspiracy, yeah, and cover up that occurred.
A lot of the American public did not know about
it and would not learn about it for some time.
But many of those scientists were not necessarily like, they
(09:27):
were not ideological Nazis.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
No, they're the greatest minds in their fields.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah, and they some of them were only there because
they couldn't get out of Germany before things went south.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Certainly.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
So that's this is all this all stuff that neither
Parsons nor von Braun know about at this time. They're
just two rocket nerds.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, just talking on the phone.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
And as he said, Matt, the Great Depression hits here
in the US. We usually think of the Great Depression
just in terms of its effect on this country, but
the Great Depression has consequences that touch the entire globe. Right,
very few people, accept arguably the people responsible for the
(10:14):
situation escape unscathed in most countries. The Great Depression starts
in nineteen twenty nine, lasts until the late nineteen thirties,
and because of this, Parsons family is not elite enough
to survive the situation. So instead of becoming increasingly aristocratic,
(10:37):
they lose a ton of money. And this prevents him
from completing his higher education at Pasadena Junior College and
Stanford University, and he ultimately drops out.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah. Then in a moment of I don't know, I
guess this was just opportunity fortune. In nineteen thirty three,
our gentleman here, Jack Parsons, and his friend Ed Foreman,
they approach another man named Frank Molina, and he at
this point as a graduate student at Caltech California Technical Institute,
(11:11):
and they ask for his help for his expertise because
he's already kind of working in these fields, like, how
can you help us with rocket research that we want
to do that we're so passionate about.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Right, And luckily for them, Frank is a pretty open
minded guy. He says, you know what, yeah, I'll team
up with you.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Yeah, that's yeah, okay, sure, let's do this. Guys. They
must have come to him with something very compelling.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Well, also his field of study concerned rocketry.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, well exactly. But again for them to team up together,
the other two gentlemen, Ed and Jack must have had
some pretty good schematics or some math and or science
worked out to have Molina go yes, let's do this, right.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Yes, So it's a good partnership for these guys because
Frank is bringing scientific rigor, yes, academic discipline, and these
rocket heads can I say that, sure they're rocket heeads,
rocket heeads. These other rocket heeads are bringing a lot
of practical knowledge and experience and know enough about rocketry
(12:20):
to ask intriguing questions. And intriguing questions are the best
way to talk to a grad student anywhere. Yeah, grad
students in the audience, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Yeah, these unanswered questions that perhaps we could be the
ones to discover the.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Truth, and especially when they're niche, because you know, you
have to imagine at this time, it's safe to say
that Frank Molina is probably in need of someone to
talk with about rocketry.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, because we're we're in the days, you know, the
mid nineteen thirties, everything up until this point, Like we
kind of mentioned earlier, rock Tree, the whole idea of
jet propulsion, these kinds of things. It's just it's something
of the future. It's something that you read in a
book somewhere.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Right, it's a work of fiction. Nowadays, in twenty eighteen,
as we record this, the phrase rocket scientist is almost
always used as a synonym for genius, usually in a
sarcastic way. Right. Yeah, but back in the nineteen thirties,
pre World War Two, most people did as as you said, Matt,
I think rocket Tree was ridiculous, eccentric and impractical. You know, pseudoscience,
(13:32):
a sort of a hunt for fool's gold in the
sky exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, it would be like if you went out to
a bar right now, and someone introduced themselves to you
as a as like a teleportation specialist or something to
that effect or research. I research teleportation.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
I'm a teleportationist.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Yeah, you're like, oh, okay, well see you later.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Right, what do you really do?
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Well?
Speaker 1 (14:00):
I attempt to teleport things instantaneously through space and time.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Yeah, at this point it's mostly on paper, but we're
getting there.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
We've done some very interesting things with very small bits
of matter.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
I could totally see that that's an interesting person, maybe
at a bar as a stranger, but that's not That
doesn't sound like it's a real thing.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Yeah, you're probably not looking to get into any kind
of business venture with that person at this point.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
So these guys are not being taken seriously. Jack Parsons,
head foreman Frank Molina are not being taken seriously. They
form a group called gal Sit Rocket Research Group. They're
ridiculed by professors and learned individuals of cow Tech. They
even get a.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Nickname, Yeah, the Suicide Squad. Not the DC Universe IP,
but yeah, the Suicide Squad. It's really just due to
the reckless nature of what they do, how they perform
their experiments, these things explode.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Which is mainly Then you go ahead and say it's
mainly Parsons. Yeah, he's like, are you familiar with The Stand?
Speaker 2 (15:17):
I am?
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Okay. So in the adaptation of The Stand in the
novel itself, which is better than the adaptation, no knock
on the adaptation. But in the novel The Stand, there
is a character called the garbage Man. Yes, trash can Man,
that's it, that's his name, and trash can Man without
spoiling the story.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
And without just being wonderful to say.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Yes, yes, trash can Man has a weird fascination with
blowing things up. And there's a little bit of trash
can Man and Jack Parsons and Parsons and trash can Man,
you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Oh, totally.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
And so it's no surprise that the people who are
used to more buttoned up conservative experiments and methodologies, it's
no surprise that they think this guy is just a
somewhere between a cartoon and a terrorist.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, Well, it's not like he conducts
himself in any of those manners that you're speaking. These
guys are would probably consider themselves and acted like like
hot Shots Part two. But no, for real, like like
walking around campus like you doing rocket scientist lady, and
(16:35):
also smoke a little pot, probably.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Drink talk about socialism. Yeah, because they hung admal up.
But they it wasn't just hanging out to build and
talk about rockets. They did have social lives and they
spent that time together and they partied.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
There goes the suicide Squad. But by the way, uh,
I know you, you and Noel had mentioned this before,
and specifically I think you had mentioned this. But Castle
Rock just because we got into a Stephen King, Yeah,
novel there Castle Rock. I'm finally starting to watch and
I could not I could not recommend it more.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
How far are you?
Speaker 2 (17:11):
I'm only three episodes in, but I'm just loving all
the little bits and pieces I keep picking up from
the universe.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
I'm very interested to hear what you think about the
end because the whole season's out now.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Oh it is. Oh that makes me happy.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
I think ten episodes. Okay, So without saying anymore, okay,
I don't know how to direct this in a way
that won't spoil it. Where you Matt, how about this, folks?
I would love to hear what you think about this. Matt.
I know you would too, but we don't want to
spoil it for Matt. So if you have strong opinions,
(17:46):
I would love to hear them. I'm a little conflicted
about the end. You can write to me directly so
that it doesn't go to.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Write to conspiracy. Just put a conspiracy at how stuff
works dot com. Just put a little note in there
that says at the top, Matt, don't read this.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
There you go, great, great, Uh, yeah, I want to
hear what people think, because it did get renewed.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Yes, so.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Trash can man aside suicide squad aside parsons isn't completely
counterculture in nineteen thirty five. Well, in nineteen thirty four
he meets a woman at a church dance incredibly common
way to meet people at the time, and in nineteen
thirty five he marries her.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yes, miss Helen Northrop, who is the sister, the older
sister I believe of Sarah Northrop Hollister. And that's going
to come into play a little later. So we're not
going to expound on that. If you know what that is,
you can just put a little a little feather in
your cap.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
And if you're the sort of person who cheats at
crosswords trivia.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Don't do it.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
You will have an opportunity because we're going to take
a break for a word from our sponsor. I know
a lot of people dealt with a moral or ethical quandary,
some of you to borrow the line from D and D.
(19:22):
We're very lawful, good about it. I will not cheat.
I will wait to hear the story.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah, did you eat that one marshmallow now? Or did
you wait until after the ad break to get two marshmallows?
Speaker 1 (19:35):
M hmm, yeah right? Or did you decide I do
what I want because doing what I want should be
the entirety of the law.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Oh, back to well Man. So many easter d eggs already? Alright,
I keep going.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Back to Parsons. So they continue, despite the ridicule, to
make multiple breakthroughs in the study and manufacture of engines,
but more importantly rocket fuel.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah, the fuel for those engines. Exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
They actually receive the first government funding for a rocket
try research group, at least in the US.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
And you know it's this isn't something that our archfriendemissism,
our nemesis slash friend, Jonathan Strickland, he would call it
a princely sum but you know what they do get
where they get mad one grand, they get a stack,
(20:34):
they get a single stack. But man, that is a
nice stack at the time.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Right, especially in the thirties, right. And here's the thing.
They pretty much they have to spend about twenty five
percent of it, about a quarter of this thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Good chunk of the budget, repairing.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Damage to buildings on the Caltech campus.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Damage you say, they've just they've.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Been blowing stuff up left. So although they're and also
they asked for a lot more than one thousand dollars, Yes,
they got one thousand dollars. So they have to spend
a bunch of money repairing the campus and the damage
they've done to it. Eventually they have to move from
the campus entirely due to the danger post by the explosives,
(21:20):
and they relocate to the Arroyo Seco Canyon. They're conducting
experiments and someone's watching them.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Oh yeah, who is that group? Oh yeah, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation is watching them, the FBI. Yeah. I
think generally when you're making explosives or things that can explode,
that's you're gonna get on a list.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
And they did, they did get on a list. Also
a side note, maybe maybe we should come up with
some alternate some alternate interpretations of the FBI acronym.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Oh okay, the fully bundled.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Institute, that's not okay, the fun Boys International, that's it.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
That's it, fun Boys International with a Z on the boys.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Oh my gosh, all right, let us know if that's
a good T shirt idea. And Boys International because we
could get the we could get the FBI loco.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Yes. And one of the reasons they're very much interested
in these gentlemen and their penchant to blow things up
is because they're interested in extremists of any sort that
might want to get with these guys and or just
blow things up on the site where they're now located
in that Arroyo Siico canyon.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Right right, because they are literally just in a couple
of rundown shets iron shets the security is not very high.
So in addition to being aware of these these rocketheads
political leanings and the ideologies with which the identify, the
FBI is also aware of the fact that someone the
(23:06):
political extremists would be what we call a terrorist today,
that someone could ride up their in force, maybe with
some firearms and take the explosives, take these chemicals, maybe
even take this technology and launch a rocket at a bank,
at a city, you know, or.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Just blow it up from the ground level, or just blow.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
It up, that's right, without even bothering to deliver the rocket.
So this is when the FBI first has their eye
on Parsons and Co. In nineteen forty one, the Suicide
Squad founds the Aerojet Engineering Corporation to sell rockets to
the military. The scientists who had previously derided and pooped
(23:50):
and pissed on Parsons work now are lining up around
the block across the country to join this booming industry
because Uncle Sam has officially opened up his wallet. Yeah,
and Uncle Sam's wallet is big.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
It is that No, it's so big. It's so big. Bit,
You've got a lot of money, and Uncle Sam doesn't
even really know how much is in that wallet because
it's kind of infinite, and sometimes that money just disappears
in the level of trillions and weird little black budgets.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Or just a palette of let's say a billion dollars
can disappear in recent memory and barely make a mention
in the news.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
It gets on a plane. I didn't see it get off?
Did you see it get off? I don't know where
it is.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
It's gone to buy a plane? Doctor?
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Who knows?
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Who knows?
Speaker 2 (24:38):
It's not like we weigh these things.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Right, Let's get back to the real issues. Okay, something
social and insignificant, perfect man, we has? Has this show
made us cynical? No? Has this show made you cynical?
If you're listening, let us know.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
We've had a few people right in about that.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
That's true, that's true. And you and I have been
in situations where the void stared back, Yeah, you know,
or the abyss stared back.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
I feel like it kind of always is staring. Just
do you choose to see it or not?
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah, me and the me and the abyss have been
making some smoldering eye contact recently.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Made some smoldering eye contact with a dude earlier today.
I won't bore you with those details.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Oh yeah, I was gonna spring that on you and
ask you to mention that story at the end. Maybe
we can do that at the end. Would you be
okay with that?
Speaker 2 (25:29):
That's perfect?
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Okay, And that's this is a Paul and Matt story.
So we'll have to wait till the end. We're we're
building up expectations. Man, we better deliver ours.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Let's let's do it just like these guys. Let's deliver
a payload.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
There we go. Now again, Paul refuses to be recorded
on this show because he's worried about his future political career.
But he did purposely turn on the mic and chuckle it.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
He did. He gave me a little George W. Bush
chuckle it was but that was great.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Deliver the payload. Okay, So the industry is booming right
in nineteen forty three. There's this need for advanced research
into rockets, and it's growing exponentially because other countries are
researching this. And just as the US is concerned about
the technological innovations occurring in rival countries today, the US
(26:28):
is concerned back then of possible technological gaps.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah, because we have you know, you always have to
be ahead of your enemy. The whole point of that
military thing.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
And as we've discussed in previous episodes, nation states don't
have friends, they have interests.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yes, So Parsons Co founds this thing called the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory that you've probably heard of before, the JPL
JPL yeah, and they went with this term jet propulsion
at the suggestion of one of the suicide squad members,
the third man, Molina, And the whole idea was to
(27:06):
avoid the stigma associated with that idea or term rocket rocketry.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Right, rocket just as a phrase. It turned a lot
of people off.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
We're just interested in this jet propulsion. It sounds nice too, isn't.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
You like jets? You know, propellants.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Yeah, it's perfect.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
It's just those two things together.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
It's just the means of transportation.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
They're pregaming before they go into a meeting, and they're
just coaching themselves not to say the R word. Right. So,
Parsons and his associates, without going too deep into this,
they play a crucial role in the development of rocketry
technology excuse us jet propulsion as World War Two shifts
(27:47):
into high gear, and the contributions they make also result
in financial windfalls. Yeah, for all three men, but Parsons
and particular because he is the mad jet fuel Genius,
which is also a cool nickname. So we could spend
(28:09):
our entire episode focusing just on his contributions to the
field of rocketry, as well as his obsession with blowing
things up. In general. But there is more to this story.
You see, Jack Parsons had another obsession, one that was
even stranger than rocket science.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
And we're going to go down that rabbit hole after
another quick word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Years where it gets crazy. In addition to being obsessed
with rockets and rocketry, Jack Parsons was obsessed with the occult.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Yes, the a coat.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Yeah really, these are what our colleague Lare and Vogelbaum
will call actual facts. Yeah right. He is not only
obsessed with the occult, but there is a strange concordance,
a strange confluence and concurrence of events here because as
(29:11):
his career as one of the well actually the world's
best rocket scientists.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Jet propulsion scientists.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Oh yeah, thank you, Matt, Sorry guys, as his reputation
grows there, his association with the occult also grows and deepens,
and he moves up the rank in these esoteric organizations,
one in particular.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
Yes, the OTO. So in the late nineteen thirties, he
Parsons begins going to these nightly meetings at the Los
Angeles chapter of the Ordo Temple Orientis or the OTO,
and it's an occult society and it was. It was
formed by a gentleman that you also may know from
(29:58):
this show. Wow, all the hits in the episode, all
the goodwins, mister Alister Crowley, can we.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Get a sinister sound cue for that? Paul? There we go?
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Oh, yes, quite appropriate for the Master of the dark arts.
So at this time, mister Crowley, notice I say Crowley
and not Crowley. We learn from our mistakes. Yeah, people,
at this time, he's known as the wickedest man in
the world. He's got quite the reputation.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah. He's an English occultist, ceremonial magician, con man, all
these things, scam artists, yeah, novelists.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Does weird things in old ancient Egyptian.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Temples, Yeah, and an explorer. He is a British fellow
born in eighteen seventy five. And as you said, he
is the founder of maybe he would say, the discoverer,
the prophet of the Oto. And when Parsons is first
(31:10):
going to these things, he's a young guy, he's in
his early twenties and he's seen something that he would
he would have never seen before. Right, he is watching
magical rituals being performed and this affects him deeply. But
(31:34):
it's easy to say that someone sees a ritual and
it affects them deeply. That's what religion is about. These
rituals are much more graphic than the typical rituals you
would encounter in most organized religions.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Yeah, because we're talking about sex magic. Ultimately, we're talking
about chaos magic rituals that a lot of time involve
blood and other bodily fluids and acts of a carnal nature.
Let's say, well, and this is you know, he gets
married in nineteen thirty five, and then now we're in
(32:11):
the late thirties at this time as he's really kind
of coming into his own as a scientist in this field.
It's right, like you said at the same time, this
is before World War Two, this is before a lot
of the huge advancements in his career as he's beginning
to go to these meetings. But he is like fairly
newly married, and I don't know, I can't imagine what
(32:36):
that relationship was like behind the closed doors, what it
was like knowing that your husband is out going to
these things.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Well, every relationship is a foreign country, that's correct. Each
interaction we have with any other person, especially romantic interaction
obeys its own laws and rituals.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah, for sure. And well and the fact that the
whole sex, magic, blood magic thing is not the only
thing going on.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Oh yeah. There's also a ton of spoken word essentially invocations,
ritualistic chanting, and so on. And there's there's drinking. There's
more than a dollop of hedonism as they're conducting these rituals.
There's also the consumption of various things like this mason
(33:24):
gross to some people, but cakes made of menstrual blood,
for instance.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
That mason gross to people.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
I don't want to denegrate someone's religion just because it's
not my thing, because.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
At a thing. Is that a thing outside of this group?
Menstrual cakes? I do not know menstrual cakes. I don't know, Matt, Okay,
I guess it's kind of like the placenta eating the
placenta after birth, which has become a thing and is
quite popular.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Yeah. I look, I'm not in the OTO, understood, I'll
be I'll be explicit about that, okay, all right, but
I'm more or I'm not in the I am not
currently in the OTO, okay, but they're still around today. Yes,
and shout out to any of you who are currently
members of the organization or have been affiliated with it,
we'd love to we'd love to hear more about this stuff.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Yeah, if you want to explain menstrual cakes, I am
all yours and.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
You seem very you're fascinated with this.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
I guess that's what you could call it.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
I'm concerned. I wish you could see this face mass making. Yeah, yeah,
maybe you're perplexed. Maybe that's a better word. This group
is practicing Crowley's philosophy of Flemo, which is at base
kind of I read it described as religious libertarianism, yeah,
(34:45):
which I thought was a pretty pretty neat way to
encapsulate it. This is the origin of do what thou
wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Remember that callback callack?
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Yeah right, we brought it back. Parsons is hooked. He
is very attract to this idea of radical individualism, of nonconformity,
and the focus upon fulfilling one's self your own goals.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Yes, and if anyone else is fulfilled because you are fulfilled,
then so be it. But ultimately it's about you.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Right, and sort of admitting the open secret that most
people practice, which is, you know, we're all the main
characters of our own stories.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Right, there's nothing you can do about it, nothing you
could do about it. Go ahead and try and break
that ego, right, maybe you can.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of like you can.
You could be a cult leader, right and make other
people echoes of yourself anyway, that maybe that's Some people
who are in the OTO will feel that that is
unfair too. Crowley, sure, but he is a master manipulator,
(35:55):
and this organization does have a lot of manipulative people
in it. Will see how that comes into play. Parsons
is especially intrigued by Croley's beliefs that sex can be
an intrinsic component of magical rituals, that it's not just
a necessary but filthy act, as some of the puritanical
(36:19):
forces of the time would have him believe. He's he
likes this idea of sexism means of increasing epiphany.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Yeah, reaching some higher plane that you couldn't reach just
by walking around or thinking about something or writing. You know,
there's a physical act that can take you somewhere else
and back to his buddies, which, by the way, just
before we get there, a physical act that can take
you somewhere else. Think about within the context of jet propulsion, right,
(36:50):
Oh yeah, what he's trying to create. The technology that
he is creating in tandem with this is a physical
way to get to somewhere else, either mood or other places.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
You know, yeah, planets, and the idea that your thoughts
can have tangible material results upon the world around you
through the force of your will alone. Oto is all
about the will, philemic magic or whatever.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
And in the end, you know, it's just physical forces involved.
In one case you've got explosions and the other you've
just got friction.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
You got explosions. We're a family show. But yes, that
is a fantastic point and there's something alchemical about that, right,
transformative and Parsons friends back to the suicide squad. They
think this is really weird stuff. Yeah, they're not on board.
(37:42):
They're like, hey, man, we're here for the rockets. We
already ate.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Yeah, I mean we hear you, we hear you, just
not right.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Now, right right right? You used to be cool. Let's
be work friends. But they think it's you know, they
I think it's weird, but there's still genuinely friends. At first,
they just feel like this is a harmless obsession. This
is just Parsons being Parsons, at least at.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
First, Yes, and then he just keeps going double down.
Oh my gosh. So let's talk about Thelma, this religion
that was founded. It is a religion, and it was
founded in nineteen oh four. So you know, at the
time when Parsons joins up, it's like thirty years old
something around. They are well thirty five.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
I guess it's pretty young.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Yeah, it's a young religion. It's as old as I am.
If there is a religion that is old as I
currently am, as we're recording this podcast, it's very young. However,
like most occult practices, this gentleman Alistair Crowley, he argued
that it's based on these ancient, ancient beliefs, these esoteric
(38:54):
thoughts that have occurred far far before he was born,
far before anyone that is on earth was born, that
are forgotten a lot of times, or hidden, or just.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Universal law that exists that is bigger than our common
understanding of the world in which we live. Yes, exactly,
higher planes of consciousness, stuff of the ooze. There we go. Yeah, primordial.
The word the lima itself is a form of ancient
Greek for will. You know it's in like determination, not some.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Guys, not William.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Yeah, wouldn't that be funny though?
Speaker 2 (39:30):
It's just will It's.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
William will William magic. Thelemic magic, spelled with a K
is a system of physical, mental, and spiritual exercises designed
to quote cause change to occur in conformity with will.
This is going to be familiar to a lot of
people who have read things like The Secret Yeah, or
(39:55):
Mind over Matter.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
And type stuff, manifestation beliefs.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Right, can believe it, you can achieve it. So this
differs from some of that pop psychology self help stuff
because it has specific instructions meant to meant to accomplish
certain tasks. So Croley adds that K to magic because
(40:24):
he wants to differentiate it from stage magic or illusion.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Yeah. And it's not just switching out the sea, it's
adding a K to the full word message.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that's really important to Croley, Yeah yeah,
and to people who practice this today. Many of the
rituals in this discipline are a synthesis of older rituals,
stuff from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and
then practices from Eastern belief systems. They captured Croley's attention.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Well, and that's ye. Crowley was a member of their
medic Order of the Golden Down for a while and
he borrowed a lot of that stuff.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
Right, right, and I think was pretty open about it.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
But like this is my thing now, my thing now.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
Yes, And there are some examples of this kind of stuff.
There's a ritual in the Library of Things that he's written.
There's a ritual meant to invoke a holy guardian angel
that you could have a conversation with, and rituals called
libra semic and there's a gnostic mass it's a eucharistic
(41:30):
kind of ritual. And then of course there's sexual gnosis,
the idea that through physical acts with oneself or another
person or people, it's possible to achieve a higher plane
of consciousness, which for skeptics is going to sound a
lot like a way to convince people to sleep with you.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Yeah. Well, and it's also a it's an interesting little
litmus test when you're going through and trying to sell
someone on this religion. You can tell if it's someone
you want in your group or not as soon as
you get there, and you start discussing how perhaps we'll
use the word masturbation of you and your friends here
(42:19):
that we're all hanging out with as I'm talking to
you about this, that's one of our major rituals. And
a certain percentage of those people are going to turn around,
walk away, and then a few others are going to go,
let me hear a little more about this. And those
are the people that you want in your group.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
And there's probably something. It's probably not something where they
just throw people to the deep end. It escalates over
a period of time, right, sure, But.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
A little peak behind the curtain gets you your converts.
I'm thinking strategically in cult formation and gathering the masses.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Right right right, the idea of being special or privy
to this hidden knowledge. But for people who do believe this,
do practice it, and do feel that they have attained
the realizations for which they yearned or the results that
they desired, this stuff is legitimate. So we're presenting both
(43:16):
sides of the belief. We're despite not being in the OTO,
we're not making a judgment call about it, as these
people are all in theory, consenting adults in full possession
of their wits.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
As long as you're not hurting anyone, like say, branding
them with a cattle iron, then we're okay.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Right, do what thou wilt, you know what I mean?
And many It's important to mention that many practitioners of
this form of magic do seek material, tangible results, money, power, love,
a breakthrough in rocketry, for example. But it's not a
mandatory thing. Sometimes it's just a higher realization. Crowley believed
(44:03):
himself to be a prophet, as we said, and Parsons
at this time is relating the concepts of magic that
he's exploring to the ideas of quantum physics in itself.
Quantum physics is a relatively new concept at this time.
They're both in their own way young religions.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
Yeah, oh wow, that's a really great point of quantum physics.
As a young religion, I can totally see that.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
I mean, when you get to the edges of physics,
it's really just the smartest people in the room throwing
their opinions at each other. Yeah, you know what I mean,
which I think is a beautiful, beautiful point for our
species to be at. So we mentioned that Parsons makes
a lot of money. He encounters significant amounts of cash,
(44:50):
as the US government continues to buy his groups liquid
jet fuel first and jet engines designed to run on
this fuel.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
This allows him to start holding his own elaborate oto
rituals at his house, which becomes known as wait for it,
the Parsonage.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Oh, that's pretty great. It's okay, the parsonage. Well, hey, hey,
we ben so let's say I've got really nothing to do.
It's a Friday night. I hear about this new group.
I'm gonna go hang out at the parsonage here. It's
a good place to be. What am I going to
get into while I'm over there?
Speaker 1 (45:32):
I'm so glad you asked, Pat. You're gonna get it.
If you can get in the door, you're gonna get
into a crazy time. These rituals are very not safe
for work as we call it today, and they are
wild for the standards of the time. There are people
shouting chants during massive orgies, and on multiple occasions, the
(45:54):
Parsons is taking steps to attempt to conceive the Antichrist
the moonchild, Wow, straight from the invisibles. Yes, while he
is at the forefront of rocket technology, he is attempting
to be at the forefront of antichrist advocacy.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
Wow. And then he he finishes up, has the I'm
assuming the help clean up afterwards, because you don't want
to do that on your own, I'm assuming. And he's wealthy,
as we said. Then you, you know, put on your
lap coat and head on into work on Monday.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
I mean we've all been in situations like that, right, sure. Yeah,
good fences make good coworker relationships. Ok, that's probably That's
probably what his buddies are saying to each other.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
Yeah, like, look, man, he's getting that stuff. But man,
he's really got some great ideas.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
But when he's here, he's here.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
So in nineteen forty one, things get even stranger. Parsons
engages in an ongoing sexual relationship with his wife's sister,
who is seventeen years old at the time. Oh, underage person.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
Yeah, And here's the problem. The group he's a part of,
the ORTO the OTO. It's kind of encouraged because it's
something that he wants and that it's all that matters.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
And it seems consensual to everyone involved, so they don't
call the cops or anything.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
And well there's a flip side of the coin too, right,
Parsons wife is also in a sexual relationship with one
of these other most senior members of the OTO.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
So there's this very open attitude towards sex and very
fluid relationships. Right, yeah, monogamy, that's something for the squares.
The Pasadena police, meanwhile, have been receiving repeated complaints about
unspeakable acts occurring at the parsonage. Imagine forties, you're one
(48:01):
of the neighbors. You live in a nice neighborhood. You're
probably wealthy, as you don't you're probably well off if
you're living next door to Jack Parsons, and then you're
hearing these crazy chants, these moans of sexual ecstasy, and
then maybe some ritualistic screaming. You don't know what's going on.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
It is funny that at in every instance they begin
as a simple noise complaint and the officers show up,
and then they find themselves in a oh, very different situation.
But there's nothing you do privacy of your own home.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Just keep it down, please, I guess you're right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Well that's true. I don't know what the blue laws
were at the time where he is, like, if he
could actually be arrested for doing something in his home.
I sawtomy in the like.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Yeah, or maybe consumption of an illegal substance.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
The counter culture is like the Pasadena police Force, well
aware of Parsons' activity, and in a way he becomes
a precursor to the common thing that we have here
in the US today on the West Coast, the billionaire
bro tech guru Tony Stark esque genius. Right, he makes
(49:15):
massive amounts of money from his innovations. He spends massive
amounts of money partying, pursuing alternative lifestyles. And we can
compare it today to tech gurus go microdosing at burning Man.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Sure, and also come out with incredible technology, or at
least own the companies that come out with incredible technology.
Speaker 1 (49:40):
Right, And there's this sense that they are somewhat above
the law of the common peasant.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
Note quick cut in your head, folks to that picture
of Elon Musk on the Joe Rogan Show smoking a
massive blunt and you know his employees can't do that
because there would be problems with their security clearances for SpaceX.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
Yeah, I really didn't think that was real when I
just saw the thumbnail from YouTube.
Speaker 1 (50:07):
That nice photoshop.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Yeah, that's funny. Oh wow, I mean, I it's marijuana.
It's fine. It's legal there.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
It's very close to being legal across the US, you
know what I mean. That's just the money got too good.
That's what happens. The morality this is a different episode,
but the the racism disguised as morality, that was the
original reason for the criminalization of marijuana. Just it doesn't
(50:42):
match up to money.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
Yeah. That being said, we encourage you not to do drugs,
everyone listening, unless you want to. And that's all the
whole of the law.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
So there, Hey there were oh man, no comment, no comment.
So the counter culture aware of this. This guy is
an La Musk a Tony Stark. Soon, another figure of
California's underground scene joins the activities, a fellow named el
Ron Hubbard. Oh that's true, Pauk. We got to sound
(51:14):
cue great man. Who's l Ron Hubbard?
Speaker 2 (51:23):
El Ron Hubbard is the father of a little thing
called dionetics. It's a philosophy that he created, that he summoned,
and he would later change his mind and create the
concepts that would become a full on religion scientology.
Speaker 1 (51:42):
A religion for tax purposes.
Speaker 2 (51:45):
Maybe I don't know, I don't know. L Ron Hubbard
was thinking.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
Well, he joins the gang. He joins the parsonage in
nineteen forty five, and around this time Fumboys International remaws
their interest in parson and both because they're concerned about
his unorthodox private life, his open practice of the dark arts,
and still his political inclinations. These may lead him to
(52:12):
be considered untrustworthy or sympathetic to communist forces.
Speaker 2 (52:15):
Yeah. Yeah, and in the worst he would be the
worst kind of mole, the person who is at the
top creating technology that will then be used. You know,
he's not some he's not a rocket scientist employed by
this thing. He is the rocket scientist running septualizing thing.
Speaker 1 (52:31):
Yeah, he's at the point of expertise where his best
guess qualifies as leading scientific theory.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
Yeah, you don't want iron Man as an enemy.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Right there you go, that's a good quote. Yeah, you
don't want iron Man as an enemy. And also, a
someone who switched or became a spy or double agent
or a mole for ideological purposes is much more difficult
to control than someone who does it because they're in
or they're being blackmailed, for instance, right, yea much more dangerous. Also,
(53:07):
so they're like, Okay, the guy's happy. I don't think
he's hurt anybody, and we need rockets. At this time,
there's some personal problems that he encounters. The person that
he's infatuated with Sarah.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
That's the sister of Helen, his wife.
Speaker 1 (53:24):
She becomes infatuated with l Ron mister Steel your girl Hubbard.
Speaker 2 (53:29):
Oh yep, that's him.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
And this makes Parsons insanely upset and he starts delving
into He's moving up in the ranks of the OTO,
by the way, on the time, getting into leadership positions.
He develops a different focus. He has a deeper interest
in witchcraft and the darker side of magic. He's fascinated
by Poltergeist, by spiritual apparitions.
Speaker 2 (53:51):
Oh man. Feeling really tortured at this time.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
And being always an innovator, right, he decides to try
and create a new lover, to create his own lover
and elemental.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
Wow like like a like a Golam lover.
Speaker 1 (54:10):
Yeah, like like a thought form. He wants to manifest.
Got you a perfect lover? Uh? Sarah runs off with
l Ron Hubbard, and so Parsons takes part in these
very unusual rituals that are supposed to help him manifest
his thought into the world.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
Yeah. He uh, he plants his seed with magic tablets.
Yep ah, and he does it to the sound of music,
not the not the musical. Yeah, but there's well and well,
this is something that's at the basis of most chaos
or some chaos magic, where where seed is planted on
(54:51):
a piece of paper that has writing and or a
symbol on it that is then burned a lot of
times like a roun.
Speaker 1 (54:58):
Yeah. And and shortly after this, Parsons meets a woman
named Marjorie Cameron, and he feels as if this is
the elemental force that he has invoked somehow conjured. She
becomes his muse, and he sees his scientific and spiritual
pursuits as increasingly intertwined, you know what I mean. Yeah,
(55:18):
he sees himself as of the line of great thinkers
like Isaac Newton who totally totally may breakthroughs in physics,
but then also totally believed in alchemy and practiced.
Speaker 2 (55:32):
It and thought that perhaps the science was part of
the alchemy.
Speaker 1 (55:35):
Right. Yeah, So Parsons is the same way rocketry is
magic and magic is rocketry. For example, when he works
on his experiments in the desert, he recites a pagan
poem to pan. You can imagine how weird this sounds
to the g men. Yeah, who are listening in the
fun boys are not You're not having fun.
Speaker 2 (55:55):
This is not as fun as It's not as fun.
Speaker 1 (55:58):
As the boys thought. Persons eventually runs into financial trouble
after he gets involved with bad investments associated with al
Ron Hubbard. This is a pattern Hubbert goes on to repeat.
Speaker 2 (56:12):
By the way, is this the whole yacht thing? Mm
hmmmm the yacht boys.
Speaker 1 (56:17):
Yeah, Hubbard had convinced him to take money and travel
to Miami and buy three yachts.
Speaker 2 (56:23):
Oh, three yachts.
Speaker 1 (56:24):
He has a yacht thing. El Ron Hubbard has a yacht.
Speaker 2 (56:26):
At a time. That's that's that's a lot, okay.
Speaker 1 (56:32):
Many of the academics that are suspected of being Communist
sympathizers are blacklisted as the Cold War sets in post
World War two, and this means a Parsons and a
lot of his colleagues lose their security clearances, and without
their security clearances, they are out of jobs.
Speaker 2 (56:50):
Oh wow, Yeah, that is that is a sweeping change
that starts coming through around that time, and then I
can imagine someone who's associated with something like the Oto
and order the those old communist beliefs that he even
maybe had just back in the day that the Fun
Boys know about. I can imagine him just getting xed
off that list. Right.
Speaker 1 (57:10):
So he found himself having to earn money as a
manual laborer, a hospital orderly, a car mechanic. He was
pushed out of science, so he dove even deeper into
the occult. He ended up working for the film industry
making explosives, creating pyrotechnics, and just before he took a
trip to Mexico, or just before he was going to
(57:33):
leave on a tripa planned in nineteen fifty two, he
received a large order of explosives for a movie and
while getting everything together, there was an explosion involving mercury.
Parsons suffered fatal wounds and he died at the age
of thirty seven.
Speaker 2 (57:49):
This was only thirty seven. He's done all of this,
that's crazy.
Speaker 1 (57:53):
He his death was ruled an accident. His friends suspected
it was a state sponsored conspiracy to remove this dangerous
mad genius from the fold. And that's where it stops.
Parsons controversial private life led him to be wiped from
NASA history and that magic stuff aside, esoteric orders aside.
(58:17):
That's another true cover up, and for a long time
his role was not acknowledged. According to biographer George Pendall,
Parsons was written out of the history books, his role
in rocketry discredited for decades simply because his supernatural beliefs
did not fit into the other supernatural beliefs that were
more dominant at the time.
Speaker 2 (58:39):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (58:40):
I mean, that's an interesting way of looking at it.
Speaker 2 (58:42):
It really is, It really is, and I can identify
with that holy mackerel. It makes you wonder about today
the people at the bleeding edge of science, what are
their closed door religious beliefs White biohackers and stuff. Yeah, biohackers.
I mean even like maybe you're Elin Musk and some
(59:03):
of those people out there right now that can essentially
do anything they want to do at any time. What
are their spiritual beliefs? And is there anything that's hidden
enough that we won't know about it? Oh?
Speaker 1 (59:16):
I see, Yeah, that's a fascinating question. Anything you know
what you had the opportunity to ask, oh, someone about
this earlier today? You and Paul both we didn't forget folks.
Speaker 2 (59:33):
I missed that opportunity.
Speaker 1 (59:34):
There is a story here, and it's a story that
I really enjoyed hearing. I know that we've been going long,
but can can you give us just like the broad Strokes,
the brad Strokes.
Speaker 2 (59:46):
Okay, you're the here're the broad Strokes. Right before we
started recording this episode, I walked in. I was heading
in a little bit early so I could continue.
Speaker 1 (59:57):
Researching here, and I was running late.
Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
Ben was not quite in the office yet, and our
president of our network, his name's Connell Burn. He was
showing somebody around the office and I'm gathering up my
computer and my books and everything, and I'm heading in.
And you know, I don't think about that because our
president walks around with important people all the time. I
don't know who walks around with Anyway, Conall says, hey, Matt,
(01:00:24):
this is my friend Brad and I you know, I
just turn and put my hand out and it's just
is Bradley Cooper standing there staring at me with those
beautiful blue eyes. My goodness, they're striking. But anyway, here's
the thing, and I hope, I hope he wouldn't be
upset to mention this. But we begin chatting and we
(01:00:47):
get into some conversations about the Apollo missions, and then
he wants to talk a little bit about September eleventh,
and then we want to talk about a little bit
about these other conspiracies. And the guy I think would
fit right in with us. And perhaps that's just because
he's such an enigmatic person that he will engage you
(01:01:09):
in anything you want to talk about. But I did
not bring up either of those subjects. So yeah, there
you go. So there you go.
Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
How Matt and Paul met Bradley Cooper.
Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
Yes, and Paul met Bradley a little later over by
the water cooler, and they had a very nice conversation
about his new movie coming out by the way, that
he is his directorial debut and he's working with Lady
Gagats called a Star Is Born. There you go, plug
for Bradley Cooper.
Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
You're welcome, Brad and thank you everyone for tuning in.
We want to know where you land on this. I
think now the story of Jack Parsons and his legacy
is a little more apparent in the public sphere. It's
more common knowledge. But do you feel that as a society,
(01:02:02):
our norms limit our ability to innovate technologically, you know
what I mean, Like like the US government, and this
may apply. This surely applies to other governments as well.
The US government in the past had a very difficult
time hiring quality hackers because of their affinity for drugs.
(01:02:24):
And you know, they were brilliant minds, brilliant computer people,
but they didn't want to stop smoking weed or stop
you know, doing whatever drug they do. And they have
to be clean to pass the security clearance.
Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
Yeah, that's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
So eventually they, I believe in many cases, eventually the
US government just folded and made exceptions to the rule.
Do you think those exceptions should exist? Let us know.
You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, check out
our community page. Here's where it gets crazy, where there
are tons of fascinating conversations in the mean game is
(01:03:02):
a double plus good.
Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
And that's the end of this classic episode. If you
have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can
get into contact with us in a number of different ways.
One of the best is to give us a call.
Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you
don't want to do that, you can send us a
good old fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (01:03:23):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Oh Man, Folks, in a world of conspiracy, there are
all kinds of names. It's easy to miss some of them,
but one name you should definitely remember is a guy
called Jack Parsons, a literal rocket scientist and a fascinating,
fascinating person. I still read about this guy. Actually, I
(00:23):
think there's something more to the story. But who was he?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Well, he was a rocket scientist, as you said, but
he hit some interesting associates and friends and people you
would hang out with and let's say, do very specific things.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Right, Yeah, besties with Alistair Crowley, who you may ever
heard of. Kind of a big deal in that occultic space.
But there's a lot of parts about this guy's story,
Jack Parsons story, that you probably aren't familiar with, And
if you haven't heard this episode, it's a good time
to dig in.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
So here we go with sex Hoults in rocket Science,
the Jack Parsons story, from UFOs to psychic powers and
government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can
turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want
you to know.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt and
they call me Ben.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
We are joined with our super producer Paul Decktt. Most importantly,
you are you, You are here, and that makes this
stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Today we bring you two worlds that will smash together,
the world of science, rocketry, physics, and the occult, the mysterious,
the the void.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Absolutely and that sounds maybe like a little bit of hyperbole,
but it's that's absolutely true. Today's episode centers on something
that the three of us find fascinating and we hope
you find it fascinating too. It's a little known cover
up that was quite successful for decades. It occurs in
(02:18):
the United States, and it does, as you said, Matt,
combine the bleeding edge of science with the hidden dare
we say occulted heart of the dark arts?
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yes? And how different are they really? We'll get into
that too. The exploration of mankind's abilities, that's really what
both of those pursuits are. What can we achieve either
with our hands or through our mind and through some
other plane that may be spiritual?
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Right, And this also calls to mind the old sci
fi quotation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
And there you have it. That is the end that
encapsulates this episode.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yes, let's start at the beginning. Marvel white Side Parsons.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, that's not a comic book character.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
It's his real name. Isn't that a great name?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
It is.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Marvel Whiteside Parsons is born on October two, nineteen fourteen,
in Los Angeles, California.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, he's also known as Jack. That's what he becomes
known as.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yes, Yes, And from his early childhood days, Jack has
an abiding interest in rocketry. At this point in the
early twentieth century, rocketry is still seen very much as
a science fiction thing.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah, that's where it exists in the pages of fiction,
of drawings of what a rocket could.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Be like, right, people landing on various lunar shores, weird
space rocks, and meeting you.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Know, martians, perhaps.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Martians, Yeah, some sort of some sort of alien that
functions as a stand in for whatever ideology the author dislikes. Yep,
there's a lot of There was a lot of communism
in space at the time. Gotta love allegory, Yeah, especially
when it's naked allegory. Yeah, you know what I mean.
But Jack swallows the stuff hook line and sinker. He
(04:22):
loves it, loves it, and I think a lot of
us can understand that feeling. Right. In nineteen twenty eight,
Jack and his friend, a guy named Ed Foreman, start
experimenting with rockets on an amateur level. Matt, have you
ever done this when you were a kid? Did you
ever make and launch those model rockets?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, and that's about the right time. When he was fourteen,
he was doing this. When I was in middle school
to high school, my friend Scott and I would spend
a lot of time in the backyard experimenting with chemicals
and with cardboard tubes actually, which is something that Jack
also did.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Hey, Paul, what about you? Were you a rocketman a
rocket boy? So conspiracy realists, fellow listeners, our super producer
Paul has asked us to relay to.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
You because he won't record his own voice.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Because he couldn't get him on MIC. He asked us
to relate to you that he, like many of us,
as a child, bought the model rocket kits, experimented with
them in the backyard, and noted there was an element
of danger to it.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, there's like there's an explosion that happens, and then
this thing goes up into the air really high, and
then usually at least in my experience, blows up to
some extent.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
And Jack Parsons to let the badger out of the bag. Here.
He is from a wealthy family.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
A very wealthy family, a very well.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
To do family, and he gets some leeway experimenting with
these rockets, something a lot of kids can maybe afford
to do, And even if they can afford to do it,
not many of them have the ingenuity, perhaps yeah, to
do this. So his parents' backyard is filled with craters
(06:12):
very soon after he begins experimenting with stuff, and his
neighborhood is littered with flaming bits of paper and scorched
cardboard tubes.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, and this is a year before the Great Depression hits,
by the way, in nineteen twenty eight. So everybody's living
the high life shooting off rockets in their backyard. Well,
at least Jack is right, right.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
And as Parsons and Foremen go to high school, they
become captivated with how ingenious is this? They become captivated
with the idea of creating a solid fuel rocket engine.
And this concept at the time is widely considered poppycock, nonsense.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
It can't happen. Why would you study that right now?
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Yes, what are you a poon? Yes, you know what
I mean?
Speaker 2 (07:02):
And to get on the liquid stuff.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
And if God meant rockets to travel to space, wouldn't
God have put them there already?
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (07:17):
One are those things. Yeah, but Parsons also as a kid,
has long, meandering teenage conversations. I'm sure we can all
identify with some of with those situations, like when you're
when you're a teenager, you often get involved in these
epic marathon conversations. You hang up, no, you hang up?
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Right, Yeah, So who is who is Parsons talking to?
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Uh, he's he's talking to someone who was born two
years before him, who was also a fairly young man
at the time, a man named Werner von Brown, Magnus
Maximilian von Brown. There's there's a lot more names in there. Yeah,
you might remember this fella. So he has kind of
become a name on this show. We talk about him
(08:04):
quite often. He's the former Nazi scientist who helped to
develop the V two rocket for the Nazi Party, and
then he was secretly brought over to the US via
that Operation paper Clip that we speak about, where over
sixteen hundred scientists were brought to the United States and
then you know, he went on to develop the Saturn
five heavy lift vehicle that was used in the Apollo
(08:25):
programs that took us to the Moon, as well as
the original rockets that started the United States space program.
And there's like, there's a whole other host of things
that he did for this country and for rocketry in general.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah, it's a little bit of an eye opener for
anybody who just started listening to our show to learn
that the NASA institution, as we understand it, would not
be capable of the feats it is capable of, yeah,
without Nazi engineering and ingenuity.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Yeah. Yeah, And again at this point, he's just a
young guy.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Yeah, and I feel, you know, I feel weird say
Nazi ingenuity. We do have to point out Operation paper
Clip was a genuine conspiracy, yeah, and cover up that occurred.
A lot of the American public did not know about
it and would not learn about it for some time.
But many of those scientists were not necessarily like, they
(09:27):
were not ideological Nazis.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
No, they're the greatest minds in their fields.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah, and they some of them were only there because
they couldn't get out of Germany before things went south.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Certainly.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
So that's this is all this all stuff that neither
Parsons nor von Braun know about at this time. They're
just two rocket nerds.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, just talking on the phone.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
And as he said, Matt, the Great Depression hits here
in the US. We usually think of the Great Depression
just in terms of its effect on this country, but
the Great Depression has consequences that touch the entire globe. Right,
very few people, accept arguably the people responsible for the
(10:14):
situation escape unscathed in most countries. The Great Depression starts
in nineteen twenty nine, lasts until the late nineteen thirties,
and because of this, Parsons family is not elite enough
to survive the situation. So instead of becoming increasingly aristocratic,
(10:37):
they lose a ton of money. And this prevents him
from completing his higher education at Pasadena Junior College and
Stanford University, and he ultimately drops out.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah. Then in a moment of I don't know, I
guess this was just opportunity fortune. In nineteen thirty three,
our gentleman here, Jack Parsons, and his friend Ed Foreman,
they approach another man named Frank Molina, and he at
this point as a graduate student at Caltech California Technical Institute,
(11:11):
and they ask for his help for his expertise because
he's already kind of working in these fields, like, how
can you help us with rocket research that we want
to do that we're so passionate about.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Right, And luckily for them, Frank is a pretty open
minded guy. He says, you know what, yeah, I'll team
up with you.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Yeah, that's yeah, okay, sure, let's do this. Guys. They
must have come to him with something very compelling.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Well, also his field of study concerned rocketry.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, well exactly. But again for them to team up together,
the other two gentlemen, Ed and Jack must have had
some pretty good schematics or some math and or science
worked out to have Molina go yes, let's do this, right.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Yes, So it's a good partnership for these guys because
Frank is bringing scientific rigor, yes, academic discipline, and these
rocket heads can I say that, sure they're rocket heeads,
rocket heeads. These other rocket heeads are bringing a lot
of practical knowledge and experience and know enough about rocketry
(12:20):
to ask intriguing questions. And intriguing questions are the best
way to talk to a grad student anywhere. Yeah, grad
students in the audience, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Yeah, these unanswered questions that perhaps we could be the
ones to discover the.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Truth, and especially when they're niche, because you know, you
have to imagine at this time, it's safe to say
that Frank Molina is probably in need of someone to
talk with about rocketry.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, because we're we're in the days, you know, the
mid nineteen thirties, everything up until this point, Like we
kind of mentioned earlier, rock Tree, the whole idea of
jet propulsion, these kinds of things. It's just it's something
of the future. It's something that you read in a
book somewhere.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Right, it's a work of fiction. Nowadays, in twenty eighteen,
as we record this, the phrase rocket scientist is almost
always used as a synonym for genius, usually in a
sarcastic way. Right. Yeah, but back in the nineteen thirties,
pre World War Two, most people did as as you said, Matt,
I think rocket Tree was ridiculous, eccentric and impractical. You know, pseudoscience,
(13:32):
a sort of a hunt for fool's gold in the
sky exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, it would be like if you went out to
a bar right now, and someone introduced themselves to you
as a as like a teleportation specialist or something to
that effect or research. I research teleportation.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
I'm a teleportationist.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Yeah, you're like, oh, okay, well see you later.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Right, what do you really do?
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Well?
Speaker 1 (14:00):
I attempt to teleport things instantaneously through space and time.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Yeah, at this point it's mostly on paper, but we're
getting there.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
We've done some very interesting things with very small bits
of matter.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
I could totally see that that's an interesting person, maybe
at a bar as a stranger, but that's not That
doesn't sound like it's a real thing.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Yeah, you're probably not looking to get into any kind
of business venture with that person at this point.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
So these guys are not being taken seriously. Jack Parsons,
head foreman Frank Molina are not being taken seriously. They
form a group called gal Sit Rocket Research Group. They're
ridiculed by professors and learned individuals of cow Tech. They
even get a.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Nickname, Yeah, the Suicide Squad. Not the DC Universe IP,
but yeah, the Suicide Squad. It's really just due to
the reckless nature of what they do, how they perform
their experiments, these things explode.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Which is mainly Then you go ahead and say it's
mainly Parsons. Yeah, he's like, are you familiar with The Stand?
Speaker 2 (15:17):
I am?
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Okay. So in the adaptation of The Stand in the
novel itself, which is better than the adaptation, no knock
on the adaptation. But in the novel The Stand, there
is a character called the garbage Man. Yes, trash can Man,
that's it, that's his name, and trash can Man without
spoiling the story.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
And without just being wonderful to say.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Yes, yes, trash can Man has a weird fascination with
blowing things up. And there's a little bit of trash
can Man and Jack Parsons and Parsons and trash can Man,
you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Oh, totally.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
And so it's no surprise that the people who are
used to more buttoned up conservative experiments and methodologies, it's
no surprise that they think this guy is just a
somewhere between a cartoon and a terrorist.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, Well, it's not like he conducts
himself in any of those manners that you're speaking. These
guys are would probably consider themselves and acted like like
hot Shots Part two. But no, for real, like like
walking around campus like you doing rocket scientist lady, and
(16:35):
also smoke a little pot, probably.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Drink talk about socialism. Yeah, because they hung admal up.
But they it wasn't just hanging out to build and
talk about rockets. They did have social lives and they
spent that time together and they partied.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
There goes the suicide Squad. But by the way, uh,
I know you, you and Noel had mentioned this before,
and specifically I think you had mentioned this. But Castle
Rock just because we got into a Stephen King, Yeah,
novel there Castle Rock. I'm finally starting to watch and
I could not I could not recommend it more.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
How far are you?
Speaker 2 (17:11):
I'm only three episodes in, but I'm just loving all
the little bits and pieces I keep picking up from
the universe.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
I'm very interested to hear what you think about the
end because the whole season's out now.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Oh it is. Oh that makes me happy.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
I think ten episodes. Okay, So without saying anymore, okay,
I don't know how to direct this in a way
that won't spoil it. Where you Matt, how about this, folks?
I would love to hear what you think about this. Matt.
I know you would too, but we don't want to
spoil it for Matt. So if you have strong opinions,
(17:46):
I would love to hear them. I'm a little conflicted
about the end. You can write to me directly so
that it doesn't go to.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Write to conspiracy. Just put a conspiracy at how stuff
works dot com. Just put a little note in there
that says at the top, Matt, don't read this.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
There you go, great, great, Uh, yeah, I want to
hear what people think, because it did get renewed.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Yes, so.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Trash can man aside suicide squad aside parsons isn't completely
counterculture in nineteen thirty five. Well, in nineteen thirty four
he meets a woman at a church dance incredibly common
way to meet people at the time, and in nineteen
thirty five he marries her.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yes, miss Helen Northrop, who is the sister, the older
sister I believe of Sarah Northrop Hollister. And that's going
to come into play a little later. So we're not
going to expound on that. If you know what that is,
you can just put a little a little feather in
your cap.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
And if you're the sort of person who cheats at
crosswords trivia.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Don't do it.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
You will have an opportunity because we're going to take
a break for a word from our sponsor. I know
a lot of people dealt with a moral or ethical quandary,
some of you to borrow the line from D and D.
(19:22):
We're very lawful, good about it. I will not cheat.
I will wait to hear the story.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah, did you eat that one marshmallow now? Or did
you wait until after the ad break to get two marshmallows?
Speaker 1 (19:35):
M hmm, yeah right? Or did you decide I do
what I want because doing what I want should be
the entirety of the law.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Oh, back to well Man. So many easter d eggs already? Alright,
I keep going.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Back to Parsons. So they continue, despite the ridicule, to
make multiple breakthroughs in the study and manufacture of engines,
but more importantly rocket fuel.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah, the fuel for those engines. Exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
They actually receive the first government funding for a rocket
try research group, at least in the US.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
And you know it's this isn't something that our archfriendemissism,
our nemesis slash friend, Jonathan Strickland, he would call it
a princely sum but you know what they do get
where they get mad one grand, they get a stack,
(20:34):
they get a single stack. But man, that is a
nice stack at the time.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Right, especially in the thirties, right. And here's the thing.
They pretty much they have to spend about twenty five
percent of it, about a quarter of this thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Good chunk of the budget, repairing.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Damage to buildings on the Caltech campus.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Damage you say, they've just they've.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Been blowing stuff up left. So although they're and also
they asked for a lot more than one thousand dollars, Yes,
they got one thousand dollars. So they have to spend
a bunch of money repairing the campus and the damage
they've done to it. Eventually they have to move from
the campus entirely due to the danger post by the explosives,
(21:20):
and they relocate to the Arroyo Seco Canyon. They're conducting
experiments and someone's watching them.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Oh yeah, who is that group? Oh yeah, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation is watching them, the FBI. Yeah. I
think generally when you're making explosives or things that can explode,
that's you're gonna get on a list.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
And they did, they did get on a list. Also
a side note, maybe maybe we should come up with
some alternate some alternate interpretations of the FBI acronym.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Oh okay, the fully bundled.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Institute, that's not okay, the fun Boys International, that's it.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
That's it, fun Boys International with a Z on the boys.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Oh my gosh, all right, let us know if that's
a good T shirt idea. And Boys International because we
could get the we could get the FBI loco.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Yes. And one of the reasons they're very much interested
in these gentlemen and their penchant to blow things up
is because they're interested in extremists of any sort that
might want to get with these guys and or just
blow things up on the site where they're now located
in that Arroyo Siico canyon.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Right right, because they are literally just in a couple
of rundown shets iron shets the security is not very high.
So in addition to being aware of these these rocketheads
political leanings and the ideologies with which the identify, the
FBI is also aware of the fact that someone the
(23:06):
political extremists would be what we call a terrorist today,
that someone could ride up their in force, maybe with
some firearms and take the explosives, take these chemicals, maybe
even take this technology and launch a rocket at a bank,
at a city, you know, or.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Just blow it up from the ground level, or just blow.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
It up, that's right, without even bothering to deliver the rocket.
So this is when the FBI first has their eye
on Parsons and Co. In nineteen forty one, the Suicide
Squad founds the Aerojet Engineering Corporation to sell rockets to
the military. The scientists who had previously derided and pooped
(23:50):
and pissed on Parsons work now are lining up around
the block across the country to join this booming industry
because Uncle Sam has officially opened up his wallet. Yeah,
and Uncle Sam's wallet is big.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
It is that No, it's so big. It's so big. Bit,
You've got a lot of money, and Uncle Sam doesn't
even really know how much is in that wallet because
it's kind of infinite, and sometimes that money just disappears
in the level of trillions and weird little black budgets.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Or just a palette of let's say a billion dollars
can disappear in recent memory and barely make a mention
in the news.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
It gets on a plane. I didn't see it get off?
Did you see it get off? I don't know where
it is.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
It's gone to buy a plane? Doctor?
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Who knows?
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Who knows?
Speaker 2 (24:38):
It's not like we weigh these things.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Right, Let's get back to the real issues. Okay, something
social and insignificant, perfect man, we has? Has this show
made us cynical? No? Has this show made you cynical?
If you're listening, let us know.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
We've had a few people right in about that.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
That's true, that's true. And you and I have been
in situations where the void stared back, Yeah, you know,
or the abyss stared back.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
I feel like it kind of always is staring. Just
do you choose to see it or not?
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah, me and the me and the abyss have been
making some smoldering eye contact recently.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Made some smoldering eye contact with a dude earlier today.
I won't bore you with those details.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Oh yeah, I was gonna spring that on you and
ask you to mention that story at the end. Maybe
we can do that at the end. Would you be
okay with that?
Speaker 2 (25:29):
That's perfect?
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Okay, And that's this is a Paul and Matt story.
So we'll have to wait till the end. We're we're
building up expectations. Man, we better deliver ours.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Let's let's do it just like these guys. Let's deliver
a payload.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
There we go. Now again, Paul refuses to be recorded
on this show because he's worried about his future political career.
But he did purposely turn on the mic and chuckle it.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
He did. He gave me a little George W. Bush
chuckle it was but that was great.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Deliver the payload. Okay, So the industry is booming right
in nineteen forty three. There's this need for advanced research
into rockets, and it's growing exponentially because other countries are
researching this. And just as the US is concerned about
the technological innovations occurring in rival countries today, the US
(26:28):
is concerned back then of possible technological gaps.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah, because we have you know, you always have to
be ahead of your enemy. The whole point of that
military thing.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
And as we've discussed in previous episodes, nation states don't
have friends, they have interests.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yes, So Parsons Co founds this thing called the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory that you've probably heard of before, the JPL
JPL yeah, and they went with this term jet propulsion
at the suggestion of one of the suicide squad members,
the third man, Molina, And the whole idea was to
(27:06):
avoid the stigma associated with that idea or term rocket rocketry.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Right, rocket just as a phrase. It turned a lot
of people off.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
We're just interested in this jet propulsion. It sounds nice too, isn't.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
You like jets? You know, propellants.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Yeah, it's perfect.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
It's just those two things together.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
It's just the means of transportation.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
They're pregaming before they go into a meeting, and they're
just coaching themselves not to say the R word. Right. So,
Parsons and his associates, without going too deep into this,
they play a crucial role in the development of rocketry
technology excuse us jet propulsion as World War Two shifts
(27:47):
into high gear, and the contributions they make also result
in financial windfalls. Yeah, for all three men, but Parsons
and particular because he is the mad jet fuel Genius,
which is also a cool nickname. So we could spend
(28:09):
our entire episode focusing just on his contributions to the
field of rocketry, as well as his obsession with blowing
things up. In general. But there is more to this story.
You see, Jack Parsons had another obsession, one that was
even stranger than rocket science.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
And we're going to go down that rabbit hole after
another quick word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Years where it gets crazy. In addition to being obsessed
with rockets and rocketry, Jack Parsons was obsessed with the occult.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Yes, the a coat.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Yeah really, these are what our colleague Lare and Vogelbaum
will call actual facts. Yeah right. He is not only
obsessed with the occult, but there is a strange concordance,
a strange confluence and concurrence of events here because as
(29:11):
his career as one of the well actually the world's
best rocket scientists.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Jet propulsion scientists.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Oh yeah, thank you, Matt, Sorry guys, as his reputation
grows there, his association with the occult also grows and deepens,
and he moves up the rank in these esoteric organizations,
one in particular.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
Yes, the OTO. So in the late nineteen thirties, he
Parsons begins going to these nightly meetings at the Los
Angeles chapter of the Ordo Temple Orientis or the OTO,
and it's an occult society and it was. It was
formed by a gentleman that you also may know from
(29:58):
this show. Wow, all the hits in the episode, all
the goodwins, mister Alister Crowley, can we.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Get a sinister sound cue for that? Paul? There we go?
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Oh, yes, quite appropriate for the Master of the dark arts.
So at this time, mister Crowley, notice I say Crowley
and not Crowley. We learn from our mistakes. Yeah, people,
at this time, he's known as the wickedest man in
the world. He's got quite the reputation.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah. He's an English occultist, ceremonial magician, con man, all
these things, scam artists, yeah, novelists.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Does weird things in old ancient Egyptian.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Temples, Yeah, and an explorer. He is a British fellow
born in eighteen seventy five. And as you said, he
is the founder of maybe he would say, the discoverer,
the prophet of the Oto. And when Parsons is first
(31:10):
going to these things, he's a young guy, he's in
his early twenties and he's seen something that he would
he would have never seen before. Right, he is watching
magical rituals being performed and this affects him deeply. But
(31:34):
it's easy to say that someone sees a ritual and
it affects them deeply. That's what religion is about. These
rituals are much more graphic than the typical rituals you
would encounter in most organized religions.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Yeah, because we're talking about sex magic. Ultimately, we're talking
about chaos magic rituals that a lot of time involve
blood and other bodily fluids and acts of a carnal nature.
Let's say, well, and this is you know, he gets
married in nineteen thirty five, and then now we're in
(32:11):
the late thirties at this time as he's really kind
of coming into his own as a scientist in this field.
It's right, like you said at the same time, this
is before World War Two, this is before a lot
of the huge advancements in his career as he's beginning
to go to these meetings. But he is like fairly
newly married, and I don't know, I can't imagine what
(32:36):
that relationship was like behind the closed doors, what it
was like knowing that your husband is out going to
these things.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Well, every relationship is a foreign country, that's correct. Each
interaction we have with any other person, especially romantic interaction
obeys its own laws and rituals.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah, for sure. And well and the fact that the
whole sex, magic, blood magic thing is not the only
thing going on.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Oh yeah. There's also a ton of spoken word essentially invocations,
ritualistic chanting, and so on. And there's there's drinking. There's
more than a dollop of hedonism as they're conducting these rituals.
There's also the consumption of various things like this mason
(33:24):
gross to some people, but cakes made of menstrual blood,
for instance.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
That mason gross to people.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
I don't want to denegrate someone's religion just because it's
not my thing, because.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
At a thing. Is that a thing outside of this group?
Menstrual cakes? I do not know menstrual cakes. I don't know, Matt, Okay,
I guess it's kind of like the placenta eating the
placenta after birth, which has become a thing and is
quite popular.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Yeah. I look, I'm not in the OTO, understood, I'll
be I'll be explicit about that, okay, all right, but
I'm more or I'm not in the I am not
currently in the OTO, okay, but they're still around today. Yes,
and shout out to any of you who are currently
members of the organization or have been affiliated with it,
we'd love to we'd love to hear more about this stuff.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Yeah, if you want to explain menstrual cakes, I am
all yours and.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
You seem very you're fascinated with this.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
I guess that's what you could call it.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
I'm concerned. I wish you could see this face mass making. Yeah, yeah,
maybe you're perplexed. Maybe that's a better word. This group
is practicing Crowley's philosophy of Flemo, which is at base
kind of I read it described as religious libertarianism, yeah,
(34:45):
which I thought was a pretty pretty neat way to
encapsulate it. This is the origin of do what thou
wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Remember that callback callack?
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Yeah right, we brought it back. Parsons is hooked. He
is very attract to this idea of radical individualism, of nonconformity,
and the focus upon fulfilling one's self your own goals.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Yes, and if anyone else is fulfilled because you are fulfilled,
then so be it. But ultimately it's about you.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Right, and sort of admitting the open secret that most
people practice, which is, you know, we're all the main
characters of our own stories.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Right, there's nothing you can do about it, nothing you
could do about it. Go ahead and try and break
that ego, right, maybe you can.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of like you can.
You could be a cult leader, right and make other
people echoes of yourself anyway, that maybe that's Some people
who are in the OTO will feel that that is
unfair too. Crowley, sure, but he is a master manipulator,
(35:55):
and this organization does have a lot of manipulative people
in it. Will see how that comes into play. Parsons
is especially intrigued by Croley's beliefs that sex can be
an intrinsic component of magical rituals, that it's not just
a necessary but filthy act, as some of the puritanical
(36:19):
forces of the time would have him believe. He's he
likes this idea of sexism means of increasing epiphany.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Yeah, reaching some higher plane that you couldn't reach just
by walking around or thinking about something or writing. You know,
there's a physical act that can take you somewhere else
and back to his buddies, which, by the way, just
before we get there, a physical act that can take
you somewhere else. Think about within the context of jet propulsion, right,
(36:50):
Oh yeah, what he's trying to create. The technology that
he is creating in tandem with this is a physical
way to get to somewhere else, either mood or other places.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
You know, yeah, planets, and the idea that your thoughts
can have tangible material results upon the world around you
through the force of your will alone. Oto is all
about the will, philemic magic or whatever.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
And in the end, you know, it's just physical forces involved.
In one case you've got explosions and the other you've
just got friction.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
You got explosions. We're a family show. But yes, that
is a fantastic point and there's something alchemical about that, right,
transformative and Parsons friends back to the suicide squad. They
think this is really weird stuff. Yeah, they're not on board.
(37:42):
They're like, hey, man, we're here for the rockets. We
already ate.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Yeah, I mean we hear you, we hear you, just
not right.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Now, right right right? You used to be cool. Let's
be work friends. But they think it's you know, they
I think it's weird, but there's still genuinely friends. At first,
they just feel like this is a harmless obsession. This
is just Parsons being Parsons, at least at.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
First, Yes, and then he just keeps going double down.
Oh my gosh. So let's talk about Thelma, this religion
that was founded. It is a religion, and it was
founded in nineteen oh four. So you know, at the
time when Parsons joins up, it's like thirty years old
something around. They are well thirty five.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
I guess it's pretty young.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Yeah, it's a young religion. It's as old as I am.
If there is a religion that is old as I
currently am, as we're recording this podcast, it's very young. However,
like most occult practices, this gentleman Alistair Crowley, he argued
that it's based on these ancient, ancient beliefs, these esoteric
(38:54):
thoughts that have occurred far far before he was born,
far before anyone that is on earth was born, that
are forgotten a lot of times, or hidden, or just.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Universal law that exists that is bigger than our common
understanding of the world in which we live. Yes, exactly,
higher planes of consciousness, stuff of the ooze. There we go. Yeah, primordial.
The word the lima itself is a form of ancient
Greek for will. You know it's in like determination, not some.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Guys, not William.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Yeah, wouldn't that be funny though?
Speaker 2 (39:30):
It's just will It's.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
William will William magic. Thelemic magic, spelled with a K
is a system of physical, mental, and spiritual exercises designed
to quote cause change to occur in conformity with will.
This is going to be familiar to a lot of
people who have read things like The Secret Yeah, or
(39:55):
Mind over Matter.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
And type stuff, manifestation beliefs.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Right, can believe it, you can achieve it. So this
differs from some of that pop psychology self help stuff
because it has specific instructions meant to meant to accomplish
certain tasks. So Croley adds that K to magic because
(40:24):
he wants to differentiate it from stage magic or illusion.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Yeah. And it's not just switching out the sea, it's
adding a K to the full word message.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that's really important to Croley, Yeah yeah,
and to people who practice this today. Many of the
rituals in this discipline are a synthesis of older rituals,
stuff from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and
then practices from Eastern belief systems. They captured Croley's attention.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Well, and that's ye. Crowley was a member of their
medic Order of the Golden Down for a while and
he borrowed a lot of that stuff.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
Right, right, and I think was pretty open about it.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
But like this is my thing now, my thing now.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
Yes, And there are some examples of this kind of stuff.
There's a ritual in the Library of Things that he's written.
There's a ritual meant to invoke a holy guardian angel
that you could have a conversation with, and rituals called
libra semic and there's a gnostic mass it's a eucharistic
(41:30):
kind of ritual. And then of course there's sexual gnosis,
the idea that through physical acts with oneself or another
person or people, it's possible to achieve a higher plane
of consciousness, which for skeptics is going to sound a
lot like a way to convince people to sleep with you.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Yeah. Well, and it's also a it's an interesting little
litmus test when you're going through and trying to sell
someone on this religion. You can tell if it's someone
you want in your group or not as soon as
you get there, and you start discussing how perhaps we'll
use the word masturbation of you and your friends here
(42:19):
that we're all hanging out with as I'm talking to
you about this, that's one of our major rituals. And
a certain percentage of those people are going to turn around,
walk away, and then a few others are going to go,
let me hear a little more about this. And those
are the people that you want in your group.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
And there's probably something. It's probably not something where they
just throw people to the deep end. It escalates over
a period of time, right, sure, But.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
A little peak behind the curtain gets you your converts.
I'm thinking strategically in cult formation and gathering the masses.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Right right right, the idea of being special or privy
to this hidden knowledge. But for people who do believe this,
do practice it, and do feel that they have attained
the realizations for which they yearned or the results that
they desired, this stuff is legitimate. So we're presenting both
(43:16):
sides of the belief. We're despite not being in the OTO,
we're not making a judgment call about it, as these
people are all in theory, consenting adults in full possession
of their wits.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
As long as you're not hurting anyone, like say, branding
them with a cattle iron, then we're okay.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Right, do what thou wilt, you know what I mean?
And many It's important to mention that many practitioners of
this form of magic do seek material, tangible results, money, power, love,
a breakthrough in rocketry, for example. But it's not a
mandatory thing. Sometimes it's just a higher realization. Crowley believed
(44:03):
himself to be a prophet, as we said, and Parsons
at this time is relating the concepts of magic that
he's exploring to the ideas of quantum physics in itself.
Quantum physics is a relatively new concept at this time.
They're both in their own way young religions.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
Yeah, oh wow, that's a really great point of quantum physics.
As a young religion, I can totally see that.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
I mean, when you get to the edges of physics,
it's really just the smartest people in the room throwing
their opinions at each other. Yeah, you know what I mean,
which I think is a beautiful, beautiful point for our
species to be at. So we mentioned that Parsons makes
a lot of money. He encounters significant amounts of cash,
(44:50):
as the US government continues to buy his groups liquid
jet fuel first and jet engines designed to run on
this fuel.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
This allows him to start holding his own elaborate oto
rituals at his house, which becomes known as wait for it,
the Parsonage.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Oh, that's pretty great. It's okay, the parsonage. Well, hey, hey,
we ben so let's say I've got really nothing to do.
It's a Friday night. I hear about this new group.
I'm gonna go hang out at the parsonage here. It's
a good place to be. What am I going to
get into while I'm over there?
Speaker 1 (45:32):
I'm so glad you asked, Pat. You're gonna get it.
If you can get in the door, you're gonna get
into a crazy time. These rituals are very not safe
for work as we call it today, and they are
wild for the standards of the time. There are people
shouting chants during massive orgies, and on multiple occasions, the
(45:54):
Parsons is taking steps to attempt to conceive the Antichrist
the moonchild, Wow, straight from the invisibles. Yes, while he
is at the forefront of rocket technology, he is attempting
to be at the forefront of antichrist advocacy.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
Wow. And then he he finishes up, has the I'm
assuming the help clean up afterwards, because you don't want
to do that on your own, I'm assuming. And he's wealthy,
as we said. Then you, you know, put on your
lap coat and head on into work on Monday.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
I mean we've all been in situations like that, right, sure. Yeah,
good fences make good coworker relationships. Ok, that's probably That's
probably what his buddies are saying to each other.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
Yeah, like, look, man, he's getting that stuff. But man,
he's really got some great ideas.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
But when he's here, he's here.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
So in nineteen forty one, things get even stranger. Parsons
engages in an ongoing sexual relationship with his wife's sister,
who is seventeen years old at the time. Oh, underage person.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
Yeah, And here's the problem. The group he's a part of,
the ORTO the OTO. It's kind of encouraged because it's
something that he wants and that it's all that matters.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
And it seems consensual to everyone involved, so they don't
call the cops or anything.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
And well there's a flip side of the coin too, right,
Parsons wife is also in a sexual relationship with one
of these other most senior members of the OTO.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
So there's this very open attitude towards sex and very
fluid relationships. Right, yeah, monogamy, that's something for the squares.
The Pasadena police, meanwhile, have been receiving repeated complaints about
unspeakable acts occurring at the parsonage. Imagine forties, you're one
(48:01):
of the neighbors. You live in a nice neighborhood. You're
probably wealthy, as you don't you're probably well off if
you're living next door to Jack Parsons, and then you're
hearing these crazy chants, these moans of sexual ecstasy, and
then maybe some ritualistic screaming. You don't know what's going on.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
It is funny that at in every instance they begin
as a simple noise complaint and the officers show up,
and then they find themselves in a oh, very different situation.
But there's nothing you do privacy of your own home.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Just keep it down, please, I guess you're right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Well that's true. I don't know what the blue laws
were at the time where he is, like, if he
could actually be arrested for doing something in his home.
I sawtomy in the like.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Yeah, or maybe consumption of an illegal substance.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
The counter culture is like the Pasadena police Force, well
aware of Parsons' activity, and in a way he becomes
a precursor to the common thing that we have here
in the US today on the West Coast, the billionaire
bro tech guru Tony Stark esque genius. Right, he makes
(49:15):
massive amounts of money from his innovations. He spends massive
amounts of money partying, pursuing alternative lifestyles. And we can
compare it today to tech gurus go microdosing at burning Man.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Sure, and also come out with incredible technology, or at
least own the companies that come out with incredible technology.
Speaker 1 (49:40):
Right, And there's this sense that they are somewhat above
the law of the common peasant.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
Note quick cut in your head, folks to that picture
of Elon Musk on the Joe Rogan Show smoking a
massive blunt and you know his employees can't do that
because there would be problems with their security clearances for SpaceX.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
Yeah, I really didn't think that was real when I
just saw the thumbnail from YouTube.
Speaker 1 (50:07):
That nice photoshop.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Yeah, that's funny. Oh wow, I mean, I it's marijuana.
It's fine. It's legal there.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
It's very close to being legal across the US, you
know what I mean. That's just the money got too good.
That's what happens. The morality this is a different episode,
but the the racism disguised as morality, that was the
original reason for the criminalization of marijuana. Just it doesn't
(50:42):
match up to money.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
Yeah. That being said, we encourage you not to do drugs,
everyone listening, unless you want to. And that's all the
whole of the law.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
So there, Hey there were oh man, no comment, no comment.
So the counter culture aware of this. This guy is
an La Musk a Tony Stark. Soon, another figure of
California's underground scene joins the activities, a fellow named el
Ron Hubbard. Oh that's true, Pauk. We got to sound
(51:14):
cue great man. Who's l Ron Hubbard?
Speaker 2 (51:23):
El Ron Hubbard is the father of a little thing
called dionetics. It's a philosophy that he created, that he summoned,
and he would later change his mind and create the
concepts that would become a full on religion scientology.
Speaker 1 (51:42):
A religion for tax purposes.
Speaker 2 (51:45):
Maybe I don't know, I don't know. L Ron Hubbard
was thinking.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
Well, he joins the gang. He joins the parsonage in
nineteen forty five, and around this time Fumboys International remaws
their interest in parson and both because they're concerned about
his unorthodox private life, his open practice of the dark arts,
and still his political inclinations. These may lead him to
(52:12):
be considered untrustworthy or sympathetic to communist forces.
Speaker 2 (52:15):
Yeah. Yeah, and in the worst he would be the
worst kind of mole, the person who is at the
top creating technology that will then be used. You know,
he's not some he's not a rocket scientist employed by
this thing. He is the rocket scientist running septualizing thing.
Speaker 1 (52:31):
Yeah, he's at the point of expertise where his best
guess qualifies as leading scientific theory.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
Yeah, you don't want iron Man as an enemy.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Right there you go, that's a good quote. Yeah, you
don't want iron Man as an enemy. And also, a
someone who switched or became a spy or double agent
or a mole for ideological purposes is much more difficult
to control than someone who does it because they're in
or they're being blackmailed, for instance, right, yea much more dangerous. Also,
(53:07):
so they're like, Okay, the guy's happy. I don't think
he's hurt anybody, and we need rockets. At this time,
there's some personal problems that he encounters. The person that
he's infatuated with Sarah.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
That's the sister of Helen, his wife.
Speaker 1 (53:24):
She becomes infatuated with l Ron mister Steel your girl Hubbard.
Speaker 2 (53:29):
Oh yep, that's him.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
And this makes Parsons insanely upset and he starts delving
into He's moving up in the ranks of the OTO,
by the way, on the time, getting into leadership positions.
He develops a different focus. He has a deeper interest
in witchcraft and the darker side of magic. He's fascinated
by Poltergeist, by spiritual apparitions.
Speaker 2 (53:51):
Oh man. Feeling really tortured at this time.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
And being always an innovator, right, he decides to try
and create a new lover, to create his own lover
and elemental.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
Wow like like a like a Golam lover.
Speaker 1 (54:10):
Yeah, like like a thought form. He wants to manifest.
Got you a perfect lover? Uh? Sarah runs off with
l Ron Hubbard, and so Parsons takes part in these
very unusual rituals that are supposed to help him manifest
his thought into the world.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
Yeah. He uh, he plants his seed with magic tablets.
Yep ah, and he does it to the sound of music,
not the not the musical. Yeah, but there's well and well,
this is something that's at the basis of most chaos
or some chaos magic, where where seed is planted on
(54:51):
a piece of paper that has writing and or a
symbol on it that is then burned a lot of
times like a roun.
Speaker 1 (54:58):
Yeah. And and shortly after this, Parsons meets a woman
named Marjorie Cameron, and he feels as if this is
the elemental force that he has invoked somehow conjured. She
becomes his muse, and he sees his scientific and spiritual
pursuits as increasingly intertwined, you know what I mean. Yeah,
(55:18):
he sees himself as of the line of great thinkers
like Isaac Newton who totally totally may breakthroughs in physics,
but then also totally believed in alchemy and practiced.
Speaker 2 (55:32):
It and thought that perhaps the science was part of
the alchemy.
Speaker 1 (55:35):
Right. Yeah, So Parsons is the same way rocketry is
magic and magic is rocketry. For example, when he works
on his experiments in the desert, he recites a pagan
poem to pan. You can imagine how weird this sounds
to the g men. Yeah, who are listening in the
fun boys are not You're not having fun.
Speaker 2 (55:55):
This is not as fun as It's not as fun.
Speaker 1 (55:58):
As the boys thought. Persons eventually runs into financial trouble
after he gets involved with bad investments associated with al
Ron Hubbard. This is a pattern Hubbert goes on to repeat.
Speaker 2 (56:12):
By the way, is this the whole yacht thing? Mm
hmmmm the yacht boys.
Speaker 1 (56:17):
Yeah, Hubbard had convinced him to take money and travel
to Miami and buy three yachts.
Speaker 2 (56:23):
Oh, three yachts.
Speaker 1 (56:24):
He has a yacht thing. El Ron Hubbard has a yacht.
Speaker 2 (56:26):
At a time. That's that's that's a lot, okay.
Speaker 1 (56:32):
Many of the academics that are suspected of being Communist
sympathizers are blacklisted as the Cold War sets in post
World War two, and this means a Parsons and a
lot of his colleagues lose their security clearances, and without
their security clearances, they are out of jobs.
Speaker 2 (56:50):
Oh wow, Yeah, that is that is a sweeping change
that starts coming through around that time, and then I
can imagine someone who's associated with something like the Oto
and order the those old communist beliefs that he even
maybe had just back in the day that the Fun
Boys know about. I can imagine him just getting xed
off that list. Right.
Speaker 1 (57:10):
So he found himself having to earn money as a
manual laborer, a hospital orderly, a car mechanic. He was
pushed out of science, so he dove even deeper into
the occult. He ended up working for the film industry
making explosives, creating pyrotechnics, and just before he took a
trip to Mexico, or just before he was going to
(57:33):
leave on a tripa planned in nineteen fifty two, he
received a large order of explosives for a movie and
while getting everything together, there was an explosion involving mercury.
Parsons suffered fatal wounds and he died at the age
of thirty seven.
Speaker 2 (57:49):
This was only thirty seven. He's done all of this,
that's crazy.
Speaker 1 (57:53):
He his death was ruled an accident. His friends suspected
it was a state sponsored conspiracy to remove this dangerous
mad genius from the fold. And that's where it stops.
Parsons controversial private life led him to be wiped from
NASA history and that magic stuff aside, esoteric orders aside.
(58:17):
That's another true cover up, and for a long time
his role was not acknowledged. According to biographer George Pendall,
Parsons was written out of the history books, his role
in rocketry discredited for decades simply because his supernatural beliefs
did not fit into the other supernatural beliefs that were
more dominant at the time.
Speaker 2 (58:39):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (58:40):
I mean, that's an interesting way of looking at it.
Speaker 2 (58:42):
It really is, It really is, and I can identify
with that holy mackerel. It makes you wonder about today
the people at the bleeding edge of science, what are
their closed door religious beliefs White biohackers and stuff. Yeah, biohackers.
I mean even like maybe you're Elin Musk and some
(59:03):
of those people out there right now that can essentially
do anything they want to do at any time. What
are their spiritual beliefs? And is there anything that's hidden
enough that we won't know about it? Oh?
Speaker 1 (59:16):
I see, Yeah, that's a fascinating question. Anything you know
what you had the opportunity to ask, oh, someone about
this earlier today? You and Paul both we didn't forget folks.
Speaker 2 (59:33):
I missed that opportunity.
Speaker 1 (59:34):
There is a story here, and it's a story that
I really enjoyed hearing. I know that we've been going long,
but can can you give us just like the broad Strokes,
the brad Strokes.
Speaker 2 (59:46):
Okay, you're the here're the broad Strokes. Right before we
started recording this episode, I walked in. I was heading
in a little bit early so I could continue.
Speaker 1 (59:57):
Researching here, and I was running late.
Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
Ben was not quite in the office yet, and our
president of our network, his name's Connell Burn. He was
showing somebody around the office and I'm gathering up my
computer and my books and everything, and I'm heading in.
And you know, I don't think about that because our
president walks around with important people all the time. I
don't know who walks around with Anyway, Conall says, hey, Matt,
(01:00:24):
this is my friend Brad and I you know, I
just turn and put my hand out and it's just
is Bradley Cooper standing there staring at me with those
beautiful blue eyes. My goodness, they're striking. But anyway, here's
the thing, and I hope, I hope he wouldn't be
upset to mention this. But we begin chatting and we
(01:00:47):
get into some conversations about the Apollo missions, and then
he wants to talk a little bit about September eleventh,
and then we want to talk about a little bit
about these other conspiracies. And the guy I think would
fit right in with us. And perhaps that's just because
he's such an enigmatic person that he will engage you
(01:01:09):
in anything you want to talk about. But I did
not bring up either of those subjects. So yeah, there
you go. So there you go.
Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
How Matt and Paul met Bradley Cooper.
Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
Yes, and Paul met Bradley a little later over by
the water cooler, and they had a very nice conversation
about his new movie coming out by the way, that
he is his directorial debut and he's working with Lady
Gagats called a Star Is Born. There you go, plug
for Bradley Cooper.
Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
You're welcome, Brad and thank you everyone for tuning in.
We want to know where you land on this. I
think now the story of Jack Parsons and his legacy
is a little more apparent in the public sphere. It's
more common knowledge. But do you feel that as a society,
(01:02:02):
our norms limit our ability to innovate technologically, you know
what I mean, Like like the US government, and this
may apply. This surely applies to other governments as well.
The US government in the past had a very difficult
time hiring quality hackers because of their affinity for drugs.
(01:02:24):
And you know, they were brilliant minds, brilliant computer people,
but they didn't want to stop smoking weed or stop
you know, doing whatever drug they do. And they have
to be clean to pass the security clearance.
Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
Yeah, that's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
So eventually they, I believe in many cases, eventually the
US government just folded and made exceptions to the rule.
Do you think those exceptions should exist? Let us know.
You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, check out
our community page. Here's where it gets crazy, where there
are tons of fascinating conversations in the mean game is
(01:03:02):
a double plus good.
Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
And that's the end of this classic episode. If you
have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can
get into contact with us in a number of different ways.
One of the best is to give us a call.
Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you
don't want to do that, you can send us a
good old fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (01:03:23):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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