Talk:L. Ron Hubbard/Temp

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (13 March 1911 – 24 January 1986), better known as L. Ron Hubbard, was an American fiction and self-help writer, creator of Dianetics and founder of the Church of Scientology. He served during World War II as an officer in the United States Navy, was married three times, and had several children.

Hubbard was a controversial public figure, with many details of his life disputed. The Church of Scientology official biographies present Hubbard as "larger than life, attracted to people, liked by people, dynamic, charismatic and immensely capable in a dozen fields". However, the Church's account of Hubbard's life has changed over time, with editions of the biographical account published over the years differing from each other as new information came to light proving some claims to be inaccurate and many more false. Biographies of Hubbard by independent journalists and accounts by former Scientologists paint a much less flattering, and often sinister, picture of Hubbard. In many cases they contradict the material presented by the Church.

Early life
L. Ron Hubbard was born in 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska.

His father Harry Ross Hubbard was born Henry August Wilson in Fayette, Iowa, but was orphaned as an infant and adopted by the Hubbards, a farming family of Fredericksburg, Iowa. Harry Ross Hubbard joined the United States Navy in 1904, leaving the service in 1908, then re-enlisting in 1917 when the United States declared war on Germany. He served in the Navy until 1946, reaching the rank of Lieutenant-Commander in 1934.

His mother Dora May Hubbard (née Waterbury) was a feminist who had trained to become a high school teacher and married Harry in 1909. Her father, Lafayette O. Waterbury (born 1864), was a veterinarian turned coal merchant. Her mother, Ida Corinne DeWolfe, was the daughter of affluent banker John DeWolfe. May's paternal grandfather, Abram Waterbury, was from the Catskill Mountains, and later headed West, employed as a veterinarian.

The Hubbards moved first to Kalispell, Montana and then to Helena, the state capital. Harry Ross Hubbard's naval career led to the family moving several more times, first to San Diego, then to Oakland, California followed by Puget Sound in the state of Washington and finally to Washington, D.C..

Between 1927 and 1929, Hubbard traveled twice to the Far East to visit his parents during his father's posting to the United States Navy base on Guam. Church biographies published from the 1950s to the 1970s stated that with "the financial support of his wealthy grandfather" Hubbard journeyed throughout Asia, "studying with holy men" in northern China, India and Tibet. Hubbard said that on several occasions he visited India. However, the Church of Scientology's current official account makes no mention of India or Tibet, and according to Jon Atack "a flight change at Calcutta airport in 1959 seems to have been his only direct contact with the land of Vedantic philosophy."

While in Guam Hubbard was befriended by Commander Joseph "Snake" Thompson (1876-1943), who recently returned from Vienna and studies with Sigmund Freud and was stationed as a member of the Naval Medical Corps. Through the course of their friendship, the commander many an afternoon teaching Ron what he knows of the human mind." Thompson is an important figure in official Church accounts of Hubbard's life and was referenced in many of Hubbard's works in support of his claims to possess expertise in Freudian psychoanalysis.

George Washington University
After studies at Swavely Preparatory School in Manassas, Virginia, and graduating from Woodward School for Boys in 1930, Hubbard enrolled at the George Washington University, where he majored in civil engineering. There he became associate editor of the University newspaper "The University Hatchet" and was a member of many of the University's clubs and societies including the Twentieth Marine Corps Reserve and the George Washington College Company. His grades varied widely, and university records show that he attended for only two years, was on academic probation for his second year, and left the University in 1932 without a degree. The Church of Scientology's official account of Hubbard's university career does not mention its premature conclusion.

One of his classes was a second-year physics course entitled "Modern Physical Phenomena; Molecular and Atomic Physics", for which he received a grade of "F". On the basis of this class, however, Hubbard claimed to be a "nuclear physicist" and asserted expertise in dealing with the problems posed by radioactive contamination of the environment.

Explorers Club
After dropping out of college, Hubbard worked as a writer, aviator and headed further sailing expeditions. In June 1932 he headed the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition. The two-and-a-half-month, 5,000-mile voyage aboard the 200-foot, four-masted schooner "Doris Hamlin" with over fifty college students has the purpose to collect floral and reptile specimens for the University of Michigan.

In December 1939 Hubbard was proposed as a member to the invitation-only "Explorers Club" in New York City. He got accepted as a member on 19 February 1940 and awarded the flag of the club in May 1940 for his "Alaskan Radio Experimental Expedition". Further flags followed over the coming 25 years.

In December 1940 Hubbard was licensed by the United States Department of Commerce to "Master of Steam and Motor Vessels", valid first in the Pacific Ocean only and - from March 1941 on - in "Any Ocean".

Honorary degree
On February 10, 1953 Hubbard was awarded a honorary Ph.D. by Sequoia University, California, "in recognition of his outstanding work and contributions in the fields of Dianetics and Scientology." This non-accredited body was, however, closed by the California state courts more than 30 years later after it was investigated by the Californian state authorities on the grounds of being a mail-order "degree mill".

Early fiction career


Hubbard published many stories and novellas in aviation, sports and pulp magazines during the 1930s. Critics often cite Final Blackout, set in a war-ravaged future Europe, and Fear, a psychological horror story, as the best examples of Hubbard's pulp fiction. Final Blackout was cited by Karl Edward Wagner as one of the thirteen best science-fiction horror novels.

Among his published stories were Sea Fangs, The Carnival of Death, Man-Killers of the Air, and The Squad that Never Came Back; among the pseudonyms Hubbard used were Rene Lafayette, Legionnaire 148, Lieutenant Scott Morgan, Morgan de Wolf, Michael de Wolf, Michael Keith, Kurt von Rachen, Captain Charles Gordon, Legionnaire 14830, Elron, Bernard Hubbel, Captain B.A. Northrup, Joe Blitz and Winchester Remington Colt. He became a well-known author in the science fiction and fantasy genres; he also published westerns and adventure stories.

By 1936, at the age of 25, Hubbard was in Hollywood working as a scriptwriter on several films, amongst them the Columbia production "The Secret of Treasure Island".

Hubbard's metafiction novel Typewriter in the Sky, published in 1940 in two installments in John W. Campbell's Unknown magazine, provides an amusing insight into the New York writing scene within which Hubbard worked. The novel is centered around a character named Horace Hackett, who is a hyper-productive, multi-genre hack writer desperately trying to finish his latest potboiler to an ever-approaching deadline while (unknown to him) his friend Mike de Wolf is trapped inside the potboiler's action. Two of Horace's author friends, in Hubbard's novel, are named Winchester Remington Colt and Rene Lafayette after Hubbard's own pseudonyms.

After his military service (1941-1947), Hubbard returned to writing fiction briefly for a few years, his best-remembered work from this period being the Ole Doc Methuselah series for Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction magazine. It was in the pages of this magazine that the first article on Dianetics appeared; while some fiction works appeared after that (including "Masters of Sleep", which promotes Dianetics and features as a villain "a mad psychiatrist, Doctor Dyhard, who persists in rejecting Dianetics after all his abler colleagues have accepted it believes in prefrontal lobotomies for everyone")  most of Hubbard's output thereafter was related to Dianetics or Scientology. Hubbard did not make a major return to fiction again until the 1980s.

In 1948 Hubbard was working as a "Special Officer" for the Metropolitan Detective Agency, licensed by the Los Angeles Police Department. According to Scientology, he performed the duties of an armed security guard: "The guarding of particular properties, e.g., banks and warehouses, and the patrolling of a general neighborhood on behalf of local merchants. In the latter, the Special Officer’s duties were virtually the same as the regular officer, although he had no powers of arrest beyond the "citizen’s arrest".

Dianetics
Beginning in late 1949, Hubbard sought to publicize Dianetics, the self-improvement technique. Unable to elicit interest from mainstream publishers or medical professionals, Hubbard turned to the legendary science fiction editor John W. Campbell, who had for years published Hubbard's science fiction. The first article on Dianetics was published in Astounding Science Fiction. The science fiction community was divided about the merits of Hubbard's claims. Campbell's star author Isaac Asimov criticized Dianetics' unscientific aspects, and veteran author Jack Williamson described Dianetics as "a lunatic revision of Freudian psychology" that "had the look of a wonderfully rewarding scam." But Campbell and novelist A. E. van Vogt enthusiastically embraced Dianetics: Campbell became Hubbard's treasurer, and van Vogt—convinced his wife's health had been transformed for the better by auditing—interrupted his writing career to run the first Los Angeles Dianetics center.

In April 1950, Hubbard and several others established the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in Elizabeth, New Jersey to coordinate work related for the forthcoming publication of a book on Dianetics. The book, entitled Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, was published in May 1950 by Hermitage House, whose head was also on the Board of Directors of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation. With Dianetics, Hubbard introduced the concept of "auditing", a two-person question-and-answer therapy that focused on painful memories. According to Hubbard, dianetic auditing could eliminate emotional problems, cure physical illnesses, and increase intelligence. In his introduction to Dianetics, Hubbard declared that "the creation of dianetics is a milestone for man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and arch."

Dianetics was a hit, selling 150,000 copies within a year of publication. Upon becoming more widely available, Dianetics became an object of critical scrutiny by the press and the medical establishment. In September 1950, The New York Times published a cautionary statement on the topic by the American Psychological Association that read in part, "the association calls attention to the fact that these claims are not supported by empirical evidence", and went on to recommend against use of "the techniques peculiar to Dianetics" until such time it had been validated by scientific testing. Consumer Reports, in an August 1951 assessment of Dianetics, dryly noted "one looks in vain in Dianetics for the modesty usually associated with announcement of a medical or scientific discovery", and stated that the book had become "the basis for a new cult." The article observed "in a study of L. Ron Hubbard's text, one is impressed from the very beginning by a tendency to generalization and authoritative declarations unsupported by evidence or facts." Consumer Reports warned its readers against the "possibility of serious harm resulting from the abuse of intimacies and confidences associated with the relationship between auditor and patient", an especially serious risk, they concluded, "in a cult without professional traditions."

The Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation was incorporated in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Branch offices were opened in five other US cities before the end of 1950 (though most folded within a year). Hubbard soon abandoned the Foundation, denouncing a number of his former associates as communists to the FBI.

Scientology
In mid-1952, Hubbard expanded Dianetics into a secular philosophy which he called Scientology. That year, Hubbard also married his third wife, Mary Sue Whipp, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life. With Mary Sue, Hubbard fathered four more children— Diana, Quentin, Suzette and Arthur —over the next six years.

In December 1953, Hubbard declared Scientology a religion and the first Church of Scientology was founded in Camden, New Jersey. He moved to England at about the same time, and during the remainder of the 1950s he supervised the growing organization from an office in London. In 1959, he bought Saint Hill Manor near the Sussex town of East Grinstead, a Georgian manor house owned by the Maharajah of Jaipur. This became the world headquarters of Scientology.

Hubbard claimed to have conducted years of intensive research into the nature of human existence; to describe his findings, he developed an elaborate vocabulary with many newly coined terms. He codified a set of Scientology axioms and an "applied religious philosophy" that promised to improve the condition of the human spirit, which he called the "Thetan." The bulk of Scientology focuses on the "rehabilitation" of the thetan.

Hubbard's followers believed his "technology" gave them access to their past lives, the traumas of which led to failures in the present unless they were audited. By this time, Hubbard had introduced a biofeedback device to the auditing process, which he called a "Hubbard Electropsychometer" or "E-meter." It was invented in the 1940s by a chiropractor and Dianetics enthusiast named Volney Mathison. This machine is used by Scientologists in auditing to evaluate "mental masses" surrounding the thetan. These "masses" are claimed to impede the thetan from realizing its full potential.

Hubbard claimed a good deal of physical disease was psychosomatic, and one who, like himself, had attained the enlightened state of "clear" and become an "Operating Thetan" would be relatively disease free. According to biographers, Hubbard went to great lengths to suppress his recourse to modern medicine, attributing symptoms to attacks by malicious forces, both spiritual and earthly. Hubbard insisted humanity was imperiled by such forces, which were the result of negative memories (or "engrams") stored in the unconscious or "reactive" mind, some carried by the immortal thetans for billions of years. Thus, Hubbard claimed, the only possibility for spiritual salvation was a concerted effort to "clear the planet", that is, to bring the benefits of Scientology to all people everywhere, and attack all forces, social and spiritual, hostile to the interests of the movement.

Church members were expected to pay fixed donation rates for courses, auditing, books and E-meters, all of which proved very lucrative for the Church, which paid emoluments directly to Hubbard and his family. In a case fought by the Founding Church of Scientology of Washington, D.C. over its tax-exempt status (revoked in 1958 because of these emoluments) the findings of fact in the case included that Hubbard had personally received over $108,000 from the Church and affiliates over a four-year period, over and above the percentage of gross income (usually 10%) he received from Church-affiliated organizations. However, Hubbard denied such emoluments many times in writing, proclaiming he never received any money from the Church.

Legal difficulties and life on the high seas
Scientology became a focus of controversy across the English-speaking world during the mid-1960s, with the United Kingdom, New Zealand, South Africa, the Australian state of Victoria and the Canadian province of Ontario all holding public inquiries into Scientology's activities.

Hubbard left this unwanted attention behind in 1966, when he moved to Rhodesia, following Ian Smith's Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Attempting to ingratiate himself with the white minority government, he offered to invest large sums in Rhodesia's economy, then hit by UN sanctions, but was asked to leave the country.

In 1967, L. Ron Hubbard further distanced himself from the controversy attached to Scientology by resigning as executive director of the church and appointing himself "Commodore" of a small fleet of Scientologist-crewed ships that spent the next eight years cruising the Mediterranean Sea. Here, Hubbard formed the religious order known as the "Sea Organization" or "Sea Org", with titles and uniforms. The Sea Org subsequently became the management group within Hubbard's Scientology empire.

He was attended by "Commodore's Messengers", teenaged girls dressed in white hot pants who waited on him hand and foot, bathing and dressing him and even catching the ash from his cigarettes. He had frequent screaming tantrums and instituted brutal punishments such as incarceration in the ship's filthy chain-locker for days or weeks at a time and "overboarding", in which errant crew members were blindfolded, bound and thrown overboard, dropping up to 40 ft. into the cold sea, hoping not to hit the side of the ship with its sharp barnacles on the way down. Some of these punishments, such as imprisonment in the chain-locker, were applied to children as well as to adults. He returned to the United States in the mid-1970s and lived for a while in Florida.

In 1977, Scientology offices on both coasts of the United States were raided by FBI agents seeking evidence of Operation Snow White, a church-run espionage network. Hubbard's wife Mary Sue and a dozen other senior Scientology officials were convicted in 1979 of conspiracy against the United States federal government, while Hubbard himself was named by federal prosecutors as an "unindicted co-conspirator." Facing intense media interest and many subpoenas, he secretly retired to a ranch in tiny Creston, California, north of San Luis Obispo.

In 1978, as part of a case against three French Scientologists Hubbard was convicted for "making fraudulent promises" and given a suspended prison sentence and a 35,000₣ fine by a French court. Hubbard - who had not been defended in the trial at all and had not been in the country during the whole time - refused to appear for the appeal. The case was then appealed by one of the convicts - in 1980 - with all fraud charges being dropped and Scientology recognized as a religion. Another convict got the case retried in 1981 and the fraud charges canceled by judgment of November 9, 1981. Hubbard himself did not take action until the case was moot and the fine was never enforced.

Hubbard's refusal to talk to British immigration officials about this conviction is said to have later caused the British Home Office to re-affirm an earlier decision to bar him from the UK. In 1989 however the then Home Office Minister of State, Tim Renton, confirmed in writing that from 1980 until the date of his death, Hubbard had been free to apply for entry to the United Kingdom under the ordinary immigration rules and that any ban had been lifted on 16 July 1980.

Later life
During the 1980s, Hubbard returned to science fiction, publishing Battlefield Earth and Mission Earth, the latter being an enormous book, published as a ten volume series. He also wrote an unpublished screenplay called Revolt in the Stars, which dramatizes Scientology's OT III teachings. Hubbard's later science fiction sold well and received mixed reviews, but some press reports describe how sales of Hubbard's books were inflated by Scientologists purchasing large numbers of copies in order to manipulate the bestseller charts. While claiming to be entirely divorced from the Scientology management, Hubbard continued to draw income from the Scientology enterprises; Forbes magazine estimated his 1982 Scientology-related income as at least US $200 million.

One year before the death of L. Ron Hubbard, the Sunday Times Magazine (28 October, 1984) published an article on Scientology, including a photo (by Nik Wheeler) of a totally exhausted Ron Hubbard. Hubbard died at his ranch on 24 January 1986, aged 74, reportedly from a stroke. Scientology attorneys arrived to claim his body, which they sought to have cremated immediately per his will. They were blocked by the San Luis Obispo County medical examiner, who ordered a drug toxicology test of a blood sample from Hubbard's corpse. The examination revealed a trace amount of the drug hydroxyzine (brand name Vistaril). Vistaril is commonly prescribed as a sedative for symptomatic treatment of anxiety or neurosis or as an adjunct in non-related diseases in which anxiety is apparent. It is also useful in treating allergic pruritus such as chronic urticaria and atopic and contact dermatoses. After the blood was taken, Hubbard's remains were cremated.

The Church of Scientology announced Hubbard had deliberately discarded his body to do "higher level spiritual research", unencumbered by mortal confines, and was now living "on a planet a galaxy away." In May 1987, David Miscavige, one of Hubbard's former personal assistants, assumed the position of Chairman of the Religious Technology Center (RTC), a corporation that owns the trademarked names and symbols of Dianetics and Scientology. Although Religious Technology Center is a separate corporation from the Church of Scientology International, Miscavige is the ecclesiastical leader of the religion. Rev. Heber Jentzsch is the President of Church of Scientology International.

Ritual magic
One controversial aspect of Hubbard's early life revolves around his association with Jack Parsons, an aeronautics professor at Caltech and an associate of the British occultist Aleister Crowley. Hubbard and Parsons were allegedly engaged in the practice of ritual magick in 1946, including an extended set of sex magick rituals called the Babalon Working, intended to summon a goddess or "moonchild." The Church insists Hubbard was a US government intelligence agent on a mission to end Parsons' magickal activities and to "rescue" a girl Parsons was "using" for magickal purposes. In a 1952 lecture series, Hubbard recommended a book of Crowley's and referred to him as "Mad Old Boy" and as "my very good friend". Hubbard later married the girl he said that he rescued from Parsons, Sara Northrup. Crowley recorded in his notes that he considered Hubbard a "lout" who made off with Parsons' money and girlfriend in an "ordinary confidence trick".

Family relations
Hubbard married Margaret "Polly" Grubb in 1933, with whom he fathered two children, L. Ron, Jr. (1934 – 1991) and Katherine May (born in 1936). They lived in Los Angeles, California and, during the late 1930s, in Bremerton, Washington. L. Ron, Jr. said in a 1983 interview, "according to him and my mother" he was the result of a failed abortion and recalls at six years old seeing his father performing an abortion on his mother with a coat hanger. In the same interview, he said "Scientology is a power-and-money-and-intelligence-gathering game" and described his father as "only interested in money, sex, booze, and drugs". DeWolf retracted most of his statements in a later sworn affidavit of July 1, 1987 (Ronald E. DeWolf v. Lyle Stuart Inc.).

His next marriage to Sara Northrup - Parsons former girl-friend - happened in August 1946. It was an act of bigamy, as Hubbard had abandoned, but not divorced, his first wife and children as soon as he left the Navy (he divorced his first wife more than a year after he had remarried). Both women allege Hubbard physically abused them. He is also alleged to have once kidnapped Sara's infant, Alexis, taking her to Cuba. Later, he disowned Alexis, claiming she was actually Jack Parsons' child. Sara, filed for divorce in late 1950, citing that Hubbard was, unknown to her, still married to his first wife at the time he married Sara. Her divorce papers also accused Hubbard of kidnapping their baby daughter Alexis, and of conducting "systematic torture, beatings, strangulations and scientific torture experiments." The furor actually made it into several newspapers and from there into Hubbard's growing file at the FBI.

In March 1952 L. Ron Hubbard married Mary Sue Hubbard (born Mary Sue Whipp) who he would remain with until his death in 1986. Another son was born in 1954, Quentin Hubbard, who was groomed to one day replace him as head of the Scientology organization. Quentin was uninterested in his father's plans and had preferred to become a pilot. He was also deeply depressed, allegedly because he was homosexual and Hubbard was homophobic. Quentin unsuccessfully attempted suicide in 1974 but would then die under mysterious circumstances 1976 that might have been a suicide or murder.

Hubbard in popular culture
His fame increased greatly after the introduction of Dianetics and Scientology, and he has continued to be a popular subject since the time of his death. L. Ron Hubbard has been depicted in novels, motion pictures, television cartoons, video games and other cultural forms. Hubbard turns up in a fellow pulp author's fiction as early as Anthony Boucher's 1942 murder mystery Rocket to the Morgue which features cameos by members and friends of the "Mañana Literary Society of Southern California", in which Hubbard makes a dual appearance as D. Vance Wimpole and Rene Lafayette (one of his pen names).

In Keith Giffen's Justice League International, a robot appeared aptly named L-Ron. In later issues, L-Ron's full programming code, "L-Ron H*bb*rd" was revealed. L-Ron is still a minor character in the DC Universe.

Hubbard was awarded the 1994 Ig Nobel Prize in Literature for "his crackling Good Book, Dianetics, which is highly profitable to mankind — or to a portion thereof".

Writing career
Hubbard was an unusually prolific author and lecturer. Because the majority of Hubbard's writings of the 1950s through to the 1970s were aimed exclusively at Scientologists, the Church of Scientology founded its own companies to publish his works - Bridge Publications for the US and Canadian market and New Era Publications, based in Denmark, for the rest of the world. New volumes of his transcribed lectures continue to be produced; that series alone will ultimately total a projected 110 large volumes. Hubbard also wrote a number of works of fiction during the 1930s and 1980s, which are published by the Scientology-owned Galaxy Press. All three of these publishing companies are subordinate to Author Services Inc., another Scientology corporation.

In 2006, Guinness World Records declared Hubbard the world's most published and most translated author, having published 1,084 fiction and non-fiction works that have been translated into 71 languages.

A selection of Hubbard's best-known titles are below; an extensive bibliography of Hubbard's work is available in a separate article.

Fiction

 * Buckskin Brigades (1937), ISBN 0-88404-280-4
 * Final Blackout (1940), ISBN 0-88404-340-1
 * Fear (1951), ISBN 0-88404-599-4
 * Typewriter in the Sky (1951), ISBN 0-88404-933-7
 * Ole Doc Methuselah (1953), ISBN 0-88404-653-2
 * Battlefield Earth (1982), ISBN 0-312-06978-2
 * Mission Earth (1985-87), 10 vols.

Dianetics and Scientology

 * Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, New York 1950, ISBN 0-88404-416-5
 * Child Dianetics. Dianetic Processing for Children, Wichita, Kansas 1951, ISBN 0-88404-421-1
 * Notes on the Lectures Parts of transcripts and notes from a series of lectures given in Los Angeles, California in November 1950, ISBN 088404-422-X
 * Scientology 8-80, Phoenix, Arizona 1952, ISBN 0-88404-428-9
 * Dianetics 55!, Phoenix, Arizona 1954, ISBN 0-88404-417-3
 * Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science Phoenix, Arizona 1955, ISBN 1-4031-0538-3
 * Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought Washington, DC 1956, ISBN 0-88404-503-X
 * The Problems of Work Washington, DC 1956, ISBN 0-88404-377-0
 * Have You Lived Before This Life?, East Grinstead, Sussex 1960, ISBN 0-88404-447-5
 * Scientology: A New Slant on Life, East Grinstead, Sussex 1965, ISBN 1-57318-037-8
 * The Volunteer Minister's Handbook Los Angeles 1976, ISBN 0-88404-039-9
 * Research and Discovery Series, a chronological series collecting Hubbard's lectures. Vol 1, Copenhagen 1980, ISBN 0-88404-073-9
 * The Way to Happiness, Los Angeles 1981, ISBN 0-88404-411-4

Church of Scientology owned sites

 * Index of L. Ron Hubbard Site
 * A profile of L. Ron Hubbard
 * Websites about L. Ron Hubbard on the Yahoo directory
 * ScientologyToday: Who is L. Ron Hubbard? 6 commonly asked questions by the media
 * Author Services Inc. Various fictional genres by L. Ron Hubbard
 * Writers of the Future A contest founded by L. Ron Hubbard to encourage upcoming fiction and fantasy writers

Unofficial biographies (online)

 * L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman? by Bent Corydon and L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
 * A Piece of Blue Sky by Jon Atack
 * Bare Faced Messiah by Russell Miller

Studies of L. Ron Hubbard not done by Scientologists

 * Operation Clambake site. (critical material on Hubbard and Scientology)
 * U.S. Government FBI Files for Hubbard via The Smoking Gun
 * Ron the Nut (A critical look at the biography of LRH)
 * Factnet Report: Hubbard and the Occult
 * L. Ron Hubbard at nndb.com
 * "L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology's esteemed founder," by Michael Crowley (Slate magazine, July 15, 2005)
 * L. Ron Hubbard on Drugs videopresentation describing the life of L. Ron Hubbard, about 90 min
 * Scientology Exposed! L. Ron Hubbard on Drugs videopresentation describing the life of L. Ron Hubbard, about 90 min
 * An Illustrated History of Scientology (L. Rick Vodicka, PDF file)
 * Annotated bibliography of literature by and about L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, by Marco Frenschkowski
 * Negative: Summary of Hubbard's writing career, hosted on Amazon.com
 * Positive: Hubbard's writings, hosted on Amazon
 * L. Ron Hubbard - The Rotten Library
 * Guinness World Records: L. Ron Hubbard Is the Most Translated Author
 * A complete resumé of his works of fiction
 * L. Ron Hubbard at the Internet Book List
 * A complete resumé of his works of fiction
 * L. Ron Hubbard at the Internet Book List