Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

Written by George Pendle

Narrated by James Langton

Now a CBS All Access series: “A riveting tale of rocketry, the occult, and boom-and-bust 1920s and 1930s Los Angeles” (Booklist).

The Los Angeles Times headline screamed: ROCKET SCIENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION. The man known as Jack Parsons, a maverick rocketeer who helped transform a derided sci-fi plotline into actuality, was at first mourned as a scientific prodigy. But reporters soon uncovered a more shocking story: Parsons had been a devotee of the city’s occult scene.

Fueled by childhood dreams of space flight, Parsons was a leader of the motley band of enthusiastic young men who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a cornerstone of the American space program. But Parsons’s wild imagination also led him into a world of incantations and orgiastic rituals—if he could make rocketry a reality, why not black magic?

George Pendle re-creates the world of John Parsons in this dazzling portrait of prewar superstition, cold war paranoia, and futuristic possibility. Peopled with such formidable real-life figures as Howard Hughes, Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, and Robert Heinlein, Strange Angel explores the unruly consequences of genius.

The basis for a new miniseries created by Mark Heyman and produced by Ridley Scott, this biography “vividly tells the story of a mysterious and forgotten man who embodied the contradictions of his time . . . when science fiction crashed into science fact. . . . [It] would make a compelling work of fiction if it weren’t so astonishingly true” (Publishers Weekly).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: May 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781721348916

George Pendle

George Pendle is an author and journalist. He writes about contemporary art, historical fiction, imaginary countries, real monsters, mad scientists, sane occultists, and the color blue. He has written for the Economist, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Times (London), the Guardian, the Observer, frieze, Cabinet, Bidoun, Modern Painters, and Icon. He has also written signs for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

Reviews for Strange Angel

[manipledmutineer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating and ultimately rather sad.

[alanteder · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A Stranger Angel than FictionReview of the Audible Audio edition (2019) of the original Harcourt hardcover "Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons" (2005)I normally give things related to the occult a miss, but when Strange Angel came up as an Audible Daily Deal on Oct. 7, 2019, I couldn't resist giving it a tryout and was not disappointed. This life story not only covers the beginnings of the American rocketry program (with a group of sometimes hapless amateurs who called themselves the Suicide Squad) and the American branch of Aleister Crowley's magick worshippers but has some fascinating cameos by later famous science fiction writers. Everyone from Ray Bradbury to Robert A. Heinlein to L. Sprague de Camp put in an appearance. The notorious science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard plays an especially prominent role in these early years before he founded Scientology, but he was already scamming people even then, especially his supposed friend John Parsons. You can well understand how they could turn this into an ongoing television series which is also the reason for this new tie-in edition release.

[setnahkt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wow. I thought I was weird. John Whiteside Parsons was simultaneously:* A pioneering rocket scientist, who testified at a trial as an expert witness on explosives at age 23; invented JATO units and castable solid rocket fuel; was one of the founders of both Aerojet General Corporation and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and has a crater on the moon named for him;
* High priest of Ordo Temple Orientalis, the organization founded by Alistair Crowley, where he engaged in copious amounts of sex, alcohol, drugs, and magic (if rock-and-roll had been invented, I’m sure Parsons would have done that, too, but as it was he was a fan of classical music). The sex included essentially trading his first wife to another man so he could take up with her 16-year-old stepsister; losing this second girl to none other than L. Ron Hubbard; and “summoning” a third female companion by an elaborate ritual including hours of standing in a pentagram chanting in Enochian and engaging in “focused masturbation”. (If only I had known about Enochian and pentagrams when I was a teenager; I was so close). Drugs apparently included peyote, marijuana, morphine, cocaine, amphetamines, and whatever else accomplished chemist Parsons could cook up.
* An early member of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, where he hobnobbed with Ray Bradbury, Forest Ackerman, Jack Williamson, Anthony Boucher, L. Sprague DeCamp, Robert Heinlein, and the previously mentioned L. Ron Hubbard. Parsons’ didn’t write any science fiction himself; his literary output included a number of not terribly good poems and Crowleyesque tracts, but he appears as a character in some of the other author’s works, including Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue and De Camp’s A Gun for Dinosaur.
And he was dead at age 37, in an apparent accident involving a batch of mercury fulminate he was preparing in his laundry room. (One of his O.T.O. associates suggested the actual cause was a fire elemental Parsons had summoned and failed to control).
Author George Pendle does a pretty good job. Naturally, the sex and magic makes up most of the story, since that’s what sells books, but Pendle does a pretty decent job of explaining the science and engineering. I didn’t realize that JATO units, Aerojet, and JPL all had “jet” rather than “rocket” in their names because the military considered rockets to be “Buck Rogers stuff”; Pendle quotes the famous New York Times editorial in which Robert Goddard is dissed because he didn’t realize (according to the editorial writer) that a “rocket wouldn’t work in a vacuum because it would have nothing to push against”. I also found out about the history of JATO. Parson’s original JATO units were black powder rockets, with the powder compressed into the rocket casing with a hydraulic ram; trials showed that these worked if freshly prepared but exploded if they were allowed to sit overnight. Parsons found that the mix was sensitive to temperature change, and if the charge shrank enough to crack or move away from the chamber walls the surface area would increase and the rocket would explode. His insight came while watching a street paving crew; he made a mix of potassium perchlorate and asphalt that could be poured directly into the rocket chamber when hot and which was flexible enough when cool to avoid cracking or detachment.
After the heady excitement of the early days of rocketry, Parson’s life fell apart. He never had a college degree (he was allowed to work at CalTech on the sufferance of Theodore von Kármán, who was apparently a quarter bubble off level himself but much more disciplined); he was forced to sell out of AeroJet General for $11K (a heady sum for the 1940s but still much less than he would have realized if he had hung on to his stock for a few more years) because the military and FBI became suspicious of his OTO activity; the O.T.O itself fell apart (the organization still exists but the particular chapter Parsons was associated with dissolved); his “summoned” girlfriend left him for an artist; L. Ron Hubbard conned him out of his life savings (note that Hubbard had previously conned him out of another girlfriend); and he lost his security clearance. He was reduced to doing special effects for film companies; that’s apparently what led to his demise. He had been renting some warehouse space for a lab but was evicted and had to hastily move all his chemicals and equipment to his home. When he got a contact to make some “squibs” (small charges that could be detonated to simulate bullets striking) he seemingly couldn’t find proper glassware to make mercury fulminate and was mixing the batch in a coffee can. He survived the explosion but lost his right arm and the right side of his face, and was unable to speak or explain before dying a few hours later.
Recommended for both the history and the astonishment value. It is perhaps appropriate that the lunar crater “Parsons” is on the far side.

[craso_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

During the Great Depression people were searching for a way out of the crushing poverty. Some young people looked to science or science fiction for answers. Jack Parsons and his best friend Ed Forman decided they were going to the moon. They experimented in rocketry which was thought as fanciful science fiction stories at the time. A newspaper article about scientist Robert Goddard claimed that it was impossible to ignite a rocket in the vacuum of space. Goddard was humiliated and retreated to New Mexico. The two young men and many other rocketeers continued to work on their dream.Jack Parsons and Ed Forman were part of a team of Rocketeers at California Technical Institute called the Suicide Squad. Parsons was a master of explosives and propellants. He worked with Ed Forman who engineered the rockets and mathematician Frank Malina. Neither Parsons nor Forman ever attained a formal college education yet they were welcomed to Caltech by Theodore von Karman a professor at the Institute. They were eventually successful during World War II and were the first to create solid fuel rockets, but that isn’t the end of the story. Parson’s was killed in an accidental explosion at his home in 1952. After his death the newspapers discovered he had a strange personal life. Parsons was a follower of Aleister Crowley and the leader of a sect of OTO or Ordo Templi Orientis. Followers paid Crowley an annual subscription and fees each time they progressed along the ten degrees of attainment. Crowley was a huckster who used the naïve and charismatic Parsons to propound his religion of Thelma in Southern California. Parson’s friends thought he was eccentric and enjoyed the parties at his OTO compound in Pasadena. They didn’t realize that Parsons was mentally ill and dabbling in black magic, something Crowley even warned against. The author does a good job relating the times that Parson lived and how they affected his life. He was influenced by the Great Depression, the strong science fiction community in Los Angeles, and the many cults that sprang up in California. Parsons met authors Jack Williamson, Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard. He also became hunted by the House on Un-American Activities as many scientists did in the red scare of the 1950s. I was attracted to this book by the strange life Jack Parsons lead. What I learned from it was the history of the beginning of rocket science in America. If you are fascinated in aerospace, NASA, or how cults manipulate people then you will find a lot of interest in this book.

[gregtmills · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It’s the true story of the high school dropout who helped launched the space program, John Parsons. But this is no fuck-up does good and become Lee Iacocca bullshit. Parsons was a WACKO, as well as an interesting footnote in the history of religious chicanery, serving as a bridge between the Victorian Old World flim- flam of Aleister Crowley and the Space Age Yankee flim-flam of L. Ron Hubbard (who makes a last act appearance as a dastardly villain, fleeing on yacht with Parson’s lady and a good chunk of his life savings.)Parson blew up sheds in and around Cal Tech by day, and ran a Gnostic free love freakshow in an old Pasadena mansion by night. (LA was very, very weird in the forties. Full of racial strife, institutionalized corruption and flakely cults. The more things change...) Parson was Crowley’s man in LA, running the local temple of Crowley’s order, the OTO. He was also one of the underappreciated international network of amateurs that ushered in the rocket age.Rockets were written off by the scientific establishment as goony kids stuff, not worthy of study, especially as propulsion for spacecraft. Some physicists, who should have known better, even argued rockets would not work in a vacuum.It was only through the efforts of a bunch of obsessed misfits existing outside academia that the US eventually had any sort of rocket program. The Nazis, on the other hand, became very very interested in what their nerds were up to rocket-wise and as a result 3,000 V2s later rained on London and Rotterdam. Rockets worked.The sadly ironic result for Parsons is that once rocketry became respectable, weirdos like him were pushed aside for degreed professionals. While his grab-ass little posse of pyros eventually became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Parson ended his life in an accidental explosion, blowing himself to smithereens mixing up demolition effects for a movie studio.What’s interesting is watching Hubbard, at the time a fairly successful Sci-Fi writer, out-Crowley Crowley, creating a global religion with not a little cribbing from Crowley’s playbook. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp (Conan’s co-creator) even make a brief appearance to comment on the audacity of their fellow pulp-spieler.The prose is a bit dry, but the subject matter more than makes up for it. As soon as you’re done rereading Princess Daisy, give it a spin.

[paulmysterioso · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

George Pendle's biography of John Whiteside Parsons, early pioneer of rocket science and the space program, clues us into a major strange-o whose fixation on explosive propellants and the occult lead to his untimely end. Well written, informative (I had no idea about the origins of the early space program) and fascinating.