Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

evealed, gardener to gardener, his conviction that plants felt pain. He demonstrated by connecting
an E-meter to a geranium with crocodile clips, tearing off its leaves and showing how the needle of
the E-meter oscillated as he did so. The Garden News correspondent was enormously excited and
wrote a story under the sensational headline 'PLANTS DO WORRY AND FEEL PAIN', describing
Hubbard as a 'revolutionary horticultural scientist'.[2]
Hubbard as 'revolutionary horticultural scientist', proving that plants can feel pain. (Rex Features Ltd)
It was not long before television and Fleet Street reporters were beating a path to Saint Hill Manor
demanding to interview Hubbard about his novel theories. Always pleased to help the gentlemen of
the press, he was memorably photographed looking compassionately at a tomato jabbed by
probes attached to an E-meter - a picture that eventually found its way into Newsweek magazine,
causing a good deal of harmless merriment at his expense. Alan Whicker, a well-known British
television interviewer, did his best to make Hubbard look like a crank, but Hubbard contrived to
come across as a rather likeable and confident personality. When Whicker moved in for the kill,
sarcastically inquiring if rose pruning should be stopped lest it caused pain and anxiety, Hubbard
neatly side-stopped the question and drew a parallel with an essential life-preserving medical
operation on a human being. He might have whacky ideas, Whicker discovered, but he was
certainly no fool.
Scientologists around the world could have been forgiven for wondering what their beloved leader
was up to, but an explanation was soon forthcoming. The purpose of Ron's experiments, they were
told, was to 'reform the world's food supply'. He had already produced 'ever-bearing tomato plants
and sweetcorn plants sufficiently impressive to startle British newspapers into front-page stories
about this new wizardry'.[3]
Soon after Hubbard moved into Saint Hill, the Church of Scientology commissioned a bust of its
founder from the sculptor Edward Harris. Harris liked his sitters to talk while he was working and
asked his friend, Joan Vidal, to attend the sittings and chat with Hubbard. 'My first impression of
him', she said, 'was that with his very pink skin and light red hair he looked like a fat, pink, scrubbed