Rocket Fuel, Sex Magic, and the Birth of Scientology

The man who invented solid rocket fuel and helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory spent his nights performing sex rituals in a Pasadena mansion with a struggling science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard, trying to incarnate a goddess who would give birth to the Antichrist.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RocketMagic

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/9enkrtn5

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The creator of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, was so fascinated by the occult, he believed he was the actual devil himself… and was even upset when his own son turned out to not be the antichrist. (The Devil L. Ron Hubbard) *** Scientology is already scary and mysterious – which may not be surprising once you learn how much black magic had to do with its creation. (Scientology and the Occult) *** A house in the Altamaha River Swamp in Georgia becomes darker and more dangerous than the swamp itself. (A Terrifying Haunting in Georgia) *** Was a well known UFOlogist murdered shortly before a scheduled speech he was about to give? (The Bleached Computer of a UFO Researcher) *** Some believe we all have a guardian angel watching over us. One infamous yet respected witch hunter many years ago wrote that we all – each one of us – have a personal demon. And many people believed him. (The Demon Witch Hunter) *** For some time now, Area 51 has been seen as ground zero for conspiracies and government coverups. However, a plot of land in Utah has started to attract much of the same kind of attention. Welcome to Dugway – also known as Area 52. (Welcome to Area 52)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:37.371 = Show Open
00:03:45.021 = Rocket Fuel, Sex Magic, and the Birth of Scientology
00:25:54.957 = A Terrifying Haunting In Georgia ***
00:34:49.445 = The Demon Witch Hunter
00:46:33.406 = The Bleached Computer of a UFO Researcher ***
00:50:09.122 = Area 52
01:00:20.603 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

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*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Scientology and the Occult” by Annalee Newitz: http://bit.ly/31KIGnA
“The Devil L. Ron Hubbard” by Jacob Shelton: http://bit.ly/2ISSjIy
“A Terrifying Haunting In Georgia” by Brent Swancer: http://bit.ly/2Ip9m5Y
“The Bleached Computer of a UFO Researcher” by Paul Seaburn: http://bit.ly/2KpSyhm
“The Demon Witch Hunter” by Melissa Brinks: http://bit.ly/2MXHdaf
“Welcome to Area 52” by Hannah Collins: http://bit.ly/2WNDFY1
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)

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Originally aired: January, 2019

Weird Darkness moves through black magic, hauntings, demonology, unsolved death, and government secrecy in this episode, running from the occult roots of Scientology to a Utah military base that has earned the nickname Area 52.It opens with L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction novelist who founded Scientology, and the claim from his own eldest son — Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, Jr., who left the church in 1959 and renamed himself Ronald DeWolf — that black magic sat at the inner core of the religion. In a 1983 Penthouse interview, DeWolf described a father deeply involved in the occult who did not worship Satan so much as believe he was Satan, the Beast 666 incarnate. The story runs through Hubbard's obsession with Aleister Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis, the "moonchild" ritual he and rocket scientist Jack Parsons attempted in Pasadena to conceive an astral child and bring the goddess Babalon into the world, the poltergeist activity that followed at the Parsons house, the alleged OT Level VIII passage in which Hubbard claimed the Antichrist mantle for himself, the numerology hidden in the New Era logo's two sixty-degree triangles, and the shared contempt both Hubbard and Crowley held for psychoanalysis even as both leaned on hypnosis and past-life regression to control their followers.From there the episode digs into Jack Parsons himself — the college-dropout chemist who invented solid rocket fuel, helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and claimed to have summoned Satan at thirteen. Drawing on John Carter's Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons and Lawrence Wright's Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, the story follows Parsons through the Pasadena mansion he filled with pagans, artists, and writers; the bonfires that drew police reports from the neighbors; the arrival of Hubbard, who slept with Parsons' girlfriend Betty; the red-headed artist Marjorie Cameron, whom both men decided was Babalon made flesh; Crowley's own disgust at the pair, whom he dismissed as goats in a letter; and the boat-buying scheme in Florida that cost Parsons his last twenty thousand dollars. Parsons died in 1952 handling explosives on his front porch, two years after Dianetics made Hubbard famous.Next comes the Surrency haunting, one of the most heavily witnessed poltergeist cases on record. In October of 1872, sawmill operator Allen Surrency returned to his two-story farmhouse on the edge of the Altamaha River Swamp in Georgia to find tumblers sliding off the slab, crockery shattering on the floor, and bricks, irons, and potatoes falling through the rooms of his own house. The activity never let up: clocks spinning backward, mirrors exploding, utensils bending in the family's hands, a pan of biscuits levitating out of the oven and flying out the back door, hot bricks raining down on his daughter Clementine, an andiron chasing his son across the room and then returning itself to the fireplace. Hundreds of visitors — reporters and a minister among them — watched objects fly in plain view. The haunting followed the family when they moved away, stopped abruptly with Allen's death in 1877, and the house burned down in 1925, leaving nothing behind but the orb of light still reported along the town's railway tracks.The episode then turns to Peter Binsfeld, the sixteenth-century German witch hunter whose enthusiasm for torture was matched by his taste for taxonomy. His De confessionibus maleficorum et sagarum laid out the Seven Princes of Hell — Lucifer for pride, Beelzebub for gluttony, Satan for wrath, Belphegor for sloth, Mammon for greed, Asmodeus for lust, and Leviathan for envy — and argued that each living person is shadowed by a personal demon who knows their habits intimately, the dark counterpart to a guardian angel. Binsfeld held that women were more prone to witchcraft, that girls under twelve and boys under fourteen were usually too young to be guilty, and that anyone who claimed to have seen a witch shapeshift had been deceived by the Devil.The unsolved death of British ufologist Max Spiers follows. Spiers died in Poland on July 16, 2016, days before a scheduled conspiracy conference appearance and shortly after reportedly vomiting two liters of black liquid, having texted his mother that he was in trouble and to investigate if anything happened to him. His death was ruled natural causes. At a pre-inquest review at Guildhall in Sandwich, Kent, in August of 2018, lawyers for his mother Vanessa Bates revealed that his laptop had been wiped clean and his phone's SIM card erased or removed before being returned to the family, with Spiers found dead on the couch of his girlfriend Monika Duval and the four-day inquest set for the Archbishops Palace in Maidstone.The episode closes at Dugway Proving Ground, the 800,000-acre Utah military installation that UFO researchers call Area 52. Founded during the second World War for biological and chemical weapons work, Dugway is best known for the 1968 VX nerve agent test that drifted into Skull Valley and killed thousands of sheep, an incident the Army compensated farmers for without accepting blame. Freedom of Information requests filed by MuckRock founder Michael Morisy surfaced records of entomological munitions — mosquitoes loaded with what the Army called inert pathogens and released over American civilian populations — and of soldiers used as test subjects. The story takes in the 2011 disappearance of Joseph Bushling, whose empty car, hat, and shoes turned up sixty-five miles from the main gate with no body ever found; the runway in the base's southern expansion that never appears on Dugway's own maps; Lockheed engineer Don Phillips and former CEO Ben Rich on flying saucer technology; and Steven Greer's claim in The Sirius Project that trillions in defense funding has been siphoned into a shadow government beyond the reach of the Department of Defense.