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 writer and the founder of the cult called the Church of Scientology. In addition to religious works, he authored fiction in many genres, educational and management texts, essays and poetry.

Biography

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 failed his course [1]. He chose instead to pursue writing, authoring many pulp magazine stories and novellas during the 1930s The Pulpateer. He became a popular author in the science fiction and fantasy fiction genres, and he also authored several 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). He was relieved of command of both vessels, in the latter case after shelling a Mexican island off Baja California. 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.

A controversial chapter in Hubbard's early life revolves around his association with Jack Parsons, a rocket propulsion researcher at Caltech and associate of the British occultist Aleister Crowley. It is alleged that during this period Hubbard and Parsons were engaged in the practice of ritual magick. A notable point of Hubbard and Parsons' collaboration was the Babalon Working, an extended set of sex magic 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 to "rescue" a girl he was "using" for magickal purposes. Most critics of Scientology consider the Church's statements to be 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". Two discussions of these events can be found in Bare-Faced Messiah and A Piece of Blue Sky respectively. A third view of the relationship between Hubbard and Parsons is covered in The Marburg Journal of Religion.

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), but others in the Science Fiction community, including Campbell's star author Isaac Asimov, criticised Dianetics' unscientific aspects.

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 masterminded 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 convinced his supporters that he could give them access to their past lives, the traumas of which he said led to failures in the present unless they were audited, a process that proved very lucrative for his church, which paid emoluments directly to himself and his family. He claimed that a clear, like himself, would not suffer disease; his closest personal associates and doctors report that he went to great lengths to have evidence of his recourse to modern medicine suppressed, attributing the symptoms of disease to attacks by malicious forces.

Scientology became controversial 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 the controversy 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.

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 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 of bestsellers). Some have charged that the books published under his name were actually ghostwritten by others, such as the late Robert Vaughn Young, a claim supported by people who were Scientology officials at the time and have since left the organization. (Although Young himself claimed, even after having left Scientology, that Hubbard wrote every word.) 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. Several issues surrounding Hubbard's death are 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. The Church of Scientology announced his death in 1986, stating 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.

Within Scientology, new volumes of his transcribed lectures continue to be produced; the publishers project that the series will ultimately total 110 large volumes. Hubbard's publishers continue to release "new" Hubbard books to the public as well, 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.

Partial bibliography

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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