Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

off the hook all day. Everyone wanted to know if Dianetics was phoney or if there was really
something in it.
'I was his second guinea pig. He asked me to lie on a couch and explained about the time-track.
He said I could think of it as if I was in an elevator going down and stopping at floors equating to
different years, or I could imagine I was on a train and watching signs with different dates flash by
the window. I got the idea and lay there waiting for something to happen. Suddenly, on a sort of
velvety background I saw two disembodied eyes, hard-boiled eyes like those of the actor, Peter
Lorre. I said, "I see these popping eyes . . ."
'Van said to concentrate on that and keep repeating "popping eyes". I kept saying it and it gradually
got abbreviated to "Popeyes", then "poppies". When I was in High School we memorized a poem
about World War One: "In Flanders fields the poppies grow, by the crosses row on row . . ." I
suddenly thought of the poppies growing row on row and in my mind I went right to the grave of my
dear brother, Lorraine Ackerman, who didn't quite make it to twenty-one. When I learned he had
been killed, I remember I just went round with an empty feeling. All those years later, the sorrow
that I had been holding at bay came gushing out and I got it all out of my system. It was quite
astonishing to me at the time and gave me the feeling there was certainly something to it.[10]
All over the country the same thing was happening: science-fiction fans were buying the book and
auditing their friends, who then rushed out to buy the book so they could audit their friends. In this
first flush of enthusiasm, Hubbard's insistence that Dianetics worked seemed indisputable:
everyone could uncover an engram somewhere down their time-track and only the most churlish
pre-clears would not admit to feeling uplifted after an auditing session. If auditing worked, it was
perhaps not unreasonable to give credence to the whole science of Dianetics.
At the offices of Astounding Science Fiction in New York, more than two thousand letters had
arrived in the fortnight following publication of the Dianetics article and mail continued to pour in by
the sackload. Campbell, who liked statistics, calculated that only 0.2 per cent of the letters were
unfavourable. At Hermitage House, Art Ceppos was frantically trying to arrange for more copies of
the book to be printed and distributed; bookstore owners everywhere were complaining that they
were running out of supplies. In Los Angeles, the demand was so great that Dianetics was only
available on an under-the-counter basis.
In Elizabeth, New Jersey, the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation was inundated with inquiries
when it was announced in June that L. Ron Hubbard would be teaching the first full-time training
course for Dianetic auditors. Hopeful trainees travelled thousands of miles to New Jersey in the
hope of getting a place on the course. Jack Horner was one of them. 'I got hold of Hubbard's
telephone number and called him and said I wanted to take the course. He said, "It's awful
crowded out here, but you're as welcome as the flowers in May." I had a friend with a Cadillac who
was also interested and we drove non-stop across the country to get there in time.
'The course cost $500, which was an immense amount of money in those days, but it was worth
every cent. There were about thirty-five to forty people on the course, all sorts, men and women.
They were a well-educated, literate bunch and if there was a common factor among them it was
probably an interest in science fiction.
'Ron lectured every day. He was very impressive, dedicated and amusing. The man had
tremendous charisma; you just wanted to hear every word he had to say and listen for any pearl of
wisdom. We never discussed where he had got all his knowledge. To me, the source of his data
was irrelevant. I'd been in college studying recent discoveries in psychology and they were not