There was a very unusual person born October 2, 1914 in Los Angeles, California. I’m talking about John Parsons — and the first thing about him is his name; he always went by “Jack Pastons,” but his birth name was Marvel. Not his surname; his given name; Marvel Whiteside Parsons. He evidently changed it (or his mother did) sometime later, after his parents divorced.
Parsons was born into a wealthy family, and had hardly any friends of his own age, but had lots of servants in the house. He spent a lot of his time reading, and got interested in Jules Verne and other science fiction stories. In Junior High School he developed one close friend, Edward Forman, and they started experimenting with rockets. They managed to acquire some gunpowder, which they tried to use as rocket fuel — but most of their “rockets” turned out to be bombs. This experimentation probably led to his being expelled when he got to high school — for blowing up the toilets.
The great depression reduced the family fortune and by the time he enrolled in college, Parsons began working on weekends and holidays at the Hercules Powder Company (“powder” as in “gunpowder”), where he learned more about working with explosives and potentially using them for rockets. He and Forman kept up trying to build working rockets, and the two began corresponding with rocket builders including Robert Goddard, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and Wernher von Braun.
Parsons and Forman talked their way into positions at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) working in the aeronautical laboratory on rocket propulsion — this time attempting to use liquid fuel. They worked with Frank Malina, an engineer working on a thesis about rocketry, who wrote that Parsons “lacked the discipline of a formal higher education, [but] had an uninhibited and fruitful imagination.” By the late 1930s, they’d managed to build some working liquid-fuel rocket engines.
Remember that I mentioned that Parsons was an unusual person — well, the late 1930s was also the time he decided to join the Church of Thelema, the religion invented by occultist (and extremely unusual person) Aleister Crowley. Not that there were very many people involved in Thelema, Parsons nevertheless became known as a potential successor to Crowley himself, who was in his 60s at the time.
His rocket research was still going pretty well, though, and Parsons, Forman, and Malina managed to get the first US government grant ever made for rocket-propulsion research. It was for development of a jet-assisted takeoff rocket engine that could be attached to airplanes. The engine eventually worked, but the majority of the grant money had to be spent repairing the CalTech buildings their tests had wrecked. CalTech also ordered them to find a new location, so they moved to Arroyo Seco, a desert region just south of Los Angeles. At the same time, they incorporated as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) — it’s still in operation, and builds space probes for NASA.
in his personal life, Parsons got more involved with Thelema, which led to his divorce — but before he could marry his new paramour, she left him for L. Ron. Hubbard, who also founded his own religion: Scientology. Parsons left JPL and began to hold “magic rituals” and chants around rocket projects, and his house (“the Parsonage”), which he claimed was a site of paranormal activity. He claimed he was working on bringing an incarnation of the goddess Babalon into existence. When a woman named Marjorie Cameron came to visit, he decided that she was the manifestation of the goddess. He neglected to mention this to her, though, and Massive Confusion Ensued.
Parsons was investigated by the FBI several times, probably because he was behaving increasingly strangely, but he was never found to be a foreign agent or anything similar. By the late 1940s he had virtually abandoned rocket projects in favor of his involvement in mysticism — and hosting parties for hipsters in the emerging Beat Generation movement. He had a small business providing explosives for the movie industry, though, and in 1952 died in an explosion as he was preparing an order for a film. There are still several theories about what happened. The police decided it had been an accident. His colleagues thought Parsons was both experienced and careful, and wouldn’t have had such an accident, and someone had killed him with a bomb instead — possibly Howard Hughes, who Parsons had feuded with. One of this friends claimed the whole thing had been a mystical ritual gone wrong. Two other friends thought it was suicide. It’s never been explained — Parsons was just 37 at the time.
