Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

In May Ron received an assignment from the Sportsman Pilot to cover an amateur flying
competition at College Park Airport, near Washington. His report was competent enough and
written in his usual breezy prose: 'Since I was, perforce and per poverty, among the spectators, I
can speak only from the ground view and venture the point that those six [pylon] races suffered on
only one score. They inherited the disadvantage of all conventional pylon races - we on the ground
had nothing to watch save an empty sky as the ships disappeared for their swing around the
course. The finishes, though, made up for that temporarily empty sky. The home stretch brought the
ships down a brisk wind, through some bumps for which the field's tree-trimmed boundaries must
be blamed, and down across the finish line in a power dive to fifty feet. That satisfied the
spectators; it looked meteoric and heroic. And you know spectators.'
The article was published in the May/June issue of the magazine, with photographs also provided
by Ron. It was his first published piece as a professional writer and he was very proud of it, but it
could hardly be described as a promising start to his career. Months would pass before his by-line
appeared again.
For a short while it seemed it did not much matter that Ron was finding it difficult to make a living as
a writer, for on Friday 18 August, a headline in the Washington Daily News proclaimed: 'Youthful DC
Adventurer Finds Gold in Nearby Maryland After Trek Fails.' The three-column story reported that L.
Ron Hubbard, while on furlough from his job as general manager of West Indies Minerals Inc, had
discovered gold on his wife's farm in Maryland.
Much was made of the irony of a prospector striking gold in his own back yard: 'Hubbard, still in his
twenties, left here last year for Antilles, West Indies, in search of gold so that he might return and
marry the girl he met shortly before his departure. He returned a short time ago empty handed and
considerably weakened from fever . . . "Imagine me going 1300 miles in search of gold when it lay
right at the back door of my bride-to-be," Hubbard said dejectedly.'
Ron told the newspaper that mining would soon be under way 'on a large scale' and he had also
encountered several specimens of a curious white metal he believed was either platinum or
iridium. Two photographs accompanied the story, one of Polly, fetchingly attired in boots and
jodhpurs, panning for gold, and another of the young couple examining a large chunk of rock with
an explanatory caption: 'L. Ron Hubbard, the prospector, says the boulder in the above photo is the
largest specimen of gold quartz he has ever seen.'
Paradoxically, despite having struck gold, Ron's financial situation remained precarious. In
September, his glider pilot licence expired and he was unable to renew it as he had not completed
the necessary ten hours' solo flying in the previous six months. The problem was simply that he
had no money, but in a plaintive letter to the Bureau of Aeronautics he side-stepped confessing he
was broke by claiming the difficulty was that there was 'no glider within two hundred miles in which
I would care to risk my neck'. The Washington Glider Club had offered him the use of their Franklin
but it was in such a sorry condition he had to 'beg off' and he did not want to use a primary glider
because 'I cracked one up once in Port Huron, Michigan, for the simple reason that most primaries
won't fly.'
Ron was, as always, optimistic about the future. 'Here's the point,' he wrote. 'I am going to get me a
glider next spring. A big Franklin. It took me two months of waiting on good flying days and
inspectors the last time I took the commercial exam. I don't want to have to go through all that next
springs [sic], for springs at best are fleeting. I've flown a great deal more than most glider pilots.
Maybe you've seen one of my glider articles in aviation magazines. My one ambition is to get a
glider of my own.