Forbidden Science Dispatches #3

Satanism, Saucers, and Nazi Rocket Scientists: The Colorful Cast of Characters in Jacques Vallee's Forbidden Science 2

Read Dispatch #1 here.

Read Dispatch #2 here.

As I make the transition from Jacques Vallee’s Forbidden Science 1 (1957-1969) to the second volume that spans 1970-1979, I am struck by how many people of note Vallee interacts with after moving to Belmont, California for his employment at Stanford’s computation department. Within the first 100 pages, he recounts several remarkable visits. In September of 1970, he is taken by mutual friend Arthur Lyons to meet Church of Satan founder Anton Lavey. Lyons, who was friends Vallee’s acquaintance Don Hanlon, was a pulp fiction author who at this point in time was working on a non-fiction book about cults and the rise of Satanism: The Second Coming: Satanism in America.¹ Vallee seems to hold great respect for Lavey while also viewing him as a bit of a carnival barker—the latter certainly being an accurate reading. “Among the fakeness of the current ‘revolution’ he is saving a little piece of weird creativity,” writes Vallee. “Behind his charlatan's front, Anton has built a mind cathedral, not to an obsolete Satan as he wants his followers to believe, but to that major power of our time, the secret goddess of Absurdity.”² He would go on to visit Lavey several times in the early 70s as well as other prominent occultists nearby.

Again through his friend Don Hanlon—nowadays a professor of somatics and psychotherapy at the California Institute of Integral Studies as well as the Esalen Institute³—Vallee was introduced to former Army colonel and student of Crowley, Grady Louis McMurtry. Introduced to Thelema in 1941 by Jack Parsons, (the rocket scientist who has a part in so many later esoteric movements,) McMurtry later “made Crowley's personal acquaintance in London” while serving in Europe.⁴ “The Colonel is a charming, witty man, a good conversationalist, a poet and a liberal,” Vallee records in 1970. “It is hard to believe he spent such a long time in the Army, a fact which is to the Army's credit.”⁵ McMurtry did spend nearly three decades in military service, a fact which Peter Levenda considers mildly suspicious in Unholy Alliance:

The scenario that presents itself is intriguing. One wonders if—as the US federal government has been known to do with many other suspect organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers—they had not infiltrated an agent into the American OTO who eventually became one of its leaders?⁶

Historian Richard B. Spence, while noting that there is no evidence to suggest that McMurtry was utilizing the OTO for intelligence purposes, nevertheless finds some of the man’s military moves curious: “When the Korean conflict erupted (…), McMurtry did volunteer his services to U.S. Army intelligence (G-2), an unusual offer from a man whose prior experience had been in ordinance.”⁷ Brazilian Thelemite Marcelo Ramos Motta also accused McMurtry of being an intelligence asset during one of the many organizational skirmishes within the OTO, but Spence writes that “Motta’s detractors dismissed him as an alcoholic with delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex.”⁸ McMurtry himself would tell Vallee that he was “not a militarist at heart” but rather “a poet who happened to fight in two wars.”⁹ Never mind the fact that those two wars, WWII and Korea, did not last 30 years.

Vallee also rubbed shoulders with Israel Regardie in 1970, another Crowley associate who was formerly the Great Beast’s secretary before a messy falling out. He was working as a “specialist in the ‘manipulative treatment of emotional disorders’” in Studio City at the time.¹⁰ According to biographer Gerald Suster, this specialty was gained from his affinity for the writings of Wilhelm Reich.¹¹ Vallee found Regardie to be mostly unimpressive aside from his “technical knowledge of Crowley's system” of magick.¹² Regardie allegedly had some of his books stolen by another Satanist group, The Solar Lodge of the Ordo Templar Orientis, and Vallee notes the robbery in passing along with some unsettling developments in this group contemporary to his journal entries. “The doctrine of this Southern California sect was dangerously close to Charles Manson's philosophy,” he writes. “They believed that the Blacks would soon rise up against the Whites and take over Los Angeles. Like Manson, they expected massacres; like him, they thought the time had come to seek salvation in the desert.”¹³ This same group would later become embroiled in a child abuse case later known as “The Boy in the Box” where group members allegedly kept a six-year-old boy chained in a box in the Sonoran Desert for 56 days. Vallee appears unsurprised by these developments, noting how Jean Brayton, “the red-headed priestess” who ran the group, “exerted a Manson-like fascination over her followers.”¹⁴ This incident is further expounded upon in Dave McGowan’s certified tinfoil banger Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon where the author quotes an FBI report on these accusation: “Brayton had reportedly told cult members that ‘when it was convenient, she was going to give (the boy) LSD and set fire to the structure in which he was chained and give him just enough time to get out of reach of the fire.’”¹⁵ Certainly a sordid tale probably worth more examination at a later date—there are some contrary claims by other Thelemites. Nevertheless the account illustrates the truly bizarre occultist scene that Vallee had found himself in at the dawn of the 1970s.

As usual, the journals contain some brief analysis that send me down possible research paths. One such tidbit came on September 26^th, 1971, where Vallee observes that one doesn’t “have to go far to find links between the early contactees and murky political figures,” a prescient statement to say the least.¹⁶ Indeed, Vallee notes the friendship between Dietrich Eckart, an early leader of the German Nazi Party, and Hermann Oberth, one of the leading rocket scientists within the Nazi regime who was an important teacher for Wernher von Braun. Specifically, Vallee quotes historian André Brissaud’s description of Eckart gifting a mystical black meteorite—Eckart’s personal “stone of Kaaba”—to Oberth. Vallee calls this interaction “an interesting link between the man who said ‘Hitler will dance, but I'm the one who wrote the music’ and the visionary scientist who regularly presides over gatherings of saucer contactees.”¹⁷ Vallee recalls that Oberth “stated publicly that UFOs were piloted by plant-like crews from Uranus,” although I believe he is misremembering certain details of Oberth’s claims in an American Weekly article. Oberth called hypothetical ET beings the “Uranides” or “Uraniden” because they appear to come from the sky (“uranos” in Greek) and he doubted reports of humanoid beings like those of the contactees.¹⁸ However, with Vallee’s claims of Oberth “regularly presid(ing) over gatherings of saucer contactees,” it is possible that his statements might have come from a conference I am unaware of.¹⁹

Oberth, in fact, appears in the second issue of Flying Saucer Review—unsurprising in light of the fact that the publication seemed to be founded by those with a fondness for far-right, Nazi apologist views. Peter Rogerson writes in Magonia’s review of Holland and Perry’s The Men Behind the Flying Saucer Review that the publication’s “driving force,” Waveney Girvan, was “a man deeply involved in hard right pro-Nazi politics, before and after the war.”²⁰ The article itself is nothing out of the ordinary for mid-1950s Flying Saucer Review, speculating that UFOs are craft piloted by extraterrestrials. Oberth wrote that “not one single crash-landing of UFOs has so far been officially reported” indicating that the vehicles have “long since disposed of (their) teething troubles.”²¹ Little did he know, he’d only have to wait a few years before the issue of crashed saucers would never leave the UFO conversation. In 1967, Oberth announced his withdrawal “from all official and unofficial responsibilities in connection with UFO research” in an issue of NICAP’s UFO Investigator—right next to an article about Woodrow Derenberger.²² Perhaps explaining Vallee’s claims of a contactee connection, Oberth further informed readers that he was listed as ‘”Chief Director’ of the International UFO Observer Corps (IUOC) of the Cosmic Brotherhood Association of Japan,” a group of George Adamski acolytes, without his “permission (or) knowledge.”²³ The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.

Aside from milquetoast flying saucer hypotheses, Oberth was an unrepentant far-right figure even after the fall of the Nazi German government he built rockets for—perhaps the reason Adamski followers would give him an honorary title within the group, considering the contactee’s subtle white supremacist overtones. An article in the German publication Kontext: Wochenzeitung notes that Oberth was a member of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party and an honorary member of Deutsches Kulturwerk Europaeischen Geistes, another extreme right organization within Germany.²⁴ When he passed away, the group Stille Hilfe—a “prisoner's aid organization for Nazis and Nazi war criminals”—wrote an obituary for Oberth, calling him “a faithful helper and donor (…) until his last hour.” ²⁵ Oberth serves as an interesting personality who prefigured much of the later far-right bent of UFO groups and enthusiasts throughout ensuing decades. Vallee, a few entries later, appears to ruminate on the existence of these personalities within ufology and the occulture:

In The Magus, John Fowles points out that the Nazi did not come to power because they brought order over chaos, but on the contrary because they imposed chaos. They claimed it was all right to persecute the weak and the poor. They offered up all temptations to mankind: “Nothing is true, therefore everything is permitted.” LaVey says something similar.²⁶

Perhaps Vallee is right—the UFO subject is certainly chaotic. Satanism too often attempts to cultivate a similar chaos. Vallee postulates that Nazi Germany represented as “an intersection of (…) Magician-Politician in which the mystical current turned into a historical reality,” having a further cryptocratic component in scientists like Oberth and von Braun.²⁷ As he bathes in the chaos of early 1970s California, meeting psychonauts and satanists with the ever-present UFO question haunting him, it is easy to see why Vallee’s thoughts would go to the dark undercurrents. While I continue to read through his journals hoping to glean interesting leads or stories, I hold little doubt that these dark undercurrents will be recurring.

Thank you for reading Getting Spooked. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read, consider recommending it to a friend. Become a paid subscriber to directly help the continuation of this publication and you will be granted access to over a dozen archived articles. I also started a referral program that rewards archive access to those who share the newsletter with others, just follow the button down below. It might make a lovely holiday gift for certain weirdos! Email me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1 or on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social. This week, I recommend Mark Pilkington’s new afterword to the classic Mirage Men, an excellent assessment of the situation a decade out from the book’s initial publication. And read Mirage Men if you haven’t already for crying out loud. Until next time, stay spooked.

1. Available at the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/secondcomingsata0000lyon/page/n5/mode/2up.

2. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 83.

3. “Don Hanlon Johnson Receives Prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award.” California Institute of Integral Studies. 8 June 2023. https://www.ciis.edu/news/don-hanlon-johnson-receives-prestigious-lifetime-achievement-award.

4. Levenda, Peter. Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002. Ebook. Page 299.

5. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 44.

6. Levenda, Peter. Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002. Ebook. Page 300-301.

7. Spence, Richard B. Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult. Port Townsend: Feral House, 2008. Page 260.

8. Ibid., page 262.

9. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 44.

10. Ibid., page 47.

11. Suster, Gerald. Crowley’s Apprentice: The Life and Ideas of Israel Regardie, the Magical Psychologist. London: Rider, 1989. Page 110.

12. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 47.

13. Ibid., page 45-46.

14. Ibid., page 46.

15. McGowan, David. Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream. London: Headpress, 2014. Page 89.

16. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 97.

17. Ibid., page 98.

18. Oberth, Hermann. “Flying Saucers Come From a Distant World.” The American Weekly. 24 October 1954. Republished here: https://rr0.org/time/1/9/5/4/10/24/Oberth_FlyingSaucersComeFromDistantWorlds_AmericanWeekly/.

19. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 98.

20. Rogerson, Peter. “The Life and Death of a UFO Magazine.” Magonia Review. September 2019. https://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-life-and-death-of-ufo-magazine.html.

21. Oberth, Hermann. “The Come from Outer Space.” Flying Saucer Review. Vol. 1, no. 2. May-June 1955. Page 14.

22. “Dr. Herman Oberth.” The UFO Investigator. Vol. 4, no. 1. May-June 1967. Page 4. Available here: https://cufos.org/PDFs/UFOI_and_Selected_Documents/UFOI/037%20MAY-JUN%201967.pdf.

23. Ibid.

24. Maegerle, Von Anton. “Der Raketen-Nazi mit Bundesverdienstkreuz.” Kontext: Wochenzeitung. 17 July 2019. https://www.kontextwochenzeitung.de/zeitgeschehen/433/raketen-nazi-mit-bundesverdienstkreuz-6062.html.

25. Ibid.

26. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 102.

27. Ibid., page 94.