Sunday, June 05, 2005
 Reason May 2005: John Whiteside Parsons was born in 1914 and died in 1952.[...]
Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (Harcourt), tells the bizarre tale of a character whose innovations in rocket fuel design were vital to mankind’s leaving the surface of the planet. Simultaneous with his more material scientific pursuits, he also tried with painstaking ritual—but apparently failed—to create a "Moon Child," a magic being conjured via mystic ritual who would usher in a new age.[...]
His gang was not-so-affectionately dubbed the Suicide Squad for the series of alarming explosions they caused on campus. [...]
Gradually the little gang of misfits evolved into the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. (JPL has far exceeded its humble origins. As Pendle notes, it "manufactured lunar landers and Mars landers, as well as…Voyager 1 and 2" and now employs 5,500 scientists on an annual budget of $1.4 billion.)
While inventing the castable rocket fuel that made the space age possible, Parsons simultaneously explored the frontiers of inner space, building the other half of his weird reputation. He became enraptured with the writings of the British occultist Aleister Crowley and joined the L.A.-based Agape Lodge of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis. Crowley’s American lieutenants seized on the charismatic and successful scientist as a potential savior for their movement; he began donating almost all his salary to the upkeep of his lodge brethren. ...
After the war his occult activism attracted the young L. Ron Hubbard into his life and home. The scalawag pulp writer, pre-Dianetics, took off for Florida with Jack’s girl and most of his money, supposedly to buy boats to bring to California and launch a business operation they’d jointly own. Hubbard never came back. The official Scientology line —unsupported by any evidence—is that Hubbard was sent by Naval Intelligence to break up Parsons’ evil occult sex ring.
As the '40s wound down Parsons was stripped of his security clearance and almost prosecuted for treason for slipping classified documents from his then-employer, Hughes Aircraft, to the nascent Israeli government, with whom he was negotiating for a rocket guru gig That same Agape Lodge was a keystone of the occult control mechanisms hovering over young Hollywood. Today, of course, much of Hollywood is under the thrall of its descendent institutiion, Scientology.
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