L. Ron Hubbard

• 1. Introduction

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  L. Ron Hubbard, the American writer who founded Scientology, once told his wife exactly what he wanted from life. In a letter, he declared: "I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all books are destroyed." He wrote those words after publishers turned down a manuscript he believed in.

  He did become famous. He also became the leader of a movement that has been called a cult, a new religious movement and a business, depending on who is describing it.

  How did a hungry pulp writer come to lead such a movement? What did he build, and what did it cost the people around him? And how much of the life story he told about himself actually holds up?

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• 2. The Pulp Writer

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  Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born on the 13th of March 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska. He was the only child of Ledora May Waterbury, a trained teacher, and Harry Ross Hubbard, a low-ranking Navy officer. Like many service families, they moved often. They settled in Helena, Montana, in 1913. When his father was posted to Guam, young Ron and his mother joined him there, stopping briefly in a couple of Chinese ports.

  His teenage years brought a run of setbacks. High school dropped him from enrollment over failing grades. He then failed the Naval Academy entrance examination. A Virginia preparatory school was meant to prepare him for a second try, but he complained of eye strain and was diagnosed with myopia, which ended any chance of enrolling. Years later he privately wrote to himself that his eyes had gone bad when he "used them as an excuse to escape the naval academy."

  In June 1930 Hubbard graduated from the Woodward School in Washington and entered George Washington University. He studied civil engineering, earned poor grades and collected repeated warnings. He did write for the student newspaper and join the glider club. In 1932 he organized a student trip to the Caribbean. Misfortune and a shortage of money wrecked it, the passengers burned him in effigy, and the ship's owners canceled the voyage. He did not return to the university the next year.

  In 1933 he renewed a friendship with a fellow glider pilot, Margaret "Polly" Grubb, and they married on the 13th of April. A son, also named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard and later nicknamed Nibs, arrived in 1934. A daughter, Katherine May, followed two years later. In the spring of 1936 the family moved to Bremerton, Washington, and then to nearby South Colby. A friend, Robert MacDonald Ford, remembered them as "in fairly dire straits for money" and living off Hubbard's writing.

  That writing was relentless. From 1934 until 1940 Hubbard produced hundreds of short stories and novels, spanning adventure, aviation, travel, mystery, western, romance and science fiction. His first full-length novel, Buckskin Brigades, appeared in 1937. It told of "Yellow Hair", a white man adopted by the Blackfeet, and its promotional material claimed the author was himself a "bloodbrother" of the tribe. The New York Times Book Review enjoyed it, writing: "Mr. Hubbard has reversed a time-honored formula and has given a thriller to which, at the end of every chapter or so, another paleface bites the dust."

  On New Year's Day 1938, Hubbard reportedly had a dental procedure and reacted badly to the anesthetic gas. By his account, this triggered a near-death revelation. Allegedly inspired by it, he composed a manuscript under the working titles The One Command and Excalibur.

  Steadier success came through the editor John W. Campbell. He ran Hubbard's short stories and serialized novelettes in the magazines Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction. Final Blackout followed a British lieutenant who rises to become dictator of the United Kingdom. In July 1940, Unknown published Fear, a psychological horror about an ethnologist convinced that demons are hunting him. Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and others praised it. That November and December came Typewriter in the Sky, about a pulp writer whose friend becomes trapped inside one of his stories.

  Fiction never left him. In August 1947 Astounding carried his serial The End Is Not Yet, about a young nuclear physicist who builds a new philosophical system to stop a world takeover. That October began Ole Doc Methuselah, a series about long-lived physicians called the "Soldiers of Light". In February and March 1950, To the Stars told of an engineer who learns that months aboard an interstellar trading ship equal centuries on Earth.

  Fans and critics were cooler than editors. One sociologist argued that even at his peak in the late 1930s Hubbard was regarded as "a passable, familiar author but not one of the best". By the late 1970s, the same sociologist wrote, "the science fiction subculture wishes it could forget him". Fans rated him worse than any other Golden Age writer. A reference work on the genre ranked him below Asimov, Heinlein and Sprague de Camp. It grouped him with Van Vogt as "rogue members of the early Campbell pantheon".

  But in 1941 the pulp writer set his typewriter aside and applied to join the Navy that had shaped his family's life.

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• 3. War and Aftermath

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  The 19th of July 1941 made Hubbard a lieutenant junior grade in the United States Naval Reserve. By November he was in New York training as an intelligence officer. The day after Pearl Harbor he was posted to the Philippines and left the country for Australia. There the plan collapsed. The US Naval Attaché accused him of sending the blockade-runner Don Isidro "three thousand miles out of her way", and Hubbard was ordered home.

  Command did not suit him either. In June 1942 he received a patrol boat at the Boston Navy Yard, but the yard commandant wrote that he was "not temperamentally fitted for independent command". He was relieved. In 1943 he took over a submarine chaser. Five hours into its shakedown cruise he believed he had found an enemy submarine, and he and his crew spent 68 hours in combat. An investigation concluded he had probably mistaken a "known magnetic deposit" for a submarine. The following month he unwittingly fired on Mexican territory and lost the command.

  After that, illness filled his record. Once removed from the chaser, he began reporting sick with ulcers, malaria and back pains. In July 1943 he entered the San Diego naval hospital for observation and stayed for months. In 1944 he served aboard the USS Algol, reporting an attempted sabotage the night before he was transferred. On the 9th of April 1945 he was admitted to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland. He was discharged on the 4th of December 1945. Years afterward he privately wrote to himself: "Your stomach trouble you used as an excuse to keep the Navy from punishing you."

  Rather than return to his family in Washington state, Hubbard moved into the Pasadena mansion of John "Jack" Whiteside Parsons. Parsons was a rocket propulsion engineer and a leading follower of the English occultist Aleister Crowley. Hubbard soon became sexually involved with Parsons's 21-year-old girlfriend, Sara "Betty" Northrup.

  The two men collaborated on the "Babalon Working", a series of sex magic rituals meant to summon an incarnation of Babalon, the supreme goddess of Crowley's pantheon. Parsons found Hubbard unusually sensitive to occult forces and made him the "Scribe", who channelled the goddess's messages. One account from March 1946 has Hubbard speaking in her voice as the "flame of life, power of darkness" who "feeds upon the death of men". In 1969 the Church of Scientology acknowledged the rites and said Hubbard took part to rescue Betty.

  Around then Hubbard wrote the "Affirmations", a private list of statements about his physical, sexual, psychological and social troubles. It appears to have been meant as self-hypnosis. Parsons, Hubbard and Sara put nearly all their savings into a plan to buy yachts on the East Coast and sail them west to sell. Most of that money came from Parsons and Sara. Hubbard instead wrote to the Navy asking permission for a world cruise. Parsons sought an injunction to stop Hubbard and Sara leaving the country, yet recovered only a $2,900 promissory note. He went home "shattered" and had to sell his mansion. On the 10th of August 1946, Hubbard married Sara, although he was still married to Polly.

  Money stayed short. Hubbard resumed writing fiction to add to a small disability allowance, and he worked as an amateur stage hypnotist, a sort of "swami". In October 1947 he wrote to the Veterans Administration asking for psychiatric treatment. "I cannot account for nor rise above long periods of moroseness and suicidal inclinations," he wrote, and he ended with a plea: "Would you please help me?" The agency eventually raised his pension. In the summer of 1948 the San Luis Obispo sheriff arrested him for petty theft after he passed a fraudulent check.

  In June 1948 the wire service United Press ran a story on an American Legion-sponsored psychiatric ward in Savannah, Georgia, meant to keep mentally ill veterans out of jail. In late 1948 Hubbard and Sara moved to Savannah. He later claimed to have volunteered there as a lay analyst at a psychiatric clinic. His letters from Savannah gave the first public hints of something called Dianetics.

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• 4. Dianetics Boom and Bust

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  The plan was to "make supermen". Inspired by the science fiction of his friend Robert Heinlein, Hubbard announced a book that would deliver exactly that. He described a superhuman condition he called "Clear". People in that state, he claimed, would have a perfectly functioning mind, a higher IQ and a photographic memory. They would be cured of ailments from poor eyesight to the common cold, which he insisted were purely psychosomatic.

  To promote the book, he enlisted his longtime editor John Campbell, who was fascinated by fringe psychologies and psychic powers. Campbell invited Hubbard and Sara to move into a cottage in New Jersey. He also recruited an acquaintance, the physician Joseph Winter, and wrote to him that Hubbard had worked with nearly 1000 cases and cured every single one. Winter delivered Hubbard's second daughter, Alexis Valerie, on the 8th of March 1950, in the middle of the launch preparations.

  The core of Dianetics was a pseudoscientific retelling of psychoanalytic theory for a mass English-speaking audience. As with Freud, memories were recorded in the brain, and Hubbard called them "engrams". They lay in the unconscious mind, which he restyled "the reactive mind". Later in life they could be triggered and cause psychological, emotional or even physical problems. A person could cure himself by sharing memories with a friendly listener, called an "auditor". Hubbard claimed engrams caused most illnesses, including arthritis, asthma, ulcers and migraine headaches, and said Dianetic research was also focused on cancer and diabetes.

  Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health was released on the 9th of May 1950, with an article in the May issue of Astounding. The press and the scientific and medical professions received it poorly. Readers did not care. The book was an immediate commercial success and sparked "a nationwide cult of incredible proportions". Five hundred Dianetic auditing groups sprang up across the United States, and Hubbard founded the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation. Financial controls were lax, and he took large sums without explaining what he did with them.

  On the 10th of August, an audience of 6,000 gathered at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Hubbard introduced a woman named Sonya Bianca and said Dianetic therapy had given her perfect recall. She then forgot the color of his necktie. Much of the crowd walked out, and the popular science writer Martin Gardner publicized the debacle. On the 3rd of September the psychologist Erich Fromm called Dianetics a "mixture of some oversimplified truths, half truths and plain absurdities". By late 1950 the foundations were in financial crisis. His publisher Arthur Ceppos, his promoter Campbell and the physician Winter all resigned under acrimonious circumstances.

  His marriage collapsed at the same time. Hubbard began an affair with an employee, Barbara Klowden, and Sara began her own with Miles Hollister. On the 23rd of February 1951, Sara and her lover consulted a psychiatrist about Hubbard. He advised that Sara was in grave danger and that Hubbard should be institutionalized. Sara later said experts had diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia and recommended lifelong hospitalization.

  When Hubbard learned of the plan, he and two trusted aides kidnapped Sara and their one-year-old daughter Alexis. They tried and failed to find a doctor who would declare Sara insane. He released Sara but took Alexis to Cuba. He denounced Sara and her lover to the FBI as communist infiltrators, and an agent annotated his letter: "Appears mental". On the 12th of April, the press ran Sara's story under headlines such as "Ron Hubbard Insane, Says His Wife". On the 2nd of May, Polly wrote to Sara: "Ron is not normal... Your charges probably sound fantastic to the average person - but I've been through it - the beatings, threats on my life, all the sadistic traits you charge - twelve years of it." In June, Sara won her daughter's return by signing a statement written by Hubbard. It said she had always believed him a "fine and brilliant man".

  The craze "burned itself out as quickly as it caught fire". A millionaire named Don Purcell rescued it by backing a new foundation in Wichita, Kansas. In August 1951 Hubbard published Science of Survival, which introduced the immortal soul, or "Thetan", and past-life regressions called "Whole Track Auditing". Only 1,250 copies of the first edition were printed, and sales were poor. Then a court ruled the Wichita foundation liable for the unpaid debts of its predecessor in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Purcell and the other directors filed for voluntary bankruptcy in February 1952. Hubbard resigned at once, accused Purcell of being bribed by the American Medical Association, and emptied the foundation's bank accounts, partly through forgery.

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• 5. Scientology Takes Shape

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  At a convention in Wichita, Hubbard announced that he had found a new science beyond Dianetics, and he called it Scientology. Where Dianetics offered the superhuman state of Clear, Scientology promised god-like powers in a state called Operating Thetan. He also introduced the electropsychometer, or e-meter, which users hold as two metal cans to measure shifts in skin conductivity from sweat or grip. The inventor Volney Mathison had built it and introduced it to Hubbard. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung had used a similar device in a word-association study in 1906. Hubbard presented his as having "an almost mystical power to reveal an individual's innermost thoughts".

  He married a 20-year-old staff member, Mary Sue Whipp, and the pair moved to Phoenix, Arizona. His 18-year-old son Nibs joined as a staff member and "professor". Dianetics had been loose and decentralized. Scientology had one official body, the Hubbard Association of Scientologists. Its branches, called orgs, worked like fast food franchises, and each holder paid ten percent of income to the center.

  His books grew stranger. In July he published "What to Audit", later retitled Scientology: A History of Man. It taught that everyone carries traumatic memories of past lives as clams, sloths and cavemen. November brought Scientology 8-80 and December brought Scientology 8-8008, which argued that the physical universe is the creation of the mind. In December he also gave a seventy-hour lecture series in Philadelphia to 38 people. There he linked Scientology rituals to the magickal practices of Aleister Crowley and recommended Crowley's book The Master Therion. He joked that he was "the prince of darkness", and the audience laughed.

  On the 16th of December 1952, Hubbard was arrested in the middle of a lecture for failing to return $9,000 withdrawn from the Wichita Foundation. He settled by paying $1,000 and returning a car that belonged to the Wichita financier Don Purcell.

  In April 1953 Hubbard proposed a chain of "Spiritual Guidance Centers" as part of what he called "the religion angle". On the 18th of December 1953 he incorporated the Church of Scientology in Camden, New Jersey. The explanation was that religious status would protect Scientologists from charges of practicing medicine without a license. Hubbard has been quoted telling a science fiction convention in 1948: "Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion."

  The Internal Revenue Service recognized the Church of Scientology of California as tax-exempt in 1954. Hubbard took a percentage of the church's gross income, and by 1957 he was paid about $250,000 per year.

  He was an eclectic borrower. He explicitly cited Freud and simply renamed some of his terms. Sara recalled him discussing the biologist Richard Semon, who coined the word "engram". From Herbert Spencer he took the idea that the one command given to all life is to "survive". Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics reached him through the superhuman heroes of fellow writers Van Vogt and Heinlein. He said the psychiatrist Joseph Thompson taught him the adage "If it's not true for you, it's not true". Nibs named Crowley as his father's most important source, saying Scientology was "black magic that is just spread out over a long time period".

  Hubbard was equally inventive with opponents. In 1954 Don Purcell, worn out by constant litigation, handed the copyrights of Dianetics back to Hubbard. Nibs recalled that his father "only knew how to do one thing and that was to destroy people." Hubbard told Scientologists: "Don't ever defend, always attack." Anyone who broke away and started a separate group was to be shut down. Most independent groups were driven out of business or absorbed.

  He then turned on psychiatrists, whom he blamed for the backlash. In 1955 he wrote Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics, presented as a secret manual linking psychiatry and communism by a Soviet secret police chief. He founded a National Academy of American Psychology that sought a "loyalty oath" from psychologists and psychiatrists. Opponents would be labeled "Subversive psychiatrists" and mere refusers "Potentially Subversive". By the early 1970s he wrote of having redefined the word "psychiatrist" to mean "an antisocial enemy of the people".

  In 1958 the IRS withdrew the tax exemption of the Washington, D.C. church after finding that Hubbard and his family profited unreasonably. In the spring of 1959 he bought Saint Hill Manor, an 18th-century English country house once owned by the Maharaja of Jaipur. It became his home and an international training center. That year Nibs resigned, citing financial difficulties, and Hubbard regarded it as a betrayal. Hubbard introduced "security checking", interrogations using the e-meter, with questions such as "Have you ever had unkind thoughts about L. Ron Hubbard?"

  On the 4th of January 1963, US Food and Drug Administration agents raided the church's American offices. They seized over a hundred e-meters as illegal medical devices, thousands of pills marketed as "radiation cures" and tons of literature. In November 1963 the Australian state of Victoria opened an inquiry into accusations of brainwashing, blackmail and extortion. Its report, published in October 1965, condemned every aspect of Scientology and Hubbard himself. Scientology was banned in Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia. Public perception shifted from "relatively harmless, if cranky" to "evil, dangerous".

  Hubbard answered by tightening control. By 1965 "Ethics Technology" required Scientologists to "disconnect" from any person or group deemed "suppressive", including family. Members wrote "Knowledge Reports" on each other. At the start of March 1966 he created the Guardian's Office, headed by Mary Sue, to handle public relations, legal actions and intelligence on perceived threats. It issued hundreds of libel and slander writs, more than forty in a single day. Hubbard ordered staff to find "lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence on Scientology's attackers". In 1967 the "fair game" policy was codified. An enemy "May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed."

  Overseas, the pressure grew. In April 1966 Hubbard traveled to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, hoping for a remote safe haven, but the government refused to renew his visa. In July 1968 the British Minister of Health barred foreign Scientologists and excluded Hubbard himself as an "undesirable alien". Further inquiries opened in Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.

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• 6. Commodore at Sea

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  At the end of 1966 Hubbard acquired a fleet of three ships. He bought one in Las Palmas and used it to found the Sea Org, a private navy of elite Scientologists, and he took command himself. On the voyage he wrote OT III, the story of Xenu. In a letter to Mary Sue, he said he was drinking alcohol and taking stimulants and depressants to assist his research.

  OT III describes a disaster that occurred "on this planet, and on the other seventy-five planets which form this Confederacy, seventy-five million years ago". It teaches that Xenu, the leader of the Galactic Confederacy, shipped billions of people to Earth and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their traumatized spirits were stuck together at "implant stations", brainwashed with false memories, and eventually became contained within human beings.

  When he founded the Sea Org, Hubbard publicly declared that he had given up management of the church. In fact, daily telex messages brought him statistics and income reports from Scientology organizations worldwide. The church sent him $15,000 a week, plus millions of dollars transferred to bank accounts. Couriers delivered luxury food for his family, or cash smuggled out of England to dodge currency export restrictions.

  The fleet drifted from port to port in the Mediterranean and the eastern North Atlantic, rarely staying anywhere longer than six weeks. Hubbard claimed enemies were pursuing him and that their interference could lead to global chaos or nuclear war. Scientologists were shown a glamorous picture of Sea Org life, and many applied. The reality was different. Most recruits had no nautical experience, and crew blunders and mechanical problems caused embarrassing incidents and near-disasters.

  After a storm damaged the rudder of the Royal Scotman, Hubbard ordered the entire crew into a "condition of liability". They wore gray rags tied to their arms, and dirty tarpaulins were tied around the ship's funnel to mark its lower status. Those aboard described appalling conditions. The crew was worked to exhaustion, given meager rations and forbidden to wash or change clothes for several weeks. Mistakes were punished by confinement in the ship's bilge tanks without toilet facilities, with food provided in buckets. Erring crew members or students were sometimes thrown overboard while Hubbard watched and occasionally filmed. One Sea Org member recalled a little boy confined to the chain locker.

  From about 1970, children of Sea Org members, organized as the Commodore's Messenger Organization, attended Hubbard aboard ship. They lit his cigarettes, dressed him and relayed his orders to the crew. He once said the organization had been inspired by the Hitler Youth. Mary Sue was aboard, along with all four of their children, who were Sea Org members too. Orders to use R2-45, meaning killing someone with a .45 pistol, on specific individuals were also published. Hubbard dispatched teams to search for evidence of his past lives and published Mission into Time about it in 1973.

  The fleet then looked for a friendlier shore. It stayed at the Greek island of Corfu for several months in 1968-1969. Hubbard renamed the ships after Greek gods, so the Royal Scotman became the Apollo, and he praised the recently established military dictatorship. In March 1969 the ships were ordered to leave. That year the church began prominently displaying the cross in its centers, after hostile coverage questioned whether Scientology was a legitimate religion. In October 1969 The Sunday Times published an exposé by the Australian journalist Alex Mitchell about Hubbard's occult experiences with Parsons and Crowley's teachings. The church replied, without evidence, that the US Government had sent Hubbard in to "break up Black Magic in America", and that he had succeeded.

  In mid-1972 he tried Morocco, training senior policemen and intelligence agents in techniques for detecting subversives. The program failed when it was caught up in Moroccan politics, and he left hastily in December 1972. French prosecutors charged him with fraud and customs violations, so extradition loomed. At the end of 1972 he left the fleet and lived incognito in Queens, New York. His health suffered. He was an overweight chain-smoker with bursitis and a prominent growth on his forehead. In September 1973, with the extradition threat easing, he returned to his flagship. In December 1973 a motorcycle accident on the island of Tenerife injured him seriously.

  In 1974 he created the Rehabilitation Project Force, a punishment program for Sea Org members who displeased him. His son Quentin found it hard to adjust and reportedly attempted suicide in mid-1974. That year Hubbard also confessed to two top executives that people do not leave Scientology because of unconfessed sins. Instead, he said, "they stop liking Scientology or stop believing in it". He warned: "If any of this information ever became public, I would lose all control of the orgs and eventually Scientology as a whole."

  Throughout this period he directed the Guardian's Office. In 1973 he instigated the Snow White Program and told the office to remove negative reports about Scientology from government files and track down their sources. Operation Bulldozer Leak aimed to convince authorities that Hubbard bore no legal liability for the church's actions. He was kept informed of the theft of medical records from a hospital, the harassment of psychiatrists, and infiltrations of groups including the Better Business Bureau, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service.

  The journalist and Scientology critic Paulette Cooper faced at least 19 lawsuits and was framed for sending bomb threats. A roommate, later believed to be a Guardian's Office agent, urged her to climb onto a dangerous ledge on the 33rd floor.

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• 7. Hiding and Death

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  A heart attack persuaded Hubbard to return to the United States. In October 1975 he moved into a hotel suite in Daytona Beach while the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, was secretly bought as the Sea Org's "land base". On the 11th of June 1976 the FBI apprehended two Guardian's Office agents inside the US Courthouse in Washington. Hubbard moved cross-country to a safe house in California and later a nearby ranch.

  On the 28th of October 1976, Las Vegas police found his son Quentin unconscious in his car with a hose connected to the tailpipe. Hubbard was furious at the news, shouting: "Look what he's done to me!" Scientologists were told Quentin had died from encephalitis.

  On the 8th of July 1977, the FBI raided Guardian's Office locations in Los Angeles and Washington at the same moment. Agents retrieved wiretap equipment, burglary tools and some 90,000 pages of incriminating documents. A week later Hubbard fled with Pat Broeker to Sparks, Nevada. In 1978 France convicted him of fraud in absentia. The same year 11 high-ranking Scientologists were indicted on 28 charges for their role in the Snow White Program, a systematic espionage campaign against the US government. One of them was Mary Sue, and Hubbard himself was named an unindicted co-conspirator.

  On the 18th of August 1978, he suffered a pulmonary embolism and fell into a coma, then recovered. He summoned his personal auditor, David Mayo, to heal him. In August 1979 he saw his wife for the last time. He faced a possible indictment over Operation Freakout, the campaign of attacks on Paulette Cooper. In February 1980 he disappeared into deep cover with two trusted messengers, Pat and Annie Broeker.

  For the first years of the 1980s, Hubbard and the Broekers toured the Pacific Northwest in a recreational vehicle and later lived in Southern California. He returned to science fiction, writing Battlefield Earth in 1982 and Mission Earth, a ten-volume series published between 1985 and 1987.

  His document OT VIII, dated 1980, was meant to circulate only after his death. In it he denounced the historic Jesus as "a lover of young boys" given to "uncontrollable bursts of temper". He wrote that his mission "could be said to fulfill the Biblical promise represented by this brief anti-Christ period." In a 1983 interview, Nibs said his father believed he was the Anti-Christ.

  In December 1985 Hubbard allegedly attempted suicide with a custom e-meter. On the 17th of January 1986 he suffered a stroke, and he died on the 24th of January 1986. His body was cremated and the ashes were scattered at sea.

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• 8. Myth and Legacy

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  Nibs once said that "Ninety-nine percent of what my father ever wrote or said about himself" was false. In October 1984 an American judge went further, writing that "the evidence portrays a man who has been virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background and achievements." Hubbard seems to have known it. In his private Affirmations he wrote to himself: "You can tell all the romantic tales you wish... you know which ones were lies."

  The records tell a different story. He described his grandfather as a wealthy Western cattleman, but Lafayette Waterbury was a veterinarian and not wealthy. Hubbard lived over a hundred miles from the Blackfeet reservation, and the tribe did not practice blood brotherhood. He said he was the youngest Eagle Scout in history, though the Boy Scouts kept no records of the ages of Eagle Scouts. His diary did not record the trip to Manchuria he claimed. He called himself a graduate engineer, but he was placed on probation in September 1931 and dropped out in the fall of 1932. His only doctorate came from a diploma mill. He claimed to have been crippled and blinded in combat, yet he was never wounded and never received a Purple Heart. Church biographies credit him with twenty-one campaign medals, while his Navy records show four. The sociologist Stephen Kent has observed that Hubbard "likely presented a personality disorder known as malignant narcissism".

  Hubbard was survived by Mary Sue and all his children except Quentin. His will supported Mary Sue, her children Arthur, Diana and Suzette, and Katherine, the daughter of Polly. He disinherited two others. L. Ron Hubbard Jr. had changed his name to Ronald DeWolf and in 1982 sued unsuccessfully for control of the estate. Alexis Valerie tried to contact her father in 1971 and was rebuffed with the implied claim that her real father was Jack Parsons. Hubbard's great-grandson Jamie DeWolf is a noted slam poet.

  The teachings spawned offshoots. In 1966 two former Scientologists founded the Process Church of the Final Judgement, which mixed Hubbard's ideas with Satanism. In 1971 the former Scientologist Werner Erhard founded EST, a large group awareness training. In 1998 Keith Raniere drew on Hubbard's writings and Erhard's techniques to create ESP, a forerunner of NXIVM. Raniere taught Hubbard's doctrine of "suppressive persons" and was sentenced to 120 years for crimes including sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit forced labor. In 2010 the Nation of Islam began introducing its followers to Hubbard's teachings, and Louis Farrakhan proclaimed: "I thank God for Mr. L. Ron Hubbard!"

  In March 1988 Dianetics topped the national best-seller lists through an organized campaign of mass book buying. Booksellers reported customers purchasing hundreds of copies at once. The number of followers peaked in the early 1990s at roughly 100,000 Scientologists worldwide. In 2009 the American Religious Identification Survey found that 25,000 Americans identified as Scientologists.

  Mainstream audiences learned the Xenu story only recently. On the 8th of February 1998, The Simpsons satirized Scientology in "The Joy of Sect". In 2005 the South Park episode "Trapped in the Closet" broadcast a condensed version of Xenu with the caption "This is what Scientologists actually believe". Before that episode, the story was almost completely unknown in mainstream culture. Paul Thomas Anderson's 2012 film The Master features a religious leader named Lancaster Dodd, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is based on Hubbard.

  After his death, Scientology leaders announced that his body had become an impediment to his work and that he had decided to "drop his body" to continue his research on another plane of existence. His copyrights and much of his estate went to the church. According to the church, his entire corpus is etched onto steel tablets in a vault under a mountain, topped by a bulldozed logo meant to be visible from space. He is called "Source" and has no successor. Scientologists treat everything he said or wrote as scripture. Every Church of Scientology keeps an office reserved for him, with a desk, chair and writing equipment, ready to be used.

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