Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

existence of the book, with the exception of Art Burks: 'Ron called me one day and said, "I want to
see you right away, I have written the book." I never saw anybody so worked up. Apparently he had
written it without sleeping, eating, or anything else and had literally worked himself into a frazzle.
'He was so sure he had something "away out and beyond" anything else that he said he had sent
telegrams to several book publishers telling them that he had written the book and that they were to
meet him at Penn Station and he would discuss it with them and go with whoever gave him the
best offer. Whether he did this or not, I don't know, but it is right in line with something he would do.
'He told me it was going to revolutionize everything: the world, people's attitudes to one another. He
thought it would have a greater impact upon people than the Bible.'[8]
Burks's recollection of the manuscript was that it was about seventy thousand words long and
began with a fable about a king who gathered all his wise men together and commanded them to
bring him all the wisdom of the world in five hundred books. He then told them to go away and
condense the information into one hundred books. When they had done that, he wanted the
wisdom reduced into one book and finally into one word. That word was 'survive'.
Ron developed an argument that the survival instinct could explain all human behaviour and that to
understand survival was to understand life. Burks particularly remembered a passage in which
Ron explained how emotions could be whipped up to the point where a lynch mob was formed. 'It
made the shivers move up your back from your heels to the top of your head,' he said.
Burks was sufficiently impressed by Excalibur to agree to write a brief biographical sketch of Ron
for use as a preface. It was the usual 'red-headed fire-eater' material, with only one surprising new
claim - that 1934 was the year Ron 'rounded off his application of analytical geometry to aerial
navigation'.
The preface also mentioned a facet of Ron's character which few members of the American Fiction
Guild had noticed - his unwillingness to talk about himself. 'Long ago he discovered that his most
concrete adventures raised sceptic eyebrows and so, without diminishing his activities, he has
fallen back on silence. We hear of him building a road in the Ladrone Islands or surveying the
Canadian border and bellowing squads east and west with the perfection of a trained military man
and delve though we may, that is as far as we can get.'
Burks concluded with a tactful reference to the difficulty of reconciling the adventurer with the author
of a philosophic treatise: 'One envisions the philosopher as a quiet gray-beard, timid in all things
but thought. It is, withal, rather upsetting to the general concept to think of L. Ron Hubbard as the
author of Excalibur.'
Although Excalibur was never published - Burks was convinced that Ron was deeply disappointed
he could not find a publisher - Ron assiduously stoked rumours about its existence and its content.
'He told me once that he had a manuscript in his trunk that was going to revolutionize the world,'
said his friend Mac Ford. 'He said it was called Excalibur, but that's all I know about it. I never saw
it.'[9]
Unquestionably, Ron himself believed in Excalibur, for in October 1938 he wrote a long and
emotional letter to Polly in which he expressed his hope that the manuscript would merit him a
place in history.
Polly had recently had a riding accident which resulted in her losing the tip of one finger. Ron tried
to cheer her up with a funny catalogue of his own imagined ailments and promised her a jewelled