Chris Owen on Scientology

Miscellaneous Writings

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Hubbard's Autobiography [part 1]

< Hubbard's Autobiography [part 2]

Hubbard's Autobiography

by Chris Owen

FromChris Owen <chriso@lutefisk.demon.co.uk>
SubjectHUBBARD'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Part 2
Date1998/12/15
Msg-ID<cdOlVZAA6td2EwaK​@lutefisk​.demon​.co​.uk>
Newsgroupsalt.religion.scientology

[Links and comments added. -k]

Here's the second part of L. Ron Hubbard's unpublished autobiography, originally dictated in 1972. My comments are appended.

WHEN I FIRST TRAVELLED:

I first went on an automobile trip with my grandfather out to Portland, Oregon at a time when the Yellowstone Trail was still the old wagon tracks that had been cut by the early pioneers. I remember my grandfather measuring me to see if I could sleep on the back seat of a Model T Ford. I slept in a polar bear rug brought by my father from the Straits of Magellan, we lived in tents, we had a blow-out every thirty miles and generally experienced travelling in its very pioneer state in the dawn of the automobile in the West. Later, during a summer vacation, I went by myself to Tacoma, Washington and was well on my way to being a seasoned traveller by the time I was eight.

[The Straits of Magellan are near the southernmost tip of South America. As there are no polar bears in the southern hemisphere, perhaps Hubbard's childhood memory is faulty, or perhaps his father bought the rug from a trader (who had obtained it elsewhere) passing through the Straits.]

It is certainly true that Hubbard's grandfather had a Model T Ford — photos of it still exist. His father had rejoined the Navy in 1917, when the USA entered World War 1, serving mainly on the West Coast. Hubbard and his grandfather probably went out to Oregon and Washington to visit his father. One has to wonder, though, why they did not simply take the train — their home town, Helena, had a railway connection via which they could have travelled in rather more comfort to the West Coast.

COMMANDER THOMPSON

I travelled with Commander Thompson from Seattle, Washington through the Panama Canal to Washington, D. C. when I was about twelve and knew him during all that time that I was in Washington and later. Commander Thompson was the first man to study with Sigmund Freud from the U. S. Government and had just returned from his studies, bringing psychoanalysis back to the United States Navy. He was a tall, rangy, eccentric individual. His friends called him "Snake" and his enemies called him "Crazy". He had lots of both. He lived a life to very much please himself in spite of being a Naval officer and would read until he fell asleep, falling sideways over onto his bunk and get up and go about his duties when it pleased him, regardless of Navy schedules. Through his friendship I attended many lectures given at Naval hospitals and generally became conversant with psychoanalysis as it had been exported from Austria by Freud. All the various schools which sprung up later, such as Horney, seem a far cry from Freud's original work and it has seemed to me that there are no psychoanalysts who practice Freudian Psychoanalysis. Commander Thompson wrote innumerable monographs on all manner of observations in various parts of the world which he had visited, and all of them dealing with ethnology. He was a very fine man and I was very fortunate to have known him.

Commander "Snake" Thompson, USN is a somewhat mysterious figure — so much so, in fact, that Hubbard's biographer Russell Miller implies that he did not exist. Since Miller wrote "Bare-Faced Messiah" in 1986, however, it has become clear that Thompson was in fact a real person. William Sims Bainbridge, the eminent sociologist and author of several papers on Scientology, reports this vignette of the man:

"Snake Thompson was the best friend of my great uncle, Con (Consuelo Seoane). Together, around 1911, they spent nearly two years as American spies inside the Japanese Empire, charting possible invasion routes and counting all the Japanese fortifications and naval guns. It was an official but top secret joint Army-Navy spy expedition, with Con representing the Army, and Snake, the Navy. They pretended to be South African naturalists studying Japanese reptiles and amphibians, and Con was constantly worried that Snake had a camera hidden in his creel, which would get them shot if the Japanese checked too closely. Thompson habitually wore a green scarf fastened with a gold pin in the shape of a snake."

During the 1984 trial of Gerry Armstrong, Robert Vaughn Young (then a loyal Scientologist) produced several pieces of additional evidence. Young had spoken to Thompson's daughter and found a library catalogue listing several papers by Thompson on the subjects both of snakes and the human mind, as well as a postcard from Freud to Thompson. His death certificate showed that he had indeed been a Commander in the US Navy.

There's little doubt, then, that Thompson did indeed exist or that Hubbard did in fact meet him. (The US Navy, for reasons best known to itself, had decided to transport the Hubbards from the West to the East Coast not by land but by sea, aboard the USS U.S. Grant, a German warship acquired by the US Navy after the First World War.)

In later life, Hubbard claimed that his meeting with Thompson had been a crucial event in his career. Strangely, his contemporary journal makes only a brief mention of his journey via the Panama Canal and none at all of Thompson. Later accounts claim that "he had received while young an extensive education in the field of the human mind" (see Mission into Time, Hubbard 1973), while in a key lecture Hubbard claimed:

"At the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. … [Thompson] started shoving my nose into an education in the field of the mind."

[Hubbard, "The Story of Dianetics and Scientology", 1958]

Curiously, none of this is mentioned in his journal or in his boy scout diary; the most frequent entry in the latter is "Was bored". There is no indication whatsoever of any interest in or knowledge of psychology.

Hubbard's attitude towards Freud appears to have been rather ambivalent. He was certainly keen on Freud at first, presenting Dianetics as a development of Freudian psychology; early Scientology books credit Freud as a source of inspiration. Yet by the 1960s, Hubbard was routinely denouncing psychology and psychiatry as "Germanic" and "Russian" (contrasting with Scientology, "the only Anglo-Saxon science of the mind") and describing Freud as "the Viennese defamer of Man". Scientology has certainly not relented in its virulent campaigns against psychiatry and psychology, as the website of CCHR (www.cchr.org), a Scientology front group, demonstrates. It is therefore somewhat confusing to find that while Hubbard was publicly denouncing Freud and his "perversions", he was privately expressing relatively sympathetic views.

CHINA:

I first went over to China with my mother when I was fourteen or fifteen to join my father who was on Asiatic Station. Subsequently I almost commuted back and forth across the Pacific and calculated when I was about nineteen I had travelled over a quarter of a million miles on the surface of Earth which, in a day before transcontinental airplanes, was quite a distance.

Hubbard's visits to the Far East are a key element of the myth propagated both by himself and by his successors — that he travelled extensively in the East, learning the secrets of ancient Oriental mysticism which he was later to temper with the Western scientific approach to create Scientology and Dianetics. However, much of what has been claimed is quite simply untrue. Take this example, from Volume I of the Research & Discovery Series (published eight years after Hubbard's autobiography):

"The following years, from 1925 to 1929, saw the young Mr. Hubbard, between the ages of 14 and 18, as a budding and enthusiastic world traveller and adventurer. His father was sent to the Far East and having the financial support of his wealthy grandfather, L. Ron Hubbard spent these years journeying through Asia."

Unfortunately for the myth, Lafayette Waterbury was barely making ends meet at the time; hard hit by the Depression and a serious arm injury, he had closed down his small ranch and his Capital City Coal Company. He tried to establish a small business selling automobile spares and vulcanizing tyres, but the Depression meant that motorists were laying up their cars rather than repairing them. Consequently he decided to retire and by 1920 was living off his savings, which were modest at best.

The real sponsor of his Asian trips was in fact the US taxpayer, through the US Navy. As a "naval brat", he and his mother were granted subsidised passage across the Pacific to visit his father, then stationed on Guam. This did not happen often, though, and certainly did not amount to "commuting". He appears to have made only two trans-Pacific crossings in his youth:

The milage incurred on these journeys cannot have been much more than around 50,000-60,000 miles; a very sizeable distance even by today's standards but far less than Hubbard's claimed 250,000 miles (very nearly equivalent to travelling around the world seven times). Once again, this seems to be another example of Hubbard's determination to make his life story seem as extraordinary as possible.

FATHER'S ASSIGNMENTS

My father followed the usual routine of a Naval officer of two years at sea followed by a tour of duty in a shore station. He was connected with the Supply Corps although he had started in the "line". He was very expert in logistics and finance and it was commonly suspected amongst his innumerable friends in the Navy that he was assigned to places which were hot spots in order to straighten them out.

By 1927, Harry Hubbard had been promoted to Lieutenant and appointed Officer in Charge of the Commissary Store at the US Naval Station on Guam. He was indeed a logistician by trade, having been trained at the Bureau of Supply and Accounts School of Application in Washington DC. However, it is highly ironic that his son should claim that he was expert in "straightening out" financial "hot spots". His naval record shows that he was in fact rather poor at taking care of his own finances, let alone the US Navy's. He had been obliged to appear before a court of inquiry in May, 1920, while serving as Supply Officer on the USS Aroostock, to explain a deficiency in his accounts of $942.25. He also had an unfortunate tendency to overlook personal debts. No less than fourteen creditors in Kalispell claimed he left behind unpaid bills totalling $125; Fred Fisch, high-grade clothier of Vallejo, California, was pursuing him for $10 still owed on a uniform overcoat; and a Dr McPherson of San Diego was owed $30. All of them complained to the Navy Department, casting a shadow over Harry Hubbard's record.

CHINA:

I was up and down the China coast several times in my 'teens from Ching Wong Tow to Hong Kong and inland to Peking and Manchuria. I had a very good friend in the British Legation in Peking, Major Ian McBean who was an intelligence officer. I spent quite a bit of time in the Western Hills in the southern parts of Manchuria. The country was in the hands of warlords and very unsettled. I visited many lamasaries. My most particular friend was an old magician named Mayo who was the last of a line of magicians who had served the emperors of China beginning with Kublai Khan. These were, of course, the travels of a boy and although I had quick curiosity and attention, none of these by any means could be considered extensive studies. My friends were very kind to me, even indulgent, and I was extremely fortunate in having the friendship of a great many older men. They found me a good listener.

Hubbard again exaggerates the extent of his travels. Even the most recent Scientology biography, Images of a Lifetime, acknowledges that he in fact made only two trips to China — one with his mother en route to Guam in 1927 and a tourist visit from Guam in the company of his parents in 1928. In the light of his later claims, it's worth noting that he was no daring adventurer; he was escorted on both trips by his parent(s).

Not that that stopped him making extraordinary claims. Scientology has published a number of accounts of his Asian journeys, which would certainly have been approved if not actually written by Hubbard, but which happen to be largely or completely incorrect. Take the following examples:

"In Northern China and India he became intensely curious about the composition and destiny of Man…"

["A Short Biography of L. Ron Hubbard", The Auditor 63]

"Deep in the hills of Western China, Ron visited the lamaseries. There he conversed with monks and made friends with them and the people. In the isolation of the high hills of Tibet, even native bandits responded to Ron's honest interest in them and were willing to share with him what understanding of life they had."

[What is Scientology?, 1978 edition]

In fact, he never visited Tibet and his only connection with India appears to have been a flight change made at Calcutta in 1959. Indeed, later in this autobiography he specifically refutes the claim that he went to Tibet — yet it remained in What is Scientology? and the Research & Discovery Series until the 1990s. Hubbard's trip to the Western Hills appears to have been in the form of a YMCA outing to the Great Wall at its nearest point to the Chinese capital.

In the light of his numerous claims to have learned about "the nature of Man" in the East, it's curious that in this particular account he should add the disclaimers that they were only "the travels of a boy" none of which "by any means could be considered extensive studies". This is certainly an interpretation borne out by his contemporary journals, which have absolutely no suggestion of a youthful mind inspired by spiritual discovery. The Temple of Heaven in Peking, one of the greatest of all traditional Chinese temples, he considered "very gaudy and more or less crudely done". He complained that the lamaseries (he is only known to have visited one, in Peking) were "miserably cold and very shabby … The people worshipping have voices like bull-frogs and beat a drum and play a brass horn to accompany their singing (?)." In general, he seems to have been underwhelmed by the mysterious Orient. "The trouble with China is," he wrote, "there are too many chinks here."

The recent Scientology-produced biography Images of a Lifetime makes the rather absurd claim that Hubbard "became one of the first Occidentals since Marco Polo to gain entrance into forbidden Tibetan lamaseries". In fact, as his journal makes clear, the lamaseries were merely "rubberneck stations" for visiting tourists.

Interestingly, Hubbard's China journal has been reproduced on the Scientology website devoted to his life — www.lronhubbard.org — but all of his racist and/or otherwise discreditable comments have carefully been edited out. Look for the ellipses!

The existence of Major Ian McBean, supposedly an intelligence officer at the British Legation in Peking, has not been confirmed but is probable, as it's hard to see why Hubbard should have made him up (he was, by and by, more of an exaggerator than an out-and-out fantasist). I am trying to track down the Legation's records to see if I can find out any more information about the good Major.

GOLDI:

About all I know of the Goldi people in Manchuria was the practices of their shamen, most of which are common knowledge today. It struck me particularly that the Manchurian was undoubtedly the blood brother of the American Indian, since there was a great deal in common between the actions of "Old Tom" and a shaman. It was not for several decades after this that the migration of the American Indian from Manchuria was conclusively proven by tracing grave mounds on the Aleutian Islands clear on through to the Mohawk Valley in New England. The horsemanship of the Mongols and that of the American Indian had several points in common; although of course there were enormous differences, it was fairly obvious that the fundamentals were the same. I have no notes to hand as I write this and can only give you what I recall.

The limitations of Hubbard's knowledge of anthropology are here rather clearly revealed. Native Americans are genetically of Asian origin, having migrated to the Americas some 30,000 years ago. The migrations had not occurred via the Aleutians — a rather improbable possibility, as they are a series of seamounts some 1200 miles long — but via the Bering Land Bridge connecting North America to Siberia during the ice ages. Hubbard's claim about horsemanship is a particularly fine howler, as the horse went extinct in the Americas tens of thousands of years ago. (The horse is, if anything, an evolutionary failure — see Stephen Jay Gould's essay "Life's Little Joke"). The first horses seen in America in modern times were those brought by the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century; Native Americans did not learn to ride until the 19th century. They could not possibly have retained any lessons on horsemanship from their Asian ancestors, as the animals had been extinct in the Americas for hundreds of centuries.

TUTORED:

I spent so much time in my 'teens in Asia that I missed most of my formal grammar and high school. Whenever I was around my mother she would make me study and would cram me and I eventually made up for it by going to Swaveley's Prep School, Manassas, Virginia and then to the Y.M.C.A. School, Woodward in Washington. I was passed on into engineering school on the basis of I.Q.

Considering his dismal failure at college, Hubbard's claim to have been admitted "on the basis of IQ" might have some foundation in truth — it is hard to see how else he could have got in. He was in fact a highly intelligent man, but he shows every sign of having been profoundly lazy intellectually.

Probably the most I ever learned was in the Boy Scouts in Washington, D. C. where a great many government civil servants took interest in the boys and Scouting and who taught them carefully on merit badge work. I was a member of Troop Ten Washington in which was a prize-winning troop and while with it became the youngest Eagle Scout in the United States.

Hubbard's status as "youngest Eagle Scout" is a staple element of any Scientology biography. Hubbard's Scout diary does indeed say "youngest Eagle Scout" on the day when the award was bestowed. However, there is no way that Hubbard could have known that he was the youngest. At the time, the Boy Scouts Association did not keep records of the age of Eagle Scouts, so it would have been impossible for Hubbard (or any other Scout) to verify that he was in fact the youngest. So how can the diary entry be explained? It seems likely that someone — perhaps the giver of the award — told Hubbard that he was the youngest, or maybe merely the youngest in Montana, which so thrilled Hubbard that he took it as official notice of his achievement. It's a little sad that fifty years later he was still hyping it as being a high point of his life.

It struck me toward the end of World War II that I never would have gotten through the war alive had it not been for the training I had had in Scouting. Of all the various information which became important to me, such as photography, woodlore, signalling and many other subjects, the basis of it was laid in Scouting.

What this refers to is not entirely clear. Hubbard's service in the US Navy in World War II was far away from the front lines. He was removed from his first command before it had even left the dock, so he could not have participated in the Battle of the Atlantic (despite his later claims to have commanded a corvette group). His second and final command lasted only some 80 days and appears to have gone no further than a few dozen miles off the US West Coast. The whole of the rest of the war he spent either in training, in minor posts such as cable censoring or in hospital apparently suffering from a stomach ulcer. At no point could he ever have been considered to have been in real physical danger.

It is likely that this rather obscure allusion by Hubbard refers to his claims to have fought behind enemy lines on Japanese-occupied Java in 1942. His one-time second-in-command, Lt Thomas Moulton, told the Armstrong trial in 1984 that Hubbard had claimed to have been part of a unit cut off when the Japanese overran Java. He apparently fought his way out, receiving serious injuries when he was machine-gunned en route, and sailed by dead reckoning back to Australia.

Scientology has, for some reason, never mentioned this story in its official biographies of Hubbard — until now. On 14 March 1997, Hubbard's official biographer Dan Sherman (a long-time Scientologist) addressed a large gathering of fellow Scientologists at the Los Angeles "Birthday Event" celebrating what would have been L. Ron Hubbard's 86th birthday. Scientology's house magazine Freedom describes Sherman's talk:

"While there were many stories that could have been told, Sherman singled out a few which were illustrative of the 'tales not told' concerning Mr. Hubbard's life. One involved his time on the island of Java 'in search of stockpiled weapons and fast, shallow-draft vessels.'

'Now conceivably, there were more perilous islands on which LRH might have landed,' said Sherman. 'If, for example, he had joined MacArthur's troops on Corregidor this story would conclude pretty quickly. But short of those islands already in the Emperor's purse, as the phrase went, Mr. Hubbard could have hardly picked a worse place to visit than Java in the closing days of February 1942.

'As he so nonchalantly put it, "I met some people who were not on my side." To which I might add, he was basically referring to the primary flank of the Japanese Imperial Army, which, in turn, explains his next remark: "We had to leave the battle." The only problem was, he had missed the last departing allied aircraft on March 6th, and was only able to escape the island after scrambling into a rubber raft and paddling out to meet an Australian destroyer.'

Sherman concluded the anecdote by putting it in perspective. 'The real point of these pages does not lie with his seventy-two depth-charge runs, the slivers of shrapnel he took in the chest or his molding of a criminal crew into sailors described as the finest in the fleet,' he said. 'The real point of these years lies in how he viewed this war, and what that view tells us about him.'"

[Freedom magazine, Spring 1997 - see http://www.freedom.org.uk/MAG/ISSUEA01/page04c.htm]

Unfortunately for Hubbard's "heroic" reputation, his war record shows that he was in fact working as a cable censor in Adelaide at the time. His medical record and death certificate both show that he received no action-related injuries — no bullet or shrapnel wounds. The seventy-two depth-charge runs were not against Japanese submarines but against a charted magnetic deposit on the seabed, while the supposed "finest crew in the fleet" were criticised by a US Navy Board of Inquiry and by Hubbard himself, who claimed that without his guidance they were prone to "get lost".

I am very indebted to a great many very fine men who gave their time and attention to a restless, boisterous and extremely active boy and teenager, and I must have tried their patience many times but I never heard of it from them. I have been taught marksmanship by Marine officers and was endlessly encouraged and led along by fellows who must have been princes in their own right. I cannot imagine why Major McBean would spend hours coaching me in the entire intelligence framework existing in the Western Hills, or going out of his way to see that my dinner jacket was properly tailored or why a Lieutenant Burk of the Navy should spend Saturday after Saturday with me in the model testing basin in the Washington Navy Yard teaching me every swimming stroke known to him, unless they were just very decent fellows. My whole life has been enriched by knowing so many wonderful and talented people and if I've had any luck, it has been in having, as a boy and young man, so many marvellous friends.

Is this somewhat maudlin exposition true or not? It is hard to tell, but the important point is not its accuracy but its place in the Hubbard mythos. The consistent theme of Hubbard's life (and one which is stressed with monotonous regularity by Scientology) is that his life was blessed by extraordinary and portentious events which led inexorably to the creation of Scientology and Dianetics. In fact, Dianetics had notably shallow roots there is no evidence that Hubbard had taken any real interest in philosophy or religion prior to 1948, save perhaps for his involvement in black magic in Pasadena in 1946-47. It is therefore not all that surprising that he felt the need to present it as being the product of decades of research, rather than being (as he himself admitted) the result of six weeks of typing and six months of notably unscientific tests.

TRAVELLING ALONE:

1918 is the year I first began to travel by myself, beginning with a trip to Tacoma, Washington. I used to get sent off to go to school somewhere and then managed to turn up by circuitous routes where my parents were.

This probably is an indirect reference to Hubbard's abandonment of his high school in Helena in 1928. At the time his parents were living in Guam.

WHERE DID YOU GO, WHO DID YOU SEE, WHAT DID YOU LEARN?:

Asia, Philippines, South Pacific, Central America, West Indies, Continental United States — it would take about three books to answer this question. There are very few I didn't see and very little I didn't inquire. I really wouldn't know how to start answering the question.

The claim to have visited Central America is a shaky one. One Scientology biography claimed that:

"His first action on leaving college was to blow off steam by leading an exhibition into Central America. In the next few years he headed three further expeditions, all of them undertaken to study savage peoples and cultures to provide material for his articles and stories."

[A Brief Biography of L. Ron Hubbard, 1960]

However, there is no record of him having travelled to Central America during the 1920s or 1930s. He did pass through the Panama Canal en route to Washington D.C. in 1923, but the Canal Zone was American territory at the time. He also went to Puerto Rico in 1932, but only the most inaccurate geographer could have placed that country in Central America. But Hubbard's stories about expeditions south of the Rio Grande long predated Dianetics and Scientology. He told the sci-fi writer Frank Gruber that he had been on a four-year expedition to the Amazon in the early 1930s. Another writer, Alva Rogers, related in "A Fan's Remembrance" (Darkhouse magazine, November 1962) how Hubbard had told him that he had been wounded by native arrows on a South American expedition. These stories were patently untrue — not only are Hubbard's movements during that period well recorded, leaving no wriggle room, but even Scientology's own biographies of his life no longer make any reference to supposed Central or South American expeditions.

ARCANE DATA:

Basically, I learned it in the East. People considered themselves spiritual beings who were inhabiting bodies. No one stated it that well but they thought of themselves as something else rather than animal bodies. Men in a graveyard on Coal Hill, Peking, who would sit down in front of an open grave, having paid the groundskeepers a few pennies, and then will themselves dead and fall in to be covered up is probably my first contact with something this life which startled me. The Western and pioneering striving for survival and an Asiatic fatalism clashed so that it was unreal to me that anybody would sit down and simply will himself dead. This probably marks the first point this life of interest in the strange and unusual. Old Mayo showed me how the servants of Kublai Kahn [sic] could make bottles fly through the air of their own accord and I was interested many years later to find that Marco Polo had already mentioned this as an everyday occurrence in the Emperor's Court. I didn't believe it even when I saw it. Being a practical, down-to-earth young man I didn't think it could happen even when I saw it happening. His explanation, that they were impelled by will. Most of this phenomena has been observed subsequently, but as a boy it was intensely interesting to me.

From a purely rationalist perspective, one has to express strong doubt about the veracity of Hubbard's account. Assuming that he is reporting truthfully — which is far from certain, as the reader will by now be aware — then it is far more convincing to explain Hubbard's observations as being the result of mundane rather than supernatural phenomena. The Chinese "willing themselves dead" were probably suffering from starvation as a result of the catastrophic warlord period, which saw relentless civil war and mass famines which killed millions of Chinese.

As for "Old Mayo" (no relation, one assumes, to Hubbard's later confidante David Mayo) — surely Hubbard could not have been fooled by the old bottle-on-a-string trick? Apart from the physical improbabilities involved — Newton would have thrown a fit — it isn't even consistent within Hubbard's own frame of reference. He cites "Old Mayo's" explanation that the bottles "were impelled by will". How? Hubbard says explicitly in A History of Man and other works relating to the supposed powers of Operating Thetans that only OTs can, as he puts it, "knock hats off at fifty yards". But he himself claimed to have been the first OT, leading his followers through the "Wall of Fire" at great personal cost to himself, and that only Scientology could make OTs; even Jesus and the Buddha were "just above Clear". So how could "Old Mayo" have exercised what were by Hubbard's own account OT powers?

Incidentally, there is no proof whatsoever that "Old Mayo" even existed. He did not mention anything about him in his otherwise extensive diary, which can be found on the Scientology-run L. Ron Hubbard website (http://www.lronhubbard.org). It surely is somewhat suspicious that his first mentions of this person should have appeared decades after his visit to China. Even the name, unless it is a translation or atrocious transliteration, is not Chinese.

EXOTIC PHENOMENA:

See above.

PHILIPPINES:

Bagio, Manilla, Cavite and other parts of the Philippines were almost way-stops for me.

No "almost" about it — they were waystops en route to Guam. Hubbard does not appear to have stayed there for more than a few days in his entire life, however.

NORTH BORNEO:

No personal contact.

What this refers to isn't clear.

LAMAS IN TIBET:

These were the Tibetan Lamas in the Western Hills, not in Tibet.

Despite this disclaimer, Scientology biographies of Hubbard continued to make those claims up until the 1990s. Given Hubbard's vigorous control of anything published by his "Church" (all rather dubiously copyrighted to himself even when he hadn't written it), it's inconceivable that they would have been published without him having given his approval of the contents.

HINDU WHO COULD HYPNOTIZE CATS:

This was in fact Commander Thompson who had a cat named Psycho that he had trained to do all manner of tricks.

SWAMI WHO COULD INHIBIT FLOW OF BLOOD:

Common enough occurrence. I've seen it many times. It can be done by self-hypnotism.

As Hubbard says, it is indeed a trick which can be performed by swamis and fakirs, or indeed any person (not that there are many) who has learned how to regulate their autonomic system.

BASICALLY LEARNED IN THE EAST:

That Man was not an animal and that there was more to life than science had dreamed of. I learned enough to know that Man did not know everything there was to know about life, and in my opinion that neither East nor West, the spiritual and the material had any full answer. I learned basically that there was a whole field going begging for research. This is why I did not mind disciplining myself, struggling through higher mathematics in college because it was obvious that they had evolved tools of research but was too materialistic to apply them to the East and the East was too fatalistic to inquire.

Hubbard's claim to have "disciplined himself" is laughable; he dropped out of college in his second semester after it became apparent that he was not going to pass, largely because he had spent much of his time on non-academic activities such as flying gliders and writing for the university newspaper. His claim about "struggling through higher mathematics" is particularly absurd. In fact, he never got higher than a D in maths and by his own admission was never much good at it. In his 1958 lecture, "The Story of Dianetics & Scientology", he tells of how he scraped through maths assignments thanks to "people around who would do mathematics for me … that's how I got through college; I was never in class … my friends were mainly newspaper reporters." Despite this, two Scientology biographies say that he graduated with a mathematics degree.

Early interest in spiritual matters is also lacking. No Hubbardian writings on spirituality appear to exist prior to 1938's unpublished Excalibur — unsurprising, as Hubbard was a jobbing pulp fiction writer, not a philosopher. It's noteworthy that the Church of Scientology constantly claims that Hubbard was developing his ideas on the human spirit from the 1920s onwards, but it has never published documentary proof of this. One would have thought that if they had such proof, it would have been published by now.

NEXT PART: Hubbard in the 1930s