Hidden Figures is rightly winning acclaim for the light it has shone on Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, three of the African-American mathematicians who calculated flight trajectories for Nasa at a time when both women and people of colour were subject to chronic discrimination.

But these women are not the only ones who have been written out of Nasa’s history in spite of the considerable contribution they made to America’s intergalactic exploration. In fact, Jack Parsons is barely acknowledged on Nasa’s website, and he’s the man who made rockets a reality and co-founded the agency’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), home to missions which paved the way for the Apollo programs and continue to explore Mars and outer space today.

If Parsons’s life story was a film script, it would be dubbed preposterous. He invented jet propulsion technology in the face of industry-wide derision that rockets would never exist, but was also a senior figure in the occult and invited Ron L Hubbard into his confidence – and riotous sex parties. Parsons tried to sell his government-funded inventions to Israel, before winding up dying, at the age of 37, in a self-created explosion, leaving a mass of disturbing materials for his friends to discover. Here’s the remarkably twisting tale of his life:

‘He said I was a bloody fool, because rockets couldn’t work in space’ 

Pasadena, California in 1928, and Parsons was 14. A fan of Jules Verne, he began the experiments that would shape his life – and eventually kill him. His love of Jules Verne was shared with his school friend Edward Forman, two years his senior, and the pair took to playing with rockets in Parsons’s back garden, pockmarking it as they began to create their own solid-fuelled rockets. It was here that he would begin to link science with Satanism, too. Parsons later claimed he first summoned the devil at 13 in a “terrifying” experience.

Neither activity proved to be merely an adolescent phase. Foreman and Parsons continued their friendship into college, where both dropped out to take jobs at the nearby Hercules Powder Company, which made munitions. Despite abandoning their studies (Parsons was forced to due to a lack of family finances) the pair remained committed to the idea of rocket science, something that was roundly dismissed as an impossible fiction by academia, attending lectures on at the nearby California Institute of Technology.

It was at one of these, in 1936, that they met Frank Malina, a 22-year-old grad student who shared their passion for defying gravity. As George Pendle would recall in his book, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons, “when Parsons and Malina met, their enthusiasm for rocketry and space travel bonded them like a Masonic handshake”.

Malina provided Parsons and Foreman with a link to Caltech and its resources. Parsons offered Malina years of hard-won experiments and the knowledge of how to build and test rockets. While Malina instructed Parsons in scientific rigour, Parsons pushed the student to go further in his experiments.

What was really stopping the trio from reaching the stratosphere were their scientific contemporaries. When they approached their academic seniors at Caltech, they were largely ridiculed. Fritz Zwicky, a physics professor, told Malina he was “a bloody fool”, the student later recalled. “That I was trying to do something that was impossible, because rockets couldn’t work in space.”

However, aerospace pioneer Theodore Von Karman was more open-minded. After hearing of the trio's ambitions to send liquid and solid fuelled rockets into space, he approved Malina’s proposal for a PhD in rocket design – the first of its kind. Suddenly, Parsons, Malina and Forman had forced their way through the doors of academia, and with it, Caltech’s laboratories.

Devil’s Gate

This, though, was not to last. The group's invitation to experiment in the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory was swiftly rescinded: their work saw sheets of steel thrust into walls and fumes released that would rust all of the equipment in a room. A misfired rocket saw the trio evicted onto a concrete platform away from the main building. After a second near-death accident, Von Karman told them to work in the desert, a quarter of a mile away from Caltech. They became known as The Suicide Squad.

This suited Parsons rather well. Once again, his fascinations with the occult and rocketry collided. In the desert lands outside of Caltech, there is a former river channel called Arroyo Seco. It is flanked on both sides by rock, one of which is called Devil’s Gate, thanks to its shape of a horned head. Some locals believed the mouth of Arroyo Seco was a portal to other dimensions, but for Parsons the area had two uses. He tested rockets there, but years later, he would return to conduct ceremonies and rituals with other occultists in the same spot.

For the Suicide Squad, Arroyo Seco had enough room to test rockets and offered shelter from their inevitable downfall. For the other members of Caltech, there was far less risk of being blown up. On Halloween, 1936, the team had a breakthrough: after accidentally setting fire to the oxygen line of their small rocket motor, it whipped around. Although it didn’t launch, Malina and his team were enthused: “the test was successful”, he wrote to his parents. Nasa would later consider this the first rocket experiments of what would become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Further experiments would show there was method in the Suicide Squad’s madness: they had created a fuel that would burn cleanly and be stored without exploding. Where the wider scientific community were skeptical, the US Army saw potential, and offered funding to the trio’s project in 1939.

As his scientific credibility soared, so did Parsons’s interest in the supernatural. He was taken to a meetings of Ordo Templi Orientis, an occult society, in Los Angeles in 1939 and soon became engrossed. The OTO, as it was known, was formed by and followed the teachings of Aleister Crowley, a heroin addicted sexual deviant, and occultist who was considered The Wickedest Man in the World by the press in his native England. Parsons went from reading Crowley’s writings to becoming The Beast 666’s pen-pal. Within a few years, Crowley considered Parsons his American protege.

Parsons, barely in his mid-twenties, wasn’t phased by the notion of keeping his personal and professional proclivities separate. The California Tech ran stories at the time that reported that he chanted Crowley’s Hymn to Pan before he lit his rockets. By 1941, he and his wife Helen, whom he had married five years earlier, had been inducted into Agape Lodge, a branch of the church which practiced Crowley’s religion of Thelemic magick.

Meanwhile, after years of spending what little cash he had on rocket experiments – much to Helen’s ire – Parsons and the Suicide Squad were coming into money. In 1942 they founded the Aerojet Engineering Corporation, which became the world’s largest manufacturer of rockets and propellants. Within 20 years, it had become a $700 million-a year business. Parsons was vice-president. A year later, he co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

‘It was like walking into a Fellini movie’

Helen was four years older than Parsons, and 22 when they met. There was turbulence in their marriage, potentially encouraged by the sexual freedoms encouraged by the OTO. When his wife went away in June 1941, he took up with her 17-year-old sister, Sara. Upon Helen’s return, Sara announced she was Parsons’s new wife. Helen responded by beginning a relationship with Wilfred T Smith, leader of the Agape Lodge of the OTO, and the four struck up a friendship.

Newly flush, Parsons took out a lease on a mansion in Pasadena’s Millionaire’s Row, Orange Grove Avenue, and invited fellow Thelemites to live communally in what became known as The Parsonage. "It was a huge wooden house. A big, big thing, full of people”, remembered Liljan Wunderman, Frank Malina’s wife, when she was interviewed years later.

A Swiss chalet-style lodge, The Parsonage had 10 bedrooms. But its greatest asset, for Parsons at least, was its additional three-bedroom “coach house”, which became an Agape Lodge. The commune was self-sufficient, maintaining allotments and livestock to eat (and use for blood rituals). The garage, meanwhile, was turned into a chemical laboratory – a considerable upgrade from Parsons’s previous home, where he had conducted experiments on his back porch.

The Parsonage became an open house for a disparate group of the curious-minded, full of people with “masks on, some had costumes on, women were weirdly dressed. It was like walking into a Fellini movie. Women were walking around in diaphanous togas and weird make-up, some dressed up like animals, like a costume party."

Writers such as Williamson, who called Parsons “an odd enigma” and Robert Heinlein joined the science fiction discussions that were held in the kitchen by Parsons, who was called “an authentic mad genius if ever I met one” by author Sprague de Camp.

Those were the more tame events which unfolded at The Parsonage. The well-to-do fellow residents of Orange Grove made frequent complaints to the police about loud music, drug taking and that naked pregnant women were dancing through fire in the garden. Parsons greeted people at the door with a live snake wrapped around his shoulders, but when the police turned up, he merely told them he was a Cal Tech scientist – there was no trouble going on here.

The parties took their toll: Parsons would arrive for work late and disheveled and struggled to fit into the corporate expectations of him. He and Foreman treated Aerojet like a souped-up version of his childhood back garden, playing chicken with each other on the rocket testing range. Parsons blew up an entire batch of rocket fuel in protest when Zwicky, who had swallowed his pride and joined the company, insisted he test it.  

Work and play continued to merge for Parsons. Aerojet secretaries were invited down to The Parsonage and to partake in the dionysian activities within its walls. While Malina and Parsons’s other colleagues had entertained his proclivities until now, this was a step too far. “We told him all the time, I mean, all these fantasies about Zoroaster and about voodoo and so on, this is okay; we do that too in our dreams,” Zwicky later recalled. “But keep it for yourself; don't start impressing this on poor secretaries. I mean he had a whole club there you know.”

Within a year Parsons had partied too much: Aerojet gave him an estimated $11,000 for his shares (although other sources suggest he got $50,000 from the deal) and asked him to leave. At 30, he once again felt excluded from science’s official enclave.

‘Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moonchild’

Shunned from rocket science’s elite, Parsons had more time to dedicate to his occultism. He used his Aerojet funds to buy the Parsonage, and started to lease rooms to non-Thelemites. Advertisements that he placed for in the local paper specified for: “only bohemians, artists, musicians, atheists, anarchists, or any other exotic types need to apply for rooms - any mundane soul would be unceremoniously rejected”, and, as Pendle wrote, “he spent almost all his time there, in the manner of a man without a care in the world”.

In 1945, Parsons was introduced to a pulp fiction writer called Layfayette Ronald Hubbard, and both he and Sara were taken in by Hubbard’s magnetism and charm. Parsons wrote to Crowley, declaring: “I deduced that he is in direct touch with some higher intelligence. He is the most Thelemic person I have ever met and is in complete accord with our own principles”. Hubbard was granted a room at the Parsonage.

Within a matter of months, Parsons was singing Hubbard’s praises to Crowley again: “We have become great friends. Although he has no formal training in magic he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field. He is in complete accord with our own principles. I have found a staunch companion and comrade in Ron.”

Parsons, arguably, needed a comrade. In the mid-Forties he decided to push the barriers of Thelemic magick to a new level: he wanted to take the spirit of Babalon, a goddess worshipped by the religion, and instill it in a human being: in short, he wanted to impregnate a woman he believed to have certain powers. The child, he believed, would embody the forces of Babalon.

Crowley wasn’t a fan of this theory. “Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moonchild,” he wrote to the US head of the cult. “I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts.”

But Hubbard saw that Parsons needed a fellow believer to enable his vision, and knew what his landlord needed to hear. “He describes his angel as a beautiful winged woman with red hair whom he calls the Empress and who has guided him through his life and saved him many times,” Parsons wrote in a letter to Crowley. Between January and March, 1946, Hubbard assisted Parsons in a series of rituals they called Babalon Working. On January 18, a woman named Marjorie Cameron turned up at The Parsonage: Parsons believed his Babalon, his Scarlet Woman, had arrived. “It is done,” Parsons told Hubbard, “I returned home and found a young woman answering the requirements waiting for me”.

‘I thought I had the most morbid imagination but it seems I have not’

In reality, Cameron had been discharged from the Navy and was a woman of free spirit, who happened to have red hair and was happy to have sex with Parsons while Hubbard – promoted to a position of high priesthood mere weeks after being exposed to Thelemic Magick – incanted rite and ritual, some of it completely off the cuff.

Afterwards, on March 6, Parsons wrote enthusiastically to Crowley: “I can hardly tell you or decide how much to write. I am under command of extreme secrecy. I have had the most important devastating experience of my life.”

Crowley responded: “You have me completely puzzled by your remarks. I thought I had the most morbid imagination but it seems I have not. I cannot form the slightest idea what you can possibly mean.”

While Parsons had been distracted with his moonchild, Hubbard had been busy elsewhere at The Parsonage, namely, seducing Parson’s girlfriend, Sara. Free love was a tenet of OTO, and, writing to Crowley, Parsons seemed unphased: “She has transferred her sexual affection to Ron. I cared for her rather deeply but I have no desire to control her emotions.”

Having gained his trust through Babalon Working, Hubbard used Parsons for capital gain, encouraging him to join Hubbard and Sara in a business relationship. Parsons needed the money: his Aerojet resources were running low after years of partying. Hubbard swindled him into a boat-buying venture. Parsons contributed his final $20,000 dollars, Hubbard 1,000, and Sara nothing. Hubbard went off to buy the boat, took Sara with him, and never came back. As US OTO correspondence from the time recalled: “Ron and Betty [Sara] have their boat at Miami, Florida, and are living the life of Riley, while Brother John (Parsons) is living at rock-bottom, and I mean rock-bottom.”

When Parsons realised what had happened, he took revenge in the best way he knew how: magick. “Hubbard attempted to escape me,” Parsons wrote, “by sailing at 5 pm and performed a full invocation to Bartzabel within the circle at 8 pm (a curse). At the same time, however, his ship was struck by a sudden squall off the coast which ripped off his sails and forced him back to port where I took the boat in custody.” Ultimately, the matter was settled in court, with Parsons retrieving a mere $2,900 compensation. Hubbard, who had left his wife and two children with relatives years earlier, bigamously married Sara. His next project, Dianetics and Scientology, would secure him lifelong fame.

The final experiment

There was also the matter of a pregnant Cameron. While Crowley may have considered Parsons’s actions “idiocy”, others were fearful of what the corrupt Hubbard may have helped to create. “Let us consider this matter of the magical child which Jack Parsons is supposed to turn loose on the world in nine months (now seven). Ron the Seer, was the guy who laid down the main ideas, technic (sic), etc., of said operation.”

They need not have worried: Cameron had an abortion. She and Parsons married, however, days after his divorce from Helen was finalised. The Parsonage was sold to developers, who built flats on the 25 acre site, and Parsons resigned from the OTO. In his letter to Crowley, he said that “as an autocratic organization, [the O.T.O.] constitutes a true and proper medium for the expression and attainment" of Thelema.”

As the House Un-American Activities Committee ramped up, Parsons was investigated by the FBI. While they frowned upon his OTO activities, investigations also showed that Parsons had been planning to give rocket plans with the newly founded Israeli government, in exchange for admission to the country and the chance of a new life abroad. Parsons had his security clearance revoked, while Cameron joined an artist’s commune in Mexico.

The man who created the foundations of Nasa’s rocket science programme ended up founding his own chemical company and making special effects for films, as well as picking up money as a car mechanic, doing physical labour at a gas station and working as a hospital orderly. He continued to practice the occult and sex magick, but, without a houseful of open-minded women, had to pay prostitutes to participate.

By 1952, Parsons’s life had returned to its dizzying heyday. He and Cameron had rekindled their relationship, and moved into a former coach house on Orange Grove Avenue. Parsons built another home laboratory in its laundry room and the couple opened their doors to a new generation of bohemians, including some jazz musicians. He founded another Thelemite group, and re-hatched plans for a new life in Israel, where the couple could raise a family and Parsons could re-ignite his rocketry career.

The day before the couple planned to move to Mexico, where Parsons would embark upon his return to rocket science, there was an explosion in the coach house. Parsons was found, conscious, by his lodgers: his right arm was missing and there was a hole in his face. He lived for 40 more minutes – Cameron, who had been getting groceries for the trip, only learned of her husband’s death when she got back from the shops.

As many questions hang over Parsons’s death as they did his life. Some conspiracy theorists argue that it was suicide, while others believe that Parsons had generated enough enemies during his extraordinary 37 years that he was victim of a murder. The police closed the case as an accidental death. F

or those closest to him, there was always hope that the occult might reunite them: Smith, Helen and Sara were among the OTO members who held a memorial service. As for Parsons’s ashes, they were scattered in the desert – the one place where his love for both the occult and rocket science truly collided.