Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

manuscript of Excalibur. Two guns were certainly missing and she reported their serial numbers to
the FBI.
With her usual efficiency, O'Brien packed up the 'communications center', shipped everything to
Philadelphia and assumed editorship of the bi-monthly magazine, the Journal of Scientology,
which was the primary channel of communication between Hubbard and his followers. In truth,
editing the magazine was not too onerous a task, since almost everything was written by Hubbard.
(Whenever he wished to discuss his own wondrous work in glowing terms, he signed the articles
'Tom Esterbrook'.)
On 10 April, Hubbard wrote another long letter to Helen O'Brien discussing the possibility of setting
up a chain of HASI clinics, or 'Spiritual Guidance Centers'. They could make 'real money', he noted,
if each clinic could count on ten or fifteen pre-clears a week, each paying $500 for twenty-four hours
of auditing. He had clearly previously discussed the prospect of converting Scientology into a
religion. 'I await your reaction on the religion angle,' he wrote. 'In my opinion, we couldn't get worse
public opinion than we have had or have less customers with what we've got to sell. A religious
charter would be necessary in Pennsylvania or NJ to make it stick. But I sure could make it stick.'
Perhaps inspired by such considerations, Hubbard's next published work bore a distinctly Old
Testament flavour. The Factors was a summation of his '30-year examination' of the human spirit
and the material universe: 'Factor No. 1: Before the beginning was a Cause and the entire purpose
of the Cause was the creation of effect.' At the end of the thirty factors was a valediction reading,
'humbly tendered as a gift to Man by L. Ron Hubbard.'
Three weeks later, the humble tenderer of gifts to mankind was writing to Helen O'Brien in a rather
less pious fashion about a particular member of the species who continued to be a thorn in his
side - Don Purcell. 'The obvious intention of Purcell is to attack and wipe out by public odium
anything and everything he can in Dianetics, thus leaving him, he thinks, with a monopoly on the
subject. Sooner or later it is quite obvious that this man . . . who is probably the most hated man in
the city of Wichita because of his business dealings, will run up against somebody insane enough
to put a bullet through him . . . Patently the man is insane. He has actively refused processing many
times. He's about as safe to have around as a mad dog . . . The only surprising part of all this is
that the American public by their attention to Purcell and what he says, demonstrates their complete
incompetence and their desire to be swindled.'
At the end of May, Hubbard announced his intention to stir up some interest in Scientology on the
continent and he left London for Spain by car, with Many Sue, who had recently discovered she was
pregnant again, and baby Diana, then eight months old. They stayed first in Sitges, a small resort
on the Mediterranean coast, then drove further south to Seville. It seems they did little other than
enjoy an extended holiday, although Helen O'Brien, who was virtually running Scientology in the
United States, continued to receive long, rambling letters in Hubbard's untidy scrawl.
On 19 July, he wrote nine pages asking her to get one of her 'electronic eager beaver' friends to
construct an extraordinary machine with which he believed he would be able to cure insanity. The
device was to be disguised as an ordinary briefcase with the trigger incorporated in the lock and it
was to be capable of delivering a concentrated supersonic beam alternating approximately
between breathing and heart rates, thus inducing hypnosis. He wanted to be able, he said, to walk
into a sanatorium with his secret machine, confront an insane patient and make him sane in a few
seconds. 'This would mean', he wrote, 'the immediate end of psychiatric resistance to Scientology.'
O'Brien was to get the machine made up as a matter of urgency and air-freight it to him in Spain
with a spurious explanation of its function for the benefit of the Customs officials.