Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

In April 1982, David Mayo received another long letter from the Commodore in which he said he did
not expect to live much longer - a few months at the least, a few years at the most. Until he was
able to pick up a new body, grow to adulthood and resume his rightful position as the head of
Scientology, Hubbard was assigning responsibility for safeguarding the 'purity' of the technology to
his friend Mayo. David Mayo believes that Miscavige and his cohorts interpreted this news as a
threat to their position and began making plans to remove him.
Meanwhile, yet another enemy stepped into the arena to do battle with the church. A commission
had been set up in Clearwater to investigate Scientology and its star witness was to be none other
than L. Ron Hubbard Junior, who had recently changed his name to DeWolf in order to further
disassociate himself from his father. Pink-faced and bespectacled, Nibs told the commission that
his father was a habitual liar, paranoid, schizophrenic and megalomaniac who had fabricated most
of his qualifications and written Dianetics off the top of his head without doing any research.
Worse was to come. In July, Nibs gave an interview to the Santa Rosa News-Herald in which he
portrayed his father as a wife-beater who had experimented in black magic and fed him and his
sister bubble gum spiked with phenobarbitol. 'He had one of those insane things, especially during
the '30s, of trying to invoke the devil for power and practices. My mother told me about him trying out
all kinds of various incantations, drugs and hypnosis . . . He used to beat her up quite often. He had
a violent, volcano-type temper, and he smacked her around quite a bit. I remember in 1946 or 1947
when he was beating up my mother one night, I had a .22 rifle and I sat on the stairway with him in
my sights and I almost blew his head off.'
It was not quite the pre-publication publicity St Martin's Press might have wished to launch
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000, L. Ron Hubbard's first science-fiction book for more than
thirty years. It was evident that the Commodore, wherever he was, had been busy, for the eight
hundred-page Battlefield Earth was trumpeted not only as the longest science-fiction book ever
written but merely the prelude to Mission Earth, an epic work of more than one million words due to
be published in ten separate volumes over the next four years.
Battlefield Earth was the story of how Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, one of the few surviving human beings
still on earth, turned the tables on the huge, shambling, hairy aliens who had taken control of the
planet. Many science-fiction buffs did not feel the work matched the pace and excitement of
Hubbard's earlier fiction. Indeed, his agent, Forrie Ackerman, wondered if it had really been written
by Ron and took the trouble to have the dedication on his personal copy ('To 4E, my favourite
monster and long-time friend') verified by a handwriting expert. Hubbard's fellow sci-fi writer, A.E.
van Vogt, whose endorsement of the book as a 'masterpiece' appeared prominently on the cover,
later confessed that he had been daunted by its size and had not actually bothered to read it.[6]
Hubbard always sent van Vogt and his wife a Christmas card and that year he included a note
boasting that it had only taken him a month to write Battlefield Earth.
If Hubbard had lost his touch as a fiction writer, he was still perfectly capable of adding, even at this
late stage in his life, further embellishments to his early career. 'I had, myself, somewhat of a
science background,' he wrote in the introduction, 'had done some pioneer work in rockets and
liquid gases, but I was studying the branches of man's past knowledge at that time . . . For a while,
before and after World War Two, I was in rather steady association with the new era of scientists,
the boys who built the bomb . . .'
It was essential for Hubbard's reputation that Battlefield Earth became a bestseller. The Church of
Scientology guaranteed to buy 50,000 hardback copies, mounted a massive publicity campaign to
support the book and instructed Scientologists throughout the United States to go out and buy at