L Ron Hubbard

Hubbard was already a fairly well-known pulp fiction author by the beginning of WWII. He saw the war as an opportunity to prove himself as more than a teller of tales, and had got himself a commission in the U.S. Navy with the help of his father, a Navy lieutenant. In 1950, Hubbard published a book about his new approach, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, and it quickly caught on. Hubbard soon added “Scientology” to Dianetics. Hubbard’s functional prose in Scientology would eventually number in the millions of words. He stopped referring to it as a science and, after 1953, started calling it a religion. But by 1959, he was feeling enough heat from the U.S. government over his health claims for Dianetic counseling that he abandoned a headquarters in Washington, D.C., for East Grinstead, England, about 30 miles south of London. On the last day of 1960, Hubbard gave a speech arguing that the apartheid government in South Africa was being distorted by the Western media. In 1975, L. Ron Hubbard had returned to land after running Scientology from sea for eight years, giving himself the title “Commodore” as his small armada plied the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and finally the Caribbean between 1967 and 1975. The FBI raided Scientology in 1977. Eleven top Scientologists were convicted and went to prison for the government break-ins, including Hubbard’s wife Mary Sue, but Hubbard himself escaped prosecution and went into permanent seclusion in 1980. In 1982, while still in hiding, he published Battlefield Earth, a massive Scientology-infused tale later adapted into a Hollywood film and then a ten-part science fiction series, Mission Earth. Hubbard died in 1986, while the final volumes of Mission Earth were still released.