Appendix A. A HOMAGE TO RON An Anecdote (Told by Mary Sue Hubbard in "Ability Minor " 3, April 1955.) "I remember one time in Spain, I had spent the whole morning shopping in the market and the whole afternoon preparing dinner on one oil burner and a charcoal fire. This was a difficult process for one used to supermarkets and a gas range. Ron had gone to the park. Dinner time passed. The food got soupy from reheating and the charcoal supply got nil. My patience wilted and I went to the park. I found him sitting at a sidewalk cafe, a middle­aged Spaniard with him. He motioned to me to sit down and be silent. He was processing. The fellow had been in the Russian army, had fought in the battle of Stalingrad and then had been forced into servitude in Siberia. His legs had been so badly frozen that they would not bend at the joints. This peglegged walk was to carry him through life and to deny him work because of his slowness. After Ron had finished, we invited him home to dinner. He walked naturally again. His realization of what had happened to him did not come until he walked to the door to leave. He suddenly stopped and began shouting, "I walk ­ I walk!" A Second Anecdote (Told by Peter Moon in his book "Encounter In The Pleiades: An Inside Look At UFOs", Sky Books, New York 1996.) From Madrid, I was put on a plane to Casablanca in Morocco where I boarded the ship longer than a football field that housed 350­400 people. Hubbard was a relentless worker and didn't meet the various individuals who came aboard. A guide was assigned to me after I boarded, and he gave me a complete tour of the ship. I got several glimpses of Hubbard. One of the first questions I asked my guide was if they ever encountered any UFOs while they were sailing. He was a former Buckingham Palace guard and was very meticulous about his answers. Having been aboard the ship practically since its inception, he carefully scanned his memory. "Only once," he said. "One time at sea, someone on the bridge had spotted a couple of flying saucers in the night sky. He turned to the Commodore (referring to Hubbard) and asked if he saw what was in the sky." He said that Hubbard shot back immediately without any hesitation and said, "Flying them quite badly, aren't they?" Hubbard was quick like that and his range of perception was wide. One heard countless anecdotes like this when aboard the ship, but no one collected them for posterity. A Biographical Sketch (This article by Peter Moon appeared under the heading of "L.Ron Hubbard", in the appendix to "Montauk Revisited" by Preston B. Nichols and Peter Moon, available from Sky Books, Box 769, Westbury, NY 11590. It is reprinted here with kind permission of the publisher.) "An incredible amount of nonsense has been written about this man. I will be as brief as possible and stick to the salient points based upon my own personal knowledge and insights. Hubbard was extremely wide read and had an acute aptitude for the paranormal. His experiences were not those of a "normal" person and he was continually finding that nobody believed him. Various authors and courts have condemned him for being a compulsive liar. I definitely found this not to be true in my own experience, but if he was a compulsive liar to some, it was partly because no one believed him when he told the truth. Why not just tell them something that works? Hubbard believed in workability beyond all else and he was extremely effective in his pursuits. He hated the establishment because it furthered stagnation and was a hallmark of ineffectiveness. The Navy carreer of L.Ron Hubbard is checkered with ambiguity. His actual naval records will not be released although there is an agreement that he worked in Naval Intelligence. This being the case, disinformation as to his whereabouts and duties would have been fabricated as a matter of due course. It is known that Hubbard studied the psychiatric records of Navy personnel and had information on the cutting edge procedures of the day. This included narcosynthesis and regression techniques. He took what he learnt from psychiatric research, plus his earlier studies, and formulated Dianetics. This was the first major regression therapy applied on a broad basis and was designed to be easy for the layman to use. Hubbard also studied Aleister Crowley and found him fascinating. Crowley's principles are to be found here and there throughout Hubbard's work, but they are not one and the same thing. Hubbard developed his own techniques and was more of an innovator than a copycat. Hubbard's popularity grew and he never had to look back as far as money was concerned. The Church of Scientology grew out of this popularity and it was incorporated as a legal religion in 1954. Hubbard had constant difficulties running organizations and found he couldn't openly trust others to "just go do it". He formulated his own administrative system and set it up to be effective. The purpose was to sell books and get his Dianetics and Scientology processes to the public. He honestly believed this would save humanity. The Government waged decades of war against Hubbard and much of it was unconstitutional. I believe that they were angry at him for breaking security with information he had obtained while with the Navy. His organization was also perceived as a threat to J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon and other establishment forces. I first saw Hubbard in 1972 and Scientology was a growing and dynamic movement at that point. He had definite health problems, but they were not exaggerated nor did they seem to hamper him. These were not hidden from the crew. He considered himself an experimental guinea pig and what he released as standard Scientology was watered down (as far as being dangerous) and foolproof as far as he was concerned. Hubbard is often described as a temperamental hot head who always had to get his way. He had extremely high expectations and they were not often met. Very often, he didn't get his way and nothing was done about it for a long time or sometimes not at all. Of course, there were plenty of times when he achieved what he wanted, but he was mostly busy researching. Hubbard did not constantly police anyone. At times he would keep to himself but he never ignored the crew. I only saw him get angry a couple of times and this was after a person had repeatedly acted like a fool. Hubbard said he had no idea he would become so popular and become such a figurehead. Had he known, he would have led his life quite differently. It was wild and filled with outrageous aspects. In fact, he told a friend of mine in the early 1970's that he would prefer to die. His body was worn out, and he felt he had to keep it alive because he had become an important symbol to so many people that followed the movement. Government agents reportedly used to take bets on how fast they could put Hubbard in prison. Although they were not successful in this regard, I believe he was under constant psychotronic attack during the time the Montauk Project was in operation. He even ended up on Long Island during most of 1973. The Church of Scientology grew to be a very large organization by the early 1980's. Despite high officials going to prison for conspiracy against the Government, the movement was highly popular and growing. In 1981, at what was probably the height of the Church's popularity, Hubbard was no longer directly involved. He was hiding so as not to be served with a subpoena. Several people thought the movement had been infiltrated by the CIA pitting one Scientology faction against another. There was tremendous infighting within the organization during this period and the majority of the people I knew left. The organization totally changed its operating basis and hasn't been the same since. Hubbard passed on in January 1986 at the age of 74. He called his confidante, Pat Broeker, to his room a few days before he departed and told him that he would be leaving his body. Hubbard was concerned that people might grieve and cry over his departure. He said this wasn't necessary and that people would cry only because of their own self­invalidation. In other words, people would be crying over their own belief system that they themselves were not immortal. I've tried to be as objective as possible about this short biographical sketch of Hubbard. It is important to realize that this man had incredible knowledge. He wanted the entire world to access it. If he were clearly interested in money and power and that was all, he would have led a much more extravagant life style. Most of the time, his quarters were not as plush as the average three bedroom house. His life was also filled with pits and valleys and he would have been the first to agree. The man has simply not been accurately portrayed in any biographical accounts of him. I believe that the real clues to this man's role on Earth have to do with his involvement with Jack Parsons and his heritage with the Wilson clan. His activities there are still shrouded in mystery." Hubbard, The Druid The somewhat cryptical remark in the last three lines of Peter Moon's article needs explaining: the Wilson clan is a family of highly initiated Scottish witches. Members of this family went abroad and settled in the USA. Ron Hubbard's father Harry Ross Hubbard was a Wilson really and had been adopted by a family named Hubbard. Which means that Ron grew up in fairly elevated spiritual circles. (I should think he chose a family to suit his purposes as you'll see in a moment.) I'm taking this from a chapter on the Wilson family in "Montauk Revisited". Preston Nichols, like other authors before, tries to explain the relationship of Hubbard and Crowley by saying that Hubbard learned from Crowley and that the link between the two was Jack Parsons who Hubbard did experiments in magick with. (Jack Parsons was a rocket engineer and a disciple of Crowley. See the chapter on him in "Montauk Revisited".) This never clicked with me. Firstly, Hubbard didn't spend a lot of time with Jack Parsons. Secondly ­ and more importantly ­ all the session data that went into the "Pied Pipers" clearly show that Hubbard as "Elron" was in dead opposition to Yatrus. Given that Crowley at his time was the senior representative of Yatrus on Earth, it wouldn't make sense that Hubbard should seriously study Crowley's magick ­ except perhaps to find out what the enemy was up to. The answer to the riddle fell into my lap when at an auditor's convention in 1996, I met a solo auditor who was also a druid. This puzzled me. How would a druid be a solo auditor on Solo 3 or vice versa? He told me that druids consider themselves to be the keepers of spirituality in Europe. They keep a low profile since the Catholic Church to this day is up in arms against them. Druids are interested in any new development to find out what it's worth, and perhaps to influence it. Hubbard's teachings are of particular importance to them. Because Hubbard (he said) was by education a druid. He was entrusted with the task of making druidic knowledge available to mankind in popular language. How would my druid friend know this? Because his teacher told him. So I rang the teacher on the phone (a very long­distance call). He confirmed the story and said he had been told it by his teacher who as a child and a young man knew Hubbard personally, at a time when Hubbard was already in his fifties and sailing the Mediterranean in his Sea Org ships. I asked him if Ron hadn't told this young man some tall story to impress him, because (don't we know?) Ron loved to create his PR image to suit the demands of his environment. No, said the druid teacher, the story was again confirmed by his teacher's teacher who studied druidism right at the time when Hubbard studied it ­ in the 1930's. They didn't study in the same place but knew of each other. So for better or worse, here is the full story as it was given to me: Ron, born into a clan of magicians and witches, received a druid education from late childhood on. It lasted some 15 years. He was entrusted with the task of rendering Crowley powerless since Crowley was into black magic, and black magic is not what druids favour. Further, and as his masterpiece, he was to rehabilitate druidic knowledge in the eyes of the world. Ron was excluded from druidic circles when he founded the "Church of Scientology" in 1954 since it's against druidic policy to start a religion.