Behind the Bastards - Part Two: L. Ron Hubbard: The Greatest Con-Man In History

Episode Date: October 24, 2018

In Part Two of our Three Part Series on L. Ron Hubbard, Robert is joined again by Caitlin Durante (The Bechdel Cast) to discuss how L. Ron Hubbard lived the life of Indiana Jones, mixed with Steve Zizou, as well as mixed with the Prophet Mohammed.  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. But we are recording them all in one terrible marathon. One fell swoop. So you're at us in the point, if this were an actual marathon, this is about mile five. Where you're starting to feel good, you've hit a stride, you're happy with the progress.

But midway through this is when we're going to hit our wall and it's just going to break us both as human beings and as creative artists. So that should be really exciting for all you people. And then the third episode, we won't even be human beings, we'll just be shattered remnants of souls hanging on to meat coffins. Ingrams. Ingrams. Ingrams in meat packing. Anyway, you ready? I'm so ready.

Let's do this. So people regularly message me on Twitter to suggest new candidates for episodes of this podcast. Sometimes their suggestions are spot on and I do appreciate them, but I get a lot of people who will suggest shitty people like Ben Shapiro or Rand Paul or Brett Kavanaugh. And I'm not going to do an episode on any of these people because while they're shitty, they're all kind of lame. Like they're not interesting in a bad way. We all know the ways in which they're bad. Like Brett Kavanaugh, everybody thinks he's bad, understands everything about him as a shitty person that's public knowledge. I like to cover people who are shitty and exceptional and that's why I picked Elron Hubbard this week.

Because I really do think, we talked about this a little in the first episode, I think he may be the greatest con man who ever lived. So today is a story about, we ended the last episode with the establishment of Dianetics as a science is kind of how he built it. You can think of like anyone, Jordan Peterson. He's like that sort of guy where he, you know, normally a guy like that gets six months a year of prominence or so, right? Where everybody loves their new pop philosophy book. And then we just sort of shovel them into the coal fire of our culture and forget about them and move on another year someone else will come up. And we'll all be obsessed with that for a little while. Elron Hubbard avoided letting that happen to him.

And this episode is the story of how, of how he fought against falling into obscurity. Okay, so I'm going to take notes during this episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you want to become a guru and then transmit that guru-ness into starting your own world religion, this is the first class you've got to take on that. Because Elron Hubbard is the master. Yep. Whoa, that's why that movie is called The Master. I just got it.

The Master is literally about. Okay, so within two months of publishing Dianetics, more than 500 different Dianetics groups had started across the United States. Elron Hubbard began offering classes in Dianetics that were like $250, $500 apiece and holding, you know, conferences. He established different centers in different states and whatnot, foundations he called them, and the money started pouring in. Hubbard's work developed a rapid fan base who blanketed newspapers with angry letters when they provided critical commentary. It was sort of like an early example of what now happens every time anyone insults anybody popular. Yes. Like the first edition of the Elon Musk's Internet Hate Mob was Elron Hubbard's fans of Dianetics sending angry letters to the New York Times.

One of the heads of Hubbard's Troll Brigade was a political science professor from Massachusetts named Frederick Schumann. In one letter to the New York Times, he wrote, history has become a race between Dianetics and catastrophe. Dianetics will win if enough people are challenged in time to understand it. Now, the reason that people thought this was so important was because Elron Hubbard had claimed that Dianetics was not just a path to personal betterment. It was a way to cure people of mental illness, of psychopathy, but also it was a way to, if everyone did Dianetics, if everybody became clear, Hubbard said, there'd be no more war. And this was again, you're talking about 1950, the specter of nuclear extermination has just arisen for the first time. So people are freaked out that like, we're going to murder the whole species, which we probably will at some point. Hubbard is claiming with Dianetics we can denuclearize the world, we can all live in peace.

This is what will save humanity from the darkness of the Cold War. And America ate it up for the first time in his life. Elron Hubbard became the focus of national attention, which is clearly what he'd wanted his entire life. So suddenly he was being interviewed by a lot of journalists and newsmen and of course they asked him about his childhood and his background. And this is when he was telling all of them about, I was a blood brother of the Blackfoot tribe, flew across the country, found gold. I went, I was a pirate to the Caribbean. What's your life? If you were to write like a Twitter post tomorrow that becomes the Bible of the world six months later for some crazy piece of internet alchemy. Suddenly, suddenly everybody's talking to Caitlyn Durrani and wants to know like, would you grow up?

What's the lie you choose to tell? Oh, I mean, I'm just such an honest person that I can't even make up a lie. So you're never going to have your own religion with that attitude? No, I know. I think the closest thing I would would be that I'm from Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the home of the groundhog, of course. That's a lame lie. I know. But the truth is that I'm from a town about 20 miles away, but it's just easier to say, yeah, I'm from Punxsutawney.

That's not even a lie. I know. That's like growing up in Mesa and claiming you live in Phoenix. I know. You're just making it easy for somebody. I'm just so brutally honest that I can't even fathom lying. Let me tell you how I do it. Oh, please.

What my lie would be. So Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS, probably dead, right? So I would just lie and say I killed him because I was over in Iraq around that time. So there's a kernel of truth. It's easy enough to make up the rest of the lie. Sure. And nobody who doesn't fact check is going to. That would be my lie.

Okay, that's a good one. If the internet wasn't here, it would be easier. The internet exists would be easy to prove it wrong. But if there's like 1950, I could probably lie and make people believe that. It's so hard to fact check in pre-internet. Yeah, everyone's just like, I guess he was a blood. I'm not going to ask a Blackfoot Indian about whether or not they have blood brothers. Talk to somebody who's not white.

No, sir. This is the New York Times. Right. Although in fairness to the New York Times, they were actually very critical of Hubbard. I just, I picked the name of the newspaper and I slandered the great lady. Let's get back to the story before I commit slander again. So Elron Hubbard started in addition to lying about his background, claiming that all of his years of work as a trashy sci-fi writer and his globetrotting adventures were all

research. You know, this was him studying human psychology and the human mind in order to develop his revolutionary new philosophy. All of his, you know, his travels, his adventures that were not real were him studying history and ancient cultures to figure out the kernels of truth. He told Parade Magazine that he'd had a child with his new wife, Sarah Hubbard, which was true. He claimed that the child was the world's first dianetics baby.

He claimed to have protected her from noise and even parental conversations in order to keep her from developing any ingrams. Oh no. He said she'd started talking at three months and crawling at four months. Oh no. Oh, it's going to get terrible. Oh, it's going to get neglected as baby by like not talking to it or by the attention to it.

Well, if I know anything about babies, it's that they thrive when isolated and neglected. Yes. I think that everyone says that about babies. Definitely, yeah. Yeah, that's why most cradles are just dark rooms in the basement. That's how you raise a kid. Just a few months after the debut of Dianetics onto the world stage, Elron Hubbard introduced Sonya Bianca as the world's first clear.

He claimed that she had quote, full and perfect recall of every moment of her life and then brought her out in front of an audience to prove it. Unfortunately, Sonya was just a 21-year-old physics major who did not have perfect recall of her entire life. No kidding. So the audience immediately started asking her stuff like, what did you have for breakfast on October 3rd, 1942? What's on page 122 of Dianetics?

And she couldn't answer any of this stuff. Yeah. At least get like an improv actor to be like, oh yeah, I had that omelet. Someone to lie, right? Yeah. At one point, Hubbard turned his back and someone asked her what color his tie was and she couldn't even answer that. Oh.

So it's, this is like, it's a debacle, this first attempt to reveal a clear. But it teaches Hubbard a powerful lesson, which is never ever put yourself in a position where people can prove you're wrong. If you're gonna hold events and stuff, you gotta stage manage that shit so that it goes exactly the way you want. Yeah. He would be more careful in the future. He did come up with insane Dianetics logic to justify why she hadn't been able to perfectly

recall everything. He said that when he'd called her up and asked her to come out now, the word now had frozen her in present time and temporarily interrupted her perfect memory. Oh, wow. That makes sense to me. The mental gymnastics. I'm back on board. So the whole event was a debacle, but it hardly put a dent in the progress of Dianetics.

In less than a year, the new science had made enough money to buy a four and a half million-dollar mansion in Los Angeles so Hubbard could manage his new operation in style. It was the old California governor's mansion, which is weird because the capital's not in Los Angeles. I don't know why we had a governor's mansion in LA, but he bought it. All that money attracted attention from the government and from the media. They were from this point on kind of regular looks into him from the FBI and stuff just because like he's making a lot of money.

He's not paying taxes on a lot of it. He's being very shady with it. He worked with him at this time. She was a PR assistant for Mr. Hubbard. She later noted in interviews that, quote, he was having a lot of political and organizational problems with people grabbing for power. He didn't trust anyone and he was highly paranoid. He thought the CIA had hit men after him.

We'd be walking along the street and I would ask, why are you walking so fast? He would look over his shoulder and say, you don't know what it's like to be a target. No one was after him. It was all delusion. Good. Barbara would go on to have an affair with Hubbard, who'd since lost interest in his second wife, Sarah. The two worked closely together and often traveled together so the great leader could

administer the far-flung chunks of his burgeoning new empire. At one point, he leased an apartment at the Chateau-Mormon for them to share. In order to reassure Barbara of their relationship, Ron walked her through the apartment and said, this is your closet. This is your dressing table. This is your toothbrush. Two days later, she found all of her possessions that she'd left in the apartment on a bag at her desk.

Ron Hubbard's wife, Sarah, and their baby had moved to Los Angeles and Hubbard had put them up in the apartment. That was off of Barbara. Later in the day, he apologized to her, called his wife a bitch, and said, I miss you. Then he asked her to have dinner with him and his wife that night. Wait. With his wife present. Yeah, yeah.

He wanted to have dinner with him so she wouldn't think that he was having an affair with Barbara. Okay. All right. I understand. In her interviews with Russell Miller, Barbara admitted that she felt almost uncontrollably drawn towards Elron Hubbard because she would get pissed him a lot for being a creep. But quote, I was completely infatuated. I remember I said to my roommate, we had a small apartment in Beverly Hills.

If I ever tell you I am marrying this guy, I want you to tie me up and not let me out the door because he's a lunatic. But I didn't trust myself not to do it because I was so enchanted by him. Being with him was like watching a fascinating character playing a role on a stage. I was never bored with him. He was a magical, delightful man, a great raconteur, very bright and amusing, and a very gentle, patient and sweet lover. Oh, so he has learned to fuck.

Yeah, she says he's learned to fuck and she clearly recognizes he's a nut, so she has no reason to lie about this. I'm going to guess he learned how to fuck. Good on him. So everyone, good news. Elron Hubbard learned to fuck. That's a t-shirt. That's a t-shirt.

Someone do some art for our Elron Hubbard learned to fuck shirt so we can get really sued by the Church of Scientology, like ludicrously sued. Elron Hubbard condoms, maybe? Elron Hubbard dental dam. That's the one. Oh, wow, yeah. He was a gentle lover. That's what dental dam says.

Here's Barbara again. At the time, I recognized early on that he was also deeply disturbed. Some of the things he told me were really bizarre, but I never knew what to believe. He said his mother was a lesbian and that he had found her in bed with another woman and that he had been born as the result of an attempted abortion. He talked a lot about his grandfather who could really hold his liquor and played a fiddle with the head of a Negro carved on the end. But he never talked about his father and never once mentioned he had children.

I did not know he had a son until I read it in the newspapers years later. There's a lot in that paragraph too. Wait, also wasn't the fiddle a guitar? I think it was a guitar. Okay. So he's just lying about his instruments too. He may have forgotten what kind of instrument with a weirdly racist carving his grandfather had. I don't know.

I'm going to give him a pass on that one. Sure. That's so close to the truth that it counts as honesty out of Elron Hubbard's mouth. Yes. I don't even know what to say about this. Part of what this makes me think is that maybe he did think that his mom had tried to abort him and heard no evidence of this. But he seems to be obsessed with the idea.

So maybe he thought that? I don't know. Well also he was, as we heard in part one, the beloved baby. Everyone loved him and the family. So what that? It does seem, and I think this will become clear, that he had a persecution complex. There's part of him that wanted to be hunted, that wanted the government after him. So he may have just had a really happy family life and wanted to invent this dark backstory for himself

because his real life was kind of boring. At one point, Barbara went with him to San Francisco and they attended a welcoming party at the house of a local dianeticist who adored Elron Hubbard. Barbara caught the great man in the kitchen making out with the host's wife. When they got back to the hotel, she refused to sleep with Hubbard and he shouted, They're all against me! By the winter of 1950, dianetics had grown way way too fast for its britches. Hubbard had established too many schools and too many places and they couldn't cover their own bills.

He'd also hired way too many people. Dr. Winter, the guy who'd helped make dianetics look legitimate, left the organization after several people developed psychoses during auditing. The other day, one attendee, turns out you can damage people by doing this. Have an untrained people try to do psychotherapy. It's a mixed bag! Well, this lesson learned. Well, they didn't learn any lessons.

This lesson flew way over everybody's head and still has. One attendee of a dianetic center in Elizabeth, New Jersey noted, People had breakdowns quite often, it was always hushed up before anyone found out about it and happened to a guy in my course, a chemical engineer. They wanted to get him out of the school and I volunteered to stay with him in an adjoining building. He never slept or ate and was in a terrible state. No one could do anything with him and in the end, they took him off to an asylum. Yeah! Yeah!

So Dr. Winter leaves and a number of people who had been backers of dianetics sort of step away after, because Hubbard just immediately goes to like crazy guru, like right away, because he'd been waiting for this his whole life. Which guy's Campbell again? Campbell's the editor, the science fiction editor, who was like a fan of his, yeah. When Dr. Winter left, Hubbard announced that the doctor had been engaged in a scheme to take over the foundation, rather than just him being like, nah, this isn't working out. So he can't take accountability for anything.

Oh good lord, no, no, no, Elron Hubbard take accountability for something? That is not the story we're reading, yeah. Cool! Sounds like this is gonna end really well. So problems with dianetics were compounded by Hubbard's problems at home. In 1951, his wife Sarah attempted suicide. Elron audited her afterwards and claimed to have recovered an ingram that told him his wife's suicide attempt had been caused by a phone call from Barbara about work-related business. Hubbard interrogated Barbara about this, and she actually wrote a record of the conversation in her diary.

And it's pretty fun. Oh. Me, Barbara. You make a habit of instilling ingrams too, don't you? That's fine, that's good behavior for the founder of dianetics, Hubbard. Isn't it exciting for you, being a pawn of such a grand chessboard? You are playing for the world, can you think of anything more exciting? Barbara, I don't give a good goddamn about the world, I want a single gratifying human relationship.

Yeah. Hubbard, you couldn't have one, you're an ambitious woman, you crave power, you're a Marie Antoinette, a Cleopatra, a Lucretia Borgia, you must have a Caesar or an Alexander. You get the idea. She told him he needed her more than she needed him, and he responded, In 1939, I was very much in love with the girl, she felt that way too, when I knew she had a boyfriend coming up, I waited on the stairway with a gun, just for a moment. Then I said, there, flies, I realized who and what I wasn't left, I told her I would leave her free to marry a Sharpie with a cigar in his mouth from Muncie, Indiana. Would you like to be left free? So, Hubbard, I don't understand that either, this is just how Elrond Hubbard responds to someone trying to break up with him, I guess.

I don't know, I could not find out what a Sharpie with a cigar in his mouth means as an insult. A permanent marker. I mean, I understand why Muncie, Indiana is an insult, and if there's any fans from Muncie, Indiana, let me know I've offended you. No, we do have a lot of Pittsburgh fans, and I'm going to give another shout out to Pittsburgh. It has no bearing on this story. Not too far from Punxsutawney, where I'm from. You're learning, you're hubbarding. So, this seems to have prompted Elrond Hubbard to fire Barbara and break off the affair temporarily, although he would try to re-engage it a couple of times.

His marriage, though, was already doomed at that point. His wife, Sarah, had begun to date a dianeticist named Miles Hollister, who she'd met when Hubbard had forced his mistress to go on a double date with him and his wife, and she brought Miles along, and his wife wound up with Miles. Wow. It's a messy tale. And Miles was apparently like a handsome, nice, intelligent guy, so Hubbard was obviously furious at all of this. It was around this point in 1951 when Elrond Hubbard decided to start drugging his followers. Based on nothing really, he came to the conclusion that a mix of benzodrine, which is a type of speed, insane doses of vitamins and glutamic acid would help make auditing more effective. He called this chemical mixture GUK.

According to his agent, you were supposed to take it every two hours for at least 24 hours, so it was like really crazy doses of speed and vitamins. And taking enough would allow you to release the ingrams within you without the need for an auditor. So that was Hubbard's claim. It didn't work out. Dianetics quickly abandoned this practice, but Elrond Hubbard never gave up on the idea of dosing people with absurd amounts of vitamins to gain unspecified benefits. You need your B12. You need it. You need too much B12.

In the late 70s, after Scientology was established, the church, he developed a variety of Scientology-focused rehab centers, Narcanon for drugs, Criminon for crimes, just to name two. One treatment method used in these programs was the Purification Rundown, or still is, which, yeah, is basically you sit in a sauna for days and take huge amounts of vitamins. Multiple people have died in these facilities for a variety of reasons. Oh, sure. One Oklahoma facility lost four patients in the space of three years. Yikes. Don't do that. Don't overdose on vitamins, guys.

Don't give people fatal doses of vitamins for no good reason. Yeah. But you know what you should take fatal doses of? That's not the right way to introduce ads. You know what you should take the right amount of is the ads that we have? I'm going to eat a Dorito. You guys can, by the way, the simply organic white cheddar Doritos. Really good.

Yeah. Really tasty. Here's some ads that paid us. 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. And 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 heaven.

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. Two death sentences and a life without parole. 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. 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.

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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back, and I just ate a couple of white cheddar organic Doritos. Delicious.

I'm not really focused on the organic thing normally. I can't imagine how organic would be different from normal Doritos, because it's all very processed, but it's good. Maybe it might just be that white cheddar is a flavor I like a lot, and these white cheddar Doritos are fucking fantastic. Yeah. Are those cool ranch? Are those white cheddar? Is that something different? It's cool ranch.

What do you mean? What do you mean is that something different? Well, there's got to be cheese involved in the look. We have three bags of Doritos on the table right now. They've given us zero dollars. We have three more bags than dollars we've gotten from the Doritos people. I should stop plugging them at this point. I'm now pushing three bags of Doritos towards Caitlin.

They're all right here in front of me. Uncomfortably so. You look uncomfortable. I'll explore these later. Explore is the right word for it. And you know who would have appreciated the adventurous taste of Doritos? Would it be Elron Hubbard? It would be.

Famed Explorer Elron Hubbard. This is not going to help our sponsorship. But we're off the rails now, fuck it. I'll unfuck it if I'll do a whole podcast on how Elron Hubbard would not have enjoyed the flavorful taste of Doritos if the Doritos people get in touch with us. Is that good? Okay, let's get back to this story. So when we last left Elron Hubbard, he'd broken things off with his wife and his mistress.

And yeah, it's 1951. He tried to drug his followers, but it hadn't worked very well. And later in 1951, the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiner started what would become a decades-long pattern of state and national agencies investigating Elron Hubbard's activities. They accused his facility in Elizabeth of teaching medicine without a license and they brought a suit against him. In response, Hubbard closed up shop because he knew he was going to lose any sort of legal battle because he was 100% teaching medicine without a license.

And they left New Jersey. Everything he owned was shoved into the back of a black limousine and they drove to Los Angeles. Oddly enough, Greg Hemingway, youngest son of Ernest Hemingway, was one of the Dianeticists who packed Elron Hubbard's stuff. Greg. Greg. Come on.

Greg Hemingway. Jeez. It's weird because Ernest Hemingway sounds like an author name. It just has that probably because of Ernest Hemingway, but it still has Greg. Right. As a father, you're really sabotaging your kid from following in your footsteps. At least go by Gregory. I mean, you need more than one syllable.

Even Gregory. I'd never read a book from a Gregory. That's such an untrustworthy name. No. I mean, I wouldn't. Yeah. Michael. There's a book name.

Oh, come on. That's just too generic. Sorry for all you Michaels out there. You want a generic first name and then an exciting last name. Like Michael Crichton. Michael Crichton. There you go. See?

Exactly. The most trustworthy writer in all of history. He didn't turn out to be crazy or anything. You know what? I'll forgive everything he did after Jurassic Park because of Jurassic Park. You and I are on the same page. But yeah, that was a not as bad of a scent as this cheesy sci-fi author, but pretty rough. In case you don't know, Michael Crichton spent his later years writing a whole book about

how global warming was a lie and also writing one of the critics who badly reviewed his books into one of his novels as a pedophile and describing the critics small penis. Oh, geez. Michael Crichton. Classy fella. Yep. Oh boy. Okay.

So the marriage of Elron Hubbard and Sarah Northrop fell apart as he was fleeing New Jersey. He knew that there was going to be a divorce and since he was now quite wealthy, there was a lot of money at stake in order to secure more favorable divorce terms. What do you think Elron Hubbard did in order to ensure that he would have the upper hand in the coming divorce battle? Well, he's not known for lying, so I don't imagine he did anything dishonest. So, I would guess that, you know, he just parted with half of his money in assets emicably. No.

Oh, shoot. Fun fact, he kidnapped his daughter Alexis and took her to Cuba. Yes, I remember this from going clear. Oh boy. Well, he didn't immediately take her to Cuba. First, he kidnapped her and paid a random nurse to take care of her for a month and then kidnapped his wife, once the baby was already taken care of. He and two of his followers kidnapped his wife, physically forced her into the vehicle.

According to Bearface Messiah, they grabbed her by each arm, one of them clamped a hand over her mouth and they bustled her out of the house across the sidewalk and into the back of the car, which drove off at speed. Sarah fought like a cat in the back of the car, screaming and shouting at Hubbard, who in turn was shouting at her. At one point, when the car stopped at traffic lights, she tried to leap out and thereafter Hubbard gripped her around the neck in a stranglehold while the argument continued. Oh.

Yeah. Okay, feminist icon. I'll run Hubbard. Kidnapped his wife. This is why I say it's shocking that I can't find any evidence of him being like a child molester. Right. Yeah.

Because it's like, he really seems like he probably would have been molesting some kids. Right. Oh boy. Okay. Like I said, still a piece of shit. Still a monster. So, once his wife was subdued in the back of the car, they drove to San Bernardino to try

and find a midnight doctor who would declare Sarah legally insane. Oh no. Unfortunately, and kind of shockingly, he couldn't find one. Oh. Okay. Which I think you probably would be able to find a doctor willing to do that in L.A. now. Yeah.

If you had L. Ron Hubbard money. Right. Apparently you couldn't back then. All right, that's encouraging. So, Kudos, 1950s San Bernardino psychiatrists. You get a clear pass from behind the bastards. Eventually, he promised to tell his wife where she could find their daughter if she signed a piece of paper claiming he hadn't abducted her just then.

Wow, this guy. I'm starting to like him. It's just so consistent. Yeah. Like it's just so shockingly, consistently terrible. I'll tell you where our kidnap daughter is. If you agree not to tell anyone that I just kidnapped you and strangled you. And strangled you.

And tried to declare you insane. I mean, I gotta say, 1951, strangling probably wouldn't have gotten him in a much trouble. Probably not. And it didn't. It sure didn't. He let her go after she signed the paper, but when she went to go find their baby, Hubbard had already had the child moved. In fact, he'd hired a couple who were against strangers to drive the baby across the country.

The baby's just an afterthought. And no point has he focused on this kid. It couldn't matter less to him. Sarah Hubbard filed a kidnapping complaint with the LAPD, but they assumed this was just a domestic dispute and decided not to get in the middle of things. So the LAPD hitting it out of the park in 1951. Good job. Yeah.

You guys don't get a pass. Psychiatrists of San Bernardino, cool with you. Fuck the LAPD in 1951. LAPD today, if you want to sponsor the show, we can talk about it. In the meantime, while Sarah was trying to file a kidnapping complaint, Elron Hubbard found a psychiatrist who was willing to diagnose him sane, which he had done just as sort of a precautionary measure. According to one of the men who helped him do all this, a dieneticist with the last name

of DeMille, quote, he and I first went to a psychiatrist who didn't like the smell of it. He obviously thought he was being manipulated, so we just paid him $10 and left. Then we went to a prominent diagnostic psychologist of that era who did some projective testing on Hubbard and produced an upbeat, harmless report, saying he was a creative individual upset by family problems and dissension, and it was depressing his work and so forth. It was very bland, but Hubbard was delighted with it. The main value of it to him was that it didn't say he was crazy, so he could claim he had

been given a clean bill of health by the psychiatric profession. Okay. Good. Next. Uh-huh. He called the FBI to claim that Miles Hollister, the man his wife was having an affair with, was a communist as well as armed and dangerous. He made several calls and reports to the FBI trying to get them to murder his wife's new

lover by claiming he was an armed and dangerous communist. Next, Elron Hubbard, DeMille and his baby flew to Havana, Cuba. Hubbard put the baby in the care of two Jamaican women as soon as they arrived, who were also strangers. Strangers? Yeah, strangers. Not with anybody who cares about it. No, no, no, no, no.

No. Elron Hubbard's not going to spend any time with his baby. Yeah, no, no, no. He spent the time in Cuba writing the draft of a sequel to his book on Dianetics and drinking huge quantities of rum. So he couldn't be taking care of a baby then. No, he's too busy. He had to drink for several weeks straight and write a terrible book.

Sarah did eventually file a writ with the LA Superior Court and the news picked up the exciting story that the founder of America's newest cult psychological fad whatever had abducted his own child. As a result, Elron Hubbard had to write in a letter to his estranged wife. So I'm going to read you that letter now. This is to Sarah. This is to Sarah. Okay.

Dear Sarah, I have been in a Cuban military hospital and I am being transferred to the United States next week as a classified scientist immune from interference of all kinds. Though I will be hospitalized probably a long time, Alexis is getting excellent care. I see her every day. She is all I have to live for. My wits never gave way under all you did and let them do, but my body didn't stand up. My right side is paralyzed and getting more so.

I hope my heart lasts. I may live a long time and again, I may not, but Dianetics will last 10,000 years for the army and Navy have it now. My will is all changed. Alexis will get a fortune unless she goes to you as she would then get nothing. Hope to see you once more. Goodbye. I love you, Ron.

More truth. Yeah. No, 100% honestly. Truth. Alexis is his daughter who he's not taking care of and instead drinking rum. Yes. He will deny is his child and tells her when she comes to him as an adult that she was the illegitimate child of his wife and I was going to ask about because he has kids from

his first marriage with Paula. Do you know anything about them? Oh, wow. Yeah. One of them nibs. I think was his nickname was with the coat for a while and then left changes last name to DeWolf. Oh, one hundred nephew, Jamie DeWolf does a lot of, I think he's like a motivational

speaker and stuff. And a number of his kids have become big anti-scientology sort of voices. He didn't spend any time with them. So how could they have one of his kids committed suicide? Yeah, at least one. So Sarah filed for divorce and the court documents she filed revealed horrific details from inside their relationship. According to her at one point, Ron told her they couldn't get a divorce because it would

be bad for his reputation. She says that he told her basically you'll kill yourself if you really love me because we can't get divorced because it's the fifties. She also says that he regularly strangled her. She believed that he was insane and needed to be locked up in a mental asylum. Obviously, she has a bias, but it's really hard to disagree with that statement. What a different world it would be if somebody had given Elrond Hubbard the help he so desperately needed.

Yeah. Now, Hubbard flew back from Cuba around this time. He wound up living with a millionaire, Dianetics enthusiast named Purcell, who had gotten rich through something else and just loved Dianetics. Purcell wound up essentially taking over the business operations of Dianetics for a while and fixing everything, unfucking all of the damage Hubbard had done to the structure of it to make it profitable. And for a while, Wichita, Kansas becomes the center of Dianetics research.

Yeah. Wichita. So they're doing research? Not really. I mean, yeah. They just lie. Yeah. Yeah.

No. I mean, no. Elrond Hubbard writes a bunch of books about Dianetics to try to sell them to people and to teach classes, but no, I don't think they're doing much real research. When Sarah found out that Hubbard was in Wichita, she filed a petition asking to have his assets in Los Angeles placed into receivership. Hubbard responded by sending a letter to the Department of Justice. He described himself as basically a scientist, which these are his exact words, basically

a scientist and accused the communists and their secret agent, his wife, of orchestrating a campaign to try and destroy him. He would later claim that his wife was a Nazi agent as well. He kind of switched between the two pretty much it will. And this is like McCarthy era, right? Yeah. A good time to be accusing people of communism. Yeah.

It is proof of how nutty he sounded, but he is constantly going to the FBI and claiming that all the people who are against him are communists and armed and stuff. And the FBI immediately writes them off as a nut, which the FBI was not good at determining who was legitimately a threat to the country not on this period. They went after a lot of innocent people, but even the 1950s FBI was like, this guy's fucking crazy. Joseph McCarthy is basically running the show right now, but this guy's a fucking lunatic. Yeah.

All right. Which like if the fucking FBI under J. Edgar Hoover thinks you're too crazy to be credible about your anti-communist conspiracy theories, you gotta be real crazy. You gotta be really goddamn crazy. Yeah. Okay. The good news is that Sarah Northrup eventually got both her divorce and her daughter back. And I, as far as I know, hopefully Alexis had a good childhood.

I really don't know much more about her at this point, but she went to live with her mom. Because she's like an infant whenever she's being kidnapped. She's a baby when this is happening. She's getting filled with bad engrams. Oh, yeah. Holy shit. Holy fuck.

In exchange for getting her baby back though, she agreed not to say anything bad about her ex-husband, Elron Hubbard. He also made her write a statement or rather he wrote a statement and then published it with her name attached to it and she didn't complain. That seems likely based on the actual wording of the statement, I'm going to read you the end bit of it. Oh, yeah. There is no other reason for the statement than my own wish to make atonement for the

damage I may have done. In the future, I wish to lead a quiet and orderly existence with my little girl far away from the interbulating influences which have ruined my marriage, Sarah Northrup Hubbard. Interbulating is a word that Elron Hubbard invented, which is why people think he just wrote this and she wanted her baby back and it was the 50s and she was like, this is the closest version of justice I can get. Okay. Yeah.

Interbulating. Interbulating. It's a perfectly Cromulent word. Yeah, love it. By the end of 1951, Dianetics looked to be on its way out. A conference of Dianeticists only drew 112 attendees, which is about about a year. What about what you could expect to get out of a fad pop psychology thing like this? Hubbard desperately pushed book after book, including child Dianetics, but all of them

failed to catch on. The book he wrote while drunk in Cuba did not see the same success as the original, which is really a tragedy. Was that the sequel? The Dianetics 2? Dianetics 2. Yeah. Dianetics are extremely Dianetics.

Dianetics Harder. You could call it like a reverse Hemingway because he went to Cuba and got drunk to write, but was less successful. I assume that's where Hemingway did all his good stuff. I don't know much about her. How many cats were around him? That's important. Probably a shit load.

Yeah. I assume. That's a better book if you had more cats. Yeah. Yeah. It became increasingly clear to many people that Elrond Hubbard was not quite the genius they had thought. Perry Chapterlane, a researcher at the Wichita Dianetics Foundation, said, quote, the problem

for many people involved in Dianetics was that they accepted every word Hubbard said as literal truth rather than a framework around which you could do things. I remember at a lecture one night he told people that if they did this or that they would no longer need to wear glasses and that they would be able to throw them away forever. He pointed to a big bowl at the bottom of the steps leading up to the rostrum. At the end of the lecture, people were throwing their glasses into this bowl. Don Purcell, the millionaire who saved Hubbard's ass and saved Dianetics, was one of the guys

who tossed their glasses into the bowl, quote, Hubbard thought it was a great joke. He told me about it afterwards, making a snide remark about Purcell and describing how he took off his glasses, threw them into the bowl, and groped his way out of the lecture hall. Hubbard was laughing that people would do something like that just because of what he said. Of course it didn't work. Like everyone else, Purcell had a new pair of glasses in a couple of days.

Yeah. I thought the story was going to end that someone crashed on their way home because they couldn't see. That would have made sense. Yeah. No, I mean, everyone on the road was drunk in 1951, so they were limp when they hit anyway. Right. No, no.

Hubbard met and married his third and final wife, Mary Sue Whip, during this Wichita period. She was like 18 and he was like 40 something, it was kind of a bit of a creepy. But they stayed together the rest of his life and he may even have been faithful to her. Probably not, probably a couple of affairs in there, but he might have been. Okay. They were together the rest of his life. Well, sort of. She wound up taking the fall for him and going to prison, but that's a story for another

day. Oh, wow. Good. Wichita is also where he first revealed the e-meter, a device he claimed could measure emotions and quote, give an auditor insight into the mind of his pre-clear. Hubbard announced this at a meeting in a Wichita hotel right before he made the exciting announcement to a group of 80 that he had developed a new science even better than Dianetics, a science that filled the few holes Dianetics had had and elevated it to a new level that was almost

more than a science. He called this Scientology. Yeah. Now, I looked on Scientology.org and tried to figure out what they had to say about this and I actually found another reference to his totally real book Excalibur because that's where they claimed the name comes from. Elron Hubbard began his studies of the mind and spirit in 1923 resulting in a manuscript entitled Excalibur in 1938.

In this unpublished work that the word Scientology first appeared to describe what Mr. Hubbard termed the study of knowing how to know. He decided against publishing the book for the fact Excalibur didn't contain any therapy of any kind but was simply a discussion of the composition of life. Consequently, he said, I decided to go further. So now, it's worth interesting. The author of Bareface Messiah found an earlier use of the word Scientology in like a German scientific study published like in the 30s, but it had nothing to do with any of this.

It's worth noting someone else figured out the term first. Not really a big deal. Hubbard probably wasn't plagiarizing the obscure German scientist, but I thought that was interesting. So in the Scientology.org write up of things, Scientology was immediately conceived of as a religion. The reality is that it was immediately conceived of as a science and its real purpose was to protect Hubbard legally because he and Purcell had gotten into a fight at this point over the rights to Dianetics.

Don Purcell and he had a falling out and so there was a giant legal battle waging over who was going to own the rights to Dianetics. So Hubbard created Scientology initially so he could keep making more books and selling more products under a thing that Purcell had no rights to. Yeah, and it was not a religion at first. Hubbard claimed that while Dianetics had been about the body, Scientology was essentially focused more on the soul because he had, quote, come across incontrovertible, scientifically validated evidence of the existence of the human soul.

So we're going to get into what Hubbard claimed in Scientology and how it changed from a way for him to dodge legal liability and do a religion. But first, consume. 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. Because 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. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass 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. 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.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. 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.

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.

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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back!

We're talking about Scientology, the new science of the soul that L. Ron Hubbard has just launched in order to avoid a court case, or in order to protect himself from a court case. Great reason to start a religion. Oh, the great, well, Jesus actually started Christianity because he hit a guy with his Camaro. Anyway, anyway, it was a mess, but it all worked out in the end. Thank goodness.

So Hubbard claimed to have discovered that human beings were driven by immortal and omnipotent beings called thetans. Now, thetans try on millions of bodies over the course of eons, and so they're essentially these immortal spirits that guide our meat sacks. Dianetics had been about refiling bad memories in your brain to cure health problems, but Scientology was a way of waking your thetan up to the memories of its long hidden existence in order to gain superpowers, essentially. So activating your thetan so that you can, you know, clearing off all of the bullshit

that's tricked it into thinking it's just a mortal being. Something like that. It's close enough. Makes perfect sense. Yeah, according to Bearface Messiah, thetans were obviously not restricted to this universe, and auditing sessions revealed innumerable accounts of space travel and adventures on other planets very similar to those found in the pages of astounding science fiction, to which the founder of Scientology had so recently been contributing.

One report described how a pre-clearhead arrived on a planet 74,000 years ago and battled black magic operators who were using electronics for evil purposes. So this is the point at which past lives become a real big part of Elron Hubbard's philosophy. And they have electronics 74,000 years ago? Well, yeah, space aliens. Because of space. Because space and aliens and stuff. Sorry.

Aliens have been traveling in space all the time. In July of 1952, Elron Hubbard published The History of Man. He called it, quote, a cold-blooded and factual account of your last 60 trillion years. In it, he promised that, with Scientology, the blind will again see, the lame walk, the ill recover, the insane become sane, and the sane will become saner. Oh. Yeah. And if there's one man you should trust on how to become saner, it's the guy who kidnapped

his own baby. Yes. You know what that says to me? Sane. Really stable guy. A balanced man. You know, I've always really respected kidnapping as a discipline. Oh, yeah.

It's a wonderful industry. It's a calling. It's an art form, really. A good, solid kidnapping. It's basically science. It's a guy stealing babies out of a window. What are you doing? I'm basically a scientist.

That's the t-shirt right there. Elron Hubbard stealing a baby. We're going to get some good t-shirt-based lawsuits out of this, and then I'll have to create a religion in order to maintain my rights to this show. And then I'm going to fight you for those rights, and then where something bad's going to happen. If you want a baby in Cuba, go right ahead, because that's where it's going. All right.

Oh boy, abduction jokes. It's all good fun when you know the kid got out. Yes. Yeah. A lot of kids didn't get out of Scientology. Anyway, back to the story. So the history of man basically repackaged Hubbard's dineticist ideas about engrams, but couched them in weird evolutionary terms.

So now Scientologists didn't just have to worry about the traumas they'd experienced as babies. They had to worry about the traumas that deep back in time their ancestors had experienced. Hubbard claimed that many engrams were caused by clams, because our clam ancestors were locked in an eternal conflict between the hinge that opened and the hinge that closed. He claimed that the gesture of opening and closing your thumb and forefinger was unconsciously upsetting to people as a result of this. Are you getting?

Wait. Okay. Do you have questions about that? That's not all clear? Our clam ancestors. Clam ancestors. Clam. It's like a clamato, clam ancestors.

Shellfish. No, clams. Specifically clams. We descended from them. Absolutely. Okay. Or at least our thetans spent time in clams. Oh, okay.

Yeah, no, I get it. Yeah. Okay. It's all internally consistent. Yeah. This all works out. And then the motion of me clasping my, you know, thumb against my fingers is upsetting is what he's saying.

Yeah. It upsets people if you just do this. Just walk around the street today and just do this at strangers. Basically sock puppet motions. Basically sock puppet motions. If you live near Elron Hubbard Boulevard, just walk down at doing this, you'll really piss some people off. I live near the whole church of Scientology.

I live near the Scientology like movie studios. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. I'm like in this area that where all that stuff is very close. If a Scientologist tries to abduct you, you know how to upset them. Just do the clam thing. Yeah. Now, Hubbard did warn, quote, your discussion of these incidents with the uninitiated in

Scientology can cause havoc. Should you describe the clam to someone, you may restimulate it in him to the extent of causing severe jaw pain. One such victim after hearing about a clam death could not use his jaws for three days. So how's everyone's jaw feel? You know what? It's starting to get all tired. Getting a little tired?

But just because I'm making so many good jokes about Elron. My jaw is tired, but I've read through 16 pages of this fucking nonsense. You know what? Doesn't tire your jaw out. You know what? I'm not going to do a Doritos ad now. You could have had a Doritos ad, Doritos people, but instead I'm going to shill for another product, the next product available, Lysol Sanitizing Wipes.

That's what's good for you is Lysol Sanitizing Wipes. Wipe yourself. It'll clean your thetans away. Clean your thetans away. See? Lysol got a freebie Doritos. Anyway, back to the tale. So there's an awful lot of lunacy in Scientology.

I'm not going to go into tremendous detail about all of the different crazy things he said because that could be a whole fucking 10 part episode. But it is important that it didn't all come together at once. I think most people's understanding of Scientology's actual beliefs comes from that South Park episode, which did a pretty good job of summing it up, but he hadn't even invented all of this stuff yet. Everything about Zinu and that, this was all added over time. It was definitely cobbled together.

He did not just come out with suddenly this vision of how things had happened. Well, genius doesn't happen overnight. No, and neither do bullshit science fiction short stories. In general, the story of Scientology is the story of Elron Hubbard just making up things for 70 years and writing them down. And now people have to pay attention to him because it's a religion. It's pretty great. He continuously expanded his claims of what Scientology could achieve in the book Scientology

82008. I don't know what that's a reference to. He bragged, with this book, the ability to make one's body older, young at will, the ability to heal the ill without physical contact, the ability to cure the insane and the incapacitated is set forth for the physician, the layman, the mathematician and the physicist. So anyone can use this science to heal the sick, weird that we still have sick people, shocking. Scientology proved to be a much better money making scheme than Dianetics had been.

Hubbard moved to England and bought a gigantic manor house. He built facilities there and was soon making more than $40,000 a week just at the English facility, teaching auditors there. He was making millions and millions of dollars all around the world. This marked the end of Elron Hubbard's money problems. If your question is how do they afford that, for any other part of the next two parts of the story, he's rich as shit forever now. And this is one of those things.

He does not have any more money problems. And this is because people are just buying into this religion and you're shelling out money. Buying the books, paying for training, all over, most of whom probably aren't super committed because I've talked to a number of people in LA who did Scientology for a year or so. They probably spent a couple grand on it, but then they just left. But there's a lot more people like that than there are committed Scientologists.

It's a good money making thing, which is what it's always been. But I'll give it to him for this. It was a very idiosyncratic organization at its start, and that initially caused some problems because he was bad at managing, but he really seems to have learned how to manage a really profitable, gigantic worldwide enterprise, which is not easy. So again, one of the reasons why it's hard to hate him as much as you should is he's really competent. Like, it's not like a guy who was just born rich and does shitty things like an unnamed

person we're all thinking of right now, who just is born rich and never has to work for his money and is prominent because Elrond Hubbard was born poor and built a multi-billion dollar religious cult thing. It's impressive. It's an impressive con, probably the most impressive con. On April 10th, 1953, Elrond Hubbard wrote to one of his higher-ranking followers and suggested turning their science self-help empire into a religion. I await your reaction on the religion angle.

In my opinion, we couldn't get worse public opinion than we have had or have less customers with what we've got to sell. A religious charter would be necessary in Pennsylvania or New Jersey to make it stick, but I sure could make it stick. Not inaccurate. It's stuck. Well, as for someone from Pennsylvania, from Punxsutawney specifically. From Punxsutawney, for sure.

People are, yeah, they're really impressionable there. As the guy who defeated ISIS, I agree with you. In December of 1953, Elrond Hubbard incorporated three new churches, the Church of American Science, the Church of Scientology, and the Church of Spiritual Engineering, all in Camden, New Jersey. He's a Jersey boy. Cute. In February of 1954, he incorporated the Church of Scientology in California.

Over the course of 1954, he encouraged Dianetics Foundation franchise holders, because that's how it had spread so rapidly people were starting franchises, to turn their businesses into independent churches. Oh. Yeah. Interesting, right? Yeah. They came together real well.

Executives of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists were now ministers. Some even called themselves reverents. Just let people call themselves reverents. Just do whatever you want. It's whatever. I've always wanted to be a reverent. Scientology wouldn't qualify as a religion for the purposes of tax exemption until 1993. This was a battle, the battle to get accepted.

It took a long time. I'm not going to get into everything they had to do. It was a fucking uphill. But starting in 1954, that's when he starts consistently saying this is a religion. This is the point at which Hubbard quit claiming to be a researcher and a scientist and started presenting himself to the world as a bona fide holy man. Basically a scientist. Yeah.

Basically a scientist. And now he's definitely a holy man. Definitely a holy man. Cool. He, of course, drew government attention, particularly from the FBI. This made him grow more and more paranoid. He encouraged believers to attack anyone practicing Scientology outside of the church. Apostates were called squirrels and should be sued out of existence.

The term squirrel is still used by the Church of Scientology. You can find YouTube videos called Squirrel Busters, type that in. Yeah. And it's like guys with GoPro cameras just yelling Scientology nonsense that supposedly apostate Scientologists. Yeah, I saw some of that and going clear. It's weird. Yeah.

It's really uncomfortable. It's like two people yelling about a video game that you don't know anything about. Like it's so technical and specific. Are you on tech? What are you talking about? Hubbard advised Scientologists who were arrested, heckling non-believers or apostates to immediately sue for $100,000 and claim religious persecution. He said the only proper response to any kind of challenge to the church was unrestricted

warfare. Attack, attack, attack. Never stop attacking. Just again. Always, always be attacking. It works. A, B, A. A, B, A. I mean, it's the same social media strategy that the president uses.

Yeah. Like you never apologize for doing something bad. You always just attack new people and if you get attacked for something, you find like, it works. Yeah. It's like addressing problems, just attack. Really successful idea. So Hubbard figures this out in the early 50s and applies it to his religion.

It's so cool. It is cool. The coolest. Yeah. The coolest. Throughout the late 1950s, auditing sessions and courses devolved from semi-scientific discussions of dianetics into lurid stories of past lives as aliens and famous historic figures.

One of Hubbard's followers recalled, there was a good deal of rivalry as to who could dig up the most notable or extraordinary past life. Jesus of Nazareth was very popular. At least three London Scientologists claimed to have uncovered incidents in which they were crucified and rose from the dead to save the world. Queen Elizabeth I, Walter Raleigh and the Venerable Bed were also popular. Funnily enough, I never met anyone who claimed to know anything about Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan or Pontius Pilate.

Which is, if you're ever pretending to have fake lives, pretend to be someone cool. Right. Yeah. No one wants to be a goody two shoes in the past. Yeah boo. Yeah. I was fucking Genghis Khan. Yeah.

That's a cool past life. Yeah. Now the CIA had taken an interest in Hubbard in 1957 and the FBI had been on to him for a while almost because of the hundreds of letters he'd sent them claiming people were communists. Oh right. In 1960, Elrond Hubbard officially spooked the government when he urged his followers to do everything in their power to stop the election of Richard Nixon.

Okay. Not on the wrong side of history there. Now Nixon didn't win probably for other reasons because JFK was just such a charming son of a bitch. The FBI had convinced Hubbard that he could use his cold to gain political power. In August of 1962, Elrond Hubbard wrote a letter to President Kennedy claiming that Scientology was the only way to train human beings for the rigors of spaceflight. Since Hubbard and his followers were all aware of their past lives as space travelers, they

really were the best people to manage astronaut training. Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. Totally, again, logically consistent. The S in NASA stands for Scientologists. He said in his letter to JFK, quote, man will not successfully get into space without us. We do not wish the United States to lose either the space race or the next war.

The deciding factor in that race or that war may very well be lying in your hands at this moment and may depend on what is done with this letter. Curiously, Elrond Hubbard. Spoiler alert, we did get into space without them. Have we though? I've seen those staged moon landing photos. See I think the moon landing is staged, but I think it's because we really landed on Venus.

Oh, that's an interesting theory. And that's where cell phones come from. Yes. And the government doesn't want you to know. I do agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, back to Elrond Hubbard.

In January of 1963, the FDA carried out a raid on the Church of Scientology. They didn't get much. It seems like one of those things where they basically cooked up a bullshit reason because e-meters were labeled improperly and were like making health claims they shouldn't make. But they used it as an excuse to send in like dozens of armed men and stuff to like raid a facility. It was like, it was an overreach of force. It seemed like they were expecting to find a cache of weapons or something crazy because

this cult seemed so crazy and they didn't. Church of Scientology was probably more on the right than the FDA was, although they were publishing misleading stuff. The raid seems to have been kind of bullshit. Well they read, you know, works from, what was it, Remington, Winchester, Colt, and they're like this. Exactly. He's got three guns.

Yeah. The whole thing increased Elrond Hubbard since a paranoia and persecution. In 1965, Hubbard introduced ethics technology to his new faith, which included conditions that could be applied to people when they had had ethical lapses. One member who worked in Hubbard's English manner as a butler recalled, I was assigned a condition of emergency because I served him salmon for dinner that was not quite fresh. I was shocked.

You had to go through a whole formula, write it up, and submit it with an application to be upgraded. Scientology developed a new cadre of ethics officers who were basically secret police, tasked with punishing the insufficiently dedicated or disloyal. And penalties, including a condition of liability, could be imposed. Members in a condition of liability had to wear dirty gray rags on their arms. They also couldn't like bathe and stuff, it was gross. Church members who screwed up too badly were declared suppressive persons.

These people, Hubbard declared, were a fair game to be destroyed by any means necessary. Now Australia had been a hotbed of Scientologist activity. Australia? Australia. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Hubbard bragged that it was going to be the first clear continent. But in October of 1965, an Australian Board of Inquiry published a report on Scientology

and they wholeheartedly condemned the cult. So Australia basically kicked them out. They said it seemed so silly that people would think it was harmless, but that it's really fucking dangerous. Scientology is evil. It's techniques evil. It's practiced a serious threat to the community, medically, morally, and socially. And it's adhered, sadly diluted, and often mentally ill.

All right, so Australia knows what it's talking about. Yeah, and they ban him. They basically banned, or at least the state of Victoria basically banned Scientology. And I hate to say it, but we owe a lot of that to Rupert Murdoch. Newspapers he owned and he seems to have been personally involved in really pushing coverage of how crazy Scientology was, which is responsible for starting the investigation, which got it banned. He gave them their first nickname, which is also the only nickname I'm aware of for them,

Buncomology. Didn't take off there. Rupert Murdoch's not great at naming things. But credit to a monster, he was in the right this one time in the fucking 60s, England began to crack down more on Hubbard and Scientology as well, with the US, Australia, and UK all clearly against him, Elron Hubbard began to look for a new place to base his growing faith. His first instinct was Rhodesia. You ever heard of Rhodesia?

I don't think so. I think it's in Bobway now. Rhodesia is the name when a bunch of white people were ruling over the black majority pretty brutally. They were very much an apartheid state. There was a civil war, the people in charge got overthrown. Before that happened, he went to Rhodesia and basically promised to put a bunch of money into the local economy and he wrote a new constitution for them that was meant to trick

black people into thinking their votes mattered without actually letting them vote. Weirdly enough, Rhodesia actually kicked him out. They didn't want anything to do with him. Oh. Yeah. No, no, it's weird. You expect it to go even worse, but even the country of racists run by racists for racists and it's still like a major in far right white supremacist talking points today

to talk about Rhodesia a lot. They didn't want anything to do with Elrond Hubbard, so I guess props to Rhodesia. Once he got back from Africa, Elrond Hubbard began to cook up a scheme to escape all his myriad legal troubles. One of his friends recalled him saying, you know, John, we have got to do something about all this trouble we're having with governments. There's a lot of high level research that still has to be done and I want to be able to get on with it without constant interference.

Do you realize that 75% of the earth's surface is completely free from the control of any government? That's where we could be free on the high seas. Sea. Back to the boats. Back to the boats. The high seas are exactly where Elrond Hubbard decided to go next. Quietly, carefully, he and his minions embarked upon what he called the sea project.

We're going to hear about that sea project on the next episode of Behind the Bastards. How are you feeling, Katelyn? I feel gray. I feel, I, oh man, I'm in vigor. My Theatons are, they're really charged up and my ingrams are, they're disappearing. They're gramming. Oh, they're gone. They're gone.

Well, they're Instagramming, but they, on their way out. What did you have for breakfast in 1942? Because of my many past lives, I definitely recall having some hot cakes. Hot cakes? Yeah. Hot cakes. Well, I don't know what I'm trying to do. Plug your plugables.

Speaking of Instagram, you can follow me there and on Twitter. That was good. Thanks so much. At Katelyn Durante, spelled C-A-I-T-L-I-N, you can listen to my podcast right here on How Stuff Works. It is called the Bechtelcast, and we talk about the portrayal of women in movies. And yeah, follow us there at Bechtelcast, B-E-C-H-D-E-O. Speaking of the portrayal of women in movies, my Twitter is, I write okay, you can find

this podcast online at BehindTheBastards.com. You can find us on Twitter at atBastardspod on Instagram too. So check us out. If you're an angry Scientologist, you can yell at me there. I'm sure I got something wrong about your religion, because it's silly. That's the only religion I'll say that about, except for Zoroastrianism. Oh, I don't even know what that is. No, I actually like Zoroastrianism, but it's cool as hell.

Yeah, it's really neat, really cool imagery. Sorry, I don't know why I faked and insulted Zoroastrians there. I've gone mad reading all of this. This is what happens. Two hours into the Elrond Hubbard podcast. We insult Zoroastrians for no reason, a religion that never did anything to hurt anybody. I said nothing. Oh no, you're implicated now, Caitlin.

And you're all implicated for listening, and be implicated in our part three, Boats! 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 was 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 podcast. 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 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 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.