The Secret History of Twin Peaks

by Mark Frost

  DM: Wow. Sounds complicated.

  JP: It is. And Betty just got married. To him.

  DM: Him?

  JP: Hubbard, Ron Hubbard. He was part of our crowd in Pasadena. Showed up after the war. Navy man, intelligence, a hack science fiction writer, maybe you’ve heard the name.

  DM: Can’t say that I have.

  JP: People wandered in and out of that house all the time. When Ron showed up, with his war stories and his wit and his polymath brilliance, I thought I’d found a boon companion. Betty hated him on sight. (He lights a cigarette, long exhale.) That’s when I knew she and I were in trouble.

  DM: How so?

  JP: Oh, within weeks they were together, Ron just drew her to him like he had her under a spell. So she left me. But he was such a friend--and we weren’t, you know, any of us, focused on bourgeois shit like monogamy. So I still thought of him as my friend. We were as close as could be. I thought he understood me better than anyone I’d ever met.

  DM: Was he a member of your church as well?

  JP: Oh yeah, he dove right in. Relentless, he wanted to know everything about it. We worked together, tirelessly, for two years on a, uh … on a really important project.

  DM: Are you talking about rockets or magic?

  JP: (lowers his voice) See, these were things Crowley had written about. A ritual that he’d attempted in Europe--important work--but no one had ever tried it over here.

  DM: A ritual? And Hubbard was helping you with this?

  (He nodded, a faraway look in his eye.)

  JP: We saw things that maybe men aren’t supposed to see.

  DM: Where was this?

  JP: Out in the desert. The desert’s a perfect medium for summoning … an empty canvas, a beaker into which, under certain circumstances and with fearless rigor, you can create an elixir that will call forth … call them what you will … messengers of the gods …

  DM: (I laughed nervously) Wow. What does that look like?

  JP: Oh, they assume many forms. The grays, for instance. You know, Zeta Reticulans.8

  (Continues) The tall ones, now, the Nordic types, they’re different. More benign. Some say they’ve always been here. Supposedly they come from the Dog Star.

  (I notice he’s sweating heavily as he says this and his eyes have taken on a glassy sheen. I wonder if he’s on drugs right now.)

  DM: The Dog Star?

  JP: Serious.

  DM: Yes, I’m serious.

  (Slight laughter from Parsons, but I’m not sure why.)9

  JP: Ever been to Roswell?

  DM: Roswell, New Mexico? As a matter of fact, I have.

  JP: We were near there. In the desert. A place they call Jornada del Muerto.

  DM: That’s near White Sands, isn’t it?

  JP: Right. It means “Journey of the Dead Man.” Isn’t that beautiful? The way we all move through our lives. Eyes closed, head down, shuffling along. Dead before our time, journeying toward the grave.

  DM: That’s where they tested the bomb.

  JP: Yes. (The faraway look again, eyes unfocused) Such a fertile ground for the Working.

  DM: Pardon? What’s the Working?

  JP: The ritual. The Working of Babalon. Calling forth the Elemental.

  DM: Could you elaborate on that, Jack?

  (A car horn blares. I look outside, where an old Buick roadster convertible has pulled up. A striking, Technicolor redhead is behind the wheel. Jack snaps back to himself, out of his dreamy reverie, looks at his watch and smiles.)

  JP: Sorry, that’s the wife. We’re supposed to hit the flea market today. Anyway, Hubbard, yeah. He really knew how to stick in the knife. And twist it.

  We shake hands, and after he leaves I drive to Pasadena. I’d arranged to meet with one of Parsons’s former colleagues, a longtime scientific associate, calm, cerebral and sober as a judge. I told him the truth, that I was conducting a confidential military investigation, and he agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity. I of course agreed. He had worked with Parsons from the mid-1930s as part of his “Suicide Squad,” and still had great affection for him, so he had seen changes diminish the man he knew as well as anyone.

  He took me into the Arroyo Seco near the JPL labs. The Arroyo Seco is a forbidding and desolate 25-mile-long dry river canyon, lined with rocks and immense boulders washed down over geologic eons from the San Gabriel Mountains that tower above the city. This desolate patch is where Parsons and company used to test their fuels and shoot off rockets in their halcyon days. During the sporadic monsoonal rains peculiar to the region, the Arroyo Seco (“dry stream” in Spanish, named by the Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola in the late 18th century) becomes a raging torrent. As the city of Pasadena grew down below, a dam was built there in 1920, where a waterfall rumbles during the rains, to contain the seasonal floods. They call this spot the Devil’s Gate, named for a rock outcropping at its base that many believe resembles the face of a devil.

  * The Devil’s Gate, Arroyo Seco, Pasadena

  * The Whore of Babylon, Sumerian bas relief

  I can confirm that it does. But the name goes back farther than the Army Corps of Engineers. The Tongva Indians, who lived in the area for centuries, called this spot the Hell Gate because they believed it was literally a portal to the underworld.10

  His colleague told me that Parsons used this area for his personal exploration of what he called “the explosive sciences, of both the literal and metaphorical varieties”--because he believed they would “open up the gate.”11

  So this is also where, after founding JPL, Parsons first began enacting his bizarre “Thelema” rituals. His associate told me--strictly off the record--those rituals were “an attempt to summon into human form the spirit of a figure central to the Thelema pantheon, the goddess Babalon, known as “the Mother of Abominations.”12

  I asked him what possible good could come of Parsons doing something that sounds like provoking the end of the world? Looking pale and uneasy, frequently glancing at the dark mouth of a tunnel under the “devil rock,” the man told me he had no idea what Jack had in mind, but that it took two people to enact the ritual. He said that a friend of Jack’s named Ron Hubbard had been his key collaborator in these weird rites. He described Hubbard as a science fiction writer who had drifted into Parsons’s orbit. The man I was speaking with had immediately made Hubbard for a con man who didn’t believe any of Jack’s “supernatural hoo-ha,” but Parsons wouldn’t listen to his or anyone else’s concerns about Hubbard. He also recalled a conversation in which Hubbard asserted that the best and surest way to make a fortune in America--aside from bilking your friends, I guess--was to start a religion. Within a year of worming his way into Parsons’s confidence, Hubbard had conned him out of twenty thousand dollars and his girlfriend Betty--his wife Helen’s younger sister, for whom he’d left Helen in 1945.

  After heading east, Hubbard brazenly used Parsons’s money to buy a yacht that he lived on in Miami with Betty. When Parsons threatened legal action to get his money back, Hubbard threatened to publicly expose Parsons’s relationship with Betty, who had been underage (17) at the time she and Parsons became involved.13

  ARCHIVIST’S NOTE:

  When he briefly became respectable after publishing his best-selling Dianetics in 1950, Hubbard claimed he had only infiltrated what he called Parsons’s “sex cult” on assignment from military intelligence as an undercover officer. This claim is utterly without foundation. Hubbard was infamous within the intelligence community--who were eager to see him discharged in 1945--as a braggart, liar, and opportunistic sociopath who made Jack Parsons, in all his crackpot glory, look like a Cub Scout. It’s also clear that after his close study of the Thelema religion, many of its tenets became central parts of the work Hubbard is best known for.14

  I asked his former associate if he thought that Parsons believed that any of his “black magic” rituals had worked.

  “Well,” he said quietly, “the week after that one he met the wo
man he’s married to now. Right after he came back from one of those trips to the desert, just before Hubbard ran off with Betty and most of his dough. She was actually waiting at his front door.”

  I realized I had seen the woman he then described to me behind the wheel of the Buick at the coffee shop. She is apparently now Parsons’s lawfully wedded second wife.15

  I asked the man if he knew anything about Parsons conducting a ritual in the New Mexico desert. He looked at me sharply, and asked how I knew that. I said that Parsons had told me about it himself that morning at the coffee shop; something called “The Working.” The man paused to collect himself and said that Parsons had also told him something like that had taken place. An effort to open a second gate that they’d found in the desert in order to bring across an entity he called “the Moonchild.”***

  I asked if he had any idea when that ritual might have taken place. He said he knew exactly when it happened because Parsons had asked him to feed his cats while he was gone. Cross-checking the date, I realized it was the weekend just before the UFO incident at Roswell, part of which I personally witnessed.

  I looked back at the dam, and the tunnel and the eerie face in those rocks. Something uncanny enveloped me, an animalistic fear sliding up my spine, akin to the feeling I’d had that day in the woods long ago above the Pearl Lakes.16

  Conclusions: As strange as he seems, I confess that I found Jack Parsons a sympathetic person. He doesn’t seem “evil” to me, just deeply confused, a highly creative man who wants to be liked but who has sadly lost the ability to filter out the irrational or recognize those who do not wish him well.

  That being said, it is the considered recommendation of this officer that the renewal of his security clearance be denied and that all associations with Marvel John “Jack” Whiteside Parsons by companies or agencies associated with the U.S. military, or any other branch of our government, be immediately terminated.

  Major D. Milford

  ------------------------------------------------------------------

  *** “Moonchild” is both the title and subject of a 1923 novel by Crowley about a battle between two “lodges” of black and white magicians over an unborn child who may or may not be “the Antichrist.” Crowley apparently tried to conduct this ritual himself on numerous occasions earlier in his own life--without success--which served as Parsons’s inspiration.

  ARCHIVIST’S NOTE

  So, once and for all, Parsons lost his place in the science he’d done so much to create. Called to give closed testimony to the HUAC--where he named a few names, one of them his closest former colleague--Parsons insisted that he no longer had any contact with the “Church of Thelema,” but did offer a spirited defense of his “usual religious beliefs.”

  17

  ARCHIVIST’S NOTE

  After this report, the House Un-American Activities Committee--the engine driving the paranoid hunt for Communists in the postwar U.S. government and military--planted a bull’s-eye on Jack Parsons. Although he never joined the Communist Party, by the time he came under their scrutiny, the FBI had already compiled a 200-page file on him, focusing on the salacious details of his private life. They decided not to prosecute, but denied the renewal of his high-level security clearance, citing his membership in the American Civil Liberties Union.

  With the permanent revocation of his security clearance, Parsons turned to a life of manual labor to make ends meet, working as a mechanic and hospital orderly. Apparently using bootlegged explosives, he eventually found steadier work as a pyrotechnic consultant on a number of war movies that required numerous explosions.

  Parsons’s downward spiral continued, but another perceived threat he represented to national security prompted Major Doug Milford to make a final visit to Pasadena in 1952.18

  PASADENA, CALIFORNIA June 15, 1952

  TOP SECRET

  FIELD REPORT: MAJOR DOUGLAS MILFORD

  SUBJECT: JACK PARSONS

  I found Jack Parsons living in the old carriage house of the Cruikshank estate, another Orange Grove Boulevard mansion in Pasadena, just down the street from the former location of the Parsonage, which has since been demolished and replaced with apartment buildings, and not far from the mansion he grew up in, also gone now. The Tudor-style carriage house sits far back from the street, down a long winding driveway. It is an overcast and sultry summer day, and the air smells of citrus trees, magnolia trees and thick jasmine vines that overgrow the timbers.

  Now 37, Parsons is stockier than I remember, his handsome features sagging and bloated from, I’d hazard to guess, equal parts dissipation and disappointment. I again present myself to him as the same left-wing journalist, following up on the story I wrote three years earlier, which he never asks to see. He remembers me from our previous encounter and invites me inside. He seems distracted and anxious.

  Parsons tells me he lives here with his wife Marjorie; there are pictures of them on the wall and I recognize the same striking redhead I saw him with earlier. He tells me he’s working for the movies as a “pyrotechnics” man, which means he’s the guy who “blows stuff up.” World War II movies are all the rage, and as someone able to create and control realistic explosions, he is much in demand.

  The downward trajectory of Parsons’s life is reflected in the near squalor of his surroundings. A portion of the main room is given over to a laboratory, lined with bottles, beakers, test tubes and barrels of chemicals and compounds, a few labeled DANGER: EXPLOSIVES. This area is neither clean nor well maintained and a strong chemical odor fills the air. There’s a small drafting table in the middle ofthe room where I notice sketches and formulas that seem related to rocket design, which he casually covers when I take an interest in them. When I hear people moving upstairs, he tells me he’s taken in two boarders to help with the rent, an actor and a graduate student. I notice he’s worrying the same jade green ring I’d seen during my previous visit, on his right ring finger.

  I also notice some discarded hypodermic needles in a trash can. An open box of old printed pamphlets about Thelema sits nearby. A tall dusty stack of science fiction magazines with lurid covers sags against one wall. A number of strange symbols on papers are pinned to the wall above the drafting table, some of which I recognize as related to Thelema. Gazing through curtains into the next room I notice the back wall has been painted pink and the rest is taken up by a disturbing painting of a black devil’s head, replete with horns and mesmerizing, slanted red eyes. Parsons doesn’t realize that I’ve seen this.

  He tells me that having suffered a precipitous comedown in the world, denied all avenues for work in his chosen field, he’s severed his connection to the “Church of Thelema.” From what I’ve seen here he seems--if such a thing is possible--to have thrown himself more fully into a private version of his “occult” work. Tired and irritable, he’s working on a rush order for a movie and soon tells me he needs to get back to it. We move back outside. I notice a small trailer parked nearby, loaded with suitcases, boxes and sporting gear, and ask him about it. Parsons tells me he and his wife are packing to leave soon for a vacation in Mexico. I shake his hand, wish him well and take my leave.

  ASSESSMENT:

  Recent suggestions that he may still represent a security risk seem accurate, for the following reasons:

  Parsons clearly needs money. He clearly possesses invaluable classified information about rocketry and fuels, and is clearly still dabbling in that area despite his security ban. He has been and remains obviously unstable on a personal emotional level. He has also been accused of espionage before. Although he offered that he is about to embark on a Mexican vacation, it is my belief he may be on the verge of relocating there permanently, where making contact with any number of foreign espionage agents would be considerably easier.

  It is the opinion of this officer that the foundational, arcane nature of the scientific mastery he carries with him, in tandem with his increasingly erratic personality, still renders Jack Parsons a profound sec
urity risk. I cannot with any assurance guarantee that he won’t present such a risk in the future, at least until enough time has passed that his technical know-how becomes outdated.

  It’s not for me to say how this should be accomplished, but perhaps some form of house arrest to prevent his flight to another country might be appropriate.

  Major Douglas Milford

  1 This appears authentic—as does the signature—but I can find no other existing copy of this letter or the transcript that follows it in official files—TP

  2 As unlikely as it sounds, this appears to be the same L. Ron Hubbard, a prolific pulp fiction author, who a short time later was responsible for the founding of the controversial “religion” of Scientology—TP

  3 Verified that Jack Parsons—a noted chemist and engineer—was indeed one of the founders of JPL. During the ’30s and early ’40s he was instrumental in the development of rocket fuel science, which led directly to its implementation by the military during WWII—TP

  4 The house had originally been built by one of Caltech’s early benefactors, a lumber baron named Arthur Fleming. Perhaps coincidentally, with high-grade lumber imported from the region around Twin Peaks—TP

  5 Crowley was in fact a notorious drug addict who wore himself out at 72 after decades of rampant abuse of every indulgence ever cataloged by man—TP

  6 Thelema is literally the Greek word for “will” or “intention.” Making it the centerpiece of an anti-Christian religion seems to have first been done in a 16th-century satirical novel by Rabelais, and was later appropriated by Crowley for his own purposes, which were decidedly not satirical. But Crowley took credit for “inventing” the whole Thelema business after a series of mystical experiences in Egypt, which led to his writing the tenets of his new religion while in a kind of trance state, claiming he received them from a higher power. Like opium or hashish, for instance.