"John Parsons, a maverick rocketeer who had helped transform space flight from a derided sci-fi fantasy into a reality, was at first mourned as a 37-year-old genius lost to a tragic accident. But as reporters dug deeper, a shocking story emerged: Parsons had been a practitioner of black magic." "George Pendle re-creates the world of John Whiteside Parsons in this portrait of pre-war superstition, cold war paranoia, and futuristic possibility. A lonely misfit born into a wealthy family, Parsons spent his childhood dreaming of space flight. He launched rockets in his backyard, his imagination fueled by "pulps" like Amazing Stories. By his early twenties, he was a leader of Caltech's "Suicide Squad" - a motley band of enthusiastic young men who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the institution that took America to the moon and beyond." "Yet the wild imagination that fueled his science was also leading Parsons into the occult - for if he could make rocketry a reality, why not magic? As his dabblings became devotion, fantasy's pull became stronger than reality's, and he lost both his work and his wife (not to mention his girlfriend, who ran off with L. Ron Hubbard)." "With a cast of characters that includes Aleister Crowley, Howard Hughes, Robert Heinlein, Theodore von Karman, and Albert Einstein, Strange Angel explores the unruly consequences of genius."--BOOK JACKET.