Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

'eating one's wife and other somewhat illogical activities'.
(Unfortunately for Hubbard, just twelve months after The History of Man was published, the
supposed fossil remains of primitive man found in gravel on Piltdown Common in the south of
England were exposed as a hoax. The Piltdown Man had never existed. Hubbard was describing
engrams caused by GEs occupying a fictitious early life form dreamed up in 1912 by Charles
Dawson, the English amateur archaeologist responsible for the Piltdown fraud. )
The History of Man drifted into pure science fiction when Hubbard came to the point of explaining
how thetans moved from body to body. Thetans abandoned bodies earlier than GEs, it appeared.
While the GE stayed around to see the body through to death, thetans were obliged to report to a
between-lives 'implant station' where they were implanted with a variety of control phases while
waiting to pick up another body, sometimes in competition with other disembodied thetans.
Hubbard revealed that most implant stations were on Mars, although women occasionally had to
report elsewhere in the solar system and there was a 'Martian implant station somewhere in the
Pyrenees'.
After publication of the epoch-making The History of Man, Hubbard was not of a mind to rest on his
dubious laurels. The Hubbard Association of Scientologists and the Scientific Press of Phoenix
produced a veritable avalanche of publications during 1952, including another book, Scientology: 8-
8008, which appeared only a few months after The History of Man. Continuing his tradition of
audacious introductions, the author wrote: 'With this book, the ability to make one's body old or
young at will, the ability to heal the ill without physical contact, the ability to cure the insane and the
incapacitated, is set forth for the physician, the layman, the mathematician and the physicist.'
Both books were required reading for new Scientologists and were studied as if they were serious
scientific textbooks, indicating the extraordinary hold Hubbard was beginning to exert over his
followers. Non-Scientologists could never understand how he achieved a position of such
omnipotence, but the power he wielded was far from unprecedented. Scientology already exhibited
the classic characteristics of a religious sect, offering salvation through secret knowledge and
totally dominated by a leader claiming a monopoly over the source of the knowledge. Many such
'manipulationist sects' flourished at different periods of Christian history.[5]
There were also striking parallels between Scientology and the quirkier pseudo-sciences like
phrenology, Count Alfred Korzybski's general semantics and 'iridiagnosis', which taught that all
physical ailments could be diagnosed through the iris of the eve. Many such pseudo-sciences
were built on a structure of the wildest assumptions, yet attracted a devoted following. They were
invariably the creation of a single, highly charismatic, individual viewed by his followers as a genius
of divine inspiration. Absolute power was vested in the leader, critics were derided, successes
loudly trumpeted and failures ignored. Opponents were darkly accused of ulterior motives in
wanting to prevent the advancement of the human race - Hubbard's frequent plaint.
While Hubbard was writing and lecturing in Phoenix in the summer of 1952, a somewhat
unexpected event occurred - his son, L. Ron Hubbard Junior, turned up in town apparently intent on
becoming a Scientologist. Nibs was then eighteen years old, a plump young man with a shining,
cherubic countenance topped by wispy curls of pale orange hair. He had been living with his
grandparents in Bremerton for the previous two years, but had been unable to settle down in high
school and had decided to join his father in Phoenix. Mary Sue, preoccupied with her thickening
waistline, raised no objection when her husband suggested that Nibs should move in with them, in
the modern house they had rented near Camel Back Mountain, on the outskirts of town. And since
she was only about a year older than Nibs, she felt under no obligation to be a dutiful stepmother.