Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons 1st Edition,

In 1952, a Los Angeles Times headline announced the death of rocket scientist Jack Parsons in a Pasadena explosion. Initially mourned as a scientific prodigy, the story took a darker turn when reporters revealed that Parsons had been deeply involved in the city's occult scene. Parsons was a founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a key institution in the American space program, driven by childhood dreams of space flight. Yet his imagination extended beyond rocketry into incantations and rituals—if he could make rockets real, he reasoned, why not black magic? George Pendle's biography reconstructs Parsons's world, examining prewar superstition, Cold War paranoia, and futuristic ambition. The narrative includes figures such as Howard Hughes, Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, and Robert Heinlein, exploring how genius produced contradictory and consequential results. The book served as the basis for a miniseries created by Mark Heyman and produced by Ridley Scott.