L. Ron Hubbard

Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska, the son of a low-ranking Navy officer and a schoolteacher, and spent his childhood following his father's postings, including a stretch on Guam in the late 1920s that supplied material he later inflated into an adventurer's origin story. He enrolled at George Washington University in 1930, earned mostly poor grades, and left in his second year without a degree, despite decades of later claims to a nuclear-physics background his transcript does not support. What he had instead was speed at a typewriter: starting in 1934 he turned out adventure, western, mystery and science-fiction pulp for editor John W. Campbell, prolific enough that in some months he published under several names at once.

Hubbard served in the Navy from 1941 to 1945, a record his later claims of combat heroism outran considerably — documents show he was relieved of two commands, one after depth-charging a known magnetic rock formation he had mistaken for a Japanese submarine. He published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in May 1950, promising perfect memory and freedom from disease through auditing; it became a bestseller and, within months, a discredited one, as its supporting foundations collapsed into bankruptcy. Hubbard regrouped in 1952, declaring Dianetics the basis of a new religion, Scientology, built around an E-meter device, and incorporated the first church in Camden, New Jersey, in December 1953. It grew into an international organization with real estate and publishing arms and, from 1966, its own private fleet, the Sea Organization, commanded by Hubbard as self-titled Commodore.

Hubbard built protections around Scientology that went well past ordinary organizational defense. His 1967 "Fair Game" policy declared that enemies of the church could be tricked, sued, or otherwise destroyed by any means, and the Guardian's Office he set his wife Mary Sue to run acted on it — infiltrating the FBI, the IRS and the American Psychiatric Association under the Snow White program, and running a campaign against journalist Paulette Cooper that included forging a bomb threat in her name. France convicted him of fraud in absentia in 1978. His family paid a private cost to match: he kidnapped his infant daughter Alexis and fled to Cuba during his second wife's 1951 psychiatric commitment fight, and one of his sons later said Hubbard "only knew how to do one thing and that was to destroy people."

Hubbard spent his final years in seclusion, moving through California in a recreational vehicle, and suffered a stroke on January 17, 1986, dying a week later in Creston, California, at 74. The church he founded told followers he had voluntarily "dropped his body" to continue his research on another plane of existence; his ashes were scattered at sea. Scientology carried on under David Miscavige, expanded into real estate and celebrity recruitment, and remains the subject of continuing lawsuits, documentaries and defections, decades after the pulp writer who invented it stopped answering for any of it.

L. Ron Hubbard's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Buckskin Brigades book
  His first full-length novel 1937
• Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health book
  Bestseller, May 1950, whose theories became the basis of Scientology 1950
• Church of Scientology of California other
  Incorporated December 18, 1953, in Camden, New Jersey 1954
• Sea Organization other
  Private fleet Hubbard commanded as self-titled Commodore from 1966 1967
• Battlefield Earth book
  Science-fiction novel written during his years in seclusion 1982

• March 13, 1911 aged 0 Born in Tilden, Nebraska
• 1934 aged ~23 Begins publishing pulp fiction
• July 19, 1941 aged 30 Commissioned in the US Navy Relieved of two commands over the next two years.
• May 9, 1950 aged 39 Publishes Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
• December 18, 1953 aged 42 Incorporates the first Church of Scientology, in Camden, New Jersey
• 1966 aged ~55 Forms the Sea Organization and takes to a private fleet
• July 8, 1977 aged 66 FBI raids Guardian's Office locations, seizing 90,000 documents
• February 1980 aged 68 Disappears into seclusion for his final years
• January 24, 1986 aged 74 Dies in Creston, California, at 74 A stroke a week earlier was the immediate cause.

• Joseph Smith 1805–1844
  Founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, one of the most consequential religions to originate in the United States. religious-movement founder, contemporary
• Mary Baker Eddy 1821–1910
  Founder of Christian Science and a major female religious leader and publisher. religious-movement founder, contemporary
• Isaac Asimov 1920–1992
  Writer whose science fiction and popular science helped shape public imagination about robots, technology, and the future. praised his early fiction
• Ray Bradbury 1920–2012
  Science fiction writer whose Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles became American classics. praised his early fiction