L. Ron Hubbard Part III

 False biographical claims

Hubbard claimed to have been wounded in combat, but was never awarded the Purple Heart (a decoration given to all US servicemen wounded in action).

Throughout his life, Hubbard made grossly exaggerated or outright false claims about himself. His estranged son Nibs reported that "Ninety-nine percent of what my father ever wrote or said about himself" was false. An acquaintance who knew Hubbard in Pasadena recalled recognizing Hubbard's epic autobiographical tales as being adapted from the writings of others. In October 1984, an American judge issued a ruling, writing of Hubbard that "the evidence portrays a man who has been virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background and achievements." In his private "Affirmations", Hubbard wrote to himself:

You can tell all the romantic tales you wish... you know which ones were lies... You are gallant and dashing and need tell no lies at all. You have enough real experience to make anecdotes forever. Stick to your true adventures. Or if you wish, as you will, tell adventures which happened to others – People accept them better.

Hubbard described his grandfather as a "wealthy Western cattleman", but contemporary records show that Hubbard's grandfather, Lafayette Waterbury, was a veterinarian, not a rancher, and was not wealthy. Hubbard claimed to be a "blood brother" of the Native American Blackfeet tribe, but Hubbard lived over a hundred miles from the Blackfeet reservation and the tribe did not practice blood brotherhood. Hubbard claimed to have been the youngest Eagle Scout in Boy Scouts history, but in fact the organization kept no records of the ages of Eagle Scouts.

Hubbard claimed to have traveled to Manchuria, but his diary did not record it. Hubbard claimed to be a graduate engineer, but in fact he earned poor grades at university, was placed on probation in September 1931 and dropped out altogether in the fall of 1932.  Hubbard used the title "Doctor", but his only doctorate was from a diploma mill. Hubbard claimed to have been crippled and blinded in combat, but records show he was never wounded and never received a Purple Heart (a decoration given to all US servicemen wounded in action). Hubbard's Navy service records indicate that he received only four campaign medals rather than the twenty-one claimed by Church biographies.

Legacy

Hubbard was survived by his wife Mary Sue and all of his children except his second son Quentin. His will provided a trust fund to support Mary Sue; her children Arthur, Diana and Suzette; and Katherine, the daughter of his first wife Polly. He disinherited two of his other children.  L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. had become estranged, changed his name to "Ronald DeWolf" and, in 1982, sued unsuccessfully for control of his father's estate. Alexis Valerie, Hubbard's daughter by his second wife Sara, had attempted to contact her father in 1971. She was rebuffed with the implied claim that her real father was Jack Parsons rather than Hubbard, and that her mother had been a Nazi spy during the war. Both later accepted settlements when litigation was threatened. In 2001, Diana and Suzette were reported to still be Church members, while Arthur had left and become an artist. Hubbard's great-grandson, Jamie DeWolf, is a noted slam poet.

Opinions are divided about Hubbard's literary legacy. One sociologist argued that even at Hubbard's peak in the late 1930s, he was regarded as merely "a passable, familiar author but not one of the best", while by the late-1970s "the [science fiction] subculture wishes it could forget him" and fans gave him a worse rating than any other of the "Golden Age" writers. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction argues that while Hubbard could not be considered a peer of the "prime movers" like Asimov, Heinlein, and Sprague de Camp, Hubbard could be classed with Van Vogt as "rogue members of the early Campbell pantheon". Hubbard received various posthumous awards, having a street named after in him in Los Angeles and recognition of his birthday in Utah and New Jersey.

Hubbard's teachings led to numerous offshoots and splinter groups. In 1966, two former Scientologists founded the Process Church of the Final Judgment which mixed Hubbard's teachings with Satanism. In 1969, a group led by former Scientologists Charles Manson and Bruce M. Davis was arrested and later convicted for their role in a series of high-profile murders. In 1971, former Scientologist Werner Erhard founded EST, notable large group awareness training. In 1998, Keith Raniere drew upon Hubbard's writings and Erhard's techniques to create the large group awareness training ESP, a forerunner to the group NXIVM. Raniere offered students a chance to reach a superhuman state called "Unified" and taught Hubbard's doctrine of "suppressive persons"; Raniere was ultimately sentenced to 120 years for a pattern of crimes, including the sexual exploitation of a child, sex trafficking of women, and conspiracy to commit forced labor. In 2010, the Nation of Islam began introducing its followers to Hubbard's teachings, with leader Louis Farrakhan proclaiming "I thank God for Mr. L. Ron Hubbard!"

In Scientology

After his death, Scientology leaders announced that Hubbard's body had become an impediment to his work and that he had decided to "drop his body" to continue his research. The copyrights of his works and much of his estate were willed to the Church of Scientology. According to the church, Hubbard's entire corpus of Scientology and Dianetics texts are etched onto steel tablets in a vault under a mountain, on top of which a Hubbard-designed logo has been bulldozed, intended to be visible from space.

Hubbard's presence pervades Scientology, and his birthday is celebrated annually. Every Church of Scientology maintains an office reserved for Hubbard, with a desk, chair and writing equipment, ready to be used. Hubbard is regarded as the ultimate source of Scientology, and is often referred to as simply "Source", and he has no successor. Scientology has been described as "a movement focused on the figure of Hubbard". Hubbard is presented as "the master of a multitude of disciplines" who performed extraordinary feats as a photographer, composer, scientist, therapist, explorer, navigator, philosopher, poet, artist, humanitarian, adventurer, soldier, scout, musician and many other fields of endeavor. Busts and portraits of Hubbard are commonplace throughout Scientology organizations, and meetings involve a round of applause to Hubbard's portrait. In 2009, the American Religious Identification Survey found that 25,000 Americans identified as Scientologists.

Scientology's sacred texts are inextricably linked to L. Ron Hubbard. According to Scientology's official doctrine, "Hubbard is the sole author or narrator of each and every one of the religion's sacred books; indeed he is considered to be the single orchestrating genrius behind everything Scientological." Scientologists consider everything Hubbard ever said in verbal or written terms as "scripture".

In popular culture

In the mid-1980s, the church began to promote Dianetics with a radio and television advertising blitz that was "virtually unprecedented in book circles". In March 1988, Dianetics topped the best-seller lists nationwide through an organized campaign of mass bookbuying. Booksellers reported patrons buying hundreds of copies at once and later receiving ostensibly-new books from the publisher with store price stickers already attached. Hubbard's number of followers peaked in the early 1990s with roughly 100,000 scientologists worldwide.

On November 21, 1997, the Fox network aired an episode of X-Files spinoff Millennium titled "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" which satirized Lafayette Ronald Hubbard's biography in a brief opening narration about a character named "Juggernaut Onan Goopta" who dreamt of becoming a neuroscientist only to discover that "his own brain could not comprehend basic biology". The character switches to philosophy, but "while reading Kirkegaard's 'The Sickness unto Death', he became sick and nearly died"; After writing an entire book in a "single, feverish night" that changed the course of human history, the character began lecturing to standing room only crowds, "for he shrewdly refrained from providing chairs". In a satire of both Hubbard and George Santayana, the character explains that painful memories must be exterminated, saying "those who cannot forget their past are condemned to repeat it". The character establishes an institute where patients are called 'doctors' and founds a religious order called Selfosophy staffed by an elite paramilitary inspired by the US Postal Service. We are told the character died of cancer or "molted his earthly encumbrance to pursue his Selfosophical research in another dimension".

On February 8, 1998, Fox comedy The Simpsons broadcast "The Joy of Sect", satirizing Hubbard and Scientology when the family joins a group called the Movementarians ruled over by a figure called "The Leader" who physically resembles L. Ron Hubbard. The Movementarians' use of a 10-trillion-year commitment for its members alludes to the billion-year contract and both groups make extensive use of litigation.

In 2000, Hubbard's novel was adapted into a film called Battlefield Earth, starring long-time Scientology celebrity John Travolta. In 2001, a film titled The Profit parodied Scientology and Hubbard. In 2005, animated comedy South Park aired the episode "Trapped in the Closet" in which protagonist Stan is believed to be the reincarnation of Hubbard. The episode broadcast the great secret behind the church—a condensed version of the Xenu story while an on-screen caption reads "This is what Scientologists actually believe". Prior to the episode, the story was almost completely unknown in mainstream culture.

Paul Thomas Anderson's 2012 film The Master features a religious leader named Lancaster Dodd, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is based on Hubbard and shares a physical resemblance to him. The film depicts a Navy washout with psychological issues who is unable to hold down steady employment after the war. Facing potential legal troubles, he flees California by stowing away on a ship captained by self-proclaimed nuclear physicist and philosopher Lancaster Dodd, leader of a movement called "The Cause".

On December 5, 2013, The Eric Andre Show aired a comedy sketch titled "Black Scientologists" where André's character proclaims "Not a lot of people know this, but L. Ron Hubbard was a black man. His real name was L. Ron Hoyabembe!", while revealing an artist's conception of Hubbard wearing an afro. In April 2015, following the recent release of Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, Saturday Night Live aired a music video featuring the "Church of Neurotology", a parody of Scientology's 1990 music video "We Stand Tall". Bobby Moynihan played a Hubbard-lookalike in the video. From 2018 to 2019, the show Strange Angel dramatized the life of Jack Parsons. In the season 2 finale, actor Daniel Abeles played Hubbard.

According to Hugh B. Urban in the book Handbook of Scientology, the nature of popular media accounts of Scientology is largely due to its culture of secrecy. An example of Scientology being "America's most secretive religion" is the documentary The Secrets of Scientology. Urban states, "However, while these popular accounts are often sensational and not particularly balanced, they do highlight the fact that secrecy has in fact been a pervasive aspect of the church from its inception."

Select works

Hubbard was a prolific writer and lecturer across a wide variety of genres. His works of fiction include several hundred short stories and many novels. According to the Church of Scientology, Hubbard produced some 65 million words on Dianetics and Scientology, contained in about 500,000 pages of written material, 3,000 recorded lectures and 100 films.

Early Fiction

Buckskin Brigades (1937) recounts the story of a white man adopted by the Blackfeet tribe.

Slaves of Sleep (1939) features a man, cursed by an evil genie, who instead of sleeping must now enter an Arabian Nights-like world ruled over by an evil-genie queen.

Death's Deputy (1940) is the story of an accident-prone pilot who seemingly cannot be killed

Final Blackout (1940) tells the story of a low-ranking British army officer who rises to the role of dictator.

Fear (1951), a psychological thriller, follows a professor who, after an episode of missing time, becomes paranoid that demons are haunting him.

Typewriter in the Sky (1951) features protagonist Mike de Wolf who finds himself inside a story being written by friend Horace Hackett.

Dianetics and Scientology

Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950) introduced concepts like engram, reactive mind, and the State of Clear.

Science of Survival (1951) introduced concepts like the tone scale, the thetan and past lives.

What to Audit (1952), later re-titled Scientology: A History of Man linked traumatic incidents throughout evolutionary history to modern health problems, for example, jaw trouble was said to result from unresolved trauma from having been a clam.

Scientology 8-80 and Scientology 8-8008 (1952) embraced the magical worldview, teaching that the physical universe is a creation of the mind.

Fundamentals of Thought (1956) argued life is a game, describing some people as "pieces", others as "players", and an elite few as "game makers".

All about Radiation (1957) claimed radiation poisoning and cancer could be cured with vitamins.

Introduction to Scientology Ethics (1968) codified an authoritarian set of ethics and justice procedures.

Mission into Time (1973) chronicled Hubbard's 1968 trip in the Mediterranean where he sought to find physical evidence of his past lives.

Late fiction

Revolt in the Stars (1979), a screenplay version of the Xenu story

Battlefield Earth (1982), a novel set in the year 3000 when humanity has become an endangered species, it tells the story of tribesman Johnny Goodboy Tyler who leads humanity in rebellion against the Psychlos, an evil alien race.

Mission Earth (1985–87), a ten-book series, posthumously published, about an invasion of Earth by aliens called the Voltarian.

Notes

 Owen argues that Hubbard likely suffered from venereal disease, writing: "Sulfa drugs were used in treatment but in excess could cause bloody urine, something which Hubbard's shipmate Thomas Moulton saw him passing on at least one occasion. Hubbard himself later complained about the amount of sulfa he had been fed in the Navy. Former Scientology spokesman Robert Vaughn Young claims that Hubbard's private papers refer to him having caught gonorrhoea from a girlfriend named Fern, which forced him to secretly take sulfa."