Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

An argument inevitably followed and Barbara reconstructed the extraordinary 'highlights' in her
journal, very much as if she was writing a pulp romance:
'ME: You make a habit of instilling engrams, too, don't you? That's fine. That's good behaviour for the founder of
Dianetics.
HE: Isn't it exciting for you being a pawn on such a grand chess board? You are playing for the world. Can you think
of anything more exciting?
ME: I don't give a good God damn about the world. I want a single, gratifying, human relationship.
HE: You couldn't have one. You're an ambitious woman. You crave power. You're a Marie Antoinette, a Cleopatra, a
Lucretia Borgia . . . you must have a Caesar or an Alexander.
ME: No, I don't need a Caesar, though Caesar may need me. I know you now, Ron, and at this moment am closer to
you than anyone has ever been.
HE: (Head hung low) And knowing me you don't care for me any more.
ME: I care for you in a different, new and exciting way. (He put his hands on my shoulders and drew me to him.)
HE: I shouldn't do this. (He kissed me.)
ME: You still care for me.
HE: How do you know?
ME: You can't find your hat. You're distracted.
HE: That makes you feel powerful, doesn't it?
ME: It makes me aware of something interesting. You still want me.
HE: Why?
ME: Because you need me. You need me more than I need you.
HE: In 1939 I was very much in love with a girl. She felt that way too. When I knew she had a boyfriend coming up, I
waited on the stairway with a gun, just for a moment. Then I said they are flies. I realized who and what I was and
left. I told her I would leave her free to marry a sharpie with a cigar in his mouth from Muncie, Indiana. Would you like
to be left free?
ME: The alternative is a sharpie with a Kool cigarette from Elizabeth, New Jersey.
HE: That was unwise, very unwise, of you to say that.'
Barbara discovered just how unwise it was when, two days later, she received a terse message via
Western Union: 'Would advise you to forget all about me and the Foundation - Ron.' 'I was in shock,'
she recalled. 'Here was the man I was supposed to be having a great love affair with telling me I
was fired.'
A.E. van Vogt, meanwhile, was striving to keep the Los Angeles Foundation in business. He
calculated that the six Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundations had spent around one million
dollars and were more than $200,000 in debt. At the beginning of November, while Hubbard was
away on the East Coast, van Vogt cut the staff of sixty by half in an attempt to stay solvent. Hubbard
was furious and began hiring indiscriminately the moment he returned: within a week, the payroll
was back up to sixty-seven people. Van Vogt remonstrated, but Hubbard insisted that the extra staff
was needed for research. 'Financial disaster was inevitable,' said van Vogt.[11]
One of the research projects about which Hubbard was very excited was the aptly named 'GUK'
programme. 'GUK' was a haphazard cocktail of benzedrine, vitamins and glutamic acid which
Hubbard believed facilitated auditing. 'I recall Ron telling a meeting about this great breakthrough in
Dianetics,' said Forrest Ackerman. 'He said he had discovered a chemical way to audit yourself
called GUK. It comprised huge quantities of vitamins which you took every two hours for at least
twenty-four hours. If you took enough, he said, it would release the engrams within you without the
need for a partner.
'The Foundation rented a huge complex on Rossmore near Beverly and loads of Dianeticists were
holed up there going through the GUK programme but it didn't last too long - I think it was a dead
end.'
In December, Look magazine published a scathing article under the headline 'Dianetics - Science