Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology (11 page)

1.
   
Hubbard, Technical Bulletins vol.4 p.28. The original manuscript
included a quotation from HCO Operations Bulletin 9 “The Turn of the Tide”, 19
December 1955, Technical Bulletins vol.2, q.v.

2.
   
Hubbard,
Mission into Time
, p.5; Flag Divisional Directive 69RA “Facts about L.
Ron Hubbard Things You Should Know”, 8 March 1974, revised 7 April 1974.

3.
   
Cooper,
Scandal of Scientology,
p.160.

4.
   
Michael Linn Shannon “A Biography of L. Ron Hubbard”, unpublished essay.

5.
   
Armstrong exhibit 63, p.24.

6.
   
Affidavit sworn by H.R. Hubbard’s true brother, J.R. Wilson, 13
September 1920. H.R. Hubbard Navy record.

7.
   
Hubbard,
Mission into Time,
p.5.

8.
   
H.R. Hubbard Navy record.

9.
   
Flag Divisional Directive 69RA.

10.
 
Hubbard,
Adventure magazine, vol.93, no.5, 1 October 1935, “The Camp-Fire”.

11.
 
Russell
Miller interview with Margaret Roberts, Helena, April 1986.

12.
 
Hubbard,
Mission into Time,
p.4; Flag Divisional Directive 69RA.

13.
 
Quoted
by Evans, Cults of Unreason, p.19.

14.
 
Land
Transfers.

15.
 
Hubbard,
All About Radiation
“LRH’s biographical notes for Peter Tompkins”, 6 June
1972.

16.
 
Hubbard,
Mission into Time.

17.
 
Great Falls Tribune
11 March 1984.

18.
 
Helena
city directories.

19.
 
Miller,
BareFaced Messiah,
p.15.

20.
 
H.R.
Hubbard Navy records.

21.
 
Encyclopedia
Britannica,
1926 edition, entries for Idaho,
p.276 and Montana p.754. Maps are provided.

22.
 
The Blackfeet never created “blood brothers”; the
letter produced by Scientology, on stationery headed “Blackfeet Nation”, was
actually typed by Scientologist Richard Mataisz, an eighth-blood, under the
name Tree Many Feathers. Failing to find any record of Hubbard’s initiation,
Mataisz decided to retrospectively award blood brotherhood to Hubbard. The
document was not approved by the Blackfeet Nation. See
Los Angeles Times
, 24 June 1990. See also Hubbard’s “Search for
Research” in “Ron the Writer”, issue 1 where he says that he learned about the
Piegan people at second hand. Yet another contradictory story was given by
Hubbard in his answers in “LRH’s autobiographical notes for Peter Tomkins”.

23.
 
HCOPL
7 December 1969, reprinted in
Hubbard Volunteer Minister’s Handbook
,
p.284.

24.
 
Registration
cards.

25.
 
Helena
city directories.

26.
 
Helena
Independent
19 August 1931, p.5.

27.
 
Helena
city directory for 1922.

28.
 
“
LRH’s autobiographical notes for Peter Tomkins” p.7;
Flag Divisional Directive 69RA; Hubbard,
What is Scientology?;
Hubbard,
Dianetics Today.

29.
 
Hubbard,
Scientology 88008,
The Factors.

30.
 
Robert
Vaughn Young left the cult in 1989 and corrected my original misapprehension of
his testimony (that he had a master’s degree). He had received a degree in
philosophy, and moved onto a doctoral program, when he was recruited into the
cult. To understand my mistake, see Young in CSC v. Armstrong vol.22, p.3776.
In conversation, Young has told me that his seven year attempt to prove even a
single extravagant claim on Hubbard’s part was unfruitful. His wife Stacy
headed the preposterous (and extravagant) attempt to find the remains of the
submarines supposedly sunk by Hubbard off the Oregon coast, using Robot
Operated Video cameras (see Hubbard as Hero for the episode itself). With
regard to Thompson, see Young in CSC v. Armstrong vol.24 p.4339, and Armstrong
exhibits 106 & 110.

31.
 
Hubbard,
Mission into Time,
p.5;
What is Scientology?,
1978 edition, p.323.

32.
 
Armstrong
exhibit 63, pp.19-20, 14-15.

33.
 
Miller,
p.27. Documents relating to the Waterbury property and Helena at this time were
obtained from the marvelous, prompt and entirely helpful Montana Historical
Society.

Chapter six

“As a still very young man, with the
financial support of his wealthy grandfather, L. Ron Hubbard traveled
throughout Asia. He studied with holy men in India and Northern China, learning
at first hand the inherited knowledge of the East.”
¹

—L. Ron
Hubbard,
Hymn of Asia

Hubbard added to his mystique by making believe that he had
spent his teens communing with the great masters of Asia. Some part of
Hubbard’s authority rests on his alleged journeys in China, India and Tibet,
²
because Scientology is supposedly a reformulation of the mystic truths he
learned there. By applying the rigorous discipline of Western scientific method
to the secrets of Eastern mysticism, Hubbard later claimed to have isolated the
laws of life itself.
³

Quite typically, Scientology accounts of Hubbard’s sojourn
in the East are packed with contradictions. In one we are told his father was
posted to Asia in 1925, and that Ron travelled extensively between 1925 and
1929. Hubbard allegedly spent a considerable period of time in the western
hills of Manchuria, and while in China visited many Buddhist monasteries.

In his book
Mission into Time
, Hubbard claimed he had
studied with Holy men in Northern China and India. In
What is Scientology?
Hubbard’s life is depicted in a series of amateurish paintings, amongst them
one of three fur-clad Tibetan bandits, with the caption: “In the isolation of
the high hills of Tibet, even native bandits responded to Ron’s honest interest
in them and were willing to share with him what understanding of life they
had.”
⁵
We can only speculate how Hubbard incorporated facets of Tibetan
bandit “philosophy” into his science of the mind and spirit.

If provoked, the Scientologists hand out an article,
allegedly from a Helena newspaper (though the paper does not exist in the
Helena records).
⁶
In the article, Hubbard described a “trip to the
Orient” lasting from April 30, when he left San Francisco, to September 1, when
he returned to Helena, to stay with his maternal grandparents and attend high
school. The year was 1927, not 1925. Scientology accounts say Hubbard returned
to the US upon the death of his maternal grandfather, but the clipping the
Church provides says he was again living with this same grandfather, who in
fact died in 1931. In the article Hubbard said he had visited Guam, the
Philippines, Wake Island, Hong Kong and “Yokohoma.”

In a short autobiography written for Adventure magazine in
1935, Hubbard said: “it was not until I was sixteen [in 1927] that I headed for
the China Coast ... in Peiping ... I completely missed the atmosphere of the
city, devoting most of my time to a British major who happened to be head of
the Intelligence out there. In Shanghai, I am ashamed to admit that I did not
tour the city or surrounding country as I should have. I know more about 181
Bubbling Wells Road and its wheels than I do about the history of the town. In
Hong Kong - well, why take up space?”
⁷

So, Hubbard travelled extensively in Northern China and
India between 1925 and 1929, though by his own account he did not leave the US
until 1927, when he was 16. He allegedly learned the wisdom of the East, yet
was ashamed at his lack of inquisitiveness whilst there.

Shannon dredged up Ron’s school records, from which we learn
that Ron spent the school year 1925-1926 at Union High School, Bremerton,
Washington,
⁸
while his father was stationed at nearby Puget Sound.
⁹
At the start of the school year 1926-1927, Ron enrolled at Queen Anne High
School, in Seattle
¹⁰
Harry Hubbard’s Naval record
⁹
shows
that his first shore duty outside the US began on April 5, 1927, when he was
assigned to the US Naval Station on the island of Guam, in the western Pacific.
Ron left Queen Anne High School in April 1927.
¹⁰

Hubbard recorded two short visits to China in his teenage
diaries. The first in 1927, en route to Guam, and the second the following
year.
^{11, 12}

The 1927 diary
¹¹
records a round trip to Guam,
with summaries of the people and places he saw. The summaries are brief, as was
Hubbard’s time in the China ports. The “President Madison,” on which he and his
mother sailed, didn’t seem to stay put for more than a day anywhere. It was a
transport, not a cruise liner. The
President Madison
visited Hawaii,
where Hubbard watched young men diving for coins.

Hubbard was unimpressed with Yokohama, Shanghai and Hong
Kong. Any sympathy he felt for the people who lived in the squalor his diary
records quickly evaporated, and was displaced by a contempt which permeates all
of his descriptions of the natives of the places he visited. The “President
Madison” took Ron and his mother to the Philippines, where he complained about
the idleness and stupidity of the inhabitants. In Cavite, where they joined the
Navy transport USS Gold Star, a Lieutenant McCain told Ron that under the
derelict cathedral crawling with snakes were tunnels full of gold. Hubbard
vowed to his diary that he would return.

They left Cavite on the “Gold Star” for the rough seven day
passage to Guam. In his diary, Hubbard gave his analysis of the natives of Guam
(he called them ‘gooks’). Hubbard had been warned that his red hair would generate
considerable interest; as it was, he claimed that the Chamarros fell silent at
his approach.

Hubbard spent about six weeks on Guam in 1927. On July 16,
he left on the
USS Nitro
, leaving his parents behind. The pages covering
the journey back to the US preserve his only philosophical speculation of the
trip. Hubbard and a young friend were perplexed by a book about atheism, so
much so that Hubbard decided he would have to wait until his return home before
resolving this difficult issue.

Ron was the first to sight Hawaii. An officer told him to
wake the lookout, and Hubbard described his perilous climb to the crow’s nest.
The
Nitro
docked at Bremerton, Washington, on August 6th, 1927.

According to his later accounts, Hubbard’s diaries were the
product of a 16-year-old who had studied Freudian analysis, read most of the
world’s great classics, and had started to isolate the rudiments of a
philosophical system some four years earlier.
¹³
In fact, none of
these subjects is even touched on in the diary.

Hubbard was at Helena High School from September 6, 1927, to
May 11, 1928.
¹⁴
While there, he joined the 163rd Infantry unit of
the Montana National Guard.
¹⁵
In his diaries, he described the
events which led him to leave school, and make his second trip to Guam. These
accounts show that Hubbard had a fanciful imagination, even then.

On May 4, 1928, the inhabitants of Helena celebrated a
holiday called Vigilante Day. In a later journal, Hubbard described the procession
of clowns and pirates along the Main Street. After the parade, he was driving
two friends around in his 1914 Ford, when a baseball struck him on the head. He
pulled up and started a fight with his assailant, claiming to have broken four
of the bones in his right hand in the process
¹⁶
(though later
medical records give no indication that he had ever broken any of the bones of
his hand).
^{17, 18}

The fight supposedly took place a few days before school
examinations, so Hubbard failed to collect the necessary credits toward graduation.
As it was, he had been doing badly, having had to repeat the first semester’s
geometry and physics.
¹⁹

Hubbard visited his aunt and uncle in Seattle, and from
there, in June, revisited the Boy Scouts’ Camp Parsons. After a week or two, he
grew restless and went off on a lone hike. The first night, he made camp about
two miles beyond Shelter Rock. While asleep he fell fifty feet, and when he
recovered consciousness found blood gushing from his left wrist.
²⁰

At the end of June, Hubbard learned that the
USS
Henderson
would be leaving for the Philippines on July 1, and on impulse decided
to join her. He would return to his parents on Guam. Hubbard raced to San
Francisco only to discover that the
USS Henderson
had already left port.
He decided to sign on as an ordinary seaman with the President Pierce, which
was China bound, but at the last minute changed his mind, and went chasing
after the
Henderson
again. He caught up with her in San Diego.

According to Hubbard’s notebook, the
Henderson’s
Captain said Hubbard would need permission from Washington to join the ship.
Time was running out. Washington said his father’s permission would be needed.
An answer from Guam usually took two days, but Hubbard was in luck. Permission
came an hour before the
Henderson
sailed. Meanwhile, Ron’s trunk had
been lost en route. He did not recover it for a year, but in spite of this,
Hubbard thoroughly enjoyed the voyage.