Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

The house at Camel Back, where the Hubbards were enjoying an unaccustomed period of
residential stability, became a gathering place for whichever courtiers happened to be in favour at
the time. One of them was an Englishman by the name of Ray Kemp, who had no doubt that
Hubbard possessed supernatural powers. 'He could certainly move clouds around in the sky,' said
Kemp. 'I saw him do that. If there were a lot of little puffy clouds in the sky he could move one in one
direction and one in another and then get them to join up. It was nothing particularly special for him;
it was just a fun thing to do.'
Kemp liked to say he had found Scientology in a wastepaper basket. He was serving as a Royal
Navy radar technician in Malta and was looking for something to read at a dull party when he
spotted a discarded copy of Astounding Science Fiction. It was the Dianetics issue. He read it
avidly, then bought the book and enrolled for an auditing course at Holland Park Avenue when he
was next in London on leave. By 1954 he had made his way to Phoenix, where he was working for
the org as an auditor.
'I spent quite a bit of time with Ron and Mary Sue out at Camel Back. We used to swap war stories
and try to cap each other's yarns. He was a wonderful story-teller and he'd make a story fit whatever
point he was trying to make. I don't think he ever expected me to take his war stories seriously,
although I knew he had been wounded because one night he kept complaining of a pain in his
side and when he stood up a little bit of shrapnel fell out from under his shirt. He said it was
something that often happened - fragments of shrapnel still in his body were slowly working their
way out.
'One of the things he liked to do was ride his motorcycle - he had an Indian, a real monster - out
into the desert. He played a game he called point to point. He'd pick a spot on the horizon and go
for it, straight as he could, without deviating, regardless of what was in the way, cactus or whatever.
Nibs and Dick Steves, from the org, used to chase him on their motorcycles, but Ron's favourite
trick was to put up dust devils behind him. That's another thing he could do - manipulate dust
devils. He could whip them up and move them around at will. I often saw him do that.'[12]
Ray Kemp exemplified a propensity in Hubbard's disciples to build myths around him. There was
also a marked tendency to treat everything he said as gospel, which led to frequent
misunderstandings as Hubbard liked to make jokes. Once, during a lecture in Phoenix, he made a
crack about a Colt .45 being an 'enormously effective' method of exteriorization. As this ludicrous
piece of wisdom was disseminated, a story grew that Hubbard had drawn a gun during the lecture
and fired a round into the floor. Nibs swore later that he had seen the hole in the floorboards.
Jack Horner joined the circle close to Hubbard that summer of '54. Like so many of the early
Dianeticists he had fallen out with Hubbard, in his case after Hubbard had accused him of fiddling
the accounts, but typically he found he could not stay away. He pretended he was in Phoenix to see
some friends who were working for the org and naturally ran into Hubbard.
'He asked me what I was doing and I said "teaching school" and he said, "we'll soon fix that" and
he began to run a process on me right there and then. He told me to go and touch certain things in
the room and then sit down at a desk. Then he said, "Now you go touch them" and I knew exactly
what he meant. While I was sitting there I suddenly found myself looking at the underside of the
desk. I had a definite, certain reality of myself out of my body. I said "Oh my God, I'm out of my body!"
At that point I knew what he meant by exteriorization.
'Later, when I was working for him doing research in Phoenix, I was out at his home late one
afternoon with Jim Pinkham, who did all the recording at the org, and someone knocked at the