On this day in 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an act that creates the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He called the signing an [sic] historic step, further equipping the United States for leadership in the space age. Since the end of World War II, the United States had worked to make breakthroughs in rocket science. This particular legislation expanded the original National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) into NASA. NASA research was generously funded by Eisenhower’s successors, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
Although NASA currently engages in cooperative projects with other nations, Eisenhower at the time had to add a cautionary note when signing the legislation that created the new agency. He warned that NASA’s research into peaceful projects could be shared only when international treaties outlining such projects were authorized first by the president and the U.S. Senate. Ike, the former Army general who oversaw the Allied invasion of Normandy in World War II, wanted to ensure that NASA would not share information that was vital to national security. (History.com)
The predecessor to NASA was a young talented rocket scientist, Jack Parsons. Werner von Braun, considered by most to be the father of the space program, claimed it was the self-taught Parsons, not himself, who was the true father of the American space program for his contribution to the development of solid rocket fuel.
[1]Jack’s childhood was one of solitude, loneliness, and wealth. He could sit in his room all day and read, never worrying about supporting his family or where his next meal was going to come from. He ferociously read Jules Verne, including his 1865 novel “From the Earth to the Moon,” and the new sci-fi magazine “Amazing Stories.” Soon, space wasn’t just what was above Jack’s head, it was a romantic obsession.
One day, Jack was getting pummeled at school when an older boy swooped in and put an end to the beating. That boy, Ed Foreman, would become Jack’s best friend into his adult years and an essential player in Jack’s rocket dreams. Ed and Jack whiled away days talking about the science-fiction books they were reading and, soon, began experimenting themselves.
Using Ed’s father’s engineering tools and resources and supplies Jack took from his part time job at the Hercules Powder Company, they built explosives. Teachers and Jack’s mother began worrying about him. But Ed and Jack continued to experiment.
In 1934, with Jack now 20 years old, the duo’s interest in rockets went from a child’s fantasy to an academic pursuit when, despite not being students there, they gained the support of the close-by California Institute of Technology (CalTech). Ed, Jack, and several members of CalTech’s community formed the GALCIT Rocket Research Group.
On Halloween 1936, the group performed their first motor test near the Devil’s Gate Dam in Pasadena. The motor exploded, but soon they became infamous on campus. They were called the “Suicide Squad” due to the danger and perceived craziness of their experiments, particularly as rocket technology was considered by many scientists at the time to be foolish and mere science fiction in terms of any practical use and development of the technology.
The Suicide Squad
This “Suicide Squad” was the beginnings of the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the institution responsible for the Mars Rover Landing and many other advancements in rocket and robotic sciences. Obviously Parsons was a real talent with a seemingly innate sense of propulsion and rocketry (a very nascent industry at the time) were coveted by the military industrial complex. His design and understanding of the chemical composition of liquid rocket fuels was considered without peer. Parsons cut a path as a dashing figure with a reputation as a rocket hot-shot and risk-taker. [7]You would think all this scientific achievement would be enough for one person in one lifetime, but Parsons had a much loftier set of ambitions. He wanted to tear down the walls of time and space, and he had an entirely non-scientific set of ideas on how to do it.
The non-scientific set of ideas were steeped in the occult, satanism and black magic. Parsons “swore the Oath of the Abyss, having only the choice between madness, suicide, and that oath. (then) I took the oath of a Magister Templi, even the Oath of Antichrist before Frater 132, the Unknown God. And thus was I Antichrist loosed in the world; and to this I am pledged, that the work of the Beast 666 shall be fulfilled.” Who knew it was so easy?
Apparently noting that Antichrist is only a few letters away from “anarchist,” the manifesto that follows is in large part an exhortation to “do what thou wilt” in most things bodily-fluid-drenched, economic and/or political. The goal of all these efforts, according to Metzger, was to bring on the Apocalypse, since in theory things can only get better from there.
By now you may be thinking “What a load of crap!” But the FBI, none too keen about the notion that Parsons’ taxpayer-funded salary might be supporting the Antichrist and the hastening of the Apocalypse, took it seriously enough to open an investigation. Documents recently released through the Freedom of Information act make up 130 pages of heavily redacted text in which G-Men try to make sense of Parsons’ religious beliefs and document his frequently careless handling of classified materials. Perhaps the Errol Flynn persona fitted Jack Parsons best. But truth be told, Jack Whiteside Parsons is best known for his occultists ideals, black magic and reverence to the satanic agenda.
On November 2, 1950, a California-based special-agent of the FBI prepared a report on the actions of Jack Parsons that stated in part: “Subject, on September 15, 1950 removed certain documents pertaining to jet propulsion motors and rocket propellants without authority from Hughes Aircraft Company, Culver City, California; his place of employment [and which had been his place of employment since May 8, 1949].”
On September 25, after the documents in question had been retrieved by the authorities, they were duly handed over to a Air Force Major E.J. Krenz, after which, the FBI recorded: “[Parsons] voluntarily came to the Los Angeles office, September 27, 1950 and in [a] signed statement admitted removing documents without authority stating he desired to extract certain information from them as aid in computing [the] cost proposal on jet propulsion motors. He planned to submit this with [an] employment application through American Technion Society for employment in the country of Israel.”
Twenty-four-hours later, an FBI agent, whose name has been excised from the available papers, “displayed the document and papers to John T. Berdner, Air Provost Marshal, U.S. Army, who advised that it would be necessary for him to forward copies of them to the Chief of the Security and Policy Division, Intelligence Department, Headquarters, Air Materiel Command, Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, where the documents would be examined for the purpose of determining whether or not they contained classified or non-classified information.”
As a result of the theft and brewing trouble surrounding Parsons, he was fired from Hughes Aircraft on that very day. Hughes’ security personnel hastily advised the military that, at the very least, the documents should be classified Confidential. Then the next morning Parsons prepared a written statement for the FBI, the Army, and Air Materiel Command in which he conceded: “I now realize that I was wrong in taking this material from the Hughes Aircraft Plant.”
Whether his apology was genuine or simply a groveling attempt to try and avoid serious problems with the authorities and charges that he was secretly engaged in espionage operations for Israel, Parsons certainly obfuscated the facts and played down his ongoing involvement in matters of an occult nature. When interviewed by the FBI on September 28, he said that he had “severed all relations” with the dark world that had so dominated his earlier years, and “…described himself as being an ‘individualist,’” according to the interviewing special-agent in his report.
Significantly, files pertaining to Parsons’ theft of the papers from Hughes Aircraft reveal that, several years earlier, he had worked with some notable bodies, including the Government’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, the National Defense Research Council, and the Northrop Aircraft Company. Meanwhile, several FBI offices across the state of California tried to determine – with help from the military – if Parsons was acting as an Israeli spy or if his actions were just plain reckless and stupid. The Cincinnati FBI Office entered into a period of liaison with the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations to “ascertain the facts” concerning Air Force knowledge of Parsons’ activities.
A Major Sam Bruno of the USAF advised the FBI that the Air Force did have files on Parsons, including some that related to his relationship with Aleister Crowley, one of which, dated May 17, 1948, stated: “A religious cult, believed to advocate sexual perversion, was organized at subject’s home at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena, California, which has been reported subversive…”
The same documentation referred to USAF and FBI knowledge of the Church of Thelema, explaining that “this cult broadly hinted at free love,” that there had been “several complaints of ‘strange goings on at this home,’” and that an unnamed source had described the church as “a gathering place of perverts.” Surely not?! The military’s records also noted that in 1943, Parsons was interviewed by the FBI and “stated that the Church of Thelema was a lodge and fraternity as well as a church, and that they studied philosophy as well as religion and attempted to inform themselves concerning all types and kinds of religion.”
Parsons admitted that the church was based on the teachings of Crowley (who, rather amusingly, was described in the files merely as “an internationally known poet”!), and added that “…the organization was sometimes referred to as Crowleyism or Crowleyites.”
A less-than-impressed Air Force advised the equally unimpressed FBI that: “…women of loose morals were involved and…the story of Parsons’ activities had become fairly common knowledge among scientists in the Pasadena area.”
Then, on November 14, 1950, Major Frank J. Austin, Jr., of the Ordnance Liaison Office at the Redstone Arsenal, determined that most of the documents from Hughes Aircraft should be classified as Confidential – with four remaining unclassified. It’s eye-opening that on the very same day, Major Donald Detwiler, of AFOSI, admitted in a letter to the FBI that on March 7, 1949, the Industrial Employment Review Board had authorized Parsons “access to military information through Top Secret.”
The Secret Parsons
[2]But he had a secret life, which appeared totally at odds with his public one, and it came to further dominate his life as the ’40s progressed. Jack Parsons and his wife Helen had come into contact with the Agape lodge of the O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis) international magical fraternity in Los Angeles in 1939, and had joined it in 1941. It was under the leadership of Wilfred Talbot Smith, a Britisher who had founded this particular lodge about a decade earlier, circa 1930.Wilfred Talbot Smith
Smith and Parsons’ wife hit it off nicely and he was soon not much in evidence around the house and the O.T.O. Gnostic Mass temple in the attic. This latter space was fully fitted out, and even had a copy of the Egyptian ‘Stele of Revealing,’ venerated by followers of the famous magician Aleister Crowley. It was the only such temple in the world at that time which was properly functioning.
Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley (already a 33rd degree freemason) the world head of the O.T.O., took action that increased Parsons’ stature in the Order. Circa 1943-44, he convinced Smith, via a paper entitled ‘Is Smith a God?’ that astrological research had shown that Smith was not a man, but actually an incarnation of some deity. Taking the hint that Crowley wanted him out, the “god” went into private magical practice, eventually with reportedly rewarding results, remaining head of the lodge in name only.
Parsons had lost his wife to Smith, yet remained on good terms with her. He was kept busy by Order activities, one of the most important of which was the sending of money to Crowley, for both the old man’s minimal upkeep and the O.T.O. publishing fund. A good percentage came from Parsons’ own pocket.”
Crowley, who brought actual fame to the O.T.O. (which was already well-known in Masonic circles), was one of Parsons’ major inspirations in life. The elderly man’s accomplishments had been many: as a poet, publisher, mountain climber, chess master, and bisexual practitioner of sexual magic (or “Magick,” as he termed it).
Made famous by yellow journalists as the “Wickedest Man in the World,” he considered his central identity to be the “Great Beast 666″ as referred to in the book of “Revelation” in the Bible, though he was not leaning on that work particularly in his religious ideas.
According to most accounts, when Parsons’ father died (circa the early ’40s), Parsons inherited a mansion and coach-house at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, California. To the shock of the neighbors, the place became a haven for Bohemians and atheists, who were the sort of people to whom Parsons liked to rent out rooms.
The lodge headquarters was moved to this location, making use of two rooms in the house: the bedroom (which became a properly decorated temple), and a wood-paneled library dominated by an enormous portrait of Crowley. According to a story told by L. Sprague DeCamp (most recently appearing in the June 24, 1990 Los Angeles Times, p. A35), at one point the police — who had heard neighbors’ reports of a ritual in which a pregnant woman jumped nine times through a fire in the yard — came to investigate, but Parsons put them off by emphasizing his scientific credentials.
L. Ron Hubbard Emerges
In the late 1940s, Hubbard was broke and in debt. A struggling writer of science fiction and fantasy, he was forced to sell his typewriter for $28.50 to get by.
“I can still see Ron three-steps-at-a-time running up the stairs in around 1949 in order to borrow $30 from me to get out of town because he had a wife after him for alimony,”
-Recalled his former literary agent, Forrest J. Ackerman.
At one point, Hubbard was reduced to begging the Veterans Administration to let him keep a $51 over-payment of benefits. “I am nearly penniless,” wrote Hubbard, a former Navy lieutenant. Hubbard was mentally troubled, too. In late 1947, he asked the Veterans Administration to help him get psychiatric treatment.
“Toward the end of my (military) service,” Hubbard wrote to the VA, “I avoided out of pride any mental examinations, hoping that time would balance a mind which I had every reason to suppose was seriously affected.
“I cannot account for nor rise above long periods of moroseness and suicidal inclinations, and have newly come to realize that I must first triumph above this before I can hope to rehabilitate myself at all.”
In his most private moments, Hubbard wrote bizarre statements to himself in notebooks that would surface four decades later in Los Angeles Superior Court. “All men are your slaves,” he wrote in one. He wrote in another, “You can be merciless whenever your will is crossed and you have the right to be merciless.”
Hubbard was troubled, restless and adrift in those little known years of his life. But he never lost confidence in his ability as a writer. He had made a living with words in the past and he could do it again. Before the financial and emotional problems that consumed him in the 1940s, Hubbard had achieved moderate success writing for a variety of dime-store pulp magazines. He specialized in shoot’em-up adventures, Westerns, mysteries, war stories and science fiction. He was a master sailor and glider pilot, with a reported penchant for eye-catching maneuvers.
Although Hubbard’s health and writing career foundered after the war, he remained a virtual factory of ideas. And his biggest was about to be born. Hubbard had long been fascinated with mental phenomena and the mysteries of life. He was an expert in hypnotism. During a 1948 gathering of science fiction buffs in Los Angeles, he hypnotized many of those in attendance, convincing one young man that he was cradling a tiny kangaroo in his hands.
Hubbard’s intense curiosity about the mind’s power led him into a friendship in 1946 with rocket fuel scientist John Whiteside Parsons. Parsons was a protege of British satanist Aleister Crowley and leader of a black magic group modeled after Crowley’s infamous occult lodge in England.
Hubbard also admired Crowley, and in a 1952 lecture described him as “my very good friend.” Parsons and Hubbard soon lived in the aging mansion on South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena. The estate was home to an odd mix of Bohemian artists, writers, scientists and occultists. A small domed temple supported by six stone columns stood in the back yard. Hubbard met his second wife, Sara Northrup, at the mansion. Although she was Parsons’ lover at the time, Hubbard was undeterred. He married Northrup before divorcing his first wife. Long before the 1960s counterculture, some residents of the estate smoked marijuana and embraced a philosophy of promiscuous, ritualistic sex.
Crowley biographers have written that Parsons and Hubbard practiced “sex magic.” As the biographers tell it, a robed Hubbard chanted incantations while Parsons and his wife-to-be, Cameron, engaged in sexual intercourse intended to produce a child with superior intellect and powers. The ceremony was said to span 11 consecutive nights.Hubbard and Parsons finally had a falling out over a sailboat sales venture that ended in a court dispute between the two.
In later years, Hubbard tried to distance himself from his embarrassing association with Parsons, who was a founder of a government rocket project at California Institute of Technology that later evolved into the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Parsons died in 1952 when a chemical explosion ripped through his garage.
Hubbard insisted that he had been working undercover for Naval Intelligence to break up black magic in America and to investigate links between the occultists and prominent scientists at the Parsons mansion. Hubbard said the mission was so successful that the house was razed and the black magic group was dispersed. But Parsons’ widow, Cameron, disputed Hubbard’s account in a brief interview with The Times. She said the two men “liked each other very much” and “felt they were ushering in a force that was going to change things.” And change things they did. L. Ron Hubbard went onto create the Church Of Scientology, a masterpiece of mind control.
[5]Jack Whiteside Parsons on the other hand was a founding member of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Lab, with some crediting him as being one of the “fathers of rocketry” and others joking that JPL was actually Jack Parsons’ Laboratory, but you won’t find much about him on Nasa’s websites. Parsons’ legacy as an engineer and chemist has been somewhat overshadowed by his interest in the occult and, and has led to what some critics describe as a rewriting of the history books.However strange Parsons was, it did not preclude NASA from naming a crater on the dark side of the moon after him. Of course one cannot actually see the dark side of the moon nor confirm that such a crater exists, how appropriate. “…America’s space program owes much to Parsons’ rocket design and innovations — and in 1972 the International Astronomical Union honored him by naming Parson’s Crater on the dark side of the moon. After co-founding the JPL — which his admirers referred to as “Jack Parsons’ Laboratory” — Parsons started Aerojet Corp., now the world’s largest rocket producer and manufacturer of solid-fuel boosters for space shuttles….”
Another enigma is Jack Parsons contribution to the occult design of the Pentagon.
[10] Parsons, who took the oath of the anti-Christ in 1949, contributed to the design of the Pentagon under subsequent CIA director John J. McCloy.It’s no coincidence that NASA has been erasing and trying to rewrite it’s true origins. The mighty pillars of scientific certainty that NASA supposedly sits upon are actually satanic black magicians of the occult. This is probably a small trivial fact that is omitted in today’s school curriculum.
NASA has sprouted from the likes of the self-acclaimed “wickedest man in the world” Aleister Crowley, Mass-Mind-Control-Black Magician-Satanist L. Ron Hubbard and Uber-Occultist-Black Magician-Satanist Jack Whiteside Parsons to begin the early formation of NASA. In addition to the unholy trinity there were two more later additions to the NASA Dream Team, Werner von Braun and Walt Disney. All the elements were in place to create one of the greatest financial and theological frauds in human history-NASA.
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