Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

By then Hubbard was nearly seventy years old and bad lived so long in a world of phantasmagoria
that he was unable to distinguish between fact and his own fantastic fiction. He believed he was
the teenage explorer, swashbuckling hero, sage and philosopher his biographies said he was. It
was perhaps too late for him to comprehend that his life, in reality, far outstripped the fabricated
version. He made the leap from penniless science-fiction writer to millionaire guru and prophet in a
single, effortless bound; he led a private navy across the oceans of the world for nearly a decade;
he came close to taking over control of several countries; he was worshipped by thousands of his
followers around the world and was detested and feared by most governments. He was a storyspinning
maverick whose singular life eclipsed even his own far-fetched stories. Yet he clung
tenaciously to the fiction and when Armstrong's petition to research his biography arrived at his
hide-out that January in 1980, he unhesitatingly gave his approval.
Armstrong had no experience as an archivist or researcher, but he was intelligent, industrious,
honest and enthusiastic. He moved all the relevant documentation from Gilman Hot Springs to the
Scientology headquarters in Los Angeles, where it filled six filing cabinets, and began cataloguing
and indexing the material, making copies of everything and reverently preserving the originals in
plastic envelopes, acutely aware of their historical importance.
Not long after he had started work, posters appeared in Scientology offices announcing the private
screening of a 1940 Warner Brothers movie, The Dive Bomber, for which Hubbard had written the
screenplay. Every Scientologist knew that Ron had been a successful
Hollywood screenwriter before the war and the screening was to raise funds for the defence of the
eleven Scientologists, including Hubbard's wife, who had been indicted in Washington on
conspiracy charges. Armstrong decided to help by finding out a little more about Ron's contribution
to the film, but at the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles he
was puzzled to discover that two other writers had been credited with the screenplay of The Dive
Bomber.
Armstrong remonstrated with the librarian, then sent a memo to Ron to tell him about the mistake
in the Academy records. Hubbard replied with a cheery note explaining that Warner Brothers had
been in such a hurry to distribute the movie that it was already in the can before it was realized that
his name had been left off the credits. He was busy at that time, closing up his posh apartment on
Riverside Drive in New York and getting ready to go to war, so he just told the studio to mail the
cheque to him at the Explorers Club. After the war, he used the money to take a holiday in the
Caribbean.
It was an explanation with which Armstrong was perfectly satisfied except for one niggling worry:
like all Scientologists, he had been told that Ron was blind and crippled at the end of the war and
that he had only been able to make a recovery because of the power of his mind. Clearly,
Armstrong mused, he would not have taken the holiday until after his recovery. In an attempt to fit
together the chronology of events, Armstrong made an application under the Freedom of
Information Act for Hubbard's US Navy records.
Scientologists were enormously proud of the fact that the founder of their church was a muchdecorated
war hero who had served in all five theaters and was wounded several times; indeed he
was the first US casualty of the war in the Pacific. It was then, with a sense of mounting disbelief
and dismay, that Armstrong leafed through Hubbard's records after they had arrived from
Washington. He went from one document to another, searching in vain for an explanation, still
refusing to believe the evidence of his own eyes: the record seemed to indicate that Hubbard, far
from being a hero, was an incompetent, malingering coward who had done his best to avoid