Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

downgraded to no more than a convenient device designed to finance his 'research'.
During the 'year' he had spent in Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, Ron would claim he had had the run of
the medical library and access to the medical records of former prisoners of war. He began
experimental psycho-analysis on ex POWs, 'using a park bench as a consulting room', and his
research continued ever more intensively through the post-war years. In Savannah, he said, he
worked as a volunteer lay practitioner in a psychiatric clinic, helping charity patients no one else
would treat.
There was, perhaps, no reason why anyone should question the veracity of Hubbard's research,
but his friends must have been puzzled that they knew nothing of it. Mac Ford, for example, who had
spent so much time with Ron in the late '30s, sailing on Puget Sound and often talking through the
night over a bottle of whisky, had never realized that his friend was engaged in research of any kind.
In the heated and wide-ranging discussions that took place in the kitchen of Jack Parsons's house
in Pasadena, the ideal forum for Hubbard to talk about his theories, he had said not a word about
them. Alva Rogers had frequently heard him tapping away at a typewriter in his room, but there was
nothing to indicate he was writing anything but fiction. Not even the amiable Forrest Ackerman had
any idea that Ron was about to abandon science fiction in favour of philosophy, although in January
1949 he received an amusing letter from his client hinting at the possibility.
Addressing Ackerman, as always, as '4E', Ron wrote from Savannah to say that he had set up an
office in the apartment building where he was living on Drayton Street. It was a very nice place, he
said, and could easily become a den of vice, 'so I only allow women over 16 in there'. He had
acquired a dictaphone machine which Sara was 'beating out her wits on' transcribing not only
fiction but his book on the 'cause and cure of nervous tension', which he was going to call either
The Dark Sword or Excalibur or Science of the Mind. He was writing so much fiction, Sara was
having to work on the manuscript in fits. 'So far, however,' he wisecracked, 'she has recovered
easily from each fit.'
If Ackerman did not take the letter too seriously he could hardly be blamed, for its tone was largely
facetious throughout. Ron promised that among the 'handy household hints' contained in the book
was information on how, to 'rape women without their knowing it, communicate suicide messages
to your enemies as they sleep, sell the Arroyo Seco parkway to the mayor for cash, and evolve the
best way of protecting or destroying communism'. He had not decided, he added casually, whether
to destroy the Catholic Church or 'merely start a new one'.
Although he continued in similar vein, suggesting promotion gimmicks like requiring readers to
sign a release absolving the author of any responsibility if they went crazy, it was clear that he
expected the book to he a success: 'Thought of some interesting publicity angles on it. Might post a
ten thousand dollar bond to he paid to anyone who can attain equal results with any known field of
knowledge. A reprint of the preface, however, is about all one needs to bring in orders like a snow
storm. This has more selling and publicity angles than any book of which I have ever heard . . .'
(Publicity angles notwithstanding, he could not have been too confident of the book's success,
because shortly after writing to Forrie he wrote to the Bureau of Naval Personnel asking for a
transcript of his sea service in order to apply for a licence in the merchant marine. He asked for the
request to be dealt with quickly as he had a 'waiting berth'.[15])
The first sci-fi fans knew of L. Ron Hubbard's intention to write a philosophic treatise was an
interview with him that appeared in the January 1949 issue of a magazine called Writers' Markets
and Methods, during which he mentioned that he was working on a 'book of psychology'. But he