The Rocket Scientist Who Summoned Demons: The True Horror Story of Jack Parsons

Long before rockets carried humans into orbit, one of the brilliant minds laying the groundwork for America's space program spent his nights trying to conjure demons in the Mojave Desert. Jack Parsons helped establish what would become NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory through pioneering propulsion experiments in California. Yet this self-taught chemist was equally consumed by ceremonial magic, leading him into a bizarre partnership in 1936 with science fiction writer L.

Ron Hubbard. In the winter of 1946, Parsons and Hubbard launched an elaborate occult undertaking known as the Babalon Working. Parsons believed the world was governed by a violent force and sought to manifest a divine feminine goddess into human form to prevent global destruction. After performing rituals in the desert, Parsons became convinced the experiment succeeded when a red-haired artist named Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron walked into his Pasadena home.

He soon pursued a relationship with Cameron involving ritual sex magic, hoping to conceive a magical child that would spark a spiritual transformation. Famed British occultist Aleister Crowley viewed the endeavor with contempt, calling the participants louts and eventually costing Parsons his leadership in their occult order. Financial ruin also strained his ties to Hubbard.

Despite the chaos, Parsons married Cameron and continued his esoteric pursuits until a fatal laboratory explosion ended his life at age thirty-seven.

Our read is that Parsons did not compartmentalize his intellect; the same audacious drive that pushed him to gamble on untested rocket propellants also convinced him he could breach the boundary between the physical world and the supernatural.

History remembers Parsons both as an architect of modern spaceflight and a figure of high strangeness.

While NASA reached for the cosmos using mathematics and liquid fuel, one of its founding pioneers chased answers across a very different frontier, leaving behind a legacy where cutting-edge science and ritual magic violently collided.