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L. Ron Hubbard

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Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (March 13, 1911 – January 24, 1986), better known as L. Ron Hubbard, was a prolific and controversial American philosopher and the founder of the Church of Scientology. He devoted his life to researching the nature of the human spirit and of existence. He codified the results of his research into a set of axioms which he used to develop a technology which he claimed could be used to improve the spiritual state of human beings.In addition to philosophical and religious works, Hubbard wrote fiction in many genres, educational and management texts, and essays on diverse topics.

Biographical outline

Hubbard's Church of Scientology has produced numerous biographical publications that make extraordinary claims about his life and career; many of those claims are disputed by journalists and critics. However, there is general agreement about the basic facts of Hubbard's life.

Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska. During the 1920s, he travelled twice to the Far East to visit his parents during his father's posting to the United States Navy base on the island of Guam. He attended the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the George Washington University in Washington, DC between 1930-32 to study civil engineering, but left without completing his degree. He chose afterwards to pursue writing, publishing many stories and novellas in pulp magazines during the 1930s [1]. He became a well known author in the science fiction and fantasy fiction genres, and he also wrote westerns. Critics often cite Final Blackout, set in a war-ravaged future Europe, and Fear, a psychological horror story, as among the best examples of Hubbard's pulp fiction.

The real war caught up with Hubbard after he joined the United States Navy in June 1941 as a lieutenant (junior grade). After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he was posted to Australia. He subsequently commanded the harbor protection vessel USS YP-422 (based in Boston, Massachusetts) and the subchaser USS PC-815 (based in Astoria, Oregon). Most of Hubbard's wartime service was spent ashore in the continental United States. He was mustered out of the active service list in late 1945 and resigned his commission in 1950.

In June 1950, Hubbard published a book describing the self-improvement technique of Dianetics. As he was unable to elicit interest from the medical or psychotherapeutic professions, the legendary science fiction editor John W. Campbell, who had for years published Hubbard's science fiction stories, agreed to publicise Dianetics in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction. Dianetics quickly became popular US-wide, but science fiction fans and writers were divided about its merits. Campbell and novelist A. E. van Vogt supported Dianetics (van Vogt became Hubbard's treasurer).

In mid-1952, Hubbard expanded Dianetics into a secular philosophy which he called Scientology. The following December, he declared it to be a religion and founded the first Church of Scientology in Camden, New Jersey. He moved to England at about the same time and during the remainder of the 1950s he organized the worldwide development of Scientology from an office in London. In 1959, he bought Saint Hill Manor near the Sussex town of East Grinstead, a Georgian manor house formerly owned by the Maharajah of Jaipur. This became the worldwide headquarters of Scientology.

Hubbard devoted much of his life to disseminating what he claimed to be the results of years of intensive research that he had conducted into the nature of existence; he codified a set of axioms which he used to develop a "technology" that promised to improve the condition of the human spirit. Hubbard's followers believed that his "applied religious philosophy" gave them access to their past lives, the traumas of which led to failures in the present unless they were audited, a process that involved reviewing memories while holding a bio-feedback device called a "Hubbard Electropsychometer" or "E-meter."

In 1977, Scientology offices on both coasts of the United States were raided by FBI agents seeking evidence of a suspected Church-run espionage network. Hubbard's then-wife Mary Sue and a dozen other senior Scientology officials were convicted in 1979 of conspiracy against the United States Government, while Hubbard himself was named by Federal prosecutors as an "unindicted co-conspirator." Facing intense media interest and a number of lawsuits, he retired privately to a ranch on O'Donovan Road in Creston, California.

During the 1980s, Hubbard returned to fiction writing, publishing Battlefield Earth and Mission Earth, a science fiction satire of 20th century events and culture published in 10 volumes. He also wrote an unpublished science fiction screenplay called Revolt in the Stars. Hubbard's later science fiction works sold well, receiving mixed reviews (and charges that sales were artificially inflated by Scientologists purchasing large numbers of copies at select retailers in order to create the appearance that the books were bestsellers). The 2000 release of the film version of Battlefield Earth, starring Barry Pepper and John Travolta (who financed and produced the project), failed to attract audiences or impress critics.

Hubbard died in 1986, in an expensive Bluebird motorhome on his ranch. He had not been seen in public since 1981. The Church of Scientology announced that Hubbard had deliberately "dropped his body" to do "higher level spiritual research," unencumbered by mortal confines.

Following Hubbard's death, David Miscavige, one of Hubbard's former personal assistants, took over the leadership of the Church of Scientology, via his position as Chairman of the Religious Technology Center, a non-profit corporation set up in 1982 to control Hubbard's copyrighted works.

Controversial episodes

Hubbard's past and the history of Scientology are embroiled in controversy.

One controversial aspect of Hubbard's early life revolves around his association with Jack Parsons, a rocket propulsion researcher at Caltech and an associate of the British occultist Aleister Crowley. It is alleged that in 1946 Hubbard and Parsons were engaged in the practice of ritual magick, including the Babalon Working, an extended set of sex magick rituals intended to summon a goddess. (Among occultists today, it is widely accepted that Hubbard derived a large part of 'Dianetics' from Golden Dawn occult ideas such as the Holy Guardian Angel.) The Church of Scientology insists that Hubbard was acting as a US government intelligence agent, on a mission to put an end to Parsons' magickal activities and the related military security risks, and to "rescue" a girl Parsons was "using" for magickal purposes. Critics of Scientology dismiss the Church's claims as after-the-fact rationalizations. Crowley recorded in his notes that he considered Hubbard a "lout" who made off with Parsons' money and girlfriend in an "ordinary confidence trick." Discussions of these events can be found in the critical biographies Bare-Faced Messiah, A Piece of Blue Sky and in The Marburg Journal of Religion.

Hubbard later married the girl he claimed to have rescued, Sara Northrup. Some biographers have identified this marriage as an act of bigamy, as Hubbard had abandoned, but not divorced, his first wife and children as soon as he left the Navy. Both women have alleged that they were subjected to beatings by Hubbard. He is also alleged to have once kidnapped his and Sara's daughter, taking her to Cuba. Later, he disowned his daughter, claiming she was actually Jack Parsons' child.

Scientology itself became a focus of controversy across the English-speaking world during the mid-1960s, with Britain, New Zealand, South Africa, the Australian state of Victoria and the Canadian province of Ontario all holding public inquiries into Scientology's activities. In 1967, Hubbard left this unwanted attention behind by appointing himself "Commodore" of a small fleet of Scientologist-crewed ships which spent the next eight years cruising the Mediterranean Sea. He returned to the United States in the mid-1970s and lived for a while in Florida.

Several issues surrounding Hubbard's death and the disposition of his estate are also subjects of controversy — a swift cremation with no autopsy, the destruction of coroner's photographs, coroner's evidence of the psychiatric drug Vistaril present in Hubbard's blood, the whereabouts of Dr. Eugene Denk (Hubbard's physician) during Hubbard's death, and the changing of wills and trust documents the day before his death.

Many conflicting interpretations of Hubbard's life are spelled out in the online version of Russell Miller's largely critical biography of Hubbard, Bare Faced Messiah; this version includes links to Scientology's official accounts of Hubbard's past, embedded within Miller's description of the same events.

Partial bibliography

Hubbard's publishers continue to release "new" Hubbard books of fiction to the public, although these are actually anthologies of previously published short stories or Hubbard's "story ideas" expanded into novels by other authors such as Kevin J. Anderson.

Because the majority of Hubbard's books of the 1950s through the 1970s were written exclusively for Scientology, the organization founded its own publishing company to allow him to write and publish literally anything he wished. This company, Bridge Publications, continues to publish and promote Hubbard's works today. New volumes of his transcribed lectures continue to be produced; the publishers project that the series will ultimately total 110 large volumes.

Fiction

  • Fear
  • Final Blackout
  • Buckskin Brigades
  • Typewriter in the Sky
  • Slaves of Sleep
  • Masters of Sleep
  • The Kingslayer
  • Battlefield Earth
  • Mission Earth series:
    • 1) The Invaders Plan
    • 2) Black Genesis
    • 3) The Enemy Within
    • 4) An Alien Affair
    • 5) Fortune of Fear
    • 6) Death Quest
    • 7) Voyage of Vengeance
    • 8) Disaster
    • 9) Villainy Victorious
    • 10) The Doomed Planet

Dianetics and Scientology

Unofficial biographies

Official sites

Critical sites

Neutral sites

Directories

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