A month later, Hubbard was given a lifeline. In an address to the nation, President Roosevelt declared a state of emergency, warning Hitler that the US was prepared to go to war. For the US Navy, it became a case of all hands on deck. With recruitment standards lowered, Hubbard finally received his commission from the Naval Reserve in July 1941. After Pearl Harbor was bombed in December, Hubbard was meant to head to Manila. But the speed of the Japanese offensive in the Philippines took the military by surprise and the USS President Polk was diverted to Brisbane.
The official record of how Hubbard arrived in Australia doesn’t quite match the story he would end up spinning to his military colleagues. Captain Thomas Moulton later testified in court that Hubbard claimed he made an epic journey from Java after disembarking from the US Destroyer the Edsall, ‘He had been landed, so he told me, in Java … and had made his way across the land to Soerabaja [Surabaya], and that is when the place was occupied. When the Japanese came in, he took off into the hills and lived up in the jungle for some time until he made an escape from there.’6
Hubbard, as Moulton told it, was machine-gunned while trying to out-fox the Japanese in the Javanese jungle. ‘In the back, in the area of the kidneys, I believe on the right side,’ the Captain recalled, ‘I know that he told me he had made his escape eventually to Australia. I don’t know just when it was. Apparently he and another chap sailed a life raft, I believe, to near Australia where they were picked up by a British or Australian destroyer.’7
Scientology’s founder must have been superhuman with a paddle in his hands. According to Captain Moulton’s testimony, Hubbard said he’d navigated his life raft to within 160 km (100 miles) of Australia. That is a trip of over 1600 km (1000 miles), in shark-infested waters, smack-bang in the middle of the monsoon season, the most dangerous period to attempt a sea crossing to northern Australia. Fishing boats carrying asylum seekers struggle to make it to Australia via this route, let alone men in rubber life rafts.
Hubbard’s tall tale does not stack up with the official military record. Moulton said his navy buddy was in Java on 8 December. He didn’t even leave the US till 17 December. There is no record of Hubbard ever being on the Edsall, which was sunk on 1 March. The Japanese invaded Java on 28 February; by this time Hubbard was already in the process of being sent back to the US for ill discipline. There is no evidence that Hubbard was wounded by machine-gun fire or by any other weapon. If he had been wounded in action he would have received a Purple Heart. Despite insistent claims from the Church of Scientology, military records show he received no such award. Hubbard’s personal nurse from 1975 to 1980 testified that he had no scars from bullet wounds.8
In a 1956 lecture to Scientologists in London, Hubbard restated claims he was injured in the Pacific, further embellishing the tale by saying he was sent back to the US on the Secretary of the Navy’s plane. ‘I was flown in from the South Pacific as the first casualty to be shipped out of the South Pacific war back to the States,’9 he told a captive audience. Perhaps the truth hurt Hubbard. The real reason he was sent back home had nothing to do with enemy fire.
Within weeks of landing in Brisbane, Hubbard took to writing. He would have been better off belting out one of his boy’s own adventure stories than the five-page ‘intelligence report’ he eventually filed. The report dealt with a ship routing plan that had gone awry, and criticised his superiors including the Naval Attaché, Commander Lewis Causey.10 Six days later, Hubbard was issued orders to return home.
Commander Causey accused Hubbard of acting above his rank. ‘By assuming unauthorized authority and attempting to perform duties for which he has no qualifications he became the source of much trouble,’ Causey wrote.11 The Naval Attaché issued a blistering character assessment, as he punted the junior Lieutenant out of the country: ‘This officer is not satisfactory for independent duty assignment. He is garrulous and tries to give impressions of his importance. He also seems to think that he has unusual ability in most lines. These characteristics indicate that he will require close supervision for satisfactory performance of any intelligence duty.’12
Hubbard was sent home in disgrace. Commander Causey cabled the Bureau of Naval Personnel, stating: ‘He is unsatisfactory for any available assignment here.’13 Hubbard was eventually sent packing to the Office of Cable Censorship where he could work on removing inappropriate sentences rather than writing them. At his new posting he would continue to be reminded of his embarrassing stay in Brisbane. He received ongoing correspondence about bad debts he left owing to Ryders menswear store in Adelaide Street and a missing Thompson machine gun he had borrowed from the Australian military.14
In less than two months in Australia Hubbard had racked up debts, lost a machine gun, upset the top brass and been sent home. Yet two decades later, Hubbard would portray his time in Brisbane as something Australians should be grateful for. In a statement to the press he said, ‘In 1942, as the senior US naval officer in Northern Australia, by a fluke of fate, I helped save them from the Japanese.’15
The rest of Hubbard’s war was equally inglorious. He was withdrawn from his only command after waging a 55-hour battle with what he claimed were two Japanese submarines but actually turned out to be a magnetic deposit off the Oregon coast, and for shelling a Mexican island for gunnery practice. In his report on these incidents, Rear Admiral Braisted, Commander of the Fleet Operational Trainer Command, Pacific, said: ‘Consider this officer lacking in the essential qualities of judgement, leadership and cooperation. He acts without forethought as to probable results … Not considered qualified for command or promotion at this time. Recommend duty on a large vessel where he can be properly supervised.’16 Despite his claims, there is no record that Hubbard ever engaged in combat with the enemy.
The Church of Scientology argues there’s a good reason for the discrepancy between Hubbard’s tales of derring-do and the official military record. Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty was a chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy. In the Oliver Stone film JFK, Donald Sutherland plays an intelligence agent named X who believes the assassination of President Kennedy was part of a coup driven by the military industrial complex. The character X is based loosely on Fletcher Prouty, who worked as an adviser on the film, and as a consultant to the Church of Scientology in the 1980s.
Prouty was commissioned to write an authorised biography of Hubbard and contributed articles to Scientology’s Freedom magazine. In 1985, he issued an affidavit defending Hubbard’s war record claiming it had been ‘sheep dipped’ to hide Hubbard’s role as an intelligence officer. He made similar claims in letters to CBS’s 60 Minutes and the publisher of Russell Miller’s book Bare-Faced Messiah, arguing that Hubbard’s military record ‘is replete with markings that signify deep intelligence service at the highest levels’.17
Prouty wrote that ‘nearly all official correspondence to and from Lt Hubbard bears the symbol “NAV-1651” (or other 1600 serial). This “1600” series identifies correspondence in the Intelligence series.’ But Jon Atack, a former Scientologist who meticulously researched Hubbard’s military record for his book Let’s Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky, says Prouty’s claims do not stack up. ‘His most significant evidence was the use of the code number “16” on Hubbard’s orders,’ he says. ‘In fact, the code indicated that Hubbard was a member of the Naval Reserve, as documents within his Navy file, and comparison with other Navy Reserve officers’ files, readily demonstrates.’18
Hubbard also claimed he was a widely decorated war hero who had received 27 medals including the Purple Heart.19 The Church of Scientology at other times has argued the figure is 21 – taken from a copy of a US Navy notice of separation document they regularly distribute to journalists.
But this document has all the hallmarks of an amateur-hour forgery. It does not appear in Hubbard’s naval records and is signed by Lieutenant Commander Howard Thompson, an officer who never existed according to naval records. Two of the 21 meda
ls cited in this document were not commissioned until after Hubbard had completed active service; other medals such as the British Victory Medal simply didn’t exist during World War II.
Hubbard’s file shows he had been awarded just four standard issue decorations: the American Defense Service Medal; the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal; the American Campaign Medal; and the World War II Victory Medal. None of these medals reward heroism or mark combat. They were awarded to everyone who served in these areas or, in the last case, served in the US military. There is no record of a Purple Heart, debunking Hubbard’s claims he was wounded in action.
The missing Purple Heart undermines Scientology’s key mythology that Hubbard’s war ended in Oak Knoll Naval Hospital ‘crippled and blinded’. As Hubbard wrote in My Philosophy, ‘Blinded with injured optic nerves, and lame with physical injuries to hip and back, at the end of World War II, I faced an almost nonexistent future. My service record states: “This officer has no neurotic or psychotic tendencies of any kind whatsoever,” but it also states “permanently disabled physically”.’20 Hubbard’s military record states no such thing.
Hubbard did suffer from conjunctivitis, poor eyesight, a duodenal ulcer, arthritis and hemorrhoids. He also complained of urethral discharges, symptoms consistent with that common Naval affliction, venereal disease. When applying for a veteran’s disability pension, Hubbard made no mention of war wounds or being blinded by the flash of a large calibre gun.21
If Hubbard was truly suffering from ill health following his war service, convalescing at home with his wife and family was not part of his recovery plan. Getting laid, and dabbling in the occult soon became part of his post-war rehabilitation program. On 5 December 1945, he was discharged from the Navy. The following day he applied for a military pension and headed straight to Pasadena and a share house with a reputation for debauchery.
Rocket scientist Jack Parsons owned a three-storey mansion at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue, a street the Los Angeles Times once called ‘the most beautiful residence street in the world’.22 The 11-bedroom estate, once the home to the lumber millionaire and philanthropist Arthur Fleming, had been transformed into a bohemian flophouse following his death. Actors, writers, dancers and libertines moved in, much to the distaste of local residents. Pasadena police received official complaints about ‘sex perversion’23, while the local fire brigade were kept on their toes by Parsons’ experiments with rockets and fireworks.
Jack Parsons was a true original. His work inventing a radical new form of rocket fuel paved the way for the moon landings and further space travel. He was a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a research centre now run by NASA that oversees the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Mars Rovers. As a child, Parsons experimented shooting off home-made rockets in his backyard. As an adult he began experimenting with black magic, becoming a disciple of the English occultist Aleister Crowley, and heading up the local Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a secret society that practised ‘sex magic’.
L. Ron Hubbard didn’t just move into ‘The Parsonage’ for the stimulating conversation. He was soon participating in occult rituals with Parsons including a bizarre attempt at creating a supernatural ‘moonchild’ during a ‘sex magic’ rite. Parsons detailed the ritual in The Book of Babalon. According to the diary, Hubbard wore white, carried a lamp and played the role of ‘scribe’, channelling the voice of the goddess Babalon who provided blow-by-blow instructions on how to impregnate Parsons’ ‘scarlet woman’, the actress and artist Marjorie Cameron.24
Hubbard and Parsons performed the 8th ritual of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientalis to incarnate the Anti-Christ. During the ceremony, Hubbard urged Parsons to ‘Lay out a white sheet. Place upon it blood of birth. Envision her approaching thee. Think upon the lewd, lascivious things thou coulds’t do. All is good to Babalon. All. Preserve the material basis. Thus lust is hers, the passion yours. Consider thou the Beast raping.’25 The ‘material basis’ was Parsons’ semen, ejaculated as Hubbard looked on.26
Hubbard’s bizarre invocation did not work. No ‘moonchild’ eventuated. Aleister Crowley, a man not easily appalled, expressed his dismay in a letter to fellow occultist Karl Germer: ‘Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts.’27
When Sunday Times reporter Alex Mitchell broke the story of Hubbard’s participation in sex magic rituals, the Church of Scientology had an interesting take on why Hubbard had donned the white robes, and shouted incantations about menstrual blood and semen. Apparently he’d done it all for the good of his country.
In a statement provided to the Sunday Times in 1969 it was claimed, ‘Hubbard broke up black magic in America … He went to live at the house and investigated the black magic rites and the general situation and found them very bad. Hubbard’s mission was successful far beyond anyone’s expectations. The house was torn down. Hubbard rescued a girl they were using. The black magic group was dispersed and destroyed and has never recovered.’28 No evidence was ever provided to back these claims up. The original copy of the statement was provided during a court case in 1984. It was in Hubbard’s handwriting.29
When Hubbard mentions rescuing a girl from black magic, he is almost certainly referring to liberating Sara Northrup from her relationship with Jack Parsons. Sara, known as Betty by all those in The Parsonage, had first met Hubbard in August when he visited Pasadena at the invitation of science fiction fan Lou Goldstone.30 Jack Parsons believed in open relationships, and Sara obliged, starting a sexual relationship with Hubbard. When Hubbard returned to Pasadena in December after driving straight from the Officer Separation Center in San Francisco, he and Sara resumed their affair.31
Sara was 21 when she met Hubbard. Just as she had taken on Parsons’ appetite for ‘sex magic’, she soon adapted to the ways of her new beau. Hubbard was desperate for an income stream beyond his meagre military pension. He cooked up a plan that would see him take not only Parsons’ girlfriend, but go after his life savings as well.
In January, Jack, Sara and Ron had formed a company called Allied Enterprises. Parsons kicked in over US$20,000, Hubbard around US$1200, Northrup not a dime.32
In late April, Northrup and Hubbard withdrew US$10,000 from the Allied Enterprises’ bank account and headed for Florida. Parsons approved of the deal believing they would purchase a yacht and sell it for profit.33 When Aleister Crowley heard of the plan he cabled Karl Germer with a warning: ‘Suspect Ron playing confidence trick. Jack evidently weak fool. Obvious victim prowling swindlers.’34
Jack Parsons eventually came to the same conclusion. He headed to Miami to find that three boats had been bought including a schooner, The Harpoon, in which Ron and Sara had already set sail. Hubbard had written to the Chief of Naval Personnel seeking permission to visit South America and China.35 After Parsons worked some black magic in his Miami hotel room, the weather remarkably changed. As he later wrote in a letter to Crowley, ‘His ship was struck by a sudden squall off the coast, which ripped off his sails and forced him back to port, where I took the boat in custody.’36
Parsons kept two of the boats, retrieved most of his money, but never won back his girlfriend.37 Hubbard’s next act of deception would involve Sara, the woman he loved, and Polly, his wife and the mother of his children. On 10 August 1946, L. Ron Hubbard married his 21-year-old girlfriend. Hubbard now had two wives.38 Sara found out her husband was already married when Polly filed for divorce in 1947 on the grounds of desertion and non-support.39
By this time, Hubbard had started beating Sara. In a testimony recorded in 1997 shortly before her death, she recalled a winter’s night when Hubbard had pistol-whipped her after she had fallen asleep. ‘I got up and left the house in the night and walked on the ice of the lake because I was terrified.’40 Hubbard told her she was smiling in her sleep. He was worried she was dreaming about someone else.41
In October 1947, Hubbard asked for help. In a letter to the Veter
ans Administration, he wrote:
This is a request for treatment … I was placed on certain medication back east and have continued it at my own expense. After trying and failing for two years to regain my equilibrium in civil life, I am utterly unable to approach anything like my own competence. My last physician informed me that it might be very helpful if I were to be examined and perhaps treated psychiatrically or even by a psycho-analyst. Toward the end of my service I avoided out of pride any mental examinations, hoping that time would balance a mind which I had every reason to suppose was seriously affected. I cannot account for nor rise above long periods of moroseness and suicidal inclinations … I cannot, myself, afford such treatment. Would you please help me?42
Hubbard didn’t get the help he was after. His pension was increased a few months later,43 but the extra funds were not enough to stop him from taking desperate measures. In August 1948, Hubbard was arrested and fingerprinted by the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff, for cheque fraud. After initially pleading not guilty before the San Gabriel Township Justice Court, he changed his plea to guilty and was fined US$25.44
At the heart of Scientology’s creation myth is the assertion that Hubbard cured himself from a state of permanent disability by using the power of his own mind. By 1947, he was said to be back to full health by using the same techniques that would form the basis for Dianetics and Scientology. As Hubbard’s disciples wrote, in the 1992 edition of What is Scientology?, ‘So complete was his recovery, that officers from the Naval Retiring Board reviewing Lt. Hubbard’s case were actually upset. After all, they reasoned, how could a man physically shot to pieces at the end of the war pass his full physical examination?’45
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