Marvel Whiteside Parsons, 1914 to 1952: GALCIT Rocket Research Group with Frank Malina, JATO units in 1941, Aerojet cofounder in 1942, the first castable composite propellant, the core technology of solid rocketry. The parallel file: joined the OTO in 1939, led Agape Lodge from 1942, performed the Babalon Working in early 1946 with L. Ron Hubbard as scribe, married Marjorie Cameron that October, and was defrauded of roughly $21,000 by Hubbard, who absconded with the boat and Parsons's mistress and used the capital toward Dianetics. Parsons died June 17, 1952, in a mercury fulminate explosion in his Pasadena coach-house lab, officially accidental, a day before a planned move to Mexico.
The lore grows exactly where the documents stop: Parsons allegedly summoned a squall that wrecked Hubbard's fleeing yacht the same day; Cameron appeared at his door right after the Working, red-haired, and was read as the summoned elemental incarnate; his mother took a fatal overdose within hours of the blast; and the Pasadena faithful still translate JPL as Jack Parsons Lives. Cameron spent the next forty years certain he was murdered. The FBI had, in fact, permanently revoked his clearance that January.
The claim, from Parsons's modern biographers: the Babalon Working tore something open, the postwar paranormal explosion, Kenneth Arnold's sighting arriving in June 1947, eighteen months after the ritual, reads to the faithful as the aeon's ignition, rocketry and saucers as twin births of one rift. Verdict: the dates are real and the causality is unfalsifiable, filed as such. The archive's sober note: the twentieth century's strangest hybrid, intelligence-grade science and lodge magic under one roof, was not an anomaly. Dee had the same roof. So did the men around MKUltra. The question was never whether the two worlds touch. It is why the official histories keep demolishing the connecting hallway.
If the founder of American rocketry was a practicing Thelemite, which half of the résumé does the space program run on?