The Department of Truth #14

Lee Harvey Oswald in disguise

The issue opens with Lee Harvey Oswald complaining that he looks like a fool. He is wearing an improvised foil hat and has altered his appearance so severely that another man tells him not to curse in front of the director. Lee answers that, with the subject back in the news, Lee Harvey Oswald is one of the most famous people in America. He calls himself a corpse, an acknowledgment that the man in the room is the Department’s version of Oswald rather than the public figure whose death became part of the Kennedy assassination record.

The disguise is absurd and functional at the same time. Lee’s foil is associated with UFO folklore, mind control, and the comic’s recurring image of a person attempting to shield himself from invisible influence. His glasses catch the light until his eyes disappear. The joke about shaving his head and eyebrows gives way to a more serious problem: he cannot move freely through the world because the identity attached to his face is already a public weapon. The Department has to hide the person who is most recognizable when the investigation turns toward flying saucers and secret programs.

Lee is not alone. A second operative, shown as a pale or unclothed figure in several panels, appears as both a companion and a visual disturbance. The issue does not name that figure. It may be a body, a manifestation, or an artistic representation of the operation’s unstable reality. The narrative keeps Lee’s ordinary sarcasm beside images that cannot be reduced to ordinary surveillance, establishing the chapter’s method before the historical material begins.

The search for an operations manual

Lee says he is looking for an operations manual. He believes the manual may explain the purpose of the trip and the thing the Department is about to find. The other operative tells him not to raise his hopes and warns that belief is dangerous when it becomes a demand for specific answers. Lee answers that everything feels like magic. He is not satisfied with a vague doctrine about belief changing the world; he wants a procedure, a set of instructions, and an account of who used them.

The argument echoes Cole’s frustration in the present-day storyline. Both men distrust explanations that describe a vast mechanism without naming the people who activated it. Lee’s questions are practical—who built the facility, what happened in 1961, and what the Department knows about the Babalon Working—but the answers keep sliding into myth. The more he asks for a manual, the more the case becomes a story about symbols, rituals, and the people who allow those symbols to rewrite experience.

The issue also establishes that Lee has already seen something in Dallas. His companion reminds him that he saw an event there and warns him not to become familiar with the people connected to this field. Lee replies that the other man saw something too. Their exchange leaves the Dallas incident unspecified, but it makes the UFO case part of Lee’s personal history rather than a detached assignment. His search for the manual is an attempt to turn an encounter into knowledge before the encounter turns him into another story.

The mountain facility and the engineer

The agents drive through a mountain landscape toward a remote property. The road, the trees, the old cars, and a trailer hidden among the pines give the location the look of a private retreat, but the underground structure beneath it is industrial and immense. The bearded man they meet says he built it himself. He identifies himself as an engineer and speaks with the defensive pride of someone who has spent years constructing a refuge that other people now want to enter.

He says the facility was built in 1961, the year of the Bay of Pigs and the wider crisis around Cuba. His account is framed as a technical explanation, but it quickly becomes a story of light, heat, and disappearance. He told the boy’s mother that everything happened one night and that the first sign would be a flash. The engineer describes heat until brains boiled and skin sloughed from bone, language that may be a literal memory, a fevered reconstruction, or a narrative designed to make the agents accept the scale of the event.

The structure’s design matters. It is not presented as a conventional laboratory or a simple bunker. It has a cavernous interior, a ladder descending into darkness, and a red-lit chamber whose geometric patterns resemble ritual diagrams. The facility is a physical expression of the issue’s central proposition: engineering and magic can occupy the same room when enough people treat a symbol as an instruction.

The Babalon Working

When Lee asks how government men could know about the Babalon Working, the engineer explains that the records are not limited to a single agency. The agents have found files from the Soviets and the British, and they have identified connections among people who were officially separated by national borders and professional disciplines. The name refers to the occult working associated with Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard in the mid-1940s. Within the comic, that working is the point at which rocket science, science fiction, ceremonial magic, and the Scarlet Woman become one story.

The engineer describes Parsons as a rocket scientist who helped develop propulsion technology and as a follower of Crowley’s teachings. He calls Crowley the leader of the Agape Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis. The man explains that Crowley reinterpreted the Christian apocalypse through ritual sex magic, identifying himself with the Great Beast 666 and naming the divine feminine figure Babalon. The account is delivered as a chain of causes: Crowley supplies a symbolic vocabulary, Parsons performs a working, Hubbard participates, and a door opens.

The comic does not state that this is the documented history of the people involved. It places the explanation in the mouth of a man whose world has been reorganized by an anomalous event. His certainty is part of the case. The agents listen because the story may contain useful operational information, not because every statement has been independently established.

Parsons, Hubbard, and the American Dream

The engineer’s account turns from the ritual to the people who carried its consequences into postwar America. He says that Parsons and Hubbard were once friendly with science-fiction writers and that the rocket scientist and the pulp author were both welcomed by a culture that wanted the future to arrive quickly. In the comic, that friendship is not a quaint literary detail. It is the bridge between a private ceremony and a national imagination filled with rockets, aliens, hidden bases, and the promise that a new age can be built by men who understand the machinery.

The story also repeats accusations about Sara Northrup, Parsons’s partner, and the collapse of the business relationship. Crowley’s letters describe Parsons as weak and Hubbard as a swindler. The engineer says Hubbard later began channeling something from beyond and developed a new psychology. These claims draw on real people and real disputes, but the issue uses them as competing explanations for a fictional door. One account treats the men as frauds. Another treats them as dangerous magicians. The Department’s interest lies in the fact that both accounts can be powerful when audiences repeat them.

The engineer says Parsons took the opposite route from Hubbard. Where Hubbard moved toward a popular system of belief, Parsons remained connected to the Cold War’s subversive networks and to the O.T.O. The distinction is not presented as moral clarity. Both men become part of the same machinery once their names are attached to the Scarlet Woman and to the possibility that an unseen intelligence has entered American history.

The door and the Aeon of Horus

The engineer insists that the door is open. He calls the place Babalon’s country, invokes the Aeon of Horus, and says that the people around him are not receiving a harmless New Age revelation. His language escalates from occult terminology into end-of-the-world prophecy. He says the Catholics were right, that the world is ending, and that the lake of fire will swallow everyone. The words are rendered in jagged balloons that turn his testimony into an active manifestation.

Lee refuses the invitation to accept the prophecy. He tells the man that he is finished talking and orders the agents to leave the bunker. The refusal is important because Lee is not rejecting the possibility that belief changes reality. He is rejecting the engineer’s attempt to make one interpretation total. Lee has come looking for a manual, but the engineer offers only a theology in which every objection proves the door is working.

The issue leaves open whether the door is a literal opening in consensus reality. The images show light, fire, and a presence that can be seen only through certain symbolic arrangements. They may depict a manifestation produced by the Babalon narrative, an altered memory of a Cold War experiment, or a visual translation of several overlapping claims. The canon establishes that the Department takes the case seriously; it does not establish the engineer’s cosmology as objective fact.

The Scarlet Woman and the sky

The chapter’s central montage places the Scarlet Woman against the visual history of the early Cold War. Flying saucers appear over America. The Roswell crash is named. The Iron Curtain rises. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock moves toward midnight. Around the woman stand pale, alien-like figures and white silhouettes of people who may be witnesses, casualties, or the blank shapes left when a public story removes individual lives.

The engineer says the Scarlet Woman can see more than anyone else. He links her to the flying saucers and to the opening of the door, but he does not identify her with the Woman in Red from Cole’s story in a straightforward way. The color, the red dress, and the star-like mark create a strong visual relationship. The issue still leaves the identity uncertain. A character’s naming choice can be a way of recognizing a manifestation, or a way of forcing a new figure into an older symbol.

The montage also makes the sky a political space. Saucers, missiles, nuclear clocks, and occult signs occupy the same field. The United States and the Soviet Union are not shown as the only competing powers. The image suggests that the conflict is also between official knowledge, popular fear, and whatever enters reality when both sides use the same symbols long enough.

The operation in the woods

After leaving the bunker, Department agents continue their search through the woods. One says that he believes only what he can see. Another answers that they have seen things and still have work to do if they want to catch one of the UFOs. The exchange sets practical investigation against the engineer’s mysticism. The agents are willing to use rifles, vehicles, and surveillance equipment even when they deny the explanatory story attached to the target.

A figure in a red dress appears inside a room and tells the agents that it is important that they see. The scene may be an encounter with the Scarlet Woman, a projection of the Babalon narrative, or an image of the Department’s own desire to turn a witness into evidence. The figure carries a rifle, which makes the feminine symbol an armed participant rather than a passive object of worship. The agents’ white silhouettes suggest that the encounter changes what they can perceive, but the page does not show a stable physical body that can be catalogued.

The operation then becomes a search for a child. An agent finds a boy in the woods and initially assumes that local wildlife has entered the car. The boy is disoriented, angry, and unwilling to be treated as evidence. One agent calls him nuts and says they are not taking him along. The decision changes when the adults realize that the child has survived the same event that has consumed the rest of the operation.

Hawk Harrison as a child

The boy gives his name as Hawk Harrison. The reveal is brief, but it changes the issue’s meaning. Hawk is not introduced as an established Department officer giving Cole a lesson. He is a child discovered by agents who do not yet know whether he is a witness, a victim, or a carrier of the phenomenon. The adults ask him questions while he smokes, and their language alternates between contempt and reluctant concern.

One agent tells Hawk that his father is nuts but knows things. He says the boy should get his father to teach him without becoming nuts too. The line is both advice and foreshadowing. Hawk’s later career will depend on learning how to inhabit the border between belief and procedure. The issue does not say that the child immediately joins the Department, nor does it explain which father the agents mean or what happened to the rest of Hawk’s family. It establishes only that the Department’s first contact with him occurs during a UFO-related operation and that the adults see knowledge as something that can be inherited dangerously.

Hawk’s introduction also complicates his later authority. In the present, he can speak as though the Department has always understood the limits of truth. In the flashback, he is a boy surrounded by men who cannot agree on what they have seen. He is recruited into a world where the official record and the physical evidence are already in conflict, before he has the language to separate a manifestation from a lie.

The two histories of Lee

The issue’s Lee is already living under the pressure of two histories. In public history, Lee Harvey Oswald is an accused assassin whose life and death are documented through testimony, investigations, and decades of dispute. In the comic, the Department preserves a different Lee, an operative who can travel through hidden facilities while another version of his life becomes the world’s accepted narrative. The disguise at the beginning of the issue is therefore more than comic relief. It is an expression of the character’s split existence.

Lee’s sarcasm keeps the story from becoming reverent. He mocks the foil hat, complains about his hair, and refuses to let the engineer’s claims turn him into a disciple. At the same time, he is willing to follow the trail into a mountain bunker and to ask whether an operations manual exists. His skepticism is active rather than dismissive. He wants to know how a story was made, who built the facility, and which people have access to the archives stolen from the Soviets and British.

The chapter does not resolve whether Lee believes the Scarlet Woman is behind the UFOs. It shows him listening, rejecting, and continuing the investigation. That pattern becomes important for later issues, where Cole must decide whether uncertainty is a reason to stop looking or the only honest way to proceed.

Continuity significance

Issue #14 expands the series’ treatment of tulpas and manifestations by connecting them to occult ritual, rocket engineering, and Cold War science. Earlier chapters show belief producing figures such as the Star-Faced Man. “Rocket Men” suggests that the same process can attach itself to technical language. A rocket, a saucer, a nuclear clock, and a ritual diagram can become parts of one shared image when institutions and witnesses repeatedly arrange them together.

The issue also provides Hawk with a formative origin that is neither heroic nor clean. He is found in the aftermath of an event the agents do not understand. The Department does not rescue him from a clearly identified villain. It pulls him into an archive of contradictory accounts and gives him access to adults who may be as damaged by the story as he is. His later willingness to manipulate belief can therefore be read as a response to the first lesson he receives: knowledge is dangerous, but ignorance leaves a child alone in the woods.

The chapter’s final Department seal is a quiet institutional claim. Whatever the operation began as—a UFO hunt, an occult investigation, or an attempt to recover a stolen manual—the Department records it as part of its own history. The seal does not prove the record is complete. It proves that the organization has decided the event belongs to the version of reality it manages.

Real-world context

The issue uses real figures and movements as cultural material. Jack Parsons was an American rocket engineer associated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s early history and with the Ordo Templi Orientis. Aleister Crowley led the O.T.O. and wrote extensively about ritual and symbolism. L. Ron Hubbard later founded Dianetics and Scientology. Sara Northrup was connected to Parsons and Hubbard during the period the comic dramatizes. The fictional dialogue compresses and rearranges those histories to serve the series’ theory of consensus reality.

The Babalon Working is a real occult episode described in the writings of Parsons and in later accounts of his relationship with Hubbard. The comic’s claim that the working opened a literal door, produced the Scarlet Woman, or caused the UFO era is fictional. Likewise, Roswell, the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and the Doomsday Clock are real historical references. The issue does not establish that a hidden Department operation caused those events, nor that the historical people named in it possessed the powers assigned to them by the story.

The distinction matters because “Rocket Men” deliberately makes history feel mythic. The page can place a documented rocket laboratory beside a star, a nuclear clock, and a red woman without declaring that the same explanation is valid outside the comic. The real-world materials give the fictional case its cultural force; they do not become evidence for the fictional causal chain.

Visual and publication notes

John J. Pearson’s art gives the chapter a distinct identity within the series. The page designs alternate between narrow vertical panels, documentary collages, pencil-like inserts, and saturated fields of red, green, and white. Lee’s foil hat and mirrored glasses make him look both ridiculous and unreadable. The bunker’s machinery is rendered with the same reverence used for the engineer’s occult diagrams, so the distinction between technology and ritual repeatedly collapses at the level of form.

The Scarlet Woman’s appearance is one of the issue’s dominant images. She stands in red beneath saucers and nuclear light, surrounded by pale silhouettes that appear to have been cut out of the world. Later, she appears in a room with a rifle, turning the symbol into an active agent. The final pages return to the woods and to Hawk’s face, whose name is given only after the issue has shown him as a witness no adult can classify.

The indicia identifies the issue as The Department of Truth #14, published by Image Comics in December 2021. James Tynion IV is credited as writer, John J. Pearson as artist, Aditya Bidikar as letterer, Dylan Todd as designer, and Steve Fox as editor. The closing pages contain the Department seal and house advertisements, including a separate promotion for a Mothman project; that advertisement is not itself a canon appearance of Mothman in the issue’s story.

Unresolved questions

The issue does not identify the bearded engineer by name, confirm whether he is the father of Hawk Harrison, or explain what happened to the boy’s mother. It does not establish whether the figure in the red dress is the Woman in Red, the Scarlet Woman described by the engineer, a related manifestation, or an image produced by the agents’ expectations. It leaves the “door” without a measurable location and does not provide the operations manual Lee wants.

The chapter also leaves open whether the Department truly captured a UFO, whether the saucers were a manifestation of Cold War fear, and whether the files taken from Soviet and British archives contain independent evidence or mutually reinforcing stories. Those gaps are not invitations to invent a missing answer. They are the conditions under which Lee and Hawk learn to operate: the record is full of symbols, but the symbols do not explain themselves.