SIDE A: ROCKET MAN
In the white-hot dawn of the Space Age, Jack Parsons lit the fuse—literally. A self-taught rocketry genius and co-founder of JPL, Parsons helped create the very engines that would one day send humans hurtling beyond the Earth.
But Parsons didn’t just dream of space as a physical frontier—it was a spiritual threshold. A devoted follower of Aleister Crowley, he treated rocket fuel and ritual magick as two tools of the same mission: transcendence.
While colleagues were calculating payloads, Parsons was invoking Babalon, the divine feminine archetype he believed would help usher in a new age of liberated consciousness. His lab became a temple. His experiments were alchemical acts—binding will, flame, and the unknown into something new. Rockets weren’t just machines. They were prayers in motion.
He once wrote: “I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote, marijuana, morphine and cocaine. I never knew sadness, but only a madness that burns at the heart and the brain.” You don’t get closer to the edge than that.
Then—an explosion. 1952. Gone.
SIDE B: THE MAN WHO HEARD GHOSTS
Flash forward to 1960s Britain: in a cramped, chaotic flat above a leather shop on Holloway Road, Joe Meek is building sound that doesn’t belong to this world.
Using homemade gear, spring reverbs, and literal bags of tricks, he produces “Telstar”, a swirling, space-age pop instrumental that sounds like a transmission from another planet. It becomes the first UK single to hit #1 in the U.S.
But Meek wasn’t just chasing sonic innovation—he was chasing spirits. Obsessed with the supernatural, he filled reel after reel with attempts to record voices of the dead. He claimed to have contacted Buddy Holly through static. He rigged his studio like a séance, microphones as planchettes.
His music shimmered, floated—like it was possessed. And he was. Haunted by insecurity, industry rejection, and an ever-tightening paranoia. He’d flip from genius to ghost in seconds.
In 1967, Joe shot his landlady, then himself. Another visionary vanished in an instant.
THE SIGNAL BETWEEN THEM
Jack Parsons and Joe Meek never met, but their stories rhyme:
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Both saw science as sacred—a method for reaching beyond the veil.
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Both believed frequency was power: radio waves, propulsion blasts, spiritual transmissions.
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Both were dismissed by their contemporaries as weirdos, fringe cases, too much.
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And both were right ahead of their time, staring into the abyss with wires in their hands.
One aimed for the stars. The other listened for the dead. But they were tuned to the same hidden channel—the one where art, tech, and magick blur, distort, and sometimes explode.
EPILOGUE: STILL TRANSMITTING
Today, Parsons’ ashes float in space on Voyager data. Meek’s compressed echoes are buried in every DIY producer’s hard drive. Their ghosts live on in every synth drone and flame trail.
Maybe they’re finally in the same place now. Maybe they’re collaborating.
Play loud. Burn bright. Beware the static.
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