Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

the Explorers Club on the basis of what appeared to be an impressive application, citing the
valuable data he had obtained for the Hydrographic Office and the University of Michigan during his
expedition to the Caribbean, his pioneering mineralogical survey of Puerto Rico and his survey
flights in the United States, undertaken to 'aid adjustment of field and facility data'.
The club's membership committee did not, it seems, require any of these claims to be checked
and on 19 February 1940, L. Ron Hubbard was duly elected, to his enormous and undisguised
pleasure. Thereafter, he would rarely forgo the satisfaction of giving his address as 'Explorers Club,
New York.'
It not being in his nature to blush quietly on the sidelines, Ron was soon making his presence felt.
Within a matter of months the club magazine was reporting rumours that 'our red-headed Captain
Ron Hubbard' liked to wrestle fully-grown brown bears. Ron wrote a good-natured denial, slyly
contriving to portray himself as both sport and saint: 'I do not make a practice of going around
picking on poor, innocent Kodiak bears. The day I arrived in New York City, this thing began: I
picked up my phone to hear a cooing voice say, "Cap'n, do you like to wrassle with bears?" And
since that day I have had no peace. How the story arrived ahead of me I do not know, I mean the
whole thing is a damned lie!
'A man can spend endless months of hardship and heroic privation in checking coast pilots; he can
squeeze his head to half its width between earphones calculating radio errors; he can brave storm
and sudden death in all its most horrible forms in an attempt to increase man's knowledge, and
what happens? Is he a hero? Do people look upon his salt-encrusted and exhausted self with
awe? Do universities give him degrees and governments commissions? No! They all look at him
with a giggle and ask him if he likes to wrassle bears. It's an outrage! It's enough to make a man
take up paper-doll cutting! Gratitude, bah! Attention and notoriety have centred upon one singular
accident - an exaggerated untruth - and the gigantic benefits to the human race are all forgotten!'
In the early months of 1940, Ron was forced to abandon the pursuit of further gigantic benefits for
the human race in favour of earning a living. Working under the blue light in the curtained cubicle in
his apartment on the Upper West Side, he produced three stories that would come to be regarded
as classics- 'Fear', 'Typewriter in the Sky' and 'Final Blackout'.
'No one who read "Fear" in Unknown during their impressionable years would ever forget it,'
claimed Brian Aldiss, science fiction writer and historian.[14] The stream-of-consciousness