Jack Parsons, the Babalon Working, and the Birth of the Modern UFO Age

John Whiteside Parsons is one of the genuinely unrepeatable figures of the twentieth century: a self-taught chemist whose work on solid rocket propellant helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a devoted follower of Aleister Crowley’s religion of Thelema who ran a ceremonial-magic lodge out of his home in Pasadena. He has a crater on the Moon named after him. He also, in the first months of 1946, attempted to incarnate a goddess.

The episode is called the Babalon Working. With the assistance of a young naval officer named L. Ron Hubbard, yes, that one, years before Scientology, Parsons performed a sequence of rituals intended to invoke the divine feminine force Thelemites call Babalon, and, in his understanding, to open a doorway through which a particular kind of contact could occur. He believed he succeeded. He wrote that an “elemental” had answered, and that something had been let through.

The timeline that won’t quite leave you alone

The Babalon Working ran from January to March 1946. On June 24, 1947, fifteen months later, civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold reported nine shining objects moving “like saucers skipping on water” near Mount Rainier. The press mistranslated his description into “flying saucers,” the phrase detonated across the world’s newspapers, and the modern UFO age started on that date by near-universal agreement.

You can hold these as two unrelated facts. Most serious historians do, and they have the better of the conventional argument: a Pasadena occultist’s private rituals have no causal mechanism connecting them to a pilot’s sighting over the Cascades a year and a half later. Post hoc is not propter hoc. The safe reading is coincidence, and the safe reading might be correct.

Why the occult crowd never let it go

The reason the connection persists is that Parsons himself framed his work in the language of opening, a barrier thinned, a contact made possible. And the UFO wave that followed has, from its earliest days, carried an undertone that pure nuts-and-bolts ufology is uncomfortable with: that the phenomenon behaves less like visiting hardware and more like something responding, to attention, to ritual, to belief.

Parsons didn’t claim to have built a spacecraft. He claimed to have opened a door. The unsettling part of the timeline is that the saucers behaved less like vehicles and more like something that came through one.

The honest position

The honest position is not “an occultist caused the UFO age.” It is that the modern phenomenon was, from its literal first months, entangled with the occult, not as decoration, but at the level of its founding personnel. The man whose propellant chemistry helped put hardware into space spent his evenings trying to open a metaphysical doorway, and he was not a crank on the fringe of the rocket program. He was one of the people who started it.

That entanglement is the thread this section follows. The Babalon Working may prove nothing about flying saucers. But it proves, decisively, that the wall between “serious aerospace” and “ceremonial magic” was never as solid as the later, more respectable version of UFO history pretends.