Episode 104

Episode 104, "The End of Rocketman", aired on November 4, 2015.

Pacifica / Ellis
Nic meets with Avery Ellis and describes her as a savvy professional who’s established her own tech company, contrary to the persona she crafts for the media. She admitted to stealing the story of Pacifica from a Firefly fanfiction forum to anger her father (Cameron Ellis, CEO of the TeslaNova Corporation) who--Meerkatnip later tells Nic over the phone--paid off the publication company to shut down the book’s publication, and also paid to have most traces of Pacifica removed from the internet. MK pieced together traces of emails from one junior editor of the publishing company to another, discussing Pacifica and mentioning that it was posted on a forum of which MK is a member (“Serenity Now”). Suspicious of how she was able to find this thread--it was almost crafted to be hard to find, and yet placed purposely so someone with MK’s expertise could find it--MK then discovered a scanned copy of a resume from an editor named Julie Sanders, who listed Pacifica as one of the projects she worked on.

Tara & Sam Reynolds
Sam didn't show for the meeting he and Nic scheduled. Nic hopes to track him down soon.

The Jack Parsons Connection
Parsons founded Aerojet and the Jet Propulsion laboratory, or JPL (also called the Jack Parsons Laboratory), and was known as an industry leader by the end of WWII. But beyond developing technology that would lead to space exploration, Parsons had a vested interest in the occult, expressing a desire to conjure ancient gods and demonic entities, a desire fostered and encouraged by the infamous occult leader Aleister Crowley. Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard lived in a mansion in Pasadena, where they participated in sex magic rituals and conducted bizarre incantations. Parsons and his group of scientists at the JPL were called the Suicide Squad for their propensity for experimenting with unusual chemcial combinations, and the government tried to strongly dissuade Parsons from participating in his strange extracurricular activities.

Parsons fell on hard times, and had to sell the mansion and subsequently moved into the coach house, where he continued his scientific and explosive effect experiments. It was declared that one of these experiments led to his death in 1952, though his colleagues maintained that he had worked with those chemcials numerous times before, and some had suggested he was silenced by the government because of a secret project he was working on.

Just before this episode aired, an author named Matthew Hollingsworth published notes he'd been gathering for nineteen years, with the intention of writing a book on the origins of Scientology and, consequently, Jack Parsons. Another of Parsons' roommates was his young sister-in-law, Sara Northrup, whom Hollingsworth was able to interview, and whom was claimed as largely responsible for Hubbard's Dianetics series. Nic asks producer and host of The Black Tapes Podcast, Alex Reagan, to read the transcript of Northrup's interview: Northrup explains she, Hubbard and Parsons had a close relationship, and the two men would record Northrup's accounts of past lives and otherworldly stories, "Where is Tanis?" being one of them. Northrup and Hubbard allegedly eloped with a substantial amount of Parsons' life savings.

The Markovian Parallax Denigrate / Susan Lindauer
In 1996, a web community called UseNet was spammed by seemingly meaningless messages all titled the Markovian Parallax Denigrate. By 2006, only one message remained in Google's public archive of the Markovian Parallax Denigrate, and this was sent by Susan Lindauer, a conspiracy theorist who believed she was a CIA asset in charge of high-level, back-channel negotiations with Iraq, and was prone to generally erratic behaviour.

While this Susan Lindauer denied ownership of the Markovian Parallax Denigrate message, MK tracked down another Susan Lindauer that attended the University of Wisconsin at the same time as the other Susan, but she also denied ownership of the email. MK concluded that the email address was simply pulled off the internet for spamming purposes; however, upon digging deeper, MK found that the first Susan L. was also a member of the Fish and Tackle message board utilized by Karl van Sant.

A858
A contributor on Reddit calling themselves A858DE45F56D9BC9, has been posting strange strings of text that no one could decipher for years, until MK's friend--who works for the TeslaNova corporation--recently broke the code. MK reveals that the sequence of letters and numbers that are repeating, are actually Jack Parsons' short story, "Where is Tanis?"

Main Characters
Nic Silver, producer/host

Meerkatnip (MK), information specialist

Recurring Characters
Avery Ellis, daughter of Cameron Ellis

Jack Parsons (mentioned), rocket scientist

Guest Characters
Matthew Hollingsworth (mentioned), author

Sara Northrup (mentioned), Jack Parsons' sister-in-law

Susan Lindauer (mentioned), former journalist