Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

knew him too well to be caught out like that. 'I told him, "It's your apartment, you sign the lease,"' she
said. 'He was tricky like that.'[7]
Hubbard lectured for a total of seventy hours in Philadelphia to an audience of thirty-eight devotees,
speaking without preparation or notes on three evenings and six afternoons each week between 1
and 19 December. Every word was recorded on high-fidelity tapes and later lucratively marketed as
the 'Philadelphia Doctorate Course', along with a spiral-bound book of the fifty-four crayon drawings
with which he illustrated his talks. Many of the seventy hours were devoted to elaborating the
cosmology of Scientology, but he also talked about ways of 'exteriorizing' from the body and
demonstrated a new auditing technique called 'creative processing', similar to the 'mock-up' routine
he had tried out on Carmen D'Alessio.
'What made it interesting,' said Fred Stansfield, one of the students on the course, 'was the feeling
that you were involved in the birth of a new, developing science. It looked like something you could
do something with, not just some theory that was utterly useless.'[8]
The only small hiccup in the smooth running of the Philadelphia Doctorate Course occurred on the
afternoon of 16 December, when US marshals thundered up the stairs of the Hubbard Dianetic
Foundation at 237 North 16th Street, Philadelphia, waving a warrant for the arrest of L. Ron
Hubbard. Nibs, who was present and who had inherited something of his father's talent for storytelling,
would later talk about an 'incredible Western-style' fight ensuing, with two hundred
Scientologists battling on the stairs against FBI agents, US marshals and Philadelphia police.[9]
Helen O'Brien can recall no such mêlée. 'I was on the door so I know what happened. There was
no fight. Two detectives in plain clothes and a policeman in uniform came in. I asked them what
they wanted and they said, "We are here to arrest Ronald Hubbard". We were always apprehensive
about plots to arrest Ron and I ran upstairs and told him what was happening. He went up to the
third floor, but there was no escape. One of the students who had only one arm waved his hook at
the cops and they backed down a bit, but they said, "We've got a warrant for Hubbard and we are
going to take him". My husband and I got in the paddy-wagon with Ron. They fingerprinted him and
put him a cell - it was the only time he was ever behind bars. I called my brother, who was a lawyer,
and he got Ron out on $1000 bail later that afternoon.'
The cause of this spot of bother was Don Purcell, who was still doggedly pursuing Hubbard
through the courts in an attempt to get some of his money back and keep the Wichita Foundation in
business. When he heard Hubbard was in Philadelphia, Purcell filed an affidavit in Pennsylvania
District Court accusing him of wrongfully withdrawing $9286 from the bankrupt Wichita Foundation.
'Throughout his Dianetic career,' the affidavit noted, 'Hubbard has displayed a fine talent for profiting
personally although his firms and institutions generally fail.'[10]
Hubbard was examined before the bankruptcy court on 17 and 19 December, agreed to make
restitution and was discharged. Very soon afterwards he flew back to London, where the Hubbard
Association of Scientologists International, or HASI, had opened for business in a couple of
draughty rooms above a shop in Holland Park Avenue in West London. They were
unprepossessing premises for a science offering immortality, but Hubbard was not finding it easy
to establish a base for Scientology in Britain. Helen O'Brien received a despairing letter from a
friend describing the HASI offices in London: 'There was an atmosphere of extreme poverty and
undertones of a grim conspiracy over all. At 163 Holland Park Avenue was an ill-lit lecture room and
a bare-boarded and poky office some eight by ten feet, mainly infested by long-haired men and
short-haired, tatty women.'