The Mad Scientist

Hey True Weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. The moon doesn't show us her whole face. The dark side or far side of the moon is always turned away from Earth. We can't see how battered and pockmarked it is from eons of debris slamming into its dusty surface.

The scars left behind from that pummeling are called impact craters. One of those is named for the person who invented the very thing that made early space exploration possible, one of the daddies of the American space age. The crater itself is nothing special at all, and it's hidden forever from our view, which is a little bit sad given how much we owe its namesake.

It feels disrespectful. What could be the reason for such an obscure tribute? Could it be because the rocket scientist who gave that crater its name was a blood-drinking, orgy-hosting high priest of magical occult sex rituals? Truly weird stuff. It wasn't from page news back in June 1952. The Sacramento Bee ran it on page 10, a tragic accident is what they called it, and then a grieving mother driven to suicide.

The deceased was identified as John Whiteside Parsons, age 37, chemist and rocket expert. It was an explosion in his garage, a terrible accident that occurred as Parsons was packing up a box full of chemicals. The blast ripped through the walls of Parsons' home laboratory, tore through the floor and ceiling. It's a wonder no one else in the apartment building was injured.

Army ordinance experts from nearby Fort Murray were called in to search for any additional explosives that might still be present, might still be a danger. So they searched Parsons' home, and it was pure luck that his widow Marjorie happened to be in Mexico at the time of the blast. The victim's mother, 58-year-old Virginia Parsons, was so devastated by grief that she allegedly swallowed most of a bottle of sleeping pills just a few hours after being informed of her son's death.

John W. Parsons, let's call him Jack as he preferred, was no random dude playing with bombs in the backyard. Parsons was a genius, a very unconventional genius, and a visionary. He was a rocket scientist long before rocket science escaped the fantasy world of science fiction and became science fact. Parsons' work helped land the Apollo mission on the moon, but he'd left that work behind by the time he blew himself up.

Parsons was working in the movie business when he died, a career that found him after his government shoved him aside, forced him out of the field he'd all but created. Guess they couldn't reconcile Parsons' brilliance with his later avocation. Jack Parsons was born in 1914 to parents who divorced not long after his arrival.

He grew up with real privilege and comfort in a mansion in Pasadena. What the boy had in wealth, though, he lacked in human connection. Parsons was a solitary kid, his days spent lost in the world of books and imagination. From classical mythology to Jules Verne, Parsons was fascinated by the idea of traveling to other worlds.

It was a shock that much as he loved books, Jack was as poor a student as they come. His biographer George Pendle thought that dyslexia might be the main factor in Jack's poor performance. But there were other things going on, too. Kids bullied Parsons for having money, for being effeminate, for being just weird. If you were a weird kid, if you have a weird kid, then you'll agree that what happened next was kind of a miracle.

There was a boy at Parsons' school who didn't like bullies, who stepped up and defended Jack. And this boy, Wonder of Wonders, was into all the same things as Jack. His name was Edward Forman, and he was a couple years older than Parsons when the two boys met at Washington Junior High in Pasadena. Forman was the youngest of four boys and newly arrived in California from the Midwest.

Maybe that's why he was sensitive to what Parsons was going through, why he reached out and rescued the younger kids from the bullies who were tormenting him. It didn't take long for the pair to bond over their mutual enthusiasms, science fiction and rocketry. They began building model rockets and launching them in their backyards with every intention of developing the technology to send a rocket to the moon, which makes the rest of us look like the laziest high school slackers ever born, right?

Forman and Parsons even came up with their very own motto in Latin, because, of course, Ad Astra Per Aspera, which translates to Through Hardship to the Stars. Parsons and Edwards' friendship and backyard rocket experiments continued all through high school. Forman quit before graduating and enrolled himself at Pasadena Junior College.

Still in high school, Parsons talked his way into a part-time job at a company that manufactured explosives. That's where he became a self-taught chemist. Parsons then followed Forman to Pasadena Junior College, but was forced to drop out thanks to a brand new challenge, money problems. It was the Great Depression that put an end to the life of privilege he'd enjoyed as a child.

Parsons eventually went back to school at the University of Southern California and studied for two years. Then, in 1935, he married a woman named Helen Northrup, and a big opportunity came knocking. It was a job at the California Institute of Technology, Caltech. Parsons lacked both the degree and the experience a job like that tends to call for.

But the rules are often different for those few with a genius IQ. Meanwhile, Forman was working all kinds of jobs to keep himself afloat. Eventually he made his way to an apprenticeship as a machinist at an aircraft factory, and then to an apprenticeship at an ammunition factory. Every step Parsons and Forman took grew their knowledge and skills, which helped them improve the design of their rockets.

And now the backyard was no longer big enough for their tests and launches. They moved into the nearby desert, and then eventually set up operations in a dry canyon at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. They weren't kids anymore, and they understood now that rocketry was a far more complicated science than they had ever imagined.

And because they had been riding back and forth with rocket experts in the US and Europe, they also knew that there was no one ahead of them in the race, no major leap forward, no thrilling new discovery. In March 1935, an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times that was right up their It was about research into a potential rocket plane that could fly at speeds up to 1,200 miles an hour.

It was just their good luck that this research was being done by a grad student at Caltech named William Belay. Belay theorized that his dream rocket plane would need to carry 90% of its weight in fuel. That fuel would be a mix of gasoline and liquid oxygen, a contained explosion. As for what purpose the rocket plane might serve, Belay did not share the same big dream as Parsons and Forman.

Belay envisioned his rocket traversing the length of the United States in a single hour to deliver the mail. Parsons and Forman had other ideas. They contacted Belay, who suggested that they speak to another grad student at Caltech, one whose research better fit their vision. That student was named Frank Malina, and he was up to his eyeballs studying rocket propulsion.

The three rocket men hit it off and decided to work together. Their first proposal to build and test an alcohol-based rocket was declined by Caltech. No worries, they were scientists, self-taught scientists, and it would take more than a simple rejection to stop them. So they headed next for the office of Dr. Theodore von Kármán, mathematician, aerospace engineer, physicist, an all-around big brainiac, and director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Caltech.

Von Kármán wasn't just book smart. He'd watched the rise of Nazism in his native Europe and decided to get out while he still could, which is how he found himself in an office in sunny Pasadena listening to a proposal from three wildly enthusiastic young rocket scientists. Von Kármán liked what he heard and later said that he was really taken by the magnitude of the dream they shared, but even more so by their experience.

Vormann was a true rocketeer, as at home with a rocket engine as another person might be with a car engine. Self-taught though he was, Parsons was a hell of a chemist, and Malina had a reputation as an outstanding student of aeronautics. Throw in one more Caltech grad student with the fabulously unlikely name of Apollo Smith and the G-A-L-C-I-T, the GALCIT for Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at California Institute of Technology, was born.

They had no university funding, and they spent hours combing through nearby junkyards for parts. Their first attempt at a gas and oxygen fueled rocket failed. Their second, third, and fourth attempts not only achieved ignition, but allowed Malina to collect enough data on thrust to earn Von Kármán's approval. He gave them lab space, but they were evicted after a rocket fuel leak damaged the building.

Not long after that, there was another accident, this time blowing out a section of the building's exterior wall. That's how they got the nickname, the Suicide Squad. In their defense, something always seemed to be blowing up at Caltech back then, like the time a lab worker spilled ether on the floor, it caught fire while he was mopping it up, ignited other chemicals in the room, and boom, a laboratory worth more than four and a half million dollars in today's money was obliterated.

But you know what they say about practice making perfect? People were watching the Rocketeers, important people, like the chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps, General Henry Arnold. He popped by the campus of Caltech in 1938 to investigate the possibility of incorporating rocket engines into military planes, many of which faced the dual challenge of being super heavy with cargo and facing down shorter runways than was optimal.

General Arnold was impressed with what he saw. And the next thing you know, there was money on the table, a contract to develop something called Jet Assisted Takeoff, or JATO. It was the very first research on rocketry to squeeze a dollar out of the U.S. government. And just two years later, in 1940, Frank Malina was being asked by the Army to keep it on the down low.

We know that because a bunch of news outlets reported it, which I don't know, seems like a way of talking very loudly about a secret you've been asked to keep. But oh, well, in 1942, Parsons, Forman, Malina, von Karman, and another grad student named Martin Summerfield each chipped in $250 and founded their own company, Aerojet General Corporation.

They were officially in the business of manufacturing JATOs to be attached under the wings of military planes. One year later, the team submitted a proposal to the U.S. Army to research and improve upon the missiles that were bombarding Allied targets in World War II. They called themselves by a new name in that proposal.

They called themselves the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Remember those boyish dreams Parsons and Forman had shared all those years ago in junior high when they were building and launching model rockets in their backyards? Those boys dreamed of sending rockets into space, rockets to the moon. They made that dream come true.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, is what catapulted America into the space age. Here's the part I really love. JPL is still managed by Caltech. JPL is NASA's only federally funded R&D center. It's still right where it all began, the vision of two teenage boys who loved science fiction, who never let the lack of a degree or the absence of funding or even an explosion or ten slow them down.

If we left it right here, you could just about call it a perfect American success story. But what happened next is what takes it over the top into the realm of legend and myth. Because there was a whole lot more to Jack Parsons than just rocket science. There was another destiny awaiting him. High priest of an occult temple, practitioner of sex magic rituals, hedonist, orgy master, drinker of blood.

Bet you didn't see that coming. In the early 1940s, Jack Parsons rose to the rank of West Coast leader of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Wait, what the what? The Ordo Templi Orientis, aka the O.T.O. It was under the control of a legendary occult figure, a person some called the wickedest man in the world, Aleister Crowley.

What a renaissance man he was, painter, poet, philosopher, mountain climber, and prophet. Here to guide humanity into the eon of Horus, a period of great self-actualization where the old religions would be cast aside as relics, no longer needed in this coming age of greater consciousness. Side note, chucking the Abrahamic religions, you know, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam into the dumpster of history is one very fast way to get yourself tagged the wickedest man in the world.

Now the O.T.O. originated in Germany sometime between like 1895 and 1906, about a decade before Aleister Crowley discovered it. You might think of it as like a cousin to another secret group, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light. It's been suggested that the O.T.O. adopted its sex magic rituals from the Hermetic Brotherhood, which had developed those from the writings of an American occultist named Pascal Beverly Randolph.

If you're in the market for a headache, let me suggest you spend a few hours trying to sort out the histories of all these secret groups and the connections between them. That said, one of the things that sets the O.T.O. apart from other obscure occult religious sects is this, the O.T.O. claims no connection to the mysterious Knights Templar and the ancient magical secrets those knights allegedly guard and protect.

Aleister Crowley was admitted into the O.T.O. in 1910. Just two years later, he was rocking 10th degree status and in charge of the O.T.O. in Britain and Ireland. With this came a very impressive new title, Supreme and Holy King of Ireland, Iona and all the Britons within the Sanctuary of the Gnosis. I'm not much of a joiner myself, but you can see the appeal of belonging to any group with nicknames this swaggy.

But then came World War I and his supreme holiness Aleister Crowley left Europe and came to the U.S. Under Crowley's leadership, the O.T.O. changed dramatically. For starters, he rewrote the first three ceremonial initiation rites. They called them degrees, stripping them of their ties to Freemasonry. So what had begun as a kind of quasi Masonic organization soon morphed into a secret society for Crowley's personal and invented a cult system called Thelema.

Okay, get ready because this is a lot to take in. Thelema was aimed at helping its acolytes discover their true will, their unique purpose. Naturally, there's a holy text involved. In this case, the Book of the Law dictated to Crowley, he claims, by an entity called Aiwass. Over the course of three days in April 1904, Crowley was visited by this being whom he described as having a gauzy appearance, vaguely Persian attire, and a deep, almost musical voice that was completely devoid of any discernible accent.

Crowley said that while he understood that it could very well be his own subconscious doing the dictating and not some mystical being, he didn't think it was, mostly because he didn't like the message. He loathed the book, initially saying that it knocked my Buddhism completely on the head. I was bitterly opposed to the principle of the book on almost every point of morality.

The third chapter seemed to me gratuitously atrocious. Thelema has its own constellation of gods drawn from the ancient Egyptians. It has its own ceremonial rituals, magic, spelled M-A-G-I-C-K, because Crowley wanted to draw a firm line between stage magic, which he considered only simple entertainment, and ritual magic, which possesses the power to reveal the truth and the true self.

Magic, as practiced in Thelema, tended toward the paranormal, you know, chatting with spirits, contacting the dead, that sort of thing. Thelemic sex magic was just that. Members of the OTO saw sexual ecstasy as a path to a different, or maybe even higher level of consciousness. This thinking permeated every aspect of the faith, right down to the Eucharist at their mass, which they called Cakes of Light.

Nothing too fancy. Just a little wafer made of flour, oil, honey, ashes, and semen or menstrual blood. As far as the rules went, the OTO had only one real commandment for its members. Do what thou will. Parson's interest in the occult had grown right alongside his enthusiasm for rocketry. Despite Aleister Crowley's reputation for dark, demonic deeds, the OTO wasn't nearly as interested in the devil as it was in giving license to its members to fulfill their own deepest sexual desires.

Of course, there were levels to navigate and rites to be completed. A person couldn't just walk in off the street and express their desire to fornicate with the nearest member while downing a goblet of the blood of a virgin. Please be serious. You know you have to work your way up. The OTO has 13 numbered initiation ceremonies and 12 unnumbered degrees.

It is so unbelievably complex that you really have to pause and marvel at Jack Parson's ability to climb that convoluted ladder all the way to the top while simultaneously helping to birth the space age. Speaking of that, you don't do the work Parsons was doing at JPL without heavy scrutiny from the very government signing your paycheck.

And Parsons made no secret of his beliefs while at JPL. He liked to kick off a rocket test by reciting Aleister Crowley's hymn to Pan. Thrill with the list of lust of the light. Oh man, my man, come careening out of the night. Of Pan, Eopan, Eopan, Eopan. Come over the sea from Sicily and from Arkady, roaming as Bacchus with fawns and pods.

And nymphs and satyrs for thy gods on a milk white ass come over the sea to me, to me. Come with Apollo. Who could say what the other scientists in the room made of that? Parsons' relationship with Aleister Crowley, his position in the OTO, even the enormous mansion he bought in Pasadena with his shiny new rocket money, it was all being watched.

It also didn't help that Parsons had a little flirtation with Marxism in the late 1930s, an ideology he abandoned when he discovered Crowley's Thelema. The FBI had Parsons under surveillance, watching as that mansion, nicknamed the Parsonage, became headquarters for his almost surreal brand of hedonism. People drifting in and out at all hours, some barely dressed at all, others in togas and costumes, some dressed like animals, sporting antlers and hooves, weird makeup.

For the feds, it all added up to one thing. A massive security risk. The decision was made to buy out Parsons' shares in the company he'd helped found, a move that basically tossed him out of the very rocket industry he'd helped create. He was just 30 years old. Life at home wasn't any easier. Marriage is hard enough without having to manage orgies and do all the cleaning up afterward.

Jack's wife, Helen, had been supportive, patient, tolerant. But his affair with her 17-year-old sister, Betty, was the last straw. The couple split up in 1945. Cut loose now from his work as a rocket scientist and his wife, Parsons was free to go all in on his occult enthusiasms. Ever the scientist, he was as experimental at the OTO as he had ever been at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

He began making up his own rituals to go along with those devised by Aleister Crowley. Crazy as some of the stories out of the OTO sound today, it's hard to imagine what people thought back then. Like voodoo and witchcraft. Like Parsons emerging from a coffin to conduct ceremonies. Like nibbling on those little cakes made with menstrual blood.

Parsons was after evidence. He wanted physical proof of contact with the unseen, wanted to document the results of these carefully choreographed rituals. He was so intense that even his fellow OTO members worried that he might be coming just a little bit unhinged. Those wild parties at his Pasadena mansion attracted all kinds of people, including a science fiction writer by the name of L. Ron Hubbard.

Dianetics and Scientology were just a twinkle in Hubbard's eye when he rolled up to the infamous Parsonage. Back then, he was just another charismatic guy on the fringes, a teller of wild tales and someone you either instantly liked or instantly distrusted. Many of Parsons' associates thought Hubbard was a liar, a fake, and a conman, but Jack Parsons fell into the first category.

It wasn't long before L. Ron Hubbard had moved into the mansion and he and Parsons became fast friends. They talked about magic and they did magic rituals together. Hubbard had no problem adapting to the sex drugs and rock and roll laissez-faire vibe at the Parsonage. The future cult leader, I'm sorry, I meant church leader, got his freak on with everyone's girlfriend or wife.

Didn't matter whose. Hubbard had a way of charming, seducing, hypnotizing, pick your word, and eventually he worked his way to Parsons' lady, Betty, who you'll remember was the teenage sister of Parsons' now ex-wife. Witnesses describe Hubbard pawing Betty right in front of Parsons, making out with her and everyone in the room feeling awkward and embarrassed.

It was so messy, so rude, so ick, but you know, it really hasn't even gotten all that weird yet. It's 1946 and Jack Parsons decided to try to make the Thelemic goddess Babalon incarnate, as in, you know, summon her forth in human form. Parsons believed that the goddess Babalon would be the scarlet woman meant to fulfill his destiny of becoming the Antichrist and give birth to his moon child.

Naturally, a project this ambitious would require a whole series of magic rituals to be performed. Parsons was convinced that his new bestie, L. Ron Hubbard, was just bursting with magical potential, and so he broke his vow of secrecy and taught Hubbard some of the O.T.O.'s most hush-hush rituals. And good scientist that he was, Parsons kept detailed notes.

The first attempt, you know, to incarnate the goddess Babalon took 11 days, 11 days of consecrating weapons and talismans, 11 days to perform 11 ceremonial rituals, some of which involve masturbation. And if you're trying hard to not picture Parsons chanting and waving his magical meat wand around a candlelit room, that's the O.T.O. level eight ritual.

If you're curious, I get it. But listen, a vortex of magical energy powerful enough to summon a goddess ain't gonna do itself, right? Parsons was so convinced of his success in summoning the goddess Babalon that he wrote an excited letter to Alistair Crowley telling him all about it. And in fact, just a few days into the effort, a beautiful redhead named Marjorie Cameron materialized on the steps of the Parsonage looking for a place to stay.

Scarlet woman, scarlet hair, close enough. She became Parsons' second wife. As for L. Ron Hubbard, he proved his detractors right. Hubbard ran off with Betty and $10,000 of Parsons' life savings. That's worth $118,000 today. Hubbard used that money to buy not one or two, but three yachts and then went on to create his very own secret of religion, Dianetics and Scientology, which I'll be damned, has its own constellation of rituals and levels that look awfully similar in so many ways to how the O.T.O. is constructed.

I guess imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery. Now, this, of course, is not the version of events that Scientology wants you to know about their great and glorious leader. In December 1969, the church released the following statement on the matter. L. Ron Hubbard broke up black magic in America because he was well known as a writer and philosopher and had friends among the physicists.

He was sent in to handle the situation of black magic being practiced in a house in Pasadena occupied by nuclear physicists. He went on to live at the house and investigated the black magic rites and the general situation and found them very bad. Hubbard's mission was successful far beyond anyone's expectations. The house was torn down.

Hubbard rescued a girl they were using. The black magic group was dispersed and never recovered. Gosh, how lucky we are that L. Ron Hubbard single handedly ended black magic in America. But poor Jack Parsons. First, Hubbard swipes his girl. Then he loots the savings. Parsons tried to return to his rocketry career and managed a brief stint at the Navajo Missile Program.

That project was run by North American Aviation with the goal of building a supersonic intercontinental missile capable of dropping a nuclear weapon on the Soviet Union from military bases in the United States. Unfortunately for Parsons, he caught the attention of maniacal communist hater, Senator Joseph McCarthy's House of Un-American Activities Committee.

The Red Scare was in full swing and Parsons was deemed the kind of pervert ripe for compromise at the hands of the commies. He lost the job. Parsons filled his days with the O.T.O. and by writing. Nothing was ever published, not the occult text, not his autobiography, not essays on censorship and sexuality. He needed to earn a living somehow.

That's how he ended up creating technical documents for an Israeli rocket company. That didn't last either. L. Ron Hubbard wasn't the only backstabber in Parsons life. A former colleague accused him of being a spy, even though the FBI investigated that allegation and came up with a not guilty verdict for Parsons. They went ahead and banned him for life from ever working with classified materials in the U.S., which is how the inventor of solid rocket fuel, one of the fathers of the American space program, found himself blocked from ever again working in the American rocket industry.

He was back to where it all began, backyard and basement and garage experiments. And this is how Jack Parsons found himself in the movie business, whipping up explosives for Hollywood special effects. Now it's June 17th, 1952. Parsons and his wife Marjorie were moving to Mexico the very next day. Marjorie was already there waiting for her husband to finish up one last job, a last minute rush order for explosives to be used on a film set.

Jack Parsons was at work in his home laboratory when the explosion happened. Parsons was mortally wounded. He died 37 minutes after the blast gutted the lower half of that apartment building. He was pinned beneath a heavy laundry tub, the right side of his face torn off in the His last words, but I'm not finished yet.

Right from the get go, there were doubts that this had been an accident. The Pasadena Police Department declared that the explosion was the result of Parsons accidentally dropping something called fulminated mercury on the floor, which, as fans of the TV show Breaking Bad learned from chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin Walter White, is one of the most incredibly unstable and explosive compounds there is.

Childhood friend and co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Edward Forman, pointed out that Parsons always did have the sweatiest hands you could imagine. Other colleagues, though, weren't buying it. Parsons methods were described as scrupulously neat, thorough, professional to a fault. Rumors of suicide, of murder, of assassination spread.

It was speculated that Parsons was killed in retaliation for his expert witness testimony in the case of a corrupt LAPD cop named Earl Kinet. Kinet was sent to prison for more than 10 years and had just been released just a few days before the explosion in Parsons home lab. Parsons widow Marjorie thought eccentric gazillionaire Howard Hughes was behind it all, killing her husband to ensure that he never shared any industrial secrets.

Others believed that the military murdered Parsons or the government or the FBI. A chemical engineer named George Santmyer, who'd worked closely with Parsons, told the L.A. Times that the scene as police found it made no sense, that there was just no way that Parsons would have been so sloppy as to pile dangerous explosives into trash cans.

That was like, he said, a surgeon performing an operation with dirty hands. But proof couldn't be found to support any theory of a crime. Pasadena Detective Lieutenant Cecil Burlingame was blunt. It was an accident. Case closed. 20 seconds and counting. T-minus 15 seconds. Guidance is internal. 12, 11, 10, 9. Ignition sequence start.

6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. All engine running. Liftoff. We have a liftoff. 32 minutes past the hour. Liftoff on Apollo 11. Tower cleared. Here we got a roll program. The Armstrong reporting their roll and pitch program, which puts Apollo 11 on a proper heading. As a boy, Jack Parsons dreamed of building a rocket capable of carrying humans to the moon.

Plus 30 seconds. Roll complete and ignition program. One Bravo. One Bravo is a abort control mode. Altitude's two miles. Apollo 11, Houston. You're good at one minute. Downrange one mile. Altitude three, four miles now. Velocity 2,195 feet per second. Parsons died 16 years and 336 days before his wildest childhood fantasy became fact.

Before his boyish daydream became a milestone in human history. They were just kids, Jack Parsons and Edward Forman. Kids building model rockets in the backyard. Kids looking up at the stars, convinced that someday they'd get there. Ad Astra per Aspera, they'd said. And if that sounds familiar, it should. NASA, which didn't yet exist when Forman and Parsons were playing with rockets, would later use that same phrase to pay tribute to the three astronauts who lost their lives on January 27th, 1967, during preparation for the very first flight of the Apollo spacecraft.

I've got a fire in the cockpit. It's one of the big fire. I see it. It's mine. Ad Astra per Aspera. Ad Astra per Aspera. Jack Parsons was a complicated, enigmatic person. With no formal education, really, he developed the world's first solid rocket fuel and wrote poems about unseen dimensions. Poems that celebrated the elemental power of sex and drugs.

Not exactly how you land and keep a government job. I hate Don Quixote. I live on peyote, marijuana, morphine, and cocaine. I never knew sadness, but only a madness that burns at the heart and the brain. I see each charwoman ecstatic, inhuman, angelic, demonic, divine, each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon that brims with ambrosial wine.

I went to the city and found it a pity the devil was playing at hell, and 10 million mortals had entered hell's portals and thought they were all doing well. I said, see, dear people, on every church sepal an imp of the devil at play. See ghouls cut their capers in daily newspapers, and fiends in police courts hold sway.

The mountains are palaces, women are chalices meant to be supped and not sold. The desert of banquet halls set for a festival ripe for the free and the bold. The wind and the sky are ours, heaven and all its stars. Waken and do what you will. Break with this demon spawn hell-inspired nightmare bond. Magic lies over the hill.

They said I was crazy, ambiguous, lazy, disgusting, fantastic, obscene. So I hide from my sagebrush and cactus and corn mush to see if the air was still clean. Oh, I hate Don Quixote. I live on peyote, marijuana, morphine, and cocaine. And may I be twice damned for a bank clerk or a storehand if I visit the city again.

Some said Parsons was crazy. And maybe you have to be at least a little bit crazy to push the boundaries the way he did. The boundaries of science, of propriety, of faith. There just isn't much room in the mainstream for a visionary whose wild visions aren't limited to the lab. We want our scientific geniuses to be just one thing.

And that's a scientific genius. We want them to be brilliant, but sober minded. We want them to be rational and reasonable in all things. We want them to think like the gods, but worship like the neighbors. It would have been hard enough on Parsons had he confessed to being an atheist. But a high priest of black magic?

A confidant of Aleister Crowley? A man who sought spiritual enlightenment through sexual ecstasy? Jack, listen. It would have taken our Puritan forebears about a minute to hang you for the crime of consorting with the devil. But, you know, maybe you would have taken that over being quietly sidelined from history. Jack Parsons was born at a time when ideas like his were considered crackpot delusions.

There was no established rocket science to build on. It was pure science fiction. Parsons had only his tremendous imagination to go by. And for him, there was no contradiction whatsoever between science and magic. It was all an intertwined universe of near infinite possibilities. Why should summoning forth the powers of the unseen metaphysical world be any more impossible than sending a rocket to the moon?

If one, then why not both? Parsons was a maverick and a bohemian and a dreamer. Someone who challenged the status quo in every possible way. The world can be terribly cruel to people like that. You may have no idea who Robert Goddard was or why the Goddard Space Center is named for him. But now you can see why there are no monuments to Jack Parsons.

There's no Parsons Space Center, no Project Parsons or Parsons Mission. But there is a little something that honors the man whose wild genius helped birth the space age. And it's just a short 239,000 mile jaunt from home. You'll need a rocket to get there. A rocket like the kind Jack Parsons dreamed up in middle school.

What you're visiting is an impact crater. A jagged hole punched deep into the lifeless surface of the far side of the moon. We call it the Parsons crater. Next time on True Weird Stuff. They called them secret cities. They called them closed cities. And for the people who went there to live and work behind armed guards and barbed wire, it was a one way ticket.

Those people were erased from the system and sent forever to a place where no one would know their names because no one was supposed to know. That place even existed. That's on the next True Weird Stuff. And special thanks to our voice actor, Kary "Doc" Bowser, for appearing in this episode. Sherry, you'll be surprised to know something.

And what I'll tell you is that I have something in common with Jack Parsons. I can't wait to hear because it could be so many things at this point, right? And it's not black sexual magic or whatever the hell that is. As a boy, I was so fascinated with the space program that I got into model rocketry. And my parents bought me, I want to say for my birthday one year, a model rocket.

And so what you would do with this, and I don't know how familiar you are with this, but the rocket, you have to put it together. First of all, you have to make it, right? And so they have like a little pattern. You have to make it. And then the actual engine itself is an explosive, right? And you have to light it and it sends the rocket up.

But you can have the rocket come apart at one point because what will happen is the rocket, you light the fuse and the force of that will send it up. And then inside, after it goes, there's another little fuse that has another little explosion that can actually make the top of the rocket go off and float to the ground with a parachute.

And that, of course, is what we did with it. So my best friend, Bob Eagle and I had a goal. And the goal was we wanted to send a mouse up. And I know, I know you're thinking that first of all, I want to say something. No, no mouse was killed and we wouldn't. And the idea was never to harm a mouse. So let me just say that.

So we couldn't get a model that worked with it. So we devised, we devised one using rolls of like the interior cardboard tube that you find in like paper towels. Yeah, yeah. So we had that and that was a little different size than the toilet paper roll. So that so that when it took off, you could have the two stage part of it.

OK, so we made a payload large enough for the mouse and we did some test flights with it. And so we did it. And finally, we got a mouse. We got a mouse and we put it in it and it sent off. But what we didn't anticipate was the mouse moving inside the little capsule, the little space capsule. We didn't anticipate that.

So as it took off the launching pad, it just is kind of as it's going off rather than that you normally would get, which meant that the second stage of the rocket would not come off. So it all went up and then it all came down. And we're rushing over to see what happened to the mouse. And we open it up and the mouse went, I'm out of here and took off.

That that's all that mouse talked about for the rest of its life. That was an alien abduction experience for the mouse, by the way. The mouse was with his little buddies that night. I got to tell you about the day I had. Wow. Well, I am so impressed by your scientific experimentation in the backyard with the mouse. I know the kind of rocket you're talking about.

My older brother had those those two stage. Pretty high. He would save up his like newspaper delivery money. Oh, my gosh, this sounds like an episode of Leave it to Beaver and buy them from an outfit called Edmund Scientific. Oh, and I desperately wanted to play along, but I was told that that wasn't for girls. So they would not let me participate in rocket launch day.

But it's to me, there's something so spectacularly, beautifully like American about Jack Parsons and Edward Forman having that daydream as little boys and then really not having any kind of formal education. They sort of like, you know, they did a couple of years at Pasadena Junior College, Community College, and then, you know, Jack did a couple of years at USC, but they never neither of them graduated.

You know, they didn't go on to get master's degrees and doctorates. This is not an episode of the Big Bang Theory, even though most of it takes place at Caltech. And you just have to wonder, could that happen again today? The way that it happened for Jack and Edward? What do you think? Because it's so unlikely to me that it may be not the way that it happened.

But all genius is born out of a dream that seems highly illogical. Yeah, yeah. And this definitely was like, we are products of the we're children of the space age. I don't have any memories of a time where there wasn't NASA. I wasn't NASA. I mean, I was born into that world as were you. But when Jack Parsons and Edward Forman were back in that backyard in California, playing with rockets, they only had science fiction and comic books to go by.

There was no rocket science. These two kids, these two middle school aged kids, helped invent and pioneer what became the modern spacefaring era. Their work is the foundation for all of it. And the fact that you don't know their names is wild to me. It is. That we don't know there. And now we know why Jack Parsons has been, if not a race, definitely sidestepped.

Because in America, maybe in lots of places, but I only know this one. In America, you simply cannot be both a scientific genius and the head of a black magic sex cult. You just you can't. We just we don't have we don't have any way to make that work for you. Sorry. And Jack's Jack was every bit as enmeshed in the OTO as he was in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

And and by the way, JPL, like you, you go ahead and look, their official any JPL customer facing JPL information does not include this part of the story. And most people don't even realize that JPL is a Caltech. You hear Jet Propulsion Laboratory and I don't know what people think it is, but they don't realize what it actually is, that it's at a university and it's government funded to do research into this stuff, which isn't it was just fascinating all by itself and really super cool when you get right down to it.

But the Jet Propulsion Laboratory doesn't go, oh, hey, yeah, we're JPL. We're going to help NASA get people onto Mars. Did you know that one of the founders of this place was into orgies? You're not going to do that. Not only that, in the late 30s, he was into communism. So, you know, I mean, he just can't put a foot right.

That combination of things is not going to be good. It was interesting. You were talking about the FBI. The FBI really hadn't been around all that long by the time they were doing some work on him because the FBI was kind of like he was out to get Dillinger and, you know, Bonnie and Clyde and stuff back then. And Al Capone.

Yeah. You know, like we and the thing about the thing about Jack Parsons and all of this law enforcement stuff, all of this, you're right. All of this was new and growing up kind of together. And at the same time, Parsons just didn't fit into any of the boxes that he was supposed to. He just didn't fit. And so what do you do with a person who who just doesn't fit?

You take his work and you kick him to the curb. And that's that's what they did. And it was so, so sad, because if you'll remember, even though the FBI found Jack Parsons not guilty of any kind of espionage, they still banned him from working in classified programs for the rest of his life, which kept him. That was it.

There was no way that he was going to work in any category in the space program once they banned him for that. And, you know, today, like back then, people were like, I'm sorry, you do what you eat, what you drink, what today? Oh, can you even imagine such a thing? Can you even imagine the uproar and the conspiracy theories that would swirl around a guy like that?

Can we talk about the L. Ron Hubbard connection? Can we can we? So anyone who knows me knows that I think Scientology is such a grift and such a con and such a load of bullshit. What I can't believe. I mean, all you have to do is lift up one of the countless Scientology rocks and look under it and you walk away going, how is anybody buying this?

L. Ron Hubbard and I will say this for Scientology, they they know how to use their money to silence people, to bully and intimidate and threaten people in the silence. And they for the longest time, because they are they are categorized as a church tax exempt, by the way, it's the giant crime operation. And I don't care what Scientology thinks about me saying that.

But because they're a church and tax exempt, because they are a church, they have been able to say whatever whack craziness they want. And everyone's like, oh, yeah, well, what are you going to do? You know, it's their religion. People believe and we have to have respect for other people's beliefs. What a load of crap.

So let's talk a little bit about L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. What is the name of L. Ron Hubbard's branch of Scientology where the people in it sign billion year contracts and dress up in Navy uniforms? I don't know. The Sea Org, S.E.A., the Sea Org. So L. Ron Hubbard himself served in the U.S. Navy. Now, Scientology will tell you that not since I don't even know what Captain Ahab, was there ever a greater sailor than L. Ron Hubbard.

The official record is a little different. You know, the official record doesn't quite have him wrestling giant squid with his bare hands and saving the world. But again, the Church of Scientology has done a first rate job of rewriting and buffing up history. So when L. Ron Hubbard took Betty away from Jack and Betty became L. Ron Hubbard's wife and you can go ahead and Google that and you'll see.

So Betty was at this point probably 18 when she absconded with L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons life savings. $10,000 doesn't sound like much today, but it was worth a whole lot more then and it was worth enough for L. Ron Hubbard to buy three yachts, which became the foundation for the Sea Org. Because for the longest time, one of the yachts that L. Ron Hubbard launched Scientology with was called the Freewinds and for all I know, it's still floating.

Who even knows? But Scientology was a religion without a location. It was at sea, the Sea Org and the people who work in Scientology Sea Org signed 1 billion year contracts. The actress Leah Remini was pushed into the Sea Org in childhood by her parents who were members of the Church of Scientology. So there are a million threads you can pull on and all the stories that result are wild.

But the convergence of Scientology and the space program, L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Parsons, Alistair Crowley, the Ordi-Templey-Orientis, that's something a lot of people don't know. You know, what's interesting about him, too, is he doesn't. So, you know, you get in your mind with somebody that's kind of a genius working on rockets and he doesn't, he's kind of, he's a really handsome guy.

He's kind of almost movie star-ish, kind of got a ruggedness about him. Jack Parsons? Yeah, yeah, he's a real character. And he's one of those people that, you know, I feel so sorry for my family because they have to, they have to live with me. And this is the kind of stuff I'm always wanting to tell them about and talk about.

And I'm so frustrated that nobody cares as much as I do about this stuff. But don't you find it incredibly intriguing that if you travel to the very center of this part of American history, there's L. Ron Hubbard. Don't you find that so interesting? It is interesting, yes. And the statement in the episode, which the Church of Scientology released in 1969, it's really, it's really an important little document because if you look at the way it's worded, you can see what's coming for Scientology.

L. Ron Hubbard is being cast by the Church of Scientology as a savior figure, which is exactly how that legend began and was buffed and burnished right up until the present moment. And the Scientology, they call it the bridge. You work your way up the bridge through all of these levels. And they're highly secretive. If you're not initiated into these higher levels, you're not supposed to talk about them to anyone who doesn't share your status.

And so for decades, people had no idea what was really being taught or believed inside the Church of Scientology. They didn't understand about the Emperor Zinu and the Thetans and the nuclear explosion in the volcano, which all of which sounds like, what the what? But it's all embedded as you go up this bridge to go and clear and go and clear means purging all of these invisible Thetans off of your literal body.

These Thetans are like intergalactic hitchhikers that resulted from this volcano exploding. I wish I was as high as I sound, by the way. I genuinely wish that I was that big. And they cling to your body. And it's the Thetans that cause you to be selfish and to suffer addiction and to be depressed and anxious and all the myriad things that plague the human soul and the human experience.

So you go up this bridge in Scientology to clear these Thetans and you achieve level, level, level. So right now, Tom Cruise sits at the very highest level of Scientology, along with the leader of the church, David Miscavige. Whose wife is missing. Whose wife is missing and has been missing and no one knows where she is.

And because it's called a church, you're an asshole if you press too hard and ask. Mind your business. Let people have their faith. Any whosers. When you look at the way that the Ordi Templi Orientis, which still exists, when you look at the way that that church organizes its ceremonies and rituals and works you up the ladder, up the ladder, up the ladder, you see how very much it looks like the bridge in Scientology.

And I'm sure that's just a big old coincidence. What do you think, Max? Yeah, I'm sure it's just a coincidence. I mean, I could have made this entire episode just about L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons because Hubbard was incredibly, incredibly involved in Parsons' attempts to summon forth the goddess Babalon. And here's the other reason why there are no Jack Parsons space centers and Jack Parsons missions.

Because in America, you can't casually summon forth a goddess so that you can be the antichrist and the father of a moon child without suffering some career setbacks. And so Hubbard was right there for all of that. Right there for all of it. A huge sexual appetite. If Hubbard was at the orgy, I can assure you he sampled everything.

Well, how stupid do they think we are that L. Ron Hubbard lived in the house or having orgies and he was there just to investigate? That's the thing. That's the thing. So the thing about Scientology, it exists in two planes simultaneously. A lot of what Scientology says is meant for the faithful who've had the Kool-Aid.

It's meant to reinforce and reinforce and reinforce. The problem is, is they're saying it out loud and in print. So those of us who have not had the Kool-Aid are like, wait, what did I just hear? But Scientology doesn't care about you or me, Max. They don't care about you or me because we're not members and we can't be fleeced to work our way up the bridge to get our invisible feet hands scraped off because that's the other thing with Scientology.

This was what early the people who were in Parson's life before L. Ron Hubbard got there and after he arrived, this is what they were troubled by. They saw him as such a charismatic con man and they saw how easily even a brilliant guy like Jack Parsons fell under Hubbard's sway. And so unlike the OTO where you had to earn your way through the initiation, through the degrees to rise and rise and rise through the ranks, at Scientology you have to pay your way to do that same thing through what they call auditing.

And to me, the mind blower that the man who invented solid rocket fuel and was one of the fathers of the space age also financed the C-Org, the beginning of the early days of the C-Org in Scientology, it's crazy and it was a giant rip-off. You know, look, if you believe in Scientology, I'm sure you're outraged and offended and not the intention, but it's real hard when you look at some of these historical events before L. Ron Hubbard was turned into a bloated immortality and not go, well, what's happening here?

The FBI was so busy watching everything Jack Parsons said, did, dressed and ate that they kind of missed this. They missed this opportunity right from the jump. I'm glad you explained the thing about the yachts because when you said he bought the three yachts, I was like, okay. And to explain that and to have a little bit better understanding because then all that makes sense.

I should have put that in the main story, but I just assume everybody's is like. I didn't, I didn't, I didn't know. Fired up about Scientology. I had heard things, I mean, and I'd heard of that, but I didn't realize I didn't make the connection. The other thing Scientology is really good at, they're really good at shaping and manipulating information and history.

They're really good at going back in and sweeping their tracks into a new pattern. The church in 1969, so all of this happened with L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons in the fifties, but by 1969, when Dianetics and Scientology was proving to be just a real moneymaker and L. Ron Hubbard was really flying high, they understood that they would have to deal with this exact story, that they would have to put their own frame around it because it was so incredibly damaging, which is why in 1969, many years after the fact, what did they do?

They went, oh yeah, geez, our fearless leader was having orgies with a, not even sure she was a legal adult and stole Jack Parsons' money. He was there to investigate. Yeah, what should we say? Oh, I know, we'll say that he put an end to black magic in America. I mean, right there in that one statement, you see the entire infrastructure of how Scientology manipulates information laid bare.

It's fascinating, I think, just fascinating. I thought everybody knew about the Sea Org and the billion-year labor contracts. I'm sorry, I didn't know that. Good grief, I need to get out of this house more. You know, I only watched the show with Leah Remini. I only see the bullying and all that sort of stuff that Scientology does, which seems like an odd behavior for a religion to bully people.

It just seems just, you know. Oh, because it's not a religion, it's a freaking crime organization. I'm sideways that it has tax-exempt status. I know what you're saying. Have you ever seen, there's a fantastic documentary about Scientology called Going Clear. HBO did it originally. You can probably find it on Max. This was maybe like 20 years ago?

Yeah, this was like maybe in the late 90s, I think. Yeah, I think I remember that. It's pretty intense. And Mike Rinder, who, if you've watched the Leah Remini show, you know Mike Rinder. Mike Rinder wrote a book called A Billion Years about his own experience in the Sea Org, which literally, you're on a boat in a uniform that looks vaguely nautical slash naval, and as a child, you're not attending school.

You're getting all of your, quote unquote, education through the church, and you literally work, you make no money, you have signed a billion-year contract to the Sea Org, and you work seven days a week, not 24 hours a day because you would die, but these people get very little sleep, they have very poor food, they have no freedom, they are cut off from the world, and for devout Scientologists who really are all in on this, it's like an honor to have your kid be in the Sea Org, or yourself in the Sea Org.

Do you know, when I was back in my partying days, and I would go down to Georgetown in Washington, they would have young women who were in their 20s who would act like they liked you to get your phone number, and they were recruiters for Scientology. I'm not making this up. No, I know. They were all over, they were all over Temple's campus, they were all over.

And it was, there was something about it that I remember at the time, it was really icky. I mean, I may have been a young guy who was swayed by a really pretty girl, but when she calls and starts talking about this, and I'm going, well, I'm Catholic, you know, I'm not interested in this at all. I remember that it seemed like, even though I was young and naive, it just seemed like something not right here.

Well, the thing, and of course, Scientology doesn't tell you this. The Church of Scientology doesn't say, in August of 1967, L. Ron Hubbard founded the Sea Org with three ships, the Avon River, the Enchanter, and the HMS Royal Scotsman, which he purchased with money he stole from rocket scientist Jack Parsons. They don't tell you that part.

In fact, they never tell you how it was that L. Ron Hubbard happened to have three ships. Now, he later renamed them, of course, and this, for people that follow Scientology, will be very interesting. One of those ships that served as the flagship, they called Flag, and Scientology's headquarters in Clearwater, Florida, is called Flag Base.

So, if you are into this, you already know that, you may have seen something casually like in People Magazine, in a story about John Travolta, or Tom Cruise, or Christy Alley, or one of these other prominent celebrity Scientologists, mention of Clearwater, of Flag Base. They call it Flag for short. All of this kind of grew out of L. Ron Hubbard's early life in the Navy.

Then, like in the mid-70s, most of Scientology's operations moved to the land. But I think there's a couple of, at least one, if not two, Scientology boats still out there somewhere. I think one of them might be the Freewinds. It's been a minute since I've taken a dive in that. But yeah, it's wild, isn't it? I've seen the headquarters in Clearwater, but only because I'm a fan of the Phillies, and I went down for spring training.

One of the things that I did when down there was I went, where's this Scientology headquarters? And then I just wanted to see it. Well, when you sign your billion-year symbolic contract to be a member of the Sea Org, and by the way, every powerful person in Scientology is a member of Sea Org. All their security, all of the big players in Scientology come from Sea Org because Sea Org is the most intense, true believer, doctrinaire part of Scientology.

And people who are in Sea Org, including married couples, live in communal housing, and they I don't know what it is today, but it used to be like maybe $40 or $50 a week. It's a billion-year, and you remember you work seven days a week. Okay, you get no time off. So here's the deal. I know you're going, girl, how can you?

It's like working for the bottom insurance company. It is, it's hell. So I know you're going like, oh, hey, girl, you're probably mistaken, because how can you sign a billion-year contract? Human beings don't live that long. Oh, I'm so glad you asked. Thank you. You sign that billion-year deal. The Sea Org has a motto, which translates to the words, we come back, because you're reborn back into the Sea Org over and over again, over and over.

And if you try to leave the Sea Org, and we know this from people that have, like the bill, and they call it a freeloader's bill, and they charge you for anything, any auditing, any special training, your uniform, toilet paper, soup, whatever, you get billed retroactively for all the time that you served in Sea Org, but you didn't complete your billion-year contract.

I just, I'm sorry. Like, what? What? What? What? I can't even imagine. I can't even imagine being like, yeah, well, you know, we're saving the world. So, Karamia, that's my youngest. I'm going to need you to put on that little sailor outfit and sign this here billion-year contract. Like, all belief is a mystery, right?

People believe what they believe. And maybe I'm wrong, and we all are all covered in invisible feet hands. I don't think so. I really don't think so. I don't think so either. But then again, so yeah, it's just one of those, like, really cool little pockets of American history that most people are blissfully unaware of.

Most people have no idea who invented rocket fuel or solid rocket fuel. Nobody knows the intersection between the American space program and Scientology. And I know this because I ask, like, I all but ask strangers at Target, excuse me, hi, I love your hair. Do you know the intersection between the American space program and Scientology?

No, because why would you? You're never taught this. You don't know this. And Sherry, can I just say we did shoot that mouse up and safely return him to Earth. Now, it wasn't the way we intended, but we did bring him safely back to Earth. Ad Astra per Aspera, little mouse to the stars with great difficulty. And and we thank you.

It was it was a Jerry and Tom and Jerry. We thank you, Jerry, for your service to pushing the frontiers of human knowledge and Max's backyard in Pennsylvania when he was a child. Yeah, yeah. So what do you think? Do you think that we owe Jack Parsons a rehabilitation of his image? Or do you think that in America we just cannot wrap our head around the black magic sex cult?

You know what? So when you when it's somebody if somebody steps out in a marriage, something like that, that's forgivable. When you mix sex and Satan, it's unforgivable. Can't black magic. Yeah, can't do it. Can't do it. I'm with you. And then throw in a dash of communism. No, that's it. The the Ordo Templi Orientis. You know, it's so complicated and mysterious.

And I kind of like I'm not a joiner. You know, I'm not someone who is going to like, join things just seems exhausting to me to add one more commitment to the day. But I understand how people are attracted to organizations like that. And even attracted to organizations like Scientology. I think there's something inside us that wants to be a part of something that's special and that's secret and that not everybody can participate in.

Because it gives us if you as you rise through the levels of the OTO, you gain wisdom. This is what you're promised. And information about the universe that the average person can't handle. And that's the same cell of Scientology. You know, it's the same thing. I'm trying to remember the podcast that I listened to that sort of addresses, you know, you think to yourself, well, I never would be susceptible to or for falling for such a scam.

But they talk to people who were in a moment of vulnerability, you know, going through a recent divorce or whatever it is, an emotional vulnerability and then fell into this and then later said, oh, my God, what have I done? But you can I can. It was like I thought to myself, I would never do anything that stupid. But then you see how people fell into this and and you say, yeah, it could happen to anybody.

I totally agree. I mean, I am such a sucker for so many, many, many, many things. I'm a little bit not 100%. I'm a little bit immune to these kinds of organizations, just because like many working women in America, if I have time to join your secret sex cult, then I surely must have time to get a haircut. And since I don't have time for a haircut, how can I possibly join your secret, mysterious sex cult?

Oh, amen, Sherry. Yes, people. I'm tired. I'm trying to finish the three body problem. I don't have time to put on a robe and eat a cake made of like menstrual blood or semen. I just don't have time. And I am not who you want at your orgy. I just am not the kind of person you want at your orgy. I'm like skeedy about your germs and, oh, I got to have sex with everybody.

Oh, my Lord. I'm exhausted already just thinking about it. But I totally agree that you should never say never because within each of us is a little vulnerable spot, you know, and that's if they can find that button, push it. There you go. My husband gives me so much grief. He's like, oh, here we go with another conspiracy theory.

And in fact, when I first told him, I said, do you know who Jack Parsons is? Of course, he didn't. No one knows who Jack Parsons is. Only like geeky space people. And I was like, you've heard of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, right? And he's like, yeah, kind of like, well, Jack Parsons was one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

And he invented solid rocket fuel. And he was the leader of this weird sex cult. And he had like this big run in with L. Ron Hubbard. And that's how Scientology got the money to get started. He goes, oh, here we go. Another conspiracy theory. I get I grant you, it sounds so wacky that it could be a made up conspiracy theory.

But then it turns out to actually be true. So if you had to pick something. Which you would find which one of these things would you find less of a pain in the ass? Being besieged by Scientology for talking smack about them. Or being required by like your life partner to join like a secret society cult religion that you have to go meetings to every single night and wear special clothes and eat strange things and learn incantations in foreign languages.

Hey, Scientology, here's my phone number. Thank you. Who has the energy for any of this? I go to book club once a month and I skid into that in flames. Like, oh, my God, I gotta get this book finished. Right. If I if I'm skidding into book club once a month with my head on fire, how am I going to do as the high priestess of some magic sex cult?

Like, no, no, no. But for all of my fellow Scientology nuts, I want you to look at take a look at the bridge to go and clear and then take a look at the 25 or so ceremonial rituals in the Ordo Templi Orientis. And see if you don't see some really fascinating similarities. But I will tell you, as much as you may be put off by Alistair Crowley and the Cakes of Light and all of that, the O.T.O. didn't take anybody's money.

The O.T.O. didn't bankrupt families and separate them from their children. The O.T.O. has not done any of the things that Scientology is constantly getting its ass kicked for. So one of them to me feels like, I mean, y'all believe that. And that's like we still live in a country where you're free to believe that. And the other one feels like such a gross money grab.

Yeah. So there we go. That is the true and tragic and wild tale of one of the daddies of the American space program, whose name nobody knows. And a kick in the pants for Scientology, which is something I hate to leave on the table if we have a chance. I hate this bastard. I hate him so much. Puritans or Scientology? We said Puritans, Scientology.

I know you didn't know that. I hate the Puritans the most. So you hate them more than the Scientologists? I do. I do. I'll tell you why I hate the Puritans more than the Scientologists. Because so much of the strife and discord in our country, so much of the schizoid American cultural personality, which is like, show me your tits.

Sex is bad. Like all of that, like really weird, twisted stuff that comes from our Puritan ancestors. They were the first arrivals in the new world. And boy, did they leave a lasting impression. And nobody seems to realize, nobody connects the dots. I hate the Puritans with my whole face. Now the Scientologists, I also despise the Scientologists for completely different reasons.

Because I think that for somebody like Tom Cruise, Tom Cruise can be all in on Scientology and sleep at night in a comfortable bed in a warm house and has the option, whether he chooses it or not, to be surrounded by his family. But rank and file members of Scientology cannot say that. And all you have to do is the shallowest of dives into the stories of people that have left and have tried to leave the Church of Scientology.

And what you see over and over again are people that have been stripped of every nickel. Their families are fractured and divided, parents separated from children, children separated from siblings, husbands and wives separated from each other by Scientology's policies of suppression and disconnection. So the Puritans were some real repressed bossy mofos who think they know best.

But Scientology, I think, is an actively harmful organization to those who do not have enough money to buffer themselves from it. And I said what I said, L. Ron Hubbard and all of the invisible Thetans. And if it's a bunch of Thetans crawling on my skin that made me this way, then I don't want to be right, not changing it at all.

Thank you for joining us for this episode. So heads up, we did. I love the story of Jack Parsons. I want everybody to. I wish you could see his crater, but you can't because those bastards put that on the wrong side of the moon. We'll never even be able to look at it. Anyway, we did a true weird happy hour live on Facebook not too long ago.

We do those one Wednesday every month and one of the people who joined us there for a drink and to talk about weird stuff brought up the Soviet secret cities. We have them in the U.S. too during the Manhattan Project. If you listen to Human Product 12, Oak Ridge, Tennessee was a secret city. Now the difference between the Soviet secret cities and the American secret cities is this.

The American secret cities were secret. They were not on the map and the people inside them were working for the Manhattan Project or some other military endeavor, right? But we didn't ring them with barbed wire, erase the people inside them from the records and keep them there for their entire lives. The way it happened for a lot of people in the USSR during World War I, World War II and the Cold War.

The secret cities began under Joseph Stalin and today many of them are still standing. They're just not a secret anymore and we have Brezhnev and Gorbachev to thank for that. But we're going to tell the story of three of those secret cities in next week's episode and here's just something to think about. You know how when you're a kid, you are at the mercy of whatever your parents do, right?

You may be as happy as can be and then one day your parents sit you all down at the kitchen table and say, Daddy's got a new job and we're moving. So these cities were tucked away, removed from the maps. Of course, this is pre-satellites in the sky that could really see what the hell, right? So they're tucked away, they're removed from the maps, they're given new names, new mandates, all of it's around building the USSR's nuclear program.

And a lot of the people, they had schools and theaters and shops and parks. And of course, the laboratories and plants and nuclear waste disposal facilities, all of that, right? But a lot of the people who went into these secret cities after they were scrubbed from the records and the census, lived and died their entire lives behind that barbed wire.

And for Americans, that's a hard one to wrap our heads around, isn't it? Do you know why I believe you? Because I watch a TV show called Abandoned and if it's not the Nazis, it's the Soviet Union who left some sort of complex of buildings that have been abandoned. It's some wild stuff. So we picked three of the closed cities to tell you about because one of them was modeled after Gary, Indiana, which to me is the most wholesome random fun fact ever.

One of them is the site of one of the most significant nuclear disasters in human history right behind Chernobyl. And if you're racking your brain and going, wait, there was something before Chernobyl? Yeah, there was. And one of them was the birthplace of a saint. He was a holy man who was later beatified and turned into a saint.

And today he's the patron saint of nuclear weapons, as if such a thing should be. Can you even imagine, Max, the patron saint of nuclear weapons? So those are the three secret cities we're going to pay a visit to in the next episode of True Weird Stuff. Thank you so much for listening and be careful of those invisible V-tans that are crawling all over you.

We'll see you next time. Bye. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

Everything True Weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Seaton. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Saint Nash. Copyright 2024 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All norms remembered.