Background

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born on March 13, 1911, in Tilden, Nebraska. He was the son of Harry Ross and Dora May (Waterbury de Wolf) Hubbard. His father was a naval officer, and as Hubbard matured, he traveled through the Pacific and to Asia.

Education

In September 1927, Hubbard became a pupil of Helena High School, but on May 11, 1928, he was dropped from enrollment at Helena High due to failing grades. In September 1929, Hubbard was enrolled at the Swavely Preparatory School in Manassas, Virginia. In 1930 he enrolled in the Engineering School of George Washington University, Washington, D.C., where he studied for the next two years. He also studied at Princeton University.

Career

After education at George Washington University, L. Ron Hubbard roamed the world as a participant in various explorations and wrote over 150 articles and short stories. His first book, Buckskin Brigades, appeared in 1937. In 1940 he was elected a member of the Explorers Club in New York. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant though he was not "extensively decorated" as church brochures would later claim.

After the war, he returned to writing as a career. As a writer, Hubbard had a prodigious output and was remembered for the amazing speed at which he could produce copy. Often several stories would be published in the same issue of a magazine and thus many appeared under pseudonyms. No one systematically recorded his output, and reassembling a bibliography was a tedious process, carried out through the 1980s. In the 1930s he turned out Westerns for pulp magazines under the pseudonym "Winchester Remington Colt." His early science-fiction pulp stories were under the pseudonyms "Kurt von Rachen" and "René Lafayette." He wrote for Columbia Pictures in Hollywood in 1935.

Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health appeared a few weeks after the Astounding Science Fiction article. The book created a sensation and launched a vast new industry of do-it-yourself psychotherapy. Hubbard created the Hubbard Dianetics Research Foundation and local Dianetics centers began to emerge based upon Hubbard's technique for ridding individuals of the causes of aberrant behavior patterns and leading them to a state of "clear." Essentially the bible of Scientology, Dianetics describes a program of self-improvement and spiritual awakening.

As Hubbard continued to expand his thought and work out the implications of his theories, Dianetics grew into a comprehensive philosophical-religious system, Scientology. In 1954 the first Church of Scientology was opened in Los Angeles. The rest of Hubbard's life would be spent in developing and perfecting Scientology. In 1966 he resigned from any official position in the church, but he continued his research and writing for a number of years. He developed guidelines for the church and left behind writing that focused on the implications of his thought for education and business.

Hubbard's ideas continued to be popular throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The church has over 700 established churches, missions, and groups around the world and membership reached its peak at around six million. Dianetics has sold over eight million copies and still sells nearly 400, 000 copies a year. A 1991 Time cover story characterized the movement as at best a money-making scam and at worst a terrorist organization. As Cult Awareness Network director Cynthia Kisser has stated, "Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen."

As his church became a prosperous international movement, it and Hubbard became the center of controversies involving people who left the movement to found competing organizations, former members who turned upon the church for real or imagined grievances, and the anti-cult movement, which branded the church a cult. In retrospect, early controversy with the American Medical Association, which disapproved of Dianetics, seems to have spilled over into federal government departments and covert actions against the church were instigated. Rumors of illicit actions by the church, many of which led to problems with different governments, began to emerge around the world. Legal actions, most of which were eventually resolved, became the justification for action against the church in additional countries. Some high church officials authorized the infiltration of several government agencies, and this became a major source of embarrassment for the church when the people responsible were arrested and convicted for theft of government documents.

During the last years of his life, Ron dropped out of public sight and remained in contact with only a few church leaders. In the years prior to his death on January 24, 1986, he returned to his love for storytelling and wrote one major novel, Battlefield Earth, and a ten-volume science fiction series, Mission Earth.

For the Church of Scientology, the years since 1985 have been marked by intense polemics and court action between members of the church and the Cult Awareness Network, which emerged in the mid-1980s as the chief organizational expression of the anti-cult movement. Hubbard eventually went into seclusion, remaining the subject of rumors and speculation until his death was announced in 1986.

Achievements

• 

  L. Ron Hubbard went down in history as the founder of Scientology. The Church of Scientology claims millions of devoted members worldwide and, beyond all controversy, it cannot be denied that the movement retains its influence around the world even after Hubbard's death. Hubbard is still the model Operating Thetan to Scientologists.
  
  Hubbart holds three Guinness World Records: the most published author, with 1,084 works, most translated book (70 languages for The Way to Happiness), most audiobooks (185 as of April 2009).

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Automagic Horse

    (The Automagic Horse is a colorful blend of high adventure...)

    1940
  • Slaves of Sleep & Masters of Sleep

    (Jan Palmer wakes from a deep sleep, into a living nightma...)

  • Under the Black Ensign

    (Long before Captain Jack Sparrow raised hell with the Pir...)

    1935
  • Mission Earth Volume 3: The Enemy Within

    (Earthlings: Beware! Do you know who your enemies are? You...)

  • Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

    (Containing discoveries heralded as greater than the wheel...)

    1950
  • Mission Earth Volume 4: An Alien Affair

    (The Voltar Confederacy has a long-range strategy to invad...)

    1986
  • Mission Earth Volume 7: Voyage of Vengeance

    (The end is near! The Voltarian terrorists have won! Earth...)

    1987
  • Mission Earth Volume 8: Disaster

    (Who is the true master of disaster? Earthlings: prepare f...)

    1987
  • Typewriter in the Sky

    (It’s not easy living in someone else’s world, trapped in ...)

  • Ole Doc Methuselah

    (Ole Doc Methuselah is his name, and saving the universe i...)

    1953
  • Battlefield Earth

    (Only 35,000 humans remain… …and the aliens hunt them for ...)

    1982
  • Mission Earth Volume 5: Fortune of Fear

    (The Voltarian invaders are getting down and dirty ... in ...)

    1986
  • Mission Earth Volume 9: Villainy Victorious

    (Earth is rising in the House of Voltar ... And there’ll b...)

    1987
  • Mission Earth Volume 10: The Doomed Planet

    (Fasten your seatbelts. Mission Earth is approaching clima...)

    1987
  • Mission Earth Volume 1: The Invaders Plan

    (Earth does not exist... Or so they want you to believe. W...)

    1985
  • Seven Steps to the Arbiter aka The Kingslayer

    (The man: Kit Kellan. His mission: kill the king of the ga...)

  • Mission Earth Volume 6: Death Quest

    (Kinky killers. Exploding speedboats. $2 billion paternity...)

    1986
  • Mission Earth Volume 2: Black Genesis

    (Drugs. Sex. Murder. Taxes. Welcome to planet Earth. They’...)

    1986
  • Buckskin Brigades 1937
  • Final Black-out 1940
  • The Indigestible Triton 1940

Religion

Founded by L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology is a new religious movement of the gnostic type. Essentially the bible of Scientology, Dianetics describes a program of self-improvement and spiritual awakening. As a journalist in People described it, "basically it is the use of a crude lie-detector-type device called an 'E-meter' to diagnose an individual's emotional state, followed by lengthy and expensive Dianetics counseling sessions to deal with the 'problems' the meter detects-and it is the basis of the church's wealth."

Almost as long as it has been in existence, Scientology has been an object of controversy, accused of everything from cultic brainwashing to tax evasion. Yet despite these attacks, including government investigations, Scientology has always defended itself rigorously in court and in the public media, and weathered each storm largely unscathed. And, despite many books and periodical articles (including a 1991 cover story in Time magazine) which have attempted to debunk Scientology's precepts and reveal unscrupulous practices, the Church of Scientology seems in the 1990s to be thriving more than ever. As a religion born in the twentieth century, Scientology has proven itself a most media-savvy church, taking full advantage of modern methods, from television to cyberspace, to promote its methodology, attack what it views as the evil of psychiatry, and engage in positive public relations. The Scientologists' claims for Hubbard's teachings include techniques to improve education and combat drug addiction, although mainstream acceptance of these ideas, particularly when it would mean forming an alliance with the controversial Church of Scientology, has not been forthcoming.

Politics

L. Ron Hubbart spoke out in favor of democracy: "Democracy is probably the best political theory, workably, that has been introduced over the last twenty-five hundred years… It postulates the belief that men should be free to decide things for themselves. It outlaws tyranny as undesirable and relegates government to the service of the group, rather than the group to the service of government."

He also urged his followers to vote against Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election.

Views

During the late 1940s, Hubbard began to synthesize concepts from Eastern religions and modern psychology into a new system for mental health. Called Dianetics, after the Greek word for thought, this system promised to cure all mental disorders and psychosomatic physical ailments. "The hidden source of all psycho-somatic ills and human aberration has been discovered," Hubbard explained in his manuscript Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, "and skills have been developed for their invariable cure." Dianetics sees the human mind as "blocked" by traumatic emotional memories called engrams. By talking over these emotional memories in a process similar to conventional psychoanalysis, a patient can remove the engrams and "clear" his mind. Hubbard believed that a treated patient-called a "clear"-was "to a current normal individual as the current normal is to the severely insane," and claimed that those treated by Dianetics had higher IQs, healed faster, had better eyesight, and never got colds. "The clear is, literally, a superman-an evolutionary step toward a new species," Gardner summarized. A writer for Fantasy Review saw a parallel between Dianetics and Hubbard's outer space adventures, claiming that "like the quasi-superman heroes of most of Hubbard's fiction, initiates were encouraged to believe their mental powers were unlimited."

An applied religious philosophy, his Scientology represents a statement of human potential that even if echoed in ancient scripture is utterly unparalleled. Among other essential tenets of the Scientology religion: Man is an immortal spiritual being; his experience extends well beyond a single lifetime and his capabilities are unlimited even if not presently realized. In that respect, Scientology represents the ultimate definition of a religion: not just a system of beliefs, but a means of spiritual transformation.

How Scientology accomplishes that transformation is through the study of L. Ron Hubbard scriptures and the application of principles therein. The central practice of Scientology is auditing. It is delivered by an auditor, from the Latin audire, "to listen." The auditor does not evaluate nor in any way tell one what to think. In short, auditing is not done to a person and its benefits can only be achieved through active participation. Indeed, auditing rests on the maxim that only by allowing one to find one’s own answer to a problem can that problem be resolved. Precisely to that end, the auditor employs processes - precise sets of questions to help one examine otherwise unknown and unwanted sources of travail.

The complete route of spiritual advancement is delineated by the Scientology Bridge. It presents the precise steps of auditing and training one must walk to realize the full scope of Scientology. Because the Bridge is laid out in a gradient fashion, the advancement is orderly and predictable. If the basic concept is an ancient one - a route across a chasm of ignorance to a higher plateau - what the Bridge presents is altogether new: not some arbitrary sequence of steps, but the most workable means for the recovery of what Mr. Hubbard described as our 2immortal, imperishable self, forevermore."

Quotations: "Freedom is for honest people. No man who is not himself honest can be free - he is in his own trap."

"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."

"Never regret yesterday. Life is in you today, and you make your tomorrow."

"There are conditions worse than being unable to see, and that is imagining one sees."

"Man is sick and nations have gone mad."

"To be happy, one only must be able to confront, which is to say, experience, those things that are. Unhappiness is only this: the inability to confront that which is."

"Happiness and strength endure only in the absence of hate. To hate alone is the road to disaster. To love is the road to strength. To love in spite of all is the secret of greatness. And may very well be the greatest secret in this universe."

"I set out to try to help my fellow man and to do what little I could to make the world a better place."

Membership

• 

  The Explorers Club

Personality

Hubbard's personality is the most controversial. In public, Hubbard was sociable and friendly, followers and supporters consider him “a dynamic, charming personality; a great man who likes people and whom they like"; some of the supporters began to regard him as their own friend, after just reading books and listening to Hubbard’s lectures.

Opponents, on the contrary, describe him exclusively from a negative point of view, considering him a paranoid personality and a schizophrene.

Interests

• aviation

Connections

L. Ron Hubbard married Margaret "Polly" Grubb, a pilot, in 1933. The couple had two children, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, Jr. and Katherine May Hubbard.

On August 10, 1946, Hubbard married Sara "Betty" Northrup, while still married to Polly. Polly and Ron officially divorced in 1947. Sara bore him one daughter, Alexis Valerie Hubbard. His marriage to Sara "Betty" Northrup also ended in divorce in 1951.

Hubbard's third wife was Mary Sue Whipp, whom he married in 1952. They had four children.

Father:

Harry Ross Hubbard

Mother:

Dora May (Waterbury de Wolf) Hubbard

Acquaintance:

Isaac Asimov

ex-wife:

Margaret "Polly" Grubb

Son:

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, Jr.

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, Jr., widely known as Ronald DeWolf, is a convinced critic of his father's doctrine.

Daughter:

Katherine May Hubbard

ex-wife:

Sara "Betty" Northrup

Daughter:

Alexis Valerie Hubbard

Wife:

Mary Sue Whipp

Daughter:

Diana Hubbard

Son:

Quentin Hubbard

Daughter:

Suzette Hubbard

Son:

Arthur Hubbard

Acquaintance:

Robert Heinlein

Acquaintance:

Aleister Crowley