In the winter of 1946, a rocket scientist and a future religious founder stood in the Mojave Desert trying to summon a goddess, and seven months later the skies over America started filling with flying saucers. That timing has fascinated researchers for decades, and it’s back in the spotlight thanks to filmmaker and ex-Freemason Sean Stone, who argues the two events are directly connected.
Stone, the son of director Oliver Stone, has spent the last several years talking publicly about his own experiences with the occult, from his initiation into Freemasonry to what he describes as direct contact with entities he calls demonic. In a recent appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, Stone laid out his theory that certain rituals function as literal doorways. He pointed to the work of Jack Parsons, the eccentric co-founder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as one of the clearest examples.
The ritual behind the theory
Parsons wasn’t just a brilliant chemist who helped develop the solid rocket fuel used in early American spaceflight. He was also a devoted follower of Aleister Crowley’s occult philosophy of Thelema, and he ran a lodge of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis out of his Pasadena mansion. In January 1946, Parsons enlisted his housemate, a young Navy veteran named L. Ron Hubbard, to help him perform a series of ceremonial magic rites known as the Babalon Working.
The stated goal was audacious. Parsons wanted to invoke Babalon, a Thelemic goddess representing feminine liberation, and bring her into physical form on Earth. Over several weeks of rituals in the Mojave Desert and back at his Pasadena home, Parsons recorded his progress in detailed journals, with Hubbard acting as his scribe. When the final ritual concluded in early March, Parsons returned home to find a woman named Marjorie Cameron waiting at his door. He believed she was the manifestation he’d been calling for.
Parsons himself wrote that he believed the working had torn something open between worlds. He described feeling that a door had been unlocked, and later research would connect this same period to Cameron’s own reported UFO sighting, which Parsons treated as evidence his ritual had succeeded.
Stone’s claims and personal encounters
Stone leans heavily on this history, along with the work of paranormal researcher Nick Redfern, who first popularized the idea that the Babalon Working may have unintentionally opened some kind of portal tied to the UFO wave that began the following summer. Stone takes it further, framing the entities behind modern UAP sightings as the same beings referenced across older traditions, from the Watchers of the Book of Enoch to the jinn of Islamic folklore.
He’s also spoken about his own encounters with what he calls Enochian magic, the centuries-old practice associated with the Elizabethan occultist John Dee, and has described receiving strange, unsettling phone calls during his own initiation into Freemasonry, calls he attributes to something other than a prank. Whether those experiences point to something genuinely paranormal or are simply the product of a mind steeped in decades of occult research is something Stone leaves open, but he’s consistent in framing them as real.
A skeptical read
It’s worth being upfront about how thin the actual connective tissue is here. Parsons’ occult activities are well documented, but no contemporary evidence ties his rituals to the UFO sightings that began in 1947, starting with pilot Kenneth Arnold’s famous “flying saucer” report over Washington State that June. The timeline is suggestive to people already inclined to see a connection, but coincidence in timing isn’t the same as causation, and mainstream historians treat the overlap as exactly that: an overlap. Parsons died in a lab explosion in 1952 and never lived to expand on his own theories about what, if anything, his ritual had actually done.
Why the theory keeps resurfacing
Even so, the story has proven remarkably durable. It’s shown up in books, documentaries, and now a fresh round of interviews from Stone, partly because it sits at a genuinely strange intersection of real history. Parsons was a real rocket scientist whose work is still used today, and his occult life was not some retroactive myth. He wrote about it himself, in detail, while he was doing it. That combination of verifiable science and documented mysticism gives the theory a foothold that pure folklore doesn’t have.
For readers who want to go deeper into Parsons’ life, John Carter’s biography Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons remains the most thorough account available, pulling from Parsons’ own journals and interviews with people who knew him.
Whether the Babalon Working actually opened anything remains, like most stories on this site, a matter of where you’re willing to let your curiosity take you. Parsons believed he’d done something real. Stone believes whatever came through never left. Somewhere between the documented history and the modern reinterpretation of it is a story that isn’t going away anytime soon.
Have you experienced something you think might connect back to this kind of phenomenon? Email your report to Reports@ParaRational.com.
