PROOF NASA Was Created by Occultist

One of the fathers of American rocketry was an occultist, and the other was a Nazi. The first was a student of Alistair Crowley himself. He practiced thelum of rituals and ran a sex-magic lodge in Pasadena, where he once tried to summon a goddess in the majave. And where his best friend was the founder of Scientology. While the other was building weapons and explosives for Hitler, he was an SS officer who was complicit in a program that worked Jewish prisoners to death and one of the central figures in Operation Paperclip. Yeah, this is the actual documented history of one of the weirdest times in the American space program. And these two men, the magician and the Nazi, are the rivers that float together that caused America to reach orbit. And today we'll be uncovering the unsettling truth about how America may have used magic and science to get ahead in the space race. We're gonna look at the Babylon working, remote viewing, and the American exiled genius who went on to then build China's space program. We were always taught that America was the leader in space technology, but the truth is maybe we had a little help. Well, today we're gonna figure it all out and get to the bottom of it, so sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, dude, and welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Agdon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explored the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from around the world from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here in the tent is, you know, I just go on rabbit holes. I just get so fascinated by some random story I might see on Reddit or something on the internet. Maybe someone will DM me on Instagram and be like, "Hey, you should check this out." And I go on a crazy deep dive and I try to figure out what is fact and what is theory. Yes, I consider the show like the sports center for mysteries. You ought to understand, I was raised by a conspiracy theorist, so I am fascinated by conspiracies, and I'm always trying to figure them out. I don't believe all of them, but I do believe all of them are fascinating. Now, the show's not possible without you, so I want to give a big thanks to you, pal. Guy, girl, whoever you are, it's all the same to me. You're a camper now. And I want to say thanks for tuning in, because every time you click or comment or like a video, you help keep the lights on the tension, you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Now, how am I talking right now? Probably through a microphone? Well, who's controlling the microphones? Well, it's my good pal. Sometimes controls the microphones. Sometimes. I mean, just today, you turned off my microphone. I don't mean to keep on bringing that up. Correction, I'd never turned it on. Oh, that's a good point. And those seven minutes were fire. And no one will ever know. The seven minutes in heaven is what they call it. That is what you call it. Our secret stuff. That's right. But we're back online. Don't worry. Okay, the microphones are working right now. I hope, and we're here to talk about the craziness of the early days of American propulsion. Yes, you may have heard of Operation Paperclip. Maybe you heard some murmurs about Jack Parsons, this crazy occultist, and you're like, maybe not. The reality is that the American Space Program in like around World War II time, and even after, it was the Wild West. It was everyone trying to figure it out, and you were taken alliances from anywhere you could get them. Whether it was from some non-human intelligence, like some type of goddess that gets summoned during a magic ritual to help us. Maybe it's the Nazis. It doesn't matter. America was trying to get to the moon, and nothing was going to get in our way. Now, how true is all this? Let's find out. In order to understand this whole story, you got to go back to 1936. There is a dry kind of rocky wash on the edge of Pasadena, and it's called the Arroyo Seco. And in this specific part of Pasadena, there was a handful of young men who were doing something that didn't really look like science. They kind of looked like they were just trying to end their lives. They were basically bolting together crude rocket motors, and then firing them off in the open desert. And the motors mostly just exploded. And the guys would basically scatter around, and then patch the equipment back together as best they could, and then try it again. It was like the OG Mythbusters. They were like, "Can we get this stuff off the ground and into space? Let's see." Now, Caltech, the university, most of them were attached to one of these experiments run as far away from the campus as possible, because they kept on exploding and catching the whole campus on fire. So the nickname of this group of scientists and student researchers was the Suicide Squad. And the unofficial captain of this group was a young brilliant man named Jack Parsons. Now, Parsons was by every account just magnetic. Like, he was tall and handsome and theatrical and bright, and in many ways kind of self-taught. He reminds me of Christos, in a lot of ways. Thank you, right? Everyone loved him. And he had no advanced degree while the others that were on the site were legit academics. Parsons was mostly like a self-educated chemist with like, you could describe it a supernatural intuition for explosives and propulsion. Now, Jack Parsons had a pretty tumultuous childhood, you could say. He was kind of a lonely kid. And growing up, he was just obsessed with like sci-fi. He would devour like Jules Verne and like pulpy science fiction magazines. And he would dream of spaceflight back when most scientists considered like actual spaceflight, like basically impossible. So, to most of the legit sciencey people in 1930s, rockets were still kind of a fantasy. It was a thing you would read in sci-fi, traveling to Mars, but like, we couldn't really do it. Not in the 20s or 30s. But Jack Parsons didn't care. He wanted to reach the stars and he was going to blow himself up trying. And working alongside him were men who had eventually become the actual architects of American rocketry. I mean, some of them Frank Molina. He was like a very disciplined grad student who'd become the organizational backbone of the group. And then Edward Foreman. He was Parsons childhood best friend and also a mechanical partner. And then of course, a brilliant Chinese-born theoretician named Sway Shen Sien. Now, a quick note. Remember his name. You're probably not going to forget it right away. It's also not super easy to pronounce. I don't speak perfect Mandarin. I'm sorry. But his story turns out to be one of the craziest Cold War stories, Sago's tragedies that you've probably never heard of. Now, overseeing them was a Hungarian aerodynamics genius. And his name was Theodore von Karmon. And he was one of the few established scientists at the time who actually took propulsion and rocket science really seriously. Now, the group's first real test of a portable rocket motor is often dated to 1936, specifically to October 31, 1936, Halloween. But Frank Molina, who was actually there later officially dated the first test October 29th. And the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's official history says that 31st, so we'll probably never know for certain. But the fact is that a group that was so kind of shrouded in mystery and had so many eccentric personalities would gather together on Halloween. If you're a very sober-minded kind of skeptic, you're like, yes, just a coincidence. If you are someone that is a believer in the occult and you're like, oh, this was some type of ritual. You did it on all Hallows Eve. Now, I mentioned JPL a second ago Jet Propulsion Laboratory. If you've never heard of that before, that is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It's one of the most important space institutions on Earth to this very day, like as we sit here. And it started right in this moment with Jack Parsons and his rag tag underfunded semi-sword group of dreamers. I can't even say it on YouTube. And then there was another side to Jack Parsons. And that is the whole reason why I'm interested in him or why we're even telling the story at all. So by day, he was chasing the heavens with rockets and fire and fuel. And by night, he was chasing the cosmos with candles and incantations and blood. Yeah. So by the early 1940s, Jack Parsons was living in a grand old house in Pasadena's millionaire row. How does Jack Parsons afford to live in one of the wealthiest parts of all of California? Why? Like, how did he get all this money? It's kind of crazy that he was even there in the first place. And it's not really very much like specified how he was able to afford this. But he basically got it and started to fill it with a very strange collection of people in Southern California. So Parsons only rented rooms to what he described as artists or ascentrics or even anarchists. Anyone that was conventional or square or fitting the normal social paradigm wasn't really accepted. So it was a house full of bohemians and science fiction writers and actors and occultists. And they were moving through this house at all hours of the day and night. And the the neighbors weren't stoked on it, right? This is a nice part of Pasadena. They're like, why do we have this house full of like ruffians coming in and out? And so the rumors start to spread of like chance and rituals and pregnant women coming in and out and all sorts of stuff. Now, Jack Parsons, the rocket pioneer, the man whose propulsion work was contributing to the American war effort at the time was also the leader of a Pasadena lodge devoted to Thelema. Now, just a quick rundown for anyone who's not familiar, we've done an entire episode on Thelema and on Alistair Crowley here on Camps. You can check those out. But just to get you up to speed, Thelema is a modern esoteric religion founded in the early 20th centuries by a British occultist named Alistair Crowley. Now, real quick, Thelema is not Satanism, right? It's not Nazi occultism. I think it's called a bunch of stuff. People are like, oh, it's Freemasonic, it's evil, it's occult. It has a specific structured religious and magical system. And, you know, in the interest of trying to be fair and unbiased, it is a form of like modern esotericism and it involves magic and rituals. And Jack Parsons believed it with full sincerity. So he led the Agape Lodge, which was the Pasadena branch of the the limit or the limit. organization called "Ordo Templi Orientis" or "OTO" and he actually corresponded directly with Alistair Crowley in England who said this charismatic young smart American was one of the most promising figures in the entire new age spiritual movement. This is what you have to remember as we go through the episode. The very same disciplined, brilliant mind that could intuit the chemistry of rocket fuel and aerodynamics and spaceflight also genuinely believe that he could bend reality through ritual. Right? This type of characteristic I actually don't even think is that uncommon, like typically very bright and like daring people that go on to do amazing things, also simultaneously believe stuff that is very unconventional, you could say. I mean Isaac Newton is such a famous example, right? He's the father of like physics and calculus, but also was like fascinated by decoding the Bible and like reading like ancient texts to try to like understand theology in the end of times. And Jack Parsons is no different. To him, rocketry and magic were two doors to the same room. There were two ways of reaching past the limits of earth and of this reality. And for most of us, those things are very opposite, right? On the one hand, you have science. On the other hand, you have superstition like scientists are not superstitious and superstitious people are not going to be rigorous scientists. But for Jack Parsons, they were two sides of the same coin. And in 1946, that led him to attempt the most infamous ritual in the history of American occultism with a partner who would eventually branch off to start a whole new religion on his own. It's one of the most secretive and exclusive religions on the planet and it's called Scientology. So let's go to late 1945, a new house guess arrived at the Jack Parsons home that also people would call the "Parsonage." And this was a charming, fast-talking Navy officer and Pulp science fiction writer named El Ron Hubbard. Now at the time, Hubbard was not the founder of any religion or any organization that would come years down the road. He was, however, a prolific science fiction writer and a very big personality and a man that Jack Parsons quickly came to see as a natural talent for what he was working on and for just a vision for science and for the occult. And the two became really, really good friends. And Parsons wrote to Crowley describing his impressive new collaborator in glowing terms. And then together, the two of them, in early 1946, they set out to attempt something audacious even by Aleister Crowley's standards. They called it the Babylon working. And here's what that means. In thelemic mythology or theology, depending on how you look at it, Babylon is a sacred goddess figure, sometimes called the scarlet woman, sometimes called the mother of abominations. She's a symbol of liberated divine femininity. And Parsons didn't just want to honor Babylon symbolically. He wanted to incarnate her. He wanted to summon the goddess into a living, breathing human woman who would walk the earth and help usher in a new age for humanity. And honestly, what I love about them and what impress me is just how immediately comfortable they were right out of the box. They look great. They're suddenly built and you don't have to suffer through a long, breaking period for them to actually feel good on your feet. Now look, I'm a standard comedian and a podcaster. I'm not pretending that I'm on a work site. But this gear is made for people that actually put their boots through real punishment. 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Make sure you tell them more increased dose from the campsite sentia, but let's get back to the show. Now, I know if you are not a sort of mystical minded person, this might sound kind of crazy. But Jack Parsons really believed this. But for weeks, Parsons performed elaborate rituals with Hubbard acting as like a scribe, though one kind of like recording the visions and like standing watch on the astral plane while Jack Parsons was like doing his magical work. And some of it happened at the Parsonage. Some of it happened out in the vast emptiness of the Mojave Desert at night under the stars. And Parsons described a mounting sense of tension over multiple days, like strange lights in the house, unexplained disturbances, feeling that something or someone, some type of force was inside the building. And then Parsons believed it worked. Because shortly after the ritual reached its climax, a woman just appears at his door. And granted this was a house where, you know, very sort of a centric bohemians would kind of gather. But to Parsons, this was a sign. And her name was Marjorie Cameron. She was an artist and by all accounts, a very free spirit. And she had, you know, beautiful red hair and these just like electric, green eyes. And Parsons was convinced this was Babylon incarnate. And he even wrote to Alistair Crowley. And he was like, dude, I did it. Like I finally had my goddess incarnate, my elemental as he would describe it like red hair and all. And Cameron stayed, Marjorie Cameron actually stayed there and then actually they married later on that same year and over the course of their marriage, as Parsons drew her deeper into Thelma, Cameron came to embrace his beliefs and came to believe herself that the spirit of Babylon really had been incarnated into her. Now you can understand from her perspective, she like shows up at this house meets this very like a centric brilliant scientist magician. And he's like, you're the most beautiful woman of her met. Not only that, you're actually a goddess incarnate. And for her, she's like, sounds pretty good. Yeah, I mean that's a pretty like strong pickup line. You meet a woman and you're like, you're a goddess. Like literally, there's a goddess inside you. I did a magic ritual and that's who you are. And Karnat adds to that and so I'm saying, yeah, biblically, in the biblical sense, you know I'm saying. Now, the ritual definitely happened, like it's documented. Like Parsons and Hubbard performed these rituals in 1946 and scholars of Western esotericism study them as basically like a real event in American religious history. And that Parsons interpreted Cameron's arrival as supernatural. That is all documented in his own letters. What is not established by any historical or scientific evidence is that anything supernatural actually occurred. That Parsons performed a ritual for a woman to appear and that woman appeared. Some read that as magic. They say that by the way of sort of manifesting the world around you, these things can happen that on the surface don't look magical, but they actually are. But others and skeptics will read this as just like a coincidence. The history doesn't decide for you. I'm just telling you what happened. But here's the twist that history does tend to leave out. The great magician that I've been mentioning, Alistair Crowley, he was watching all of this unfold by mail back home in England. And he was not really impressed by any of this. He was like kind of alarmed. So reading Parsons letters with like this intensity, like Parsons is right and like dude, like it's all happening. It's all coming together. Like there's like a mania. And Crowley apparently wrote to a colleague that he was fairly frantic contemplating what he called the idiocy of these louts. So Parsons is over your stoked like yo, I did it and Alistair Crowley, like Loki, his mentor and like someone he admired was a little bit like, yeah, you got to chill with all this magic stuff. You're going crazy. Like if you're freaking out, Alistair Crowley, you're doing some wild stuff. Now the founder of the entire religion thought that this Babylon working was foolish. And the master thought that his star pupil had kind of like lost the plot here and Crowley had specifically warned Parsons about one thing. He says, Hey, that guy that you have around you, Elron Hubbard, I wouldn't trust him. And this is what's crazy about the whole thing. Here's what the Babylon working for sure summoned in Jack Parsons life. Maybe it summoned this goddess in Marjorie Cameron, but it definitely summoned financial ruin. So while the two men were performing these rituals, Hubbard had grown very close to a woman named Sarah Northrup, who is actually Parsons girlfriend at the time. And not long after Parsons entered into a business venture with Hubbard and Northrup, basically pooling a large share of his savings into a company meant to buy and sell yachts for profit. And then Hubbard and Northrup just kind of vanished. They sort of grabbed the money and they bought a boat together and just kind of sailed away. Now, I'm sure I run Hubbard or disagree. He's like, no, we had an arrangement and I, you know, took my part and I left. But Parsons who believed that he could command supernatural forces chased after them and as the story goes, he performed a ritual to stop them. Now whether by magic or by the court order he was able to get, he did manage to recover a fraction of the money that he had lost. But at that point, the damage was done. Jack Parsons savings were completely gone. Now Hubbard and Northrup eventually married and Hubbard of course went on to write a book called "Dionetics" and then later founded the Church of Scientology, a religion that still today insists its founder was never seriously involved with Jack Parsons or any of the occult stuff at all. But that betrayal broke something in Parsons. He'd lost his money and his partner and his standing and the professional walls were really closing in. His magical life had already made him a liability. The rocket company that he co-founded, a company called Aerojet and the increasingly the security conscious world. military rocketry didn't really have a place for a guy who was running a sex magic lodge out of a mansion. He had already been pushed out of the institutional rocket world that he had helped create, because Jack Parsons left the Caltech and JPL rocket world back in 1944 before the Babylon working ever happened, and roughly 14 years before NASA even existed. So the truth is by the time NASA was created in 1958, Jack Parsons had been out of like institutional rocketry for over a decade, and as a matter of fact he had even been dead for six years. Because in 1952, Jack Parsons met one of the most gruesome ends imaginable. So just imagine this. He's broke and he's doing freelance explosive work, including like pyrotechnics for like major Hollywood films, and was basically doing all of it out of a home laboratory. And he and Marjorie Cameron, the goddess incarnate herself, they were about to leave for Mexico where he'd been offered work setting up an explosives operation. But on June 17th, 1952, while handling chemicals in that lab, something detonated. And the explosion was devastating. Police believed that Parsons had dropped a can, a can of fulminate of mercury, which is this extremely volatile compound. And the coffee can that he had apparently been mixing it in was found shredded and the blast amputated his right arm and shattered his leg and tore open part of his face. But still, Jack Parsons did not die instantly. Neighbors actually saw the explosion and came inside and found him conscious in the wreckage. And he was still trying to speak and he died a short time later at the hospital at just 37 years old. Now of course, the rumor started immediately and they've never stopped to this day. Was this really an accident? I mean, Parsons was a master of explosives. What a man. That was that careful and that brilliant really fumble a can of fulminate of mercury. Was it like some type of self end? Was it a murder or was it as some occultists have whispered ever since the final cost of the Babylon working come due? Now the truth is we'll never really know for sure. There is of course the official answer, the lawful answer, and then you have the legendary answer. And at the end of the day, Jack Parsons was gone. But yet the machine that he helped start was just getting warmed up because it was about to import its next generation of geniuses from the smoking ruins of Nazi Germany. Now this next chapter of the story leaves Pasadena completely and crosses the ocean to Nazi Germany where we close in on a weapon called the V2. Now the V2 was the world's first long range ballistic missile. This is a liquid fueled rocket that could climb to the edge of space and then rain down on cities like London with basically zero warning and it was impossible to stop. It was a staggering technological leap years ahead of anything that the Allies had. And the man most associated with it and its development was a brilliant, ambitious, young aristocrat named Vorner von Braun. So just like Jack Parsons, von Braun had been obsessed with space flight since he was just a kid. Like when he was a young boy, he didn't want to build weapons. He wanted to build spaceships. He wanted to go to the moon. He wanted to see Mars. And he wanted it badly enough that he kind of made a bargain. In order to get funding for his rockets, he had to build them within the government system that he existed in, which was the third Reich. He had to build them for Hitler's war. And the bargain isn't just a spooky story. It kicks off one of the darkest moments in all of history. After Allied bombing raids hit the main V2 development site at a place called Pain the Munda. The Nazis moved production underground into a tunnel complex called Mithilvark near North Housen and the labor that built those rockets came from an attached concentration camp system called Mithilvark Dora. Now the prisoners of Mithilvark Dora were worked basically to death. They had to do everything. They dug the tunnels. They assembled the missiles. They lived and died in conditions of like unthinkable cruelty. And historians estimate that more people died building the V2 rocket than were ever killed by it as a weapon. I mean, it's insane to think about. So where does Von Braun sit and all of this? Well, when the war collapsed in 1945, Von Braun knew that he and his core team were the most valuable scientific minds in the ruins of the Third Reich. And both the Soviets and the Americans also knew it. You have to think the Nazi Germany regime basically falls and the Soviets and the Americans want to get their hands on all the technology and all the information and all the intelligence. So Von Braun made a calculated choice. He arranged for his group to surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets, basically betting that the United States would find them too useful to punish or to put them on trial. And he was right. And that's how this Nazi genius came to join the American space program. Now NASA's official biography states that Von Braun knew about the terrible conditions at Mithilvark and he was involved in decisions concerning the use of slave labor. The Smithsonian's chief space historian, a guy named Michael Newfield, documents that Von Braun was a member of the Nazi party and a commissioned officer in the SS and was at least tangentially involved in the murderous exploitation of concentration camp prisoners. So to be clear, Von Braun did not personally design the camp. He did not run the SS. He wasn't the architect of the Holocaust. He was a Nazi party member. He was an SS officer and he knew about and participated in decisions that used enslaved humans to build his rockets. And after the war, he built a spotless public image as this wholesome American space hero. He even appeared on Disney television specials and was like smiling beside cartoon rockets. So which is it? Was he an ardent true believer Nazi? It's tough to find that in the record. But he definitely was a card carrying Nazi member, but so were many other scientists at the time. Does that exonerate him? I mean, that's up for you to decide. The man who basically helped America dream about Mars also helped run one of the most brutal and savage programs arguably in all of scientific history. So in 1945, Von Braun and his dark history were now done with the Nazi party and they were working with the Americans. But what followed was a secret US program initially codenamed overcast. But later the whole sort of operation was given a name that actually stuck and that is Operation Paperclip. Now the idea was pretty simple. You bring German, scientific and technical experts into the United States and you put them to work for America and just as importantly make them absolutely sure they didn't end up working for the Soviets instead. This was basically the logic behind the Cold War, right? Every scientist that America could snag was a scientist that the Soviets couldn't have. So it was America complicit in the atrocities of the Third Reich because they brought over the scientists. Again, this is one of the moral gray areas of history. There was, however, an enormous problem. Many of these men had been card carrying Nazis, some had troubling wartime records. And so in 1946, President Harry Truman authorized this broader program with a very specific restriction, only nominal Nazis, not active supporters, not war criminals were supposed to be admitted. And that restriction was called sanitization. So the US government in some of these documented cases didn't just overlook problematic Nazi pass. Officials actively sought out revised security reports, essentially cleaned up files that kind of scrubbed or softened damaging background information so that the really valuable guys could still clear the bar and enter into the country in spite of their crimes. It's kind of like, somehow sometimes a college will kind of like overlook some of your grades to let you in to complain on like, you know, one of the sports teams. It's kind of like that. They're like, Hey, you technically didn't have this GPA, but this class didn't really counsel get rid of that one and this one, and you did some community service. So you can get it. They basically fudge the numbers of some of the background stuff in order to get the scientists that they really wanted. So the paper trail was in some cases deliberately kind of laundered. Now to be clear, Nazi party membership is not the same thing as being like a Nazi war criminal. It's kind of an uncomfortable kind of nuanced alienation to make. You want to just be like, Hey, every person in Germany, that was a Nazi as a terrible person. But in Nazi Germany, party membership was often like the prerequisite for any type of career. It was a coerced formality, so to speak. And it could come down to just having been in survival mode. We don't really know. Some paper clip recruits were very serious ideological Nazis with many of them had real blood on their hands, but others had just joined a party in order to keep their job, keep their funding, keep their research. And the record on this is honestly extremely complicated. But the bottom line is that the United States knowingly brought in hundreds of former Nazis into the country, sometimes even doctored the paperwork to do it and then put them at the heart of perhaps it's most important technological programs. So when Von Braun and his initial core of about 125 rocket scientists entered, there was no NASA and it wouldn't exist for over a decade. What these men actually did first was work for the US army. So they basically leave Nazi Germany and they land at Fort Bliss, Texas and did their early testings in White Sands, New Mexico, firing these captured V2 rockets across the American desert and basically teaching the US military everything that they knew about ballistic missiles. Now, of course, this is not space exploration at this time. This was weapons work at the dawn of the Cold War and America wanted missiles that could carry warheads and Von Braun's Germans were the best missile men on earth. So it was an obvious marriage. And then in 1950, a team moved to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama where they developed the Redstone missile and then later the more powerful Jupiter family of rockets. Now later, a lot of these experts would then get moved to NASA's rockets and human space flight programs. But of course, it sits alongside the enormous contribution of American engineers, American universities. And of course, yes, the old Caltech and JPL rocket lineage that traces all the way back to Jack Parsons. So this is where these two separate rivers that we've already laid out, one from Pasadena, one from the ruins of Nazi Germany, are about to converge. Because before we get to that meeting, we have to close the chapter to the one man that we left behind in the desert. And the way America treated him is a darkness all in and of itself. So remember the brilliant Chinese born scientists I mentioned before, Sway Shenzhen, the brilliant theoretician from the original Caltech rocket group. He was kind of overseeing Parsons and all the rest of the guys. So while Warner von Braun was being welcomed into America and getting set up in Huntsville, one of the actual founding minds of American rocketry was actually being destroyed by his own government. So this guy, Sien, also known as Chi-in Swenzhen, was by all accounts a genius. He was a protégé of von Karman. He'd rise to the top of the American rocket sciences and really helped establish the Jet Propulsion Lab itself. And he worked on classified programs. And he held a top security clearance. But this was all being done before the end of World War II. Because by the time World War II ended, came the red scare. And then in the 1950s at the height of the anti-communist paranoia, the FBI accused Sien of being a communist. The evidence historians widely agree was pretty thin if any, like some would even say it was completely non-existent. His colleagues ardently defended him and he was never actually charged with any crime. But his security clearance was stripped, his career in America basically shattered overnight. But rather than simply letting him go, the government held Sien in the country for five years, basically under like a house arrest. The fear was that he knew too much to be allowed to leave. So they thought that if they could hold him, his cutting-ed knowledge would basically just kind of age out and go stale before he could take it anywhere. Now obviously, it didn't work. In 1955, America finally deported him to communist China. And Sien kind of humiliated and like bitter and exiled. He went home and then went and built China's missile and space programs from the ground up. Like he's known today as the father of Chinese spaceflight, the intercontinental missiles, the satellites, the foundation of the program, that to this day lands rovers on the far side of the moon. So much of it traces back to the man that America decided it didn't want. One Navy official later said that deporting Sien was one of the dumbest things the country ever did. America imported a former SS officer, literally a former Nazi and then made him a hero and then took one of its own founding rocket scientists and handed him to America's greatest rival. And the country welcomed the Nazi and then exiled the Chinese American. Now, I know we've followed the money, the magic and the Nazis and the exile. So let's watch where all of these rivers finally converge and America reaches orbit for the first time. The date is October, 1957. And the Soviet Union launches an aircraft called Sputnik. It is the first artificial satellite and America just loses it. They just assumed that they were the world's technological leader. And they realized that they had just been beaten into space by its communist rival. America's first official response was a rocket called Vanguard. And on national television, it rose a few feet off the pad, about to blast off into space and exploded. The newspapers called it Flopnik and it was to say the least a massive humiliation for the United States. So the government basically turned to the team that had been keeping its back pocket the whole time and that is Vaughner von Braun and the rest of his crew in Huntsville, Alabama. And just a year later, a modified Jupiter C rocket carried Explorer I, America's first successful satellite into orbit. And this is the moment where all of the threads are about to converge. The satellite itself was designed and built by JPL. That is the jet propulsion laboratory. This is the institution grown from that crazy little group that traces all the way back to Jack Parsons. And the rocket that lifted up was built by Vaughner von Braun's team, the lineage that traces all the way back through Operation Paperclip, all the way to Nazi Germany to the tunnels of Mythelwerk. The occultist Creekbed and the Nazis missiles, both bloodlines riding into orbit on the same American launch. Now later that same year was the official beginning of NASA. If you don't know, this is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It's backbone, by the way, was an older, more boring kind of bureaucratic body called NACA, an ACA. This was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which had quietly been doing aviation research for decades. So JPL was then transferred from Army control to NASA on December 3rd, 1958. And then on July 1st, 1960, the technical and administrative core of the Army's Operation and Huntsville, aka von Braun's kind of kingdom, was also transferred to NASA and became the Marshall Space Flight Center. And guess what? von Braun became its first director. So within a decade, the rocket that his team designed would then carry Apollo astronauts all the way to the moon. So let's look at what NASA actually was and how it really came to be. It was a layered conversions of everything we just talked about from the amateur American rocketry led by this sort of wild occultist to the institutional muscle of the JPL and the imported expertise of Operation Paperclip and von Braun to the old civilian science of NACA. But overall of it was the raw political terror of the Cold War, forcing a nation to spend fortunes to get to space so that it wouldn't be left behind. Just a strange sprawling, very human collision of dreamers and opportunists and you could say desperate governments, some of them brilliant, some of them monstrous, many of them both. But before we really closed the loop on this, there's honestly one last thread to the story that I need to tell you about because the government's appetite for the strange doesn't end with space. A few decades later, the US government spent real money trying to build psychic spies and it ran under a few different code names, but the one you probably heard before is Project Stargate. Now the idea was centered around something called remote viewing, which is the claimed ability to sit in a locked room in one place and be handed nothing but like a set of map coordinates and psychically be able to sketch what was happening or what it looked like at those given coordinates. Like, you know, I would be a remote viewer sitting in a room, someone would hand me some coordinates and I would basically draw the walls and the buildings that I saw and the roads that I saw. And it would later be revealed to me that what I was looking at was a secret Soviet base. Now this isn't a rumor. Like the declassified paper trail is huge and we have legit session transcripts and training manuals on like actual operational taskings. But that is a story for another time and some of the story you've actually covered on this channel before. So check out those episodes, specifically the Ingoswan episode. I think dives deep into that one. Hey guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because I want to tell you about GLD. Yeah, GLD sent me this chain. The chain that I'm wearing right now, if you've ever seen an episode of this show for the past like probably nine months, I'm wearing this exact chain. And sometimes brands will send you stuff and they'll be like, yeah, try out our thing and every now and again, you're like, all right, whatever. This one is actually amazing. What impress me is how substantial it feels in your hand. Like it actually has a real weight. Like the class feels extremely well made. It feels like really durable and it looks even better in person. It's comfortable to wear and it kind of elevates every single outfit that I'm putting on without having to overthink it. Their pieces are sweat proof, waterproof and made to be durable and guaranteed for life. I literally wear this every single day. I never take it off. And what's amazing is that GLD has something for every style and price point. From an 18 karat gold plated piece to a solid gold piece with natural diamonds and they have collaborations with like the NFL NBA, WNBA, MLB. Literally anything you can imagine, there's something there for you. I mean, obviously as a Catholic, I had to bust out the crucifix, but they have crosses that are for Protestants even. They got everything you can imagine. So if you want to elevate any outfit, GLD is for you. And for a limited time, only new customers are getting an insane deal. You're gonna go to GLD.com and use the code camp and you're gonna get 40% off. Yeah, 40% off with the code [email protected]. You can get the exact same crucifix that I'm wearing right now. Maybe we put that in the description so people can see exactly the one that I'm wearing. And after you purchase, they're gonna ask where you heard about GLD. Make sure you tell them that Mark and Christos from the campsite sentia. Now let's get back to the show. So, what is the American Space Program born from the Colt Well? As far as history shows us, there was no cabal or like hidden hands steering it from the shadows, but here's what we actually found. The rocket that carried America towards the skies, towards space, can be traced back to a man who believed that he was basically talking to intelligence through occult rituals who performed magic in the desert to summon something into the world and whose best friend coincidentally or not was the father of Scientology. And the rocket that lifted us there was constructed by a Nazi party member who was complacent at least in the suffering and control of millions of people. I mean, think about it. All of this is all happening at once. And these were not separate worlds that happened to brush against each other. They were braided together from Aleister Crowley to Hitler to the occult to remote viewing to concentration camps from the American Space Program to the Chinese Space Program. And it ultimately came to be known as NASA. And we wanna believe that the men who touched the stars were like just pure, solid, nerdy adventurers. We want to believe the like America's like the perfect good guys in our record are completely clean and we've never done anything wrong and everyone that works for America is great. And the truth is always going to be more complicated than just that. And maybe the most honest thing that we can say is that we still don't fully understand what we were reaching for at the time or in Jack Parsons case, maybe we'll reach back. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the full story of the strange and mysterious occult and Nazi connections to the American space program. I mean, this is a fascinating one because we've done episodes on Jack Parsons, we've done episodes on Operation Paperclip, but looking at them side by side and really thinking about them and then thinking about how what they did to CNN, who pulled a picture of CNN, by the way? I mean, it's kind of crazy that he would get exiled. I mean, I recognize he was born in China, but he was born in China kind of a different time. Like it was like early 1900s China. And then America kind of like boots them because of the fear of communism. It's like, dude, we're willing to take Nazis and we we're not going to take a guy that like, maybe he's a communist, like the guy's a genius. Like what are we talking about? Like, am I off on this? I don't know. Do you have the picture, by the way? Yep. There he is. Sué Xinsien. It's got a little bit of a smug look about him. What do you think he's on trustworthy? I don't know. Like if you're in charge of the government and you're in charge of communism and also and you see this guy drawn on a chalkboard, are you are you a little on edge? Look at the smirk. I think it's a trustworthy smirk. Now I need to know, like what was the evidence against him? That's something that I didn't really look into for the research on this. I just knew that they kicked him out, but the fact that like they would be willing to shoot themselves in the foot, no pun intended. I mean, it seems crazy. Let me look here. As I was here, the Army Intelligence was aware of the allegations that he was a communist, but his security clearance was not suspended prior to the Korean War. And then they revoked it and then he was questioned by the FBI. His colleagues all supported him and there was no proof of the allegations. He received a deferred deportation under the immigration and naturalization services for the following five years. And then he announced that he was resigning from Caltech. And then crazy enough, he had secret he had secretly attended meetings with Robert Oppenheimer's brother Frank Oppenheimer, Jack Parsons and Frank Molina that were organized by Russian-born chemist Sidney Weinbaum and called professional unit 122 of the Pasadena Communist Party. Wait a second. All these guys went to that. That's wild. Weinbaum's trial commenced on the 30th and both Frank Oppenheimer and Parsons testified against him. Weinbaum was convicted of perjury and sentenced to four years. Whoa. That's crazy. He was taken into custody on September 6th and then for two weeks was detained at the Terminal Island, a federal prison near Los Angeles. And according to Theodore von Carmon's autobiography, he refused to testify against his old friend Sidney Weinbaum. The FBI decided to launch an investigation. That's crazy. We should do a whole episode on him. I mean, that is just fascinating. The fact that Jack Parsons testified against him, I wonder if he was jealous. Right? You got to wonder. I wonder if Jack Parsons like, "Oh, this guy's bad news. You got to get him out of here." Or the government told him to. Oh. Now we're talking. I mean, just crazy. This guy doesn't look like us, says a commie, and they booted him. I mean, just wild. And they killed Parsons. Allegedly. And then, allegedly, they killed Jack Parsons. Yeah, of course. I mean, just wild. So I mean, yeah, he was under house arrest during the time. He published Engineering Cybernetics, which was then published by McGraw Hill. So they're like, "Hey, you can publish books that we're going to put out to America, but you can't work for America." I mean, it's just the whole thing is absurd. But who knows? Maybe I'm off. I don't know enough about CNN to really be able to make an assessment on whether or not he's a communist. And even if he is a communist, I'm like, "Dude, let him build a rocket. What does being a communist have to do with your ability to build sick rockets?" Or he goes and sells the secrets to. He did anyway. He already did. That's because we screwed him. I mean, if you just let him be in the club, like the outcome would be we would have better rockets. And then the same thing would happen with them. They would have rockets. Or maybe he would never go over there. I don't know. What do you guys think? If you've known more about the story than I do, please drop a comment. What do you think about Jack Parsons and Warner von Braun? Do you think Jack Parsons did anything with his workings? I mean, I'm like 50/50 on the on the occult stuff, I'm like, I just don't know. I think he definitely did the working. Did it summon a goddess? Again, I don't like to work in absolutes. I do everything percentages. Percentages of likelihood of how I see the world. So I'm like, did he do the working? Let me say 99%. Was he communicated with Alistair Crowley, 99%. Did he summon a goddess to that then came in the form of Marjorie Cameron? Actually, let me take that back. And was Marjorie Cameron the goddess? I'm going to say like 3%. Did he summon a goddess? Let me put it at 10%. The goddess of abomination, right around the time that we're building nukes, like maybe that is the spiritual dimension of what we're creating, you know what I mean? Now was Warner von Braun a Nazi, 99%, again, I don't work in absolutes, everything's percentages. Okay. Was he complicit in a bad guy and like knew what he was doing and probably held some like supremacist beliefs? I don't know. Let me put it like 90%. Maybe 82%. I mean, he's also like an old guy in the 1930s that was like living in Nazi Germany. He probably believed some crazy stuff. Was he also a genius mind that built a bunch of rockets and helped America get to the moon allegedly? I mean, it is funny that we didn't even touch on the whole fact that the moon landing might also be fake. We have another episode. We have another episode, but it's funny when we're talking about this. We're like, "Hey, the US government brought over Nazis to build a space program that didn't even work." Speaking of other episodes, shout out to a commenter who goes, "Oh, if it isn't, Mark, we've already done an episode on this, Gagnon." Yeah. We've done a lot of episodes. Yeah. I just want to let the people know. They can start collecting the dots if you're in something. You're like, "Oh, this is interesting. You can tie it back." But I do say that a lot. That was objectively funny though. It's so fun. Yeah. What I want to now be known is we should do an episode on this. That is really what the show is. It's me just doing something and being like, "We should do an episode on this other thing." I'd say it's 50/50 of how much you say those. We did the other one. We're going to do this one. We're doing this one now. That's basically all reality. We're bringing in a comic to talk about this one again. Exactly. We absolutely should do that. Actually, a matter of fact. That's a great idea. But what do you guys think? If you've researched this topic at length, please drop a comment below. I'd love to know what your thoughts are. I read all of them. YouTube Spotify. Even if I don't get back to you, I'm sure somebody will. We love great news. If you like history content, we touched on a lot of history stuff today. If you want much more straight up and down fascinating history deep dives and biographies than some of the most consequential, important and controversial people that have ever existed, well, history camp is the place for you. If you like religious content, we touched on some of the cool stuff today. If you want to have deep dives on the major religions of the world right now, religion camp is the place for you. If you like to rock with the mysterious and the conspiratorial, great news here at Camp Gagnon, we drop these episodes every single week twice a week, so make sure you subscribe to them so you don't miss it. Additionally, we also have a series of society that is patreon.com/campgagnon where we put out episodes of this show completely ad free bonus episodes that never go to the public. It's also just a cool community where you get to hang and chat with other like-minded camp people. Also, anytime we do real life camp events like the event that we did in Joshua Tree, you're going to find out about that at patreon.com/campgagnon. Thank you guys so much. I appreciate you dearly. You're the best creestos. Thank you for being here. You're a good guy. Thank you. No time, creestos. We got to wrap up the episode. God bless you all. See you next time.