Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

'I was in my apartment on February 23rd, about two or three o'clock in the morning when the
apartment was entered, I was knocked out, had a needle thrust into my heart to give it a jet of air to
produce "coronary thrombosis" and was given an electric shock with a 110 volt current. This is all
very blurred to me. I had no witnesses. But only one person had another key to that apartment and
that was Sara.'
Hubbard went on to describe how he had found love letters to his wife from Miles Hollister, a
'member of the Young Communists', and an ominous telegram containing the phrase 'Lombardo
should live so long'. Lombardo, he explained, was a name Sara sometimes called him. Then he
described how they had plotted to have him committed and how he had tried to get his wife away by
taking her to Palm Springs. She consented to go with him, he said, and he had her signed
statement to prove it. Sara's real motive in filing for divorce, he claimed, was to get control of the
Foundation.
All the attacks she had mounted against him had held up research he was intending to offer to the
Government. 'In August 1950 I found out a method the Russians use on such people as Vogeler,
Mindszenty and others to obtain confessions. I could undo that method. My second book was to
have shown how the Communists used narcosynthesis and physical torture and why it worked as
it did. Further, I was working on a technology of psychological warfare to present it to the Defense
Department. All that work was interrupted. Each time I tried to write, a new attack was launched.'
Hubbard declared his concern to prevent Dianetics falling into the hands of Communists and
appealed for a 'round-up' of the 'vermin Communists or ex-Communists' who were trying to take
over the potent forces of the Foundation. He suggested the 'round-up' should start with Sara:
'I believe this woman to be under heavy duress. She was born into a criminal atmosphere, her
father having a criminal record. Her half-sister was an inmate of an insane asylum. She was part of
a free love colony in Pasadena. She had attached herself to a Jack Parsons, the rocket expert,
during the war and when she left him he was a wreck. Further, through Parsons, she was strangely
intimate with many scientists of Los Alamo Gordos [Alamogordo in New Mexico was where the first
atomic bomb was tested]. I did not know or realize these things until I myself investigated the
matter. She may have a record . . . Perhaps in your criminal files or on the police blotter of
Pasadena you will find Sara Elizabeth Northrop, age about 26, born April 8, 1925, about 5'9", blondbrown
hair, slender . . . I have no revenge motive nor am I trying to angle this broader than it is. I
believe she is under duress, that they have something on her and I believe that under a grilling she
would talk and turn state's evidence.'
Hubbard made it clear he felt his life was in danger and concluded: 'Frankly, from what has
happened, I am not certain I will live through this. If I do not, know that I have only these enemies in
the entire world.'[6]
If Hubbard's letter had been a little more moderate and his FBI file not already voluminous, his
letter might easily have resulted in Sara's arrest. The 'Red Scare' was at its height and the
American people had succumbed to an irrational fear of subversion and disloyalty encouraged by
McCarthy, the cold war, Korea, a series of sensational spy trials and the Truman administration's
loyalty programme. Many reputations and careers were destroyed by accusations a great deal
milder than those levelled by Hubbard against his wife.
But by 1951, Hubbard was well known to the FBI. The opinion of the agent who had interviewed him
in Newark that he was a 'mental case' figured prominently in his file, as did Sara's divorce
allegations that he was 'hopelessly insane'. It was a diagnosis with which the FBI was inclined to