This NASA Engineer’s Real Life Story Inspired 1973 Movie Exorcist – News18

Do you recall the 1973 film The Exorcist? This cinematic masterpiece depistc paranormal activity and it remains as one of the top movies among the greatest Hollywood horror films. It set off a domino effect of horror films in the entertainment world. Notably, this movie was inspired by a true story. The Exorcist drew its inspiration from the case of Roland Edwin Hunkeler, a 14-year-old boy who underwent exorcisms in Cottage City, Maryland, and St. Louis, Missouri, in 1949. He passed away in 2020 due to cardiac arrest, just before his 86th birthday.

During his professional life, Hunkeler served as a NASA engineer, contributing significantly to the historic Apollo space missions of the 1960s. He also patented a technology that enabled space shuttle panels to withstand extreme heat. Hunkeler retired from NASA in 2001. Interestingly, William Peter Blatty, the author of the novel The Exorcist and the screenwriter of the movie, first learned about Hunkeler’s apparent demonic possessions while at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

Roland Edwin Hunkeler was born in 1953 into a middle-class family in Cottage City. His encounters with paranormal phenomena began at the age of 14 when he claimed to hear knocking and scratching sounds emanating from the walls of his bedroom. Reverend Luther Schulze, the family’s minister, documented these occurrences in a letter to Duke University. In the letter, he described how chairs moved in Hunkeler’s presence, how his bed shook when he was in it, and how heavy furniture left scars on the floors. He also noted that a picture of Christ on the wall shook when Hunkeler was nearby. This letter was sent to the Parapsychology Laboratory at the University.

Witnessing these unsettling activities, Hunkeler’s family eventually sought the assistance of Jesuit priest William Bowdern to perform exorcism rituals on him. Over the course of three months, Bowdern conducted more than 20 exorcisms on Hunkeler. During one of these sessions, on March 10, 1949, Hunkeler entered a trance-like state in the presence of 14 witnesses, as noted in Bowdern’s diary.

On March 21, 1949, Hunkeler was admitted to the Alexian Brothers Hospital in St. Louis. An article in The Washington Post on August 20, 1949, reported that Ronald Edwin Hunkeler had been “freed by a Catholic priest of possession by the devil”.