Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

Interspersed between these gripping sagas, Ron still wrote occasional features for the Sportsman
Pilot in his capacity as aerial hell-raiser. 'There are few men in the United States - nay, the world -
as well qualified as I to write upon the subject of cross-country flying,' he began a piece in the
September 1934 issue. 'It so happens I hold the world's record in dead reckoning. I just have to
marvel about it. Probably no other pilot in the world could do it. Probably no other pilot in the world
actually has done it so well.'
The braggadocio was a tease, as he soon made clear. On a fifty-mile flight from New London to
Mansfield, Ohio, navigating by the sun, he claimed to have missed his destination by a record
margin. 'The ship bumped to a beautiful landing. But, and but again, Mansfield was nowhere in
sight. We grabbed a farmer's suspender and snapped it for attention. We asked, disdainfully,
wherewe might be. Well, there's no use dragging this out. We were 37 miles off . . . That, I maintain,
is a world record.'
In December he was offering readers tips about flying to the West Indies: 'With the long, long
shores of Cuba behind you, you hit Port au Prince. Right now we start assuming definitely that your
plane has floats on it, though we've been assuming it vaguely all along. Otherwise, you'll get your
wheels wet. Port au Prince isn't favoured unless you can wangle the Gendarmerie du Haiti into
letting you use their fields. You'd have to be a better wangler than we are . . .'
Two months after this feature was published, on 25 February 1935 Ron again applied for a student
pilot's licence. He never got round to taking the test to become a qualified pilot and never actually
applied for another licence,[6] but he blithely continued writing for the Sportsman Pilot, offering
advice to fellow aviators and filling many pages of the magazine with dashing accounts of his aerial
exploits.
Ron's published work in 1935 included ten pulp novels, three 'novelettes', twelve short stories and
three non-fiction articles. In October, Adventure magazine invited him to introduce himself to
readers in their 'Camp Fire' feature, 'where readers, writers and adventurers meet'. Ron began in
jocular fashion - 'When I was a year old, they say I showed some signs of settling down, but I think
this is merely rumour . . .' - and touched on all the familiar highspots of his dazzling career, his
'Asiatic wanderings', his expeditions, his 'barn-storming trip through the Mid-West', and so on.
Perhaps because the same issue of Adventure also published one of his 'leatherneck yarns', Ron
chose to elaborate on his experiences as a 'top-kicker' in the Marines. 'I've known the Corps from
Quantico to Peiping, from the South Pacific to the West Indies,' he wrote. 'To me the Marine Corps
is a more go-to-hell outfit than the much lauded French Foreign Legion ever could be . . .'
Expressing the hope that his thumbnail sketch would be a passport to the readers' interest, he
ended with the promise: 'When I get back from Central America, where I'm going soon, I'll have
another yarn to tell.'[7]
Ron did not go to Central America but to Hollywood, where one of his stories, 'The Secret of
Treasure Island', had been bought by Columbia to be filmed as a fifteen-part serial for showing at
Saturday morning matineés. An advertisement in the Motion Picture Herald boasted that L. Ron
Hubbard, 'famous action writer, stunt pilot and world adventurer' had written an 'excitement-jammed
yarn with one of the best box office titles in years'.
Ron, of course, was pleased to add the title of 'Hollywood scriptwriter' to his ever increasing roll-call
of notable accomplishments and he would soon be claiming screenwriting credit for a number of
successful movies, among them John Ford's classic, Stagecoach,[8] and The Plainsman, starring
Gary Cooper. Most biographies of L. Ron Hubbard describe his Hollywood career, inevitably, as a