Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  Thrill with lissome lust of the light,

  O man! My man!

  Come careering out of the night

  Of Pan! Io Pan!

  Nowadays chanting black magic invocations before rocket tests is frowned upon, but it does add a certain something.

  Parsons was recruited into the world of academic aeronautics research by the famed Hungarian physicist Theodore von Kármán, after whom the boundary between earth’s atmosphere and outer space was named. Von Kármán had a reputation for being willing to take on unlikely projects, and his colleagues at Caltech were happy to leave the ‘Buck Rogers stuff’ to him. Parsons had no formal college education, but von Kármán recognised his talent and intelligence and included him in a research group working on identifying more powerful rocket fuels. Naturally charming and handsome, Parsons had no difficulty moving among the engineers and experimenters of academia.

  Parsons’s group soon earned the nickname the Suicide Squad, following a number of failed rocket-fuel experiments that caused safety concerns on the Caltech campus. In response they were moved to a few acres of land nearer the San Gabriel Mountains, just above the Devils Gate Dam. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is situated there to this day, and considers its official moment of founding to be the experiments performed by Parsons and the Suicide Squad on Hallowe’en 1936.

  The approaching war brought a turnaround in the fortunes of the group, in terms of both financial support and the credibility of their field. The outbreak of war in Europe also coincided with Parsons’s discovery of Aleister Crowley, although he had long held an interest in the darker side of the occult. He claimed that he first attempted to invoke Satan at the age of thirteen. After the war, when his technical reputation was assured, he sold his share in the Eurojet Corporation and dedicated himself to furthering his occult studies.

  Rumours began to circulate about the ungodly activities occurring at his large house on Pasadena’s ‘millionaires’ row’. His home became a focus for both devotees of the occult and Los Angeles science fiction enthusiasts. His well-heeled neighbours were not happy when he began renting out rooms to ‘undesirables’, such as bohemians, artists or anarchists. Parsons had placed an advert in the local paper’s ‘rooms to let’ section which advised that prospective tenants ‘must not believe in God’. His bedroom was his main temple, where he regularly performed a Black Mass in black robes with a group of Crowley’s followers. One visitor recalled how ‘Two women in diaphanous gowns would dance around a pot of fire, surrounded by coffins topped with candles … All I could think at the time was if those robes caught on fire the whole house would go up like a tinderbox.’ Sexual magic and drugs play an important role in Thelemic ritual magic, due to their ability to create changes in consciousness. Parsons wrote a poem called ‘Oriflamme’, which began, ‘I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote / marihuana, morphine and cocaine. / I never knew sadness but only a madness / that burns at the heart and the brain.’

  Parsons’s great occult project was to destroy the current world, which he viewed as patriarchal and corrupt, by unleashing an overpowering wave of dark female energy. To this end he embarked on a lengthy series of rituals aimed at manifesting the Biblical Whore of Babylon (or ‘Babalon’ as he preferred to name her). He was aided in this endeavour by the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who would later found the Scientology organisation. Their relationship did not end well, and Hubbard eventually abandoned Parsons. He took with him Parsons’s lover and a large amount of his money, with which he bought a number of yachts. Parsons retaliated by declaring magical war and claimed to have summoned the sudden sea squall that almost sank Hubbard’s boat. This messy situation led to a distinct cooling in Crowley’s opinion of the pair. Referring to Parsons and Hubbard in a letter to his colleague Karl Germer, Crowley wrote that ‘I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.’

  Parsons believed that, exactly seven years after his Babalon Workings, Babalon herself would manifest and rule over this world. His prophecy included a proviso that this would only occur if he was still alive. But during the Babalon Workings, Hubbard had channelled a dreadful warning, one that left him ‘pale and sweaty’: ‘She [Babalon] is the flame of life, power of darkness, she destroys with a glance, she may take thy soul. She feeds upon the death of men. Beautiful – horrible … She shall absorb thee, and thou shalt become living flame before she incarnates.’

  An explosion ripped apart Jack Parsons’s home on 17 June 1952. It could be heard nearly two miles away. Parsons was at the very heart of it. His right arm was never found, so must have been closest to the source of the explosion. Much of his right jaw was gone, his shoes were shredded by the blast and his remaining limbs were shattered. He was found alive by neighbours, in the rubble of the firestorm. Papers both technical and occult floated through the air. He died thirty-seven minutes later, and was still just thirty-seven years old. His last words were, ‘I wasn’t done.’ Fitting for an Antichrist perhaps – the opposite of Jesus’s ‘It is finished.’

  Parsons, who had found work making explosives for Hollywood movies, had most likely made a careless mistake when working in his laboratory, where he stored a significant amount of chemicals and explosives. There have been a number of other theories for his death over the years, as you might expect given his links to military secrets and the world of the occult.

  Parsons’s interest in both rockets and ritual magic might seem surprising today, when a career in rocket science is considered to be professional and respectable. But when Parsons set out on his path, they were both fantastical. Such was Parsons’s will and personality that he pursued them both regardless, in the long tradition of magically minded scientists such as Isaac Newton or the sixteenth-century astronomer John Dee. He was concerned with summoning and controlling colossal amounts of explosive energy, both mental and chemical. Both were dangerous, and in both he could be reckless. If he didn’t have the demons that drove him towards the occult, it seems unlikely that he would have had such success in the field of rocket science. It was the same urge that propelled him down both paths.

  In 1972 the International Astronomical Union named a crater on the moon ‘Parsons Crater’, to mark his pioneering work in the field of rocket science. It is perhaps apt that the crater that honours Marvel Whiteside Parsons is on the dark side of the moon.

  In July 1943 a charming, handsome German aristocrat named Wernher von Braun was driven to Wolfsschanze, a secret bunker headquarters hidden deep in the woods outside Rastenberg in East Prussia. This was Hitler’s infamous ‘Wolf’s Lair’. Von Braun’s intention was to convince his Führer to support the production of a new rocket he had developed, the A-4.

  Amidst the dark, grimy industry of the Second World War, A-4 rockets appeared to be technology from the future. Standing forty-six feet tall, these sleek, beautifully shaped rockets looked like illustrations from pulp science fiction. They had a range of two hundred miles and were decades ahead of anything the Russians or Americans were capable of building. The problem was that Hitler had previously dismissed the project because of a dream he once had. In that dream Hitler was convinced that no rocket would ever reach England, and for that reason he simply did not believe that the project was worthwhile.

  By 1943 Hitler was pallid from living in bunkers away from sunlight. He looked much older and frailer than before the war, and the slight stoop as he walked made him look smaller. An army general who accompanied von Braun was shocked at the change in him. Yet as Hitler watched von Braun’s confident presentation and saw footage of successful A-4 test flights, a marked change came over him. ‘Why could I not believe in the success of your work? Europe and the rest of the world will be too small to contain a war with such weapons. Humanity will not be able to endure it!’ he declared. Hitler took a gamble on von Braun’s work winning him the war, and redirected much needed resources to the rocket programme. The A-4 would be renamed the V-2, the ‘Vengeance Weapon’. Hitler wanted the rocket’s load to
be increased from a 1-tonne to a 10-tonne warhead, and he wanted thousands of them to be mass-produced every month.

  For Hitler, the V-2 was a weapon that would break the spirit of British resistance in a way that his previous bombing blitzes had not. It probably would have done if it had been deployed earlier in the war, rather than during the European endgame when the Russians were approaching Berlin as the Allies advanced from the west. The V-2s that were used against England took a psychological toll on the war-weary population, which was noticeably greater than the impact of the 1940 and 1941 Blitz. There had been a ritual pattern to life under the Luftwaffe bombing campaigns against cities such as Coventry, Belfast and London. They began with the wail of the air-raid sirens, which heralded the increasing drone of the approaching bombers and the journey to the air-raid shelters until, finally, the all-clear was sounded. The British people had proved remarkably able to adjust to life under this ritual. The V-2s, in contrast, fell silently. They were undetectable in flight and impossible to shoot down. They could hit anywhere at any time, leaving the populations of target cities permanently unnerved and scared.

  Bill Holman, a child survivor of the V-2 attacks, later remembered one of the 1,115 V-2 bombs which fell on or around London. ‘On 24 November I was at junior school when all of a sudden it was rocked by a tremendous explosion. Rushing home, I met my friend Billy emerging from his front door, dazed yet calm, and announcing, “Mum and dad are dead.” A clock tower had stood near our home. Now, hit by a V-2, it was replaced by a vast crater … Mr and Mrs Russell ran a vegetable barrow in the street; he was dead, she’d had her legs blown off. Mrs Popplewell, a friend of my mum’s, was lifeless without a scratch on her. She had been walking when the blast from the rocket entered her lungs and she couldn’t breathe. Over the road, a young soldier was on leave with his wife and mother. The wife had popped out to the shops and lived. Mother and son were killed.’

  For von Braun, this was all incidental to the pursuit of his childhood dream. Like Jack Parsons, von Braun’s goal was space flight. As a boy growing up in a wealthy Berlin family he had studied the moon through a telescope and strapped rockets to his go-kart. But space flight was as much a crank’s dream in pre-war Germany as it was in pre-war America. The establishment did not take it seriously and it was certainly not something they funded. His only option was to keep that dream hidden while attempting to advance it through the only means possible: weapons research.

  Von Braun did not show signs of being unduly troubled by the morality of this path. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1940. He was promoted every year until he reached the SS rank of Sturmbannführer. Following his successful appeal to Hitler, he oversaw production of his V-2 rocket at Mittelwerk, a factory built underground in order to protect it from Allied bombers. Mittelwerk consisted of 42 miles of tunnels hewn out of the rock by slave labour, and the descriptions of the state of the slaves when they were liberated by American forces in 1945 are harrowing. Over twenty thousand slaves died constructing the factory and the V-2. Mass slave hangings were common, and it was mandatory for all the workforce to witness them. Typically twelve workers would be arbitrarily selected and hung by their necks from a crane, their bodies left dangling for days. Starvation of slave workers was deliberate, and in the absence of drinking water they were expected to drink from puddles. Dysentery and gangrene were common causes of death. There are records of the liberating forces’ failed attempts at removing the stench of death from the tunnels with strong disinfectant.

  Von Braun himself was personally involved in acquiring slave labour from concentration camps such as Buchenwald. Ten years later he was in America presenting children’s programmes on the Disney Channel, in an effort to increase public support for space research. Whatever he had to do in order to advance his dream, von Braun did it.

  Von Braun’s journey from the SS to the Disney Channel was fraught with difficulties. As one of the most gifted rocket scientists in history, he was regarded as something of a prize by Russian, British and American armed forces. But with the Third Reich collapsing around him in the final weeks of the European war, this did not mean that he or his team would not be killed by mistake, or that their work would survive the chaos of regime change. Hitler’s infamous ‘Nero Decree’ of 19 March 1945 complicated matters further, for it demanded that ‘anything … of value within Reich territory, which could in any way be used by the enemy immediately or within the foreseeable future for the prosecution of the war, will be destroyed.’ Von Braun and his men were clearly of value and were placed under armed guard by the SD, the security service of the SS. Their SD guards were under orders to shoot all the rocket scientists the moment they were in danger of being captured by either of the oncoming armies. Fortunately, von Braun’s colleague General Walter Dornberger was able to persuade the SD major that he and his men would be hanged as war criminals if they complied with this order, and that their only hope of surviving the war was to burn their black uniforms and disguise themselves as regular German troops.

  Von Braun had already decided that he wanted to surrender to the Americans. His argument was that America was the only country not decimated by the war, and hence the only country financially able to support a space programme, but it is also clear that his aristocratic background would not have been well suited to life in the Soviet Union. America, in turn, wanted von Braun primarily because they didn’t want anybody else to have him. Arrangements were quickly made to bring von Braun to America, along with his designs, his rockets and about a thousand other Germans (members of his team, along with their family members). An operation to whitewash the files of von Braun and other prominent Nazis in the team began. Jack Parsons’s old mentor von Kármán was part of this process. It was known as Operation Paperclip after the paperclips which were used to attach fake biographies, listing false political affiliations and employment histories, to their files. Following Operation Paperclip, even Nazis who were guilty of war crimes were eligible for life in the US.

  Von Braun settled into an army research facility in El Paso, Texas, together with his team and their families. His hopes of commencing research into a space programme, however, soon faltered. The US did not expect another international war to erupt and saw no reason to develop weapons for one. It would be over a decade before von Braun’s talents were put to use. Yet the chain of events which led to this started with the end of the Pacific War. Man’s conquest of space owes much to a destructive force on a par with that sought by Jack Parsons at his most insane. This appeared in the skies above Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

  The first nuclear weapon used against an enemy country was an A-Bomb called Little Boy. The United States Air Force dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. It killed an estimated 66,000 people immediately, and 69,000 as a result of injuries and fallout. The second and last nuclear weapon ever used in warfare fell on Nagasaki three days later. It was called Fat Man, and it killed a total of 64,000 people. Both bombs were carried across the Pacific in the belly of a B-29 ‘Superfortress’, an enormous four-engine bomber with a combat range of over 3,000 miles. The B-29 was developed when the Americans feared all of Europe was going to fall to the Third Reich, meaning that any air strikes against Germany would have to have been launched from Canada or the US. The B-29’s development, with hindsight, can be seen as a significant moment in American history. It has come to symbolise the rejection of the United States’ historic isolationist policies.

  The invention of nuclear bombs, as well as nuclear energy, was another of the unforeseen implications of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Einstein had been playing around with the mathematics of his work when a beautifully simple equation popped out, as if from nowhere. This equation was E=mc2. ‘E’ represented an amount of energy, but curiously the ‘m’ represented mass and so referred to physical matter, rather than energy. ‘C’ was a constant which stood for the speed of light. This was a big number, and once it was squared it became massive. The
equation, therefore, said that a small amount of mass was equivalent to a really huge amount of energy. The question then became how to free and utilise that energy, and splitting up heavier, unstable elements such as plutonium or uranium seemed to be the way to go.

  The decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan is still controversial. Some see it as a war crime and argue that, as President Eisenhower wrote in his memoir, ‘Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.’ Others point to the Japanese ancient warrior tradition of bushido as evidence that the country would never have surrendered, and to the fact that the bombing prevented a land invasion and hence saved the lives of many thousands of Allied troops. More recently historians have argued that the bomb was used as a show of strength towards the Soviet Union, rather than as a means to defeat Japan.

  But presenting Stalin with a show of strength might not have been the smartest move on the board. To those with an understanding of Stalin’s character it was clear that, after the Americans had demonstrated their power at Hiroshima, nothing on earth was going to stop him from obtaining a nuclear weapon of his own. He achieved this goal with impressive speed, relying as much on the skills of Russian intelligence agents, who stole Western nuclear secrets, as he did on the talents of Russian engineers. Russia detonated its first successful nuclear test in August 1949.

  It is, perhaps, fortunate for the world that Russia caught up so quickly. A leading member of the US Atomic Energy Commission after the war was a Hungarian mathematician called John von Neumann. Von Neumann had been a child prodigy, able to divide two eight-digit numbers in his head at the age of eight and who simultaneously took degrees at three different universities at the age of eighteen. Von Neumann was a genius, and he became one of the President’s most respected advisers. His advice was this: Eisenhower had no choice but to immediately launch a massive unprovoked nuclear strike against Russia, and to nuke the Soviets back to the Stone Age before they developed a nuclear bomb of their own.