Behind the Bastards - Part One: How L. Ron Hubbard Lied His Way to Godhood

Episode Date: October 23, 2018

Lafayette Ron Hubbard was a living monument to how much a tall white guy can achieve by lying, without pause, for seventy straight years. In Episode 27, Robert is joined by Caitlin Durante (The Bechdel Cast) and they discuss the wild life of the found of Scientology.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. My guest today is Caitlin Durante of the Bechtel Cast, a comedian and a fan of L. Ron Hubbard. I love him. Love some LRH? Yeah.

What do you know about Mr. Hubbard? I know that he was a sci-fi pulpy writer in his early days and that he is the founder of the Church of Scientology. I watched Going Clear and that's pretty much all I know. Okay, cool. He was a living monument to how much a tall white man can achieve in this world by just lying without pause or cessation for 70 straight years. That's his whole life. He just never stopped lying from the time he was about four years old until the day he died and he died worth like $600 million. So it worked out pretty well. I had a weird time researching this because I wanted to hate him and it's really hard to hate him. Really?

He's a piece of shit. He is a monster. He does terrible things. But there's also, he's not just a terrible guy. Like with a lot of terrible people today, it'll be like some rich asshole who like does something that's terrible to the environment or like, you know, is abusive to their employees or whatever. L. Ron Hubbard did his terrible things while shooting for the moon. That's interesting to me. So he's ambitious and you got to admire him for that. He might be the most ambitious con artist in human history. Wow, okay.

He's in the running. All right. So Lafayette Ron Hubbard was born on March 13, 1911 and tilled in Nebraska. His family moved there shortly thereafter to Helena, Montana. His grandfather was moderately successful but not wealthy by any means. He owned a decent house, some stables and a guitar with a black man's head carved onto the top of it. What? Yeah, that's a detail you'll run into a number of times reading about his early life.

Yeah, yeah. I'm guessing it was racist. Yeah. But I don't know. Later, Hubbard would claim his grandfather owned a massive ranch a quarter the size of Montana and that he spent his early childhood having adventures there and becoming a blood brother of the Blackfoot Indian tribe. That's good.

So he's already appropriating, you know, other cultures. He was born appropriating other cultures. Yeah. On the website What is Scientology, which is a Scientology website, it says that his particular friend among the Blackfoot tribe was an elderly medicine man commonly known as Old Tom, quote, establishing a unique friendship with the normally taciturn Indian. Ron was soon initiated into the various secrets of the tribe, their legends, customs, and methods of survival in a harsh environment.

At the age of six, he became a blood brother of the Blackfeet, an honor bestowed on few white men. So this is when he's six. This is what he claims. So this is what he claims. This is not the truth. No, there's no evidence that six-year-old L. Ron Hubbard had adventures with Indians and became their blood brother.

The Los Angeles Times reported on this in 1990. They talked to a historian named Hugh Dempsey, who was an expert on the Blackfoot tribe and whose wife is a member of the Blackfoot tribe. And he basically said blood brothers aren't even a thing the tribe has. It's like a Hollywood idea that was invented for Western movies. Yeah. So it seems like all of L. Ron Hubbard's ideas about this tribe that he claimed membership in came from like movies he watched as a kid, which is, yeah.

Okay, good. Love it, love how influential movies are and how they don't do anything to fuck up our society. Well, and it's amazing how little fact-checking people do if you claims a lie from far back enough like that, because the Church of Scientology still continues this line to this day that L. Ron Hubbard was a brother of the Blackfoot tribe. And he even claimed later that a lot of his philosophical ideas came from Indian rituals and stuff. Like as far as we know, he never met a single member of the Blackfoot tribe.

Right. So I did want to give sort of a source on L. Ron Hubbard's early life from a sympathetic side. Most of the research I did on this was by people who were very critical of him, so I didn't want to know kind of how the Church of Scientology talks about his upbringing. And I found L. Ron Hubbard.org, which claimed to have biographical information on him, but actually was just trying to sell me a series of books on L. Ron Hubbard because it was by the Church of Scientology.

But there was a trailer for the book series about L. Ron Hubbard called L. Ron Hubbard a Profile. And I want to play you a little bit of that because it gives you an idea of sort of the cliff's notes of his life as portrayed by the Church of Scientology. Okay. He earned a hallowed place in Blackfeet lore, became the nation's youngest eagle scout at the age of 13, and studied with the last in a line of legendary mystics from the court of Kubla Khan.

Hubbard, barren, stormed into aviation history, ascended to the heights of greatness in a now fabled Kingdom of the Pulps, and charted unknown realms beneath a famed Explorers Club flag. Retrace his journey to the founding of Dianetics and Scientology. So... And his ultimate... Almost none of that's true. Right.

He was an explorer and founded Uncharted... He was, there was a group called the Explorers Club, which was like a big thing in the day, and he did basically connive his way into being a member there, and he did carry out a couple of expeditions that didn't really find much. But he piloted around in a boat until his boat broke down, and he had a flag with him. Okay. So that's kind of what he's claiming there. So, one of my main sources for this episode was a book called Bareface Messiah, which is

a really comprehensive biography of L. Ron Hubbard by Russell Miller, probably the first one ever wrote, and he interviewed a lot of L. Ron Hubbard's relatives, people who like saw him as he was growing up and stuff, and none of the people who were with him when he was a baby, when he was six, when he was like a young child, had any recollection of any of the stuff that he claimed about. His aunt, Marnie, who grew up with him, described him as the baby of the family, adored and coddled by everybody. He was very much the love child of the whole family.

He was adored by everyone. I could still see that mop of red hair running around, so he was like the little baby of the family, but he grew up more or less in a house, in a small town, as a beloved youngest child of a very close knit family. No adventures in his early childhood that there's any evidence of. But you got to love that imagination on him, you know. There's a thin line between imagination and just lying. Yeah.

Yeah. The actual information shows that Hubbard enrolled in kindergarten at age six, rather than becoming a black lit brother. That tracks, I suppose. His local nickname was Brick because of his red hair, I guess, because Bricks are red. 1915 was not a good time for nicknames. So, Ryan Johnson's film, Brick, is actually based on Elron Hubbard. I wish I knew something about it.

Yeah, I'm assuming that's a very good joke. I haven't seen it. Oh, it's not a good joke. Oh, good. Is it a good movie? It is a joke. It's a pretty good movie, yeah. Okay.

Okay. Well, Elron Hubbard's young life was not a pretty good movie, because he pretty much went to kindergarten. He later claimed that while he was in school, he would protect other kids from the bullies terrorizing his classmates using the lumberjack fighting skills he learned from his grandfather. His grandfather was not a lumberjack. Owned a small oil company, but wasn't a lumberjack. One of Ron's closest childhood friends, Andrew Richardson, stated he never protected nobody.

It was all bullshit. Old Hubbard was the greatest con artist who ever lived, which is more or less true. Ron moved to Seattle after his dad joined the Navy when he was like 12 years old. He did join the Boy Scouts at this point and became an Eagle Scout at like age 13. That is true. That is true. That is true. But there's no evidence that he was the youngest Eagle Scout ever, because back then, the Boy Scouts

did not make a note of what age people were when they became Eagle Scouts. Bad bookkeeping. Bad bookkeeping. Boy Scouts. But I'm guessing Ron knew that, which is why he made the lie. Sure. Yeah. But he was good at being a Boy Scout, I guess.

Okay. He was already an explorer and a blood brother of a tribe. All that time spent with the Blackfoot really prepared him for his merit badges and whittling and bald-faced lies. During his teenage years, his dad was in the Navy, so during his teenage years, Ron visited him twice for like a month or two each time. So he did get to spend some time in the Far East, but it was mostly on military bases with his parents.

The Myth Factory, of course, that he created later spun this into a series of exotic Eastern adventures where he said, I was trained in the court of Kublai Khan by Tibetan Mystics. He was on vacation with his parents and like China and stuff, he mostly seemed to not enjoy his time in the Far East. He thought China was gross and dirty. He thought Chinese people were gross and dirty. We have his diaries from those times, and he's not weirdly racist for an American in like 1920, but he's pretty racist.

Sure. Pretty racist. In Mission Into Time, a Scientology book, though, he spun his basic vacation with his parents in China into, quote, in China, he met an old musician whose ancestors had served in the court of Kublai Khan and a Hindu who could hypnotize cats. In the High Hills of Tibet, he lived with bandits who accepted him because of his honest interest in him and his way of life. So that's fun.

Okay, good. Yeah. Love it so far. He saw the Great Wall of China. His only notes in his notebook about this was that they should make it into a roller coaster because they want to make a shitload of money, so. Okay. There's no evidence of him learning any ancient Eastern wisdom, but we do know that this is

the time when he first started sketching out short stories because he spent a lot of boring time on boats and trains and stuff with like a notebook writing out story ideas. Most of them were just like, he didn't even write out a lot of stories. It was mostly just him writing out the ideas. So like there would be entries like Love Story, Ghost of France, Meet Swell Broad and Marseille. She takes them to her sink, bedroom, and bath where he lives until notable citizens object. He stands them off and takes the next boat for America having received a long expected will donation.

So it was like weird little stories like that. Most of them involved American travelers meeting beautiful foreign women. Again, he's like 14. Yeah. He didn't seem to know how to write sex scenes. So like the closest he got in his first short story was a scene where like a Navy corpsman is with like a beautiful native woman and they fall in love, but then when he would write out like what they did, he just kept scratching it out to the point that we don't know what

he wrote because he apparently wrote a sex scene and they're just like furiously erased it. He's like, he puts his, oh God, I don't even go into what is a woman again. All right, cool. So he's an incel. It is entirely possible he did not know what a woman was at that point. He was like a 15 year old in the 20s. Yeah, he either knew everything or nothing.

He knew that you're supposed to objectify women. He just doesn't know how. Yeah, he was bad at it. Yeah. And that would be like a hallmark of Elron Hubbard's writing is that especially since a lot of the pulp fiction that he became famous for other stories in that genre were really sexual. That was never a thing he was good at.

Okay. Yeah. You heard it. You heard it here first. Elron Hubbard couldn't write about fucking. Couldn't fuck. Elron Hubbard couldn't fuck. Now actually that's not true weirdly enough, which we'll get to later.

There's some evidence he actually became pretty good at fucking. Wow. Yeah. So you heard that here first. Or did he just make that up and that's more of his inventive. No. These are people who didn't like him otherwise but like who were in relationships and were like he wasn't bad at fucking.

Oh wow. I can't wait till we get there. Oh no. It's exciting. This is quite a journey. So after he got back from the Far East he enrolled in George Washington University in the fall of 1930. Scientology publications state that while there he became the associate editor of the university.

Newspaper was a member of many university clubs and societies and enrolled in one of the first nuclear physics courses ever taught in an American university. And several words of that are not entirely incorrect. He did go to George Washington University. He was a student of the school of engineering. He did not take nuclear physics courses because this was 1930. He was not good at civil engineering. He hated it and usually did not go to class.

He did write for the school newspaper but he was not an editor for it. He just wrote a few articles mostly as PR for the club that he launched which was the school gliding club. Oh. He loved gliding. Okay. Like hang gliding? No.

It still exists today as a sport. You don't hear about it much but they're basically planes. If you saw one parked you would just guess it was a plane but most of them don't have engines and you can either fling them into the sky with this weird winch system or you can like drop them off the back of an airplane. People can travel across continents in these things. If they're really good at them you can go hundreds of miles but they're not really planes. Okay.

Because there's no engine. Yeah. There's no engine. It's just about managing your levels and what not. I don't know. I'm not a glider pilot but he was a big fan of that and he did it. He was apparently pretty good at it but he was better at creating a club for it and drilling up interest in it.

Soon he started writing articles for like sportsman's magazines, sportsman aviator and other magazines like that. I was in this horrible dive and my plane was falling apart and I had this, I crashed into this barn and so he just made up stories about stuff he did in this glider plane when in reality he did it for like a year or so and then he lost his license because he couldn't afford to renew it and then he never flew again. Okay. But he kept writing articles about flying even after he stopped being able to do it because

yeah. Sounds like a theme of his fabricating stories. Yeah. There's usually a germ of truth. He did fly a glider a lot. There was one time where he like crashed a glider into a small town and nobody got hurt and like he wound up having to take off from a nearby hill or something like that which he then turned into you know stories of traveling across the country on a glider and having

all these adventures. And then discovering a whole other continent and yeah. Yeah. Good. Yeah. So that's Elmont Hubbard in college. His grades were as bad as you'd expect because he usually would skip out on class in order to glide more often.

Right. Yeah. He was studying civil engineering. Civil engineering. Right. Okay. So his idea. Yeah.

Of course he was bad at it because he thought the great will of China should be a roller coaster. Yes. Like that was his idea of like structures. Okay. That was the first thing he thought seeing like the most impressive thing people had ever built was like man but a roller coaster on this son of a bitch. Okay.

Yeah. Elmont Hubbard. His grades were pretty bad but during this time like in 1932 when he was a sophomore his school launched a literary journal and he submitted his first finished short story for publication. So this is the first time he got published writing fiction. The story was titled Ta after the name of its main character and it was about a 12-year-old child soldier in China on a march to die horribly in a battle.

He quickly wrote another short story about another really, really bloody battle this time a naval battle on the Yangtze River. He repeatedly described the rivers being filled with headless corpses. He had a big thing for gore, big thing for violence. Most of his early stories involved bloody adventures in vaguely Asian settings. So this is his passion clearly, see the pattern. That summer, summer of 1932, Elmont Hubbard decided to launch an expedition of his own. He called it the Caribbean motion picture expedition and convinced a bunch of other

young 19-year-old boys to pool their money so they could rent a boat for the summer and sail to the Caribbean. Their goal was to explore abandoned pirate strongholds and film themselves running around in pirate costumes for the presumed historic value of these videos of children running around in pirate costumes. He also said that he wanted to quote, collect whatever one collects for exhibits in museums. Again, not a lot of specifics about what's going to happen. Loves vagueness.

Also the Disney's Pirate of the Caribbean, the film, also sounds like it was based on Elrond Hubbard. A little bit. So there's a lot of movies based on this guy's life. There was a report on his adventure in the school newspaper written by an anonymous writer who was almost certainly Elrond Hubbard himself. So I'm going to read you that school newspaper article trying to get other kids to join his expedition into the Caribbean.

Contrary to popular belief, windjammer days are not over and romance refuses to die the death, at least for 50 young gentlemen rovers who will set sail on the schooner Doris Hamlin from Baltimore on 20th June for the pirate haunts of the Spanish Maine. According to Elrond Hubbard, the strongholds and bivouacs of the Spanish Maine have lain neglected and forgotten for centuries and there has never been a concerted attempt to tear apart the jungles to find the castles of Teach, Morgan, Bonet, Bluebeard, Kid, Sharp. Down there where the sun is whipping up heatwaves from the palms, this crew of gentlemen rovers will reenact the scenes which struck terror into the hearts of the world only a few hundred

years ago, with the difference that this time it will be for the benefit of the fun and the flickering ribbon of celluloid. In their spare time, if they have any, they will scale the heights of belching volcanoes, hunt in the thick jungles, shoot flying fish on the wing, yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda. So, sounds like a great adventure. The Great Depression was in its height at this point, so it was like a lot of kids signed up because they were like, well, what else are we going to do? There's no jobs, might as well have an adventure sailing around in the Caribbean.

Hubbard claimed that Fox Movietone and Pathé News had already put in bids for the film rights. He claimed the New York Times had contracted to buy the photographs, so he was basically promising that they would do this expedition and sell a bunch of video and photos and everybody would get money. That was the claim going out there. Now, it was all lies, of course, and Elrond Hubbard actually hadn't worked out deals with any media agencies. The New York Times has no record of this, neither do any of the agencies he said he'd

contracted with. He didn't even have enough money to properly finance the whole expedition, so the Doris Hanlon, which did sail out, had to return to Porte about a month early, having found no pirate strongholds and filmed no movies. The captain Hubbard had hired, called The Voyage, the worst trip I ever made. Most of the gentlemen rovers jumped ship at their first two ports. Yeah, yeah, it was kind of a disaster. Yeah, good for them though, for abandoning ship, whatever.

The sunk cost fallacy can make fools of us all. Sometimes it's important to just get off that boat. In the third episode of this three-part series, there will be a boat that people don't get off of. We will see what happens when Elrond Hubbard gets to carry one of his dreams of taking a bunch of people on a boat to the furthest extent. He never gives up this idea. So in September, when everyone's back in school, and Hubbard's back from his failed

voyage to the Spanish Main, Elrond Hubbard wrote an article chronicling his journey for the school newspaper. In this article, the journey was turned into a historic success where everybody got laid. No, because it's getting. Yeah. Good. It was all bull—like no girls allowed, it seemed like on the streets. No, of course not.

Gentlemen rovers. Yeah. Can't have a gentle lady rover. No. No. No. Cool. Well, yeah.

Would you have wanted to be on that boat? No. Each of us testostero. Yeah, no, that sounds like a nightmare. I mean, I'll be honest. If at age like 19, I'd had a chance to get on like a sailing ship and travel to the Caribbean and pretend to be a pirate. I probably would have been convinced to do it, but I had a lot of dumb shit when I was

19. Yeah. Yeah. Hubbard wrote in the article, when they weren't out catching sharks or harpooning or visiting some colorful spot, they were capably entertained by the dark eyed senioritas at the various ports. I'm going to guess. Okay.

He just invented that all. Yeah. Yeah. The article also hailed the scientific achievements of the expedition, which mostly included a bunch of film and specimen donations to the University of Michigan. The University of Michigan has no record of any donations from Elron Hubbard. No kidding. Yeah.

Not seeing any trend here so far, but nothing. Really? No. Have you picked up on a pattern? Nope. Well, there isn't one yet. Elron Hubbard dropped out of school shortly after getting back from this, and we will be getting into all of that and what happened after he leaves college later in the start

of his career writing terrible pulp fiction. But before we get into that, give me a good ad segue, Caitlin. Hey, everyone. Stay tuned for more Elron Hubbard, but until then, check out this ad. That was fantastic. Thank you so much. Really, really natural. Thank you so much.

I know. That's the part that makes it most convincing to people. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. Standing inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

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Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

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Our producer, Sophie, just had to throw out a salad that was really bad, so if you want to feel like you're with us while you listen to the show, make yourself a terrible salad and then throw it away. When we last left off with our story, Elron Hubbard had dropped out of college after a failed expedition to pretend to be pirates in the Caribbean. What a time the 30s were. According to a brief biography of Elron Hubbard, published after he came out with Dianetics, his first action on leaving college was to blow up steam by leading an expedition into

Central America. In the next few years, he headed three, all of them undertaken to study savage peoples and cultures to provide fodder for his articles and stories. Between 1933 and 1941, he visited many barbaric cultures and yet found time to write 7 million words of public fact and fiction. No, this is true. He did get published probably about 2 million words, something like that, of mostly fiction. So like he was a prolific writer from 33 to 41, he didn't write 7 million words.

Right. And then he just would like, gotta find some savage people to write about. And that's 100% lies. He didn't go to Central America. We have no record of any expeditions that he led to study savage peoples and cultures. But also the fact that he was like, yeah, these disgusting savages, gotta go find out about them and exploit them and their lifestyles. I mean, it's 1959.

Calling them people is almost woke. Good point. But obviously, yeah. Right after Hubbard dropped out of school, his dad used his navy connections to get Hubbard a gig doing volunteer work in Puerto Rico for the Red Cross, which I think is the closest he got to a expedition into Central America, which is not very close to being an expedition in Central. Not at all that.

No. This is what I think he's talking about. He immediately abandoned his commitment to the Red Cross as soon as he arrived on the island and instead wandered off into the woods to search for gold he believed that conquistadors had hidden. Okay. So we're on over. So he is purely delusional, right?

It's hard to say how much of him is just a liar and how much of him is living in a fantasy world, because it's clearly a mix of the two, because he's not 100% a liar. I can't believe that after having read his story. Some of this, as he just lives in this whimsical world of his own. Yeah. He'll just take a nugget of true information and then blow it way out of proportion. Yeah, because for the rest of his life, he would talk about how he was a gold prospector and whatnot for a time.

And it was like, you wandered around the jungle and didn't find golds, like, yeah, Scientology Lore claims that he carried out the first mineralogical survey of Puerto Rico, but there is again no evidence of this. He did briefly work for a prospecting company, but he was back in the mainland United States within a few months. In April of 1933, he married a woman named Polly. He was ostensibly working as a writer during this period, but Polly later claimed that in their first year together, he probably made less than $100.

Now, at this point, he was writing mostly nonfiction. Later that year, he claimed to have found gold on his own land, and there's some news reports of interviews with him about the gold he found on his land. That appears to have been a lie cooked up for the benefit of a scheme that we don't know the other half of. Okay. Like, I'm going to assume he tried to make money off of it, but all we know is there's these articles about him finding gold and no evidence that he ever found gold.

Right. He was clearly trying something, but you're not going to catch the whole story for every one of this guy's schemes. He never was not scheming. Right. Right. Yes. Always be scheming.

Always be scheming. 1934 saw the explosion of the only art form Elron Hubbard would ever truly master, pulp fantasy fiction. From like 33 to 34, hundreds of new magazines started up around the United States. Many of these were like weekly magazines that would have like 15, 20 different stories in them, and they would total like 60, 70,000 words. So like every week they're putting out like a novel's worth of short stories, and there's dozens of magazines doing this.

So there's a huge amount of hunger in this market for quickly written, cheap stories of cowboys and Indians, of gangsters, of monster and bear attacks, like that sort of stuff really sold in this period. So a man capable of ceaseless, effortless, machine gun, rapidity lying was perfectly he was built to write really, really quick shitty fiction. And he was good at it. Up until this point, like I said, he'd written mostly for sportsman magazines and national geographic publications, and lying about his expeditions and stuff.

But as soon as he became aware of the hunger for pulp fiction, Lafayette Ron Hubbard knew what he needed to do. For six straight weeks, he wrote one short story per day, each between 4,500 and 20,000 words, which is an insane rate of productivity. Can you fathom it if the person writing these never edits anything, never even reads over his own stories? He would just type out a story in one long swoop and then mail it off to a random magazine. So there's probably like continuity errors and like all kinds of consistencies.

Really messy tales. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. But who gives a shit? Right. They need stories, and most of them didn't even get accepted.

Like he's just writing so many stories. Just like shitting out these horrible, these horrible, horrible stories. Also the movie Pulp Fiction was based on Hal Ron Hubbard. He certainly wasn't influenced because he helped define the genre. His stories had titles like Green God, Calling Squad Cars, Sea Fangs, Dead Men Kill, and The Carnival of Death. Oh. I would watch some of those movies.

No, of course. He was good at titling. Yeah. Of course he would. He certainly wasn't bad for a pulp fiction writer. He was definitely in like the middle of the pack in terms of quality goes. But he was mostly famous for just no one else could write this much. And this does seem to be like his real talent was he could just write like a fucking bazooka.

It was crazy. Have you ever read any of it? Yeah. It's really bad. But I don't like pulp. It's all really bad. Okay. You're sure?

I enjoy HP Lovecraft, and he's an objectively bad writer. There's fun ideas in it that are scary, but it's not good writing. Of course. It's not good pacing. Yeah. Neither is Stephen King for that matter. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Good stories. Sure. Like clunky crows. Yeah. I've actually not read much, or if any, oh no, I've read the Shashank Redemption novella that made that one. Yeah. And I think Stephen King is like the good version of Elrond Hubbard, because they both

are able to write at an absurd rate. But Stephen King was just like, well, okay, I can just write stories people enjoy and not create a cult. Right. Yeah. I'm just going to be on cocaine. I'm just going to do lots of drugs. Yeah.

Be Stephen King, not Elrond Hubbard, if you have this gift. So Elrond Hubbard quickly made a name for himself in the pulp fiction set. He started traveling to New York City regularly and became a fixture among pulp writers and editors. He made sure they knew him as, quote, a real character. He portrayed himself as a badass who, despite his young age, had lived a life full of death-defying adventures. Some of these men, like the writer Frank Gruber, quickly picked Hubbard out as a bullshit artist.

Quote, one evening Gruber sat through a long account of Ron's experiences in the Marine Corps, his exploration of the upper Amazon, and his years as a white hunter in Africa. At the end of it, he asked with obvious sarcasm, Ron, you're 84 years old, aren't you? What the hell are you talking about, Ron Snapped? Gruber waved a notebook in which he had been jotting figures. Well, he said, you were in the Marines seven years, you were a civil engineer for six years, you spent four years in Brazil, three in Africa, you barnstormed with your own flying circus for six years.

I've just added up all the years you did this, and that comes to 84. Good on him. Good on him. We're calling him out on his bullshit. But he still liked Hubbard, like even the people, like pretty much everyone knew he was full of shit for the most part, but he was fun to be around, like his stories were usually entertaining, he was an interesting guy, most people seemed to like him. For a while, his career went pretty well.

In 1935, Columbia Motion Pictures paid him to write a 15-part film story called The Secret of Treasure Island. It was played in like 15 different days or something like that during like Saturday morning matinee services, like it was a little sequential thing. And this is the only Hollywood thing he was ever involved with. But for the rest of his life, he would claim to be a Hollywood screenwriter and just claimed he had written famous movies that he didn't write and that there's no evidence he had anything to do with.

That's what I'm going to just start doing. Yeah. Yeah. The Church of Scientology says he was one of the legends of Hollywood's golden age. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. So yeah, just lie. Yeah.

Just lie and claim you wrote great movies. All right. I wrote The Godfather, part two. Oh, that was you. That was me. I produced it. Oh, yeah. We should already know each other.

Yeah. I mean, I could actually claim that pretty easily. I don't even have to change my name. So the reality is that he tried to start a career as a screenwriter in Hollywood, but he couldn't hack it. And so he moved back east to write more trashy pulp fiction in the woods with his wife. He developed a number of pseudonyms for his work with various publications, names like Winchester, Remington, Colt.

What? Yeah. So just like gun, gun, Colt. Well, Colt's a gun. Oh, is it? Yeah. Yeah. Colt 45 is like, was the most famous handgun in the world at the time.

I heard Colt. Not Colt. No, no. Colt. No. It was three guns. Gun, gun, gun. Gun, gun, gun.

Gun, gun, gun. I'm gun, gun, gunowitz. Kurt Von Racken was another, which I think was just like a badass sounding German name. Renee Lafayette, which is at least half his real name. Joe Blitz and Legionnaire 148. Okay. Okay. These are good names.

These are good names. No, he's got some gifts. Yeah. He's got some gifts. Yeah. Isaac Asimov liked a lot of his fiction. So like he gained some respect within the community. He certainly wasn't seen as like the worst.

He was one of the most prominent names in the pulp fiction universe at that point. People talked mostly though about like the rate of speed at which he was able to put out stories. There were rumors that he typed using one incredibly long piece of paper at a time that each story was just one massive scroll that he would roll up when he was done. There were rumors that he built his own keyboard with single keys for the words that he used most often. Oh, wow.

Because he just typed so fast. That's actually very smart. If that's true, which I don't think it is. There's no evidence of it. But that's, that's smart. Yeah. It would have been smart if he'd done it. I don't think he ever made enough money to get his own custom typewriter.

There were stories that editors would just send messengers to his hotel room with like cover art and then wait outside, will he wrote a story to go with the cover art? So he would just like reverse engineer stories based on a picture? These are at least stories about him. It's not hard to believe given the rate at which he produced stuff. For sure. 20,000 words in a day is insane. I can't even write three words a day.

This script is about 18,000 words and I wrote it in two days. Yeah. Wow. And there was a lot of writing. So. Well, brag, okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, look, join my cult. Just join my cult. Join me there, baby. Okay. Well, I need a boat. Hey, I've got a whole slew of boats. You know what? Not just gentlemen rovers on my boat trip to the Caribbean where we pretend to be pirates.

You're going to let women want to? How progressive? Well, I want to be able to scam twice as many people. Of course. Yeah. Absolutely. So, obviously, Hubbard eventually turned from writing adventure tales and cop dramas to writing cheesy science fiction.

This is sort of the period in the mid-30s when sci-fi starts to blow up as a genre. And he was part of the golden age of science fiction. He wrote alongside guys like, I already noted Isaac Asimov, but Robert Heideland, El Sprague de Camp, he was like one of the founders of popular science fiction. And in 1938, when his writing career was near its height, he wrote a book called Excalibur, which he never showed to anybody, but constantly claimed was going to change the world. Yeah. Excalibur was a work of philosophy, not of fiction, and it was Hubbard claimed a work

of such breathtaking, philosophic brilliance that it drove everyone who read it to commit suicide. That's why he says he couldn't show it to anybody. He had to lock it in a bank vault because people killed themselves when they read his amazing book. What could even that, okay, I can only imagine. I can't imagine. He just wrote a book so good people shoot themselves.

You know that feeling when you finish a really good book and then you go buy a gun? Yeah. Yeah. I like three guns, a Remington, a Colt, and the other one. One name for each of the guns you'll have to buy when you finish his amazing book. Some people claim they actually read copies of this back in 1938. Some people claim he never wrote it. We don't really know if he ever wrote a book and showed it to some people and then shelved

it or if it was all a lie to begin with. People who claim that they read drafts of it said that its whole focus was about the need to survive. That was Hubbard's big, the survival instinct was his big philosophical focus, the thing he was. Yeah. So it's like, here's how to survive, but then it drives people to kill. For some reason, yeah.

We don't know what he wrote in the book, but he wrote about the book to a number of people, including his wife. And in 1938, he wrote her a letter about it that includes this paragraph that provides him insight. This is Hubbard's writing. The entire function of man is to survive. The outermost limit of endeavor is creative work. Anything less is too close to simple survival until death happens along.

So I'm engaged in striving to maintain equilibrium sufficient to at least realize survival in a way to astound the gods. I turn the thing up so it's up to me to survive in a big way, foolishly perhaps, but determine nonetheless. I have high hopes for smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all books are destroyed. That goal is the real goal as far as I am concerned. So.

Wow. Honestly, he kind of accomplished his goal. He sure did. No, no. This is part of why it's hard to hate him. This is a man who set a goal to smash his name into history and did it in a really shitty, scary way. But not a failure.

I live near L. Ron Hubbard Lane or whatever it is. It's a street in Los Angeles. The building we're in, we'll probably do the video later in it, but the giant church of Scientology building is right off of our balcony and stuff. He definitely smashed his name into history and that was his goal at age 27 in 1938. So there you go. In the late 1930s, L. Ron Hubbard bought a boat and convinced the Explorers Club to let him carry their flag on a radio-experimental expedition with his wife.

The journey did achieve some useful scientific ends and did help better map the route up to Alaska. So that's nice. Ron's aunt, Marnie, suspected the trip was mainly an excuse for him to convince various companies to outfit his boat for free because he would write to all of them saying, I'm going to do this expedition, you need to send me free shit. Which is smart and he got a lot of free shit. His boat did break down in Alaska and he spent most of the trip hanging out at a radio station

in a small town in Alaska, lying about fighting German saboteurs and grizzly bears and stuff. So again, still spent most of his time lying, but did achieve some minor scientific goals here. You got to commend him for that. But his second expedition worked a lot better than his first. That's hard to argue with. L. Ron Hubbard did serve his country in World War II. The exact extent of his service is somewhat open for debate.

The official Church of Scientology line is that he was commissioned before the war and was present in the Philippines when Japan invaded. He was the first American casualty in the Far East, flown home in the secretary of the Navy's own airplane. He served in five different theaters of the war and received 22 medals. Okay. You're going to guess how much of that's true? I would say maybe five percent.

None of it. None of it. Well, no. He did enlist before the war. Okay. But that's the only thing that's true. That's it. He didn't see any combat.

He was supposed to have been in the Philippines and if he had actually been sent there, he might have wound up fighting the Japanese in the Philippines, which would have been a hell of a thing. But while he was on his way to Manila, his commanding officers decided they hated him so much that they sent him home. Amazing. Here's his personnel file. This officer is not satisfactory for independent duty assignment.

He is garrulous and tries to give impressions of his importance. He also seems to think he has unusual ability in most lines. These characteristics indicate that he will require close supervision for satisfactory performance of any intelligence duty. So he's just going around telling us stupid stories to anyone who will listen and just like, get this fucking guy out of this situation. And then he's lying to actual military intelligence people and they're like, no, get this guy. We don't want this guy anywhere near a fight.

Just like, get him the fuck away. Good on them. It's the military. That said, he was better at tricking other people in the military. What he should have done if he did see combat is just give his book Excalibur to all the enemies and then they would just kill themselves. Just airdrop Excalibur. We could have used that instead of the nukes.

Just drop those over Japan and in the war. We could have just given one to Hitler. Damn it, Elrond. Damn it. Your gift. So after this, he was sent back to a training center in Georgetown, Maine, where he lied and told everyone that he had served extensively on destroyers. His instructors believed him and he became the classroom source for information on destroyer

piloting, even though he had never been in one. He just lied about it. Eventually Lieutenant Hubbard talked his way into command of an anti-submarine boat, a Corvette, the USS PC-815. Wait, talked his way into the command of it? Yeah, a little boat, like a PT boat, like a little bitty boat meant to hunt submarines of like, I don't know, like eight or nine guys on it, but he did talk his way into getting a boat.

Wow. He loves boats. He really loves boats. He really loves, not good with them, really bad with them actually, but he loves boats. The Church of Scientology essentially put out fake military paperwork about Elrond Hubbard's service and then journalists went to the actual military, which confirmed like, no, there's no evidence of him doing any of this, but according to the Church of Scientology's fake military documents.

For part of the war, Mr. Hubbard was in command of a squadron of Corvettes. In 1943, the vessel under his direct command, PC-815, was engaged in an action which resulted in the sinking of one Japanese submarine and the disabling of another. This incident, which took place off the coast of Oregon, was described by Mr. Hubbard in a report that he sent to the commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet. Sounds really impressive. Taken out two Japanese subs. Pretty cool.

Pretty significant contribution to the war effort. Protecting Oregon? Oregon's great, except for all the racists. So shit, that racist line really threw me off for a second. We're going to talk about what actually happened in Elrond Hubbard's epic naval battle with what may have been Japanese submarines, but almost certainly was something a lot less interesting. Probably not.

We're going to talk about that in a while. But first, Caitlin, do you love products? You know what? I love this product that you're about to hear about. Let's listen to it. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And not on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. In Alphabet Boys, on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus. It's all made up. Head to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back. We're talking about Elron Hubbard and his epic naval battle with a pair of Japanese submarines. So basically what Hubbard claims is that while they were sailing out from Oregon, there had been a Japanese bombing raid on Oregon, I think it was like a balloon or something that had bombs attached to it. They did attack a place on the Oregon coast near this time. So everybody was freaked out and paranoid. And Hubbard was sailing down from Oregon and essentially thought that he had sighted a

submarine and started dropping depth charges on it and called in other boats for backup. And for two days, Elron Hubbard and five ships were just bombing the shit out of what he said was Japanese submarines. Nobody else actually dropped any bombs because they didn't find anything. They were just sailing around while Elron Hubbard bombed the ocean at random. And it's probably just like a family on a yacht and he's like, the enemy. It's even sadder than that. So the Navy had Admiral Frank Fletcher, who was the operational commander during the Battle

of Midway, like a very serious admiral dude, investigate the so-called action in which Hubbard had taken out two submarines because Hubbard, when he got back to base, claimed that he'd destroyed one submarine and wounded another most likely. Actual research found out that what had happened is there was just a magnetic iron ore deposit on the seafloor that had fooled with his instruments, and he'd spent two days and dropped more than a hundred depth charges on a lump of metal. Oh my gosh. Oh, Lieutenant Hubbard was furious when his commanders wouldn't recognize the heroism

he displayed in recklessly bombing the ocean. Now this was not a great move for his career. The Navy doesn't like it when you bomb the ocean. I thought you would think as a prospector, he would understand a deposit of metal. If he was a real prospector, yeah. So the good news is that he had an opportunity to redeem himself a couple of weeks later when he recklessly shelled an uninhabited Mexican island and then ordered his men to fire their weapons into the water around the island.

Officially, he says this was an unapproved gunnery training exercise. Mexico said it was an American boat firing wildly on Mexican land, so they weren't happy with this. So Hubbard lost his boat as a result of attacking Mexico. But he loves boats. He loves boats. The admiral who looked over this and reassigned him, rated him as below average and said that he should be put on a large boat where he could be properly supervised.

So for the rest of the war, he would spend more time in naval hospitals than serving on ships. While he would claim to Robert Heinlein and his other writer friends that he had been sunk four times and wounded repeatedly, there's no evidence that he ever suffered any service-related injuries. He did come down with a duodenal ulcer during his time in the military, but that's about it. Nothing as a result of combat.

What is that? Just an ulcer in your guts. So after the war, Elron Hubbard would spend most of his time lying about several unverifiable service-related injuries to the VA in order to get more disability benefits. He spent years doing this. This was most of his writing in the first two years after the war was lying to the VA about the extent of his injuries to try to get more money out of them. 20,000 words a day.

Please. Give me money. He did eventually get a 40% disability payment, but it was for nonsense. So right around this time, he abandoned his wife to hang out in a black magic sex mansion in Pasadena. Wait. What do you mean? That's weird to you?

Okay. That was just a lot of information. It is. Okay. You'd expect it to be more interesting than it really was. He abandoned his wife to hang out in a black magic sex cult? Sex mansion. Sex mansion.

There's this guy named Jack Parsons who was, you've heard of Alistair Crowley? No. Okay. Alistair Crowley was like a philema, this like black magic sort of thing. He was a magic guy. Okay. He wrote a bunch about it. He was very prominent in that industry and like one of his industry is the wrong word,

but whatever. The magic industry. The magic industry. One of his acolytes was a guy named Jack Parsons who was like a rich kid who owned a mansion in Pasadena. Oh, okay. They'd touch briefly on this and go in clear as you think. It's weird and murky.

I don't think Hubbard ever believed much of it, but Hubbard wanted to fuck the ladies that Jack Parsons had around him because Jack was like, they had a polyamorous thing going on because it was like, we're beyond all this. The constraints. The monogamy. Hubbard just went in there to like steal his girlfriend basically and stole $20,000 from him. Jack Parsons to invest in a yacht company and then just bought a yacht for himself and

the girlfriend. I got with the boat. Got to move away. So he lived on a yacht for a while until he had to sell it. Yeah. The whole black magic sex mansion thing isn't as interesting as it ought to be. They did try to summon the antichrist. Okay.

Yeah. But it was kind of boring, to be honest. A bummer. Yeah. Yeah. You would have hoped for more of a tale there. But I think it's all nonsense. So on August 10th, 1946, he married the woman that he had taken away from this black magic

sex mansion, the 21-year-old Sarah Northrup. He married her 30 miles away from where he'd married his first wife, Pauly, 13 years ago. He was still technically married to Pauly. So this was big of me. But he's not like actively living with both of them. He's just, he never divorced the first wife. No. He never told his first wife what he had.

He just, he just ran away. She had no idea where he was. I mean, well, good. He abandoned their kids too. They had like two kids. Oh, that's horrible. Yeah. He just abandoned his kids and his family, stole a guy's money to buy a yacht and then married

someone. 21-year-old. They really dodged a bullet, that first family of his. They did. You get the feeling she's angry that he's a creep. You don't get the feeling they feel like they missed out on not having Elron Hubbard around. During this time, after he wed Sarah, Hubbard started selling more stories, again, got back

into writing pulp fiction. He sold several stories to an editor named Sam Merwin who said of him, quote, I found him a very amusing guy and bought several stories from him. He was really quite a character. I always knew he was exceedingly anxious to hit big money. He used to say he thought the best way to do it would be to start a cult. This is like 1946, the first time when Hubbard starts putting out feelers that he wants to start his own religion.

He's like, boats, cult though. Yeah, cults. Moving up from boats to cults. That's where the money is. He eventually moves up to boat cult. Right, the whole seawork thing. The whole journey, yeah. On April 14th, 1947, Ron's first wife, Polly, filed for divorce on the grounds that her

husband had abandoned her and their children. Seems pretty fair. Very reasonable. She had no idea who he was living with. She had no idea he was already married to somebody else, but that changed three weeks later when Ron moved into the home he'd once occupied with his first wife, with his second wife. His family was furious about this because his mom and dad had been taking care of his

first wife and their kids and putting them up, so they're really angry about this. This is kind of when his aunt Marnie soured on him. Well, we loved him as a child, but he's a perfect stranger to us now. Okay. I'm glad they realized that. Yeah, he seems to have changed. In late 1947, Elron Hubbard met the man who would become his lifelong literary agent, Forrest Ackerman.

After their first meeting, Hubbard drove Forrest home and told him a long and insane story about how he died on the operating table and visited heaven. He would claim a number of times in his life to have visited heaven. He once claimed to have visited heaven six or seven million years apart. He had multiple lives. Here's how Forrest recalled Elron Hubbard driving him home telling him about his, yeah. I remember he had an old rattled trap of a car and he was chewing tobacco. As he drove, he would open the door with one hand and squirt tobacco juice out onto the

road. When we got to my apartment, we'd sat outside in the car while he continued with the story. It was after five o'clock in the morning and the sun was coming up before he had finished. Wow. Okay. And then he was like, better represent this guy as his literary agent. I think he was like, this is a motherfucker who can tell a story. Yeah.

I think he made a lot of money off of him. So Hubbard told Ackerman about Excalibur, his suicide inducing visionary, philosophy novel. I almost forgot. Yeah. Almost forgot. Don't worry. He never did.

He claimed he had been rejected by publishers. Quote. He was told it was too radical, too much of a quantum leap. If it had been a variation of Freud or Jung or Odler, a bit of an improvement here or there, it would have been acceptable, but it was just too far ahead of everything else. He also said that as he shot the manuscript around, the people who read it either went insane or committed suicide. The last time he showed it to a publisher, he was sitting in an office waiting for a

reader to give his opinion. The reader walked into the office, tossed the manuscript on the desk, and then threw himself out the window. Ron would not tell me much about Excalibur, except that if you read it, you would find all fear would be totally drained from you. I could never see what was wrong with that or why it would cause anyone to commit suicide. Right. Yeah.

Also, that's just going to be my excuse as a failed screenwriter. I'm just going to like, well, my screenplays are really good and they just get rejected because people die. Yeah. Okay. Hubbard continued to sell sci-fi short stories during this period, making just enough money to stay alive, but not quite enough to live comfortably or stay in one place with his new wife.

His most successful series was the Old Doc Methuselah Adventures. These are futuristic tales about a space-traveling physician-adventurer with an alien sidekick slave who cries whenever the doctor tries to free him. It does seem like he might have been an influence to Doctor Who, but I don't know that, but it was about like an immortal doctor traveling through the universe solving mysteries and stuff. Yeah, with a slave. Yeah.

It may have been. It was pretty popular. Elron wasn't exactly a genius, but he was probably one of the 10 most notable names in science fiction at this time. At some point, he earned the attention of John W. Campbell, who is a very famous editor. Some people call him the father of science fiction. Mary Shelley's probably the mother and founder of the discipline, but he was the editor of astounding science fiction.

Most of the greats of the sci-fi golden age worked with him, and he was apparently a really, really, really good editor. And he liked Elron Hubbard, but his work with Ron would be something outside of the sci-fi genre. See, Hubbard at this time decided that he didn't want to keep writing short stories and time-storn novels. He wanted the respect he thought he was entitled as a philosopher. So in January of 1949, Elron Hubbard wrote a letter to his agent and promised him a book

on philosophy. Here's how bare-faced Messiah summed it up. Ron promised that among the handy household hints contained in the book was information on how to, quote, rape women without their knowing, communicate suicide messages to your enemies as they sleep, sell the arroyo secco parkway to the mayor for cash, and evolve the best way of protecting or destroying communism. He had not decided, he added casually, whether to destroy the catholic church or merely start a new one.

There's a lot in that paragraph. How do you even start to unpack that? Some of that is like, 1949, people would be like, oh yeah, teach guys how to rape, sure. It's the 40s. Everyone was terrible. It was just a garbage year. But yeah, buckle up. Not get more pro-women.

Actually, I'll say this for Elron Hubbard. I kept expecting him to be a rapist. I have no evidence that he was a rapist. No accusations or anything like that, which you really expect with these guys. Really do, especially if he's taking that sort of stance. Especially if he's taking that sort of stance. Also, society's understanding of what rape was back then was a bit different. After that year, rumors began to spread in the science fiction community that Elron Hubbard

was up to something new. He was planning to reveal a new science of the mind, something that didn't seem as odd to people then as it does to us now. Science fiction had already developed an uncanny reputation for predicting the future. Science fiction writers had been the ones who sort of called nuclear bombs and stuff. That had been predicted. So had space travel and everything by science fiction writers. So there was a real belief in the community that something brilliant was going to be born

out of all this fiction. So they were ready for a sci-fi author to create a new science. That didn't seem crazy to people. Nowadays, someone's like, you hear about this new science fiction writer who's launching a science? Okay. That's not where you do it. That December of 1949, John Campbell published an editorial in the December issue of Astounding

Science Fiction. He revealed the imminent release of Elron Hubbard's new science, Dianetics. Quote from John Campbell. Its power is almost unbelievable. It proves the mind not only can but does rule the body completely, following the sharply defined basic laws set forth, physical ills such as ulcers, asthma, and arthritis can be cured as can all other psychosomatic ills. So John Campbell was a believer because Elron Hubbard had already used his revolutionary

new science to cure the editor's chronic sinusitis. Most of the work of Dianetics revolved around sitting down with an auditor and remembering old traumatic incidents from one's past. Campbell believed Hubbard had taken him back to the moment of his birth, which somehow fixed his nose. He believed it. In mid-1950, before the publication of his book on Dianetics, Elron Hubbard attended the last meeting of his life as a simple science fiction writer.

It was a convention in Newark, a sort of prototype for Comic-Con-like events of today. During the meeting, Hubbard is reported to have said, Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start his own religion. In April of 1950, Campbell teased that, coming in June, a 16,000-word article on Dianetics would be in the magazine, titled Dianetics, An Introduction to a New Science. In his hype article, Campbell related the story of an amputee veteran who Hubbard had saved.

Basically, he claimed that this guy had been hit by a mortar shell, and while the medics were coming through afterwards, they were like, this guy's hopeless, he's better off dead anyway. And then he wound up surviving, but he wanted to kill himself because the- Because he had read Excalibur? No, no, because the memory of these medics saying that he was better off dead had gotten lodged in his brain. And that was what Dianetics was all about, his bad memories get mis-filed in your brain

and you have to go through with this auditing therapy and refile them, basically. So Hubbard and Campbell succeeded in wangling support from an actual medical doctor for their science. You gotta remember, 1949, science isn't- it's pretty rudimentary. It's not an exact science. It's not an exact science. There's a lot of nonsense going on in science. And so this guy, Dr. Winter, sits in on several auditing sessions because they would run

auditing sessions on just sci-fi fans that Campbell brought in. So they were just performing quasi-psychiatry on strangers who walked in off the street and just liked reading science fiction. But yeah, eventually Dr. Winter agreed to go through a session himself and found it really compelling. He added that in the other patients he'd observed, the changes were obvious and people seemed to be cheerful and relaxed and feel better after they got out of a Dianetic session. So he figured maybe there's something to this, like this seems like it might be a real science.

It really seems like what was going on is, you know, psychotherapy was pretty new as a discipline at this point. And Dianetics was just sort of repackaging psychotherapy with different names. But like, there's a benefit in sitting down with your friends and talking about- Your feelings? Or someone and talking about your feelings. Yeah. And that's what he was doing.

So that's what people found benefit with, just like 1949. People didn't talk about their feelings. Men didn't talk about their feelings. So there was a benefit to this. It wasn't Hubbard's genius, it was just the benefit of sitting down and talking about your feelings. Dr. Winter actually tried to publish an article on Hubbard's methods, but the Journal of the AMA and the American Journal of Psychiatry both rejected his papers.

They said that he and Hubbard had neglected to provide any clinical evidence that their techniques worked. In fact, it seemed that they were just ripping off the basic techniques of psychotherapy, giving everything new names and making up wild claims about repressed memories. Many sci-fi fans, though, were interested in this new science being launched via fandom. Although several fans wrote to Campbell to complain that all he wrote about now was Dianetics, for the most part, people seemed really excited. Azek Azimov, though, did read an early copy of the Dianetics article and proclaimed it

gibberish. So not everybody was on board. In May of 1950, the science of Dianetics was released in the form most befitting a serious new scientific discipline, a science fiction fantasy pulp fiction magazine. Here's the cover of the issue where Dianetics was announced. Okay. You want to describe the cover of that astounding science fiction magazine with the new science being launched in it?

This man appears to have hair all over his body. It's drawing of like an alien. Yeah, it's like a very aggro looking man with fur. He appears to be wearing like a mask over his eyes, his cat-like eyes. He is crossing his arms. He's very angry about something. And yeah, he looks like a creature slash alien slash werewolf man. In most of the magazine that week was just a bunch of random science fiction stories.

This was from The Helping Hand, I guess. It's about some alien coming to Earth to help Earth or whatever. The article that launched Dianetics was also in this magazine. In the article, Hubbard explained that the brain was basically like a computer. And like a computer, it has the potential to operate with perfect recall and recollection. Mental illness was caused by memories that had essentially gotten misfiled in the brain. So if you could refile everything, you can make brains function perfectly and you'd remember everything and just human beings could be perfected by this new mental science

that Elron Hubbard had essentially developed. So yeah, he called these memories that got misfiled ingrams. And so like if a child got bitten by a dog when he was two, she might not remember getting bitten by the dog. But the ingram would be stuck in her and it could be stimulated by sights and sounds that were similar to what had been going on around her when the dog bit her and that could cause distress. The purpose of Dianetic Theory was essentially to gain access to the ingrams and what he

called the reactive memory banks of the mind and refile them in the analytical part of the mind. So you wouldn't react to them illogically. So that was how he justified the science behind Dianetics. Sounds like nonsense, because it is nonsense. Now Hubbard claimed that if the earliest ingrams in the brain, which usually happened around childbirth, could be located and refiled, a person's analytical mind would reach new heights of productivity and success.

Individuals who cleared their earliest ingrams would be called clear, and they would have perfect memory recall and a total immunity from all psychological illnesses, and many physical ones too. In May of 1950, Dianetics, the modern science of mental health, reached bookstores across the nation. Its publisher, Hermitage House, only printed 6,000 copies for its first run. They were not expecting a major success. The book was a guide for how to carry out auditing sessions, as described by Hubbard

and Campbell in The Reader's Own Home. Hubbard was basically providing a dressed up guide for people to perform unlicensed psychotherapy on their friends and family. Very safe. Yeah, Dianetics, the book was a profoundly anti-woman terrorist greed. How cute. I thought Elron was a feminist icon. Feminist icon Elron Hubbard claimed that attempted abortions were the single most common cause

of pre-birth in grams. Quote, a large proportion of allegedly feeble minded children are actually attempted abortion cases. Many in billions America spends yearly on institutions for the insane and jails for criminals are spent primarily because of attempted abortions done by some sex-blocked mother to whom children are accursed, not a blessing of God. All these things are scientific facts. Tested and rechecked and tested again.

So he's like a pro-life, pro-rape, again feminist icon. Feminist icon. Yeah. He believed that other ingrams came from abusive husbands. For example, if a husband beat his pregnant wife and yelled, take it, take it, I tell you you've got to take it, the child might interpret those words literally and become a thief because take it. This is Elron Hubbard.

He thought a pregnant woman suffering from constipation might sit on the toilet and be in horrible pain and go, oh, this is hell. I'm all jammed up inside. I feel so stuffy. I can't think. This is too terrible to be born. And so the child would think that they were so terrible they didn't deserve to be born because their mom couldn't poop.

That's such a specific thing for him to write to speculate as to what a woman would say also. Okay. Yeah. That's great. Really interesting. He thought a lot of prenatal ingrams and in fact the worst prenatal ingrams were caused by women cheating on their husbands because he assumed that a woman cheating on her husband

would talk shit about her husband to her lover and that the fetus developing would hear this and since many kids had the same names as their fathers, he would think that his mom was talking about him. Wow. It's weird, right? I don't know how fetuses understand language perfectly. That's what they're most famous for, fetuses, their language skills. Many of these ideas are still present in Scientology today.

For example, about a second worth of Googling brought me to a Scientology parent website and a page on that website titled, Why Silent Birth? It quotes Elron Hubbard, a woman who wants her child to have the best possible chance will find a doctor who will agree to keep quiet, especially during the delivery and who will insist upon silence being maintained in the hospital delivery room as far as is humanly possible, because of course any yelling during a birth would give the child an ingrams. Right, like if the doctor is like, come on now, push the fetus, the baby is going to be like, oh, I'm supposed to push people down.

Yeah, exactly. It'll just be a shoving monster and that's why our streets are filled with shovers, serial shovers. I'm shoving people every day because I was given birth too. ABS always be shoving. Scheming and shoving. Scheming and shoving, both important. Dianetics was not an instant success, but within the first couple of weeks of publication

it spread very widely, enough to earn bestseller status and provoke its first negative press. The New York Times wrote bad stuff about it. A reviewer from New Republic savaged it and basically claimed it was nonsense. Whatever makes sense in his discoveries does not belong to him and his own theory appears to this reviewer as a paranoic system which would be of interest as part of a case history, but which seems quite dangerous when offered for mass consumption as a therapeutic technique. Probably fair. Yeah, all the experts were like, this is a bad idea.

The reviewer also noted that in addition to being able to cure psychosomatic illness, Hubbard claimed Dianetics could treat cancer and diabetes. The experts of course cried out that this was dangerous nonsense, but no one listened. Hubbard sold 55,000 copies in the first two months after release. He was finally rich. So in 39 short years, Elrun Hubbard had gone from a fake blood brother of the Blackfoot Indian tribe to a fake war hero, real trash novelist, and had now ascended to the lofty heights of a pop psychiatry guru.

Dianetics was officially a fad, but Hubbard had a plan to keep this fad going long past its rational expiration date. And that is what we're going to get into in part two. Woo. Yeah. We haven't even gotten to the establishment of Scientology yet. I know. I know.

Or the establishment of his boat cult. Oh, I love a good boat cult. So much more to get into. Caitlin Durante, you want to plug your plugables? I would simply love to. You can listen to my podcast, The Bechtel Cast at How Stuff Works. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Bechtel Cast. And you can follow me on those places as well at Caitlin Durante.

And you can find me on Twitter at I Write Okay. You can find this podcast on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com. We'll have pictures of that wonderful issue of the stabbing science. And yeah, check us out on Instagram, Twitter at At Bastards Pod. You can buy our t-shirts on t-public behind the bastards. So go do that. Wash your brains off. Come back tomorrow and hear another hour or so about Elrun Hubbard being a fucking

nut bar. It's going to be great. Love it. See you then. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space, with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier

story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space, with no country to bring him down. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.