PART I: THE SCIENCE FICTION RELIGION

Cults of Unreason: In the Beginning...

IN THE EARLY summer of 1968 newspapers in England began carrying stories of strange doings in the town of East Grinstead in Sussex. On the outskirts of this well-heeled and slightly snooty community, a commuter suburb for the better type of London advertising executive, an odd cult had set up its headquarters - rather improperly it was felt - in the Maharajah of Jaipur's former abode, Saint Hill Manor. From this elegant Georgian mansion emanated the policies and propaganda of one of the most curious, disturbing and occasionally, highly entertaining quasi-religious cults of this century, Scientology. Here too, until his exile to a yacht in the Mediterranean, lived the cult's flamboyant founder, one Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, an American science fiction writer, explorer, philosopher manque, mystic and Messiah. In that year of 1968 Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard were to make big news, and people in Britain, and most other parts of the world for that matter, were suddenly to become aware of the name of the cult and to get a taste of its largely unwanted flair for making headlines. Few were to understand what it was all about, and most took it as another passing phase, a nine-day wonder geared to the `silly season' of the newspaper year. For others, who had looked at it more closely, slightly edgy questions concerning religious tolerance and freedom were raised when the Home Office began to harass the organization on a limited scale, and these issues are not entirely resolved to date. The press turned out to be almost universally hostile, subjecting the Scientologists to a series of flaying and often ill-judged assaults. The police and forces of law and order, provoked by complaints from public and press, reacted uncertainly. Were Scientologists breaking the law? If so, how? Their activities might seem odd, but that was their affair. Still the headlines appeared, first in the local press (SCIENTOLOGY GIRLS IN COURT; ESTATE AGENT HITS BACK AT SCIENTOLOGISTS; CULT BANS 25 BUSINESSES IN GRINSTEAD; etc.) and then in national papers (MIND BENDERS PESTERED MAN BY POST; CULT CUTS SON OFF FROM FAMILY; SCIENTOLOGY INQUIRY BY THE YARD; etc.) increasing in frequency until a climax was reached in July 1968 when, in a blaze of publicity, Hubbard himself was banned from re-entering the country by order of the Home Secretary.

Of the millions who sampled the delights of this flap in the papers and on TV, few realized that Scientology had had such heady moments before; far from being a mushroom cult destined for a few months of spongy glory, it had been founded with, if possible, even more publicity way back in the early fifties when Hubbard and his activities had leapt into prominence in the United States following the publication of best-selling book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.This is still, incidentally, Hubbard's most famous work and the Scientologists' basic text.

With only the current newspapers to go on the average person can be forgiven for feeling unable to plumb the mysteries of the cult, or to understand the motivation of its founder or, even more, its capacity for attracting enthusiastic and passionate devotees. Scientologists, of course, argue that no one can really understand their movement unless they become part of it themselves - a familiar strategy advanced by almost all other similar organizations. In fact, thanks to the frequently huge press coverage, to the loquacious ranks of its former adherents and, in particular, to Hubbard's own pacy and voluminous writings, a fairly comprehensive history of the movement can be put together, and some clear idea of its principal thesis, its origins and its aims can be grasped. It turns out to be a fascinating story, a sociological legend of our time and, as I have suggested in the introduction, an index of the shape of things to come.

Hubbard claims that the genesis of his ideas lay back in the pre-war years when, as a young man, he trotted around the world with his father, a naval officer, and was able to sample the numerous exotic religious systems that the world enjoys. In a number of his written or spoken statements he makes out lat long periods of `intensive study and research' in far-flung

parts of the globe convinced him that the world was in a pretty awful mess and that it ought to be possible for someone, or some new philosophy, to straighten it out. Never unduly modest, he makes it fairly clear that he, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, and his brainchild, Scientology, ought between them to be able to do the trick.

One of the prime problems in researching the background to Scientology is not that there is any shortage of material, for details are supplied quite lavishly by Hubbard and his aides, but rather the contradictory nature of the details, which are often disconcertingly at odds with the facts that can be gleaned from non-Scientological sources. Nevertheless, Hubbard and Scientology are pretty well inseparable and no history of the cult makes sense without a close inspection of his own background. We must do what we can, therefore, to sort the wheat out from the chaff.

The early years of his life are not particularly well documented and information about his forbears is sparse and confusing. He was born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1911. In an interview he granted the Sussex Evening Argus on 30th April 1959 (just about the time of his move to East Grinstead), he is stated to have claimed that his grandfather was one of the racy pioneers of the far West and `owned a quarter of Montana'. Hubbard's firstborn son, who also bears the name of Lafayette Ronald Hubbard but is better known by his nickname, `Nibs', contradicts this grandiose suggestion. According to him none of his father's family had much in the way of money or property, most of them being small farmers of one kind or another in the American North West and certainly not owning a quarter of the State of Montana. The founder of Scientology's father, who at the time of writing this book, is nearly ninety and still alive and well in the State of Washington, joined the US Navy straight from the farm in 1902 and was an ordinary seaman when Teddy Roosevelt sent the great white fleet around the world. After a year or so he left the navy and worked for a short while as a newspaper reporter but, after being awarded a commission in the Supply Corps, rejoined the navy in 1908. From then until his retirement in later years he toured the world with long spells of duty in China and Japan, and took his wife and young son along with him. No doubt this Asiatic backcloth to his boyhood served to inject into L. Ron's philosophies that unmistakable flavour of the Mystic East which can be detected in them. He has stated that he began formulating the principles of Dianetics and Scientology in 1923 which is not bad for a lad of twelve and suggests that he was a thoughtful, intellectually inclined child.

Occasionally there are references in his writings and lectures to a `Commander Thompson USN' who had `studied with Freud in Vienna' and who was to teach Hubbard all he knew about psychoanalysis and Freudian psychology. Thompson, who laboured under the unfortunate nickname of `Snake', was in fact a navy doctor who was a great chum of L. Ron's father and certainly exerted a good deal of influence over the boy. `Stimulated by Freud's investigatory spirit and by the encouragement of the late Commander Thompson', the blurb to a recent Scientology publication reads, `and equipped with personal experience in the Orient with phenomena not generally known in the Western world, Dr Hubbard bent the exactitudes of Occidental engineering to the investigation and practical application of such data to the human mind.'

This, a typical Scientology puff, is the sort of eulogistic waffle that anyone attempting a history of the movement has to contend with. What the phenomena `not generally known' to the West consists of is impossible to establish, and what the exactitudes of occidental engineering are is never made clear. Commander Thompson, incidentally, is by no means the only intellectual character whose assistance and inspiration Hubbard acknowledges. In the preface to his weird book, Scientology 8-8008, he admits to having drawn a few ideas from such other great thinkers as Aristotle, Euclid, Newton, Jesus of Nazareth and Voltaire, to name but five.

The reference to `Dr' Hubbard in the blurb above is no misprint. In the same piece he is referred to as a `nuclear physicist' and an engineer and credited with the degree of Ph.D. These claims wilt somewhat under close investigation, but they are of interest and relevance here because they serve to warn one that much of the data on Hubbard or Scientology which appears in its official publications needs to be inspected with a critical eye. What exactly are the facts about Hubbard's professional and academic background?

In the early 1930s a student named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was certainly enrolled in the Engineering School of the George Washington University in Washington DC, but evidently something (perhaps it was the occidental engineering) got in the way and he is not recorded as having graduated with even the American Bachelor's degree - something corresponding to a good set of `A' levels in England. In fact it appears that he did not even see the course through. Despite the fact that there is no record of him having studied nuclear physics, or any other branch of physics for that matter, to degree level the myth has long persisted in Scientology circles that he has a profound knowledge of such matters.

For example, it evidently seemed in no way incongruous to Scientologists that at the height of the radiation scare in the 1950s he could write, as a `nuclear physicist', a book entitled All About Radiation which is described in the blurb as a book `vital to the survival of your possessions, your family and the future of this planet'. In this unscholarly work Hubbard, who seems to consider himself an expert on vitamins too, publishes the formula for a mixture supposed to lower one's susceptibility to radiation damage. Called `Dianazene' and consisting of:

it is a harmless mixture of vitamins which Hubbard recommends should be `taken daily, all at the same time, with milk and chocolate'. Its role as an effective barrier to high energy radiation would, one feels, be a difficult scientific and medical case to argue. The interest of Hubbard in vitamins goes back further than this, for in the early days of Dianetics the movement's eccentric medical director, Joseph Winter M.D., fell out with him over another vitamin brew he was urging followers to take. It was assumed greatly to assist Dianetic techniques and was picturesquely known as `GUK'. His latest achievement, according to Certainty, Volume 18, Number 7, is to discover the secret of how aspirin works. Pharmacologists the world over have been toiling away for decades in an attempt to solve the mystery of how acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin's main constituent) exercises its remarkable anti-inflammatory, antipyretic and analgesic properties, and have as yet got next to nowhere. Whether they will put away their test-tubes and microscopes on hearing L. Ron's solution is another matter. It seems the action of aspirin is to `inhibit the ability of the thetan to create and to impede the electrical conductivity of nerve channels'. Hubbard himself is in no doubt whatsoever about the merits of his achievement which he states `could be the medical bio-chemical discovery of the century'. He expects no thanks from the scientific community, however, and declares that he is content to `let the Nobel prizes continue to go to the inventors of nose drops and new ways to kill'.

As for Hubbard's doctorate, it was awarded, one learns, from the magnificently styled `Sequoia University of California' - an establishment which you will search for endlessly the standard list of American universities, but which used to be well known to quacks on the West Coast as a degree mill where `qualifications' could be bought for suitable sums. There is some evidence, as it happens, that L. Ron has had occasion to regret his involvement with the diminutive faculty of the Sequoia University, for his bogus Ph.D. has been frequently brought up by unkind critics as a stick to beat him with - and one for which he can find no ready defence. On 8th March 1966, possibly tiring of suffering on behalf of this valueless embarrassment, but with a typically flamboyant gesture, he took an advertisement in the personal column of The Times, `resigning' his degree in the following words:

I, L. Ron Hubbard of Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, having reviewed the damage being done in our society with nuclear physics and psychiatry by persons calling themselves `Doctor', do hereby resign in protest my university degree as a doctor of philosophy (Ph.D.), anticipating an early public outcry against anyone called `Doctor'; and although not in any way connected with bombs or `psychiatric treatment' or treatment of the sick, and interested only and always in philosophy and the total freedom of the human spirit, I wish no association of any kind with these persons and do so publicly declare, and request my friends and the public not to refer to me in any way with this title.

With this characteristic piece, which it is impossible not to admire, he partly sealed a crack in his armour, at the same time cleverly taking the opportunity to pound psychiatrists, his perpetual antagonists. Having considered the Founder of Scientology's scanty academic background we now pass on to inspect other interesting claims which have helped to bolster his image as a man of wild and far-reaching talents. The claims are many and apart from the obvious, and quite unchallengeable, one that he is a writer, he is also often referred to as an explorer, a naval war hero, a philosopher, a master mariner and, most extraordinary of all, `one of the prime movers in the US effort of getting man into space'.

As far as exploring is concerned there is not much doubt that Hubbard has roamed the world quite a bit. Quite apart from his roving childhood, he is a member in good standing (No. 99) of the exclusive Explorers Club in New York and in the American Who's Who in the South and West, he is listed as having commanded the `Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition and WI Minerals Expedition, 1935'. He is also slated to have led the `1940 Alaskan Radio Expedition' and is a fellow of the International Oceanographic Foundation. According to the Explorers Club he conducted `the first complete mineralogical survey of Puerto Rico in 1932 and 1933' and the `Caribbean Expedition resulting in valued data for the Hydrographic Office and the University of Michigan'. In February 1970 the Explorers Club stated that Hubbard was `conducting archaeological research' in the Mediterranean.

On sailing, navigation and various other nautical topics L. Ron is an unquestioned expert. The sea has always held a deep fascination for him and in times less affluent than the present he told a close friend that one of the greatest desires of his life was to own a large personal yacht and that if ever he acquired a fortune the first thing he would do would be to buy one. This possibly underlies his present preoccupation, and that of the Scientologists as a whole, with their aquatic headquarters known as the `Sea Orgs' about which we shall be hearing more later. During the war he served as a lieutenant in the navy and at one stage commanded a corvette which did some sub-chasing in the Pacific. He also worked for a short time in naval intelligence, during which period he took a four-week course in military government at Princeton.

One aspect of his war record particularly confused, and again typical of the mixture of glamour and obscurantism which surrounds Hubbard and his past, is the matter of wounds or injuries suffered on active service. It is frequently implied in the Scientology literature and also in tape recordings of his public lectures that he was severely wounded during his spell of duty with the navy. One official account (i.e., published by a Scientology organization) states that he was ordered to the Philippines on the entry of the US into the war and `flown home in the late Spring of 1942 in the Secretary of the Navy's private plane as the first US returned casualty from the Far East'. The same account states that at the end of the war `because of his physical condition Hubbard was relegated to the amphibious forces in the Pacific'. In other Scientology publications he is quoted as having been `crippled and blind at the end of the war'. Despite these handicaps he `resumed his studies of Philosophy and by his discoveries recovered so fully that he was reclassified in 1949 for full combat duty'. It is a `matter of medical record', the same publication adds, `that he has twice been pronounced dead'. Hubbard himself, in the now rare early publication, Dianetics: Axioms, first published in 1951, states that he spent a year (1945) in a naval hospital which he `utilized in the study of endocrine substances and protein'.

Faced with this impressive, if annoyingly undetailed, record is hard to assess the nature or extent of Hubbard's battle scars in the service of his country. Many Scientologists believe that Hubbard was indeed severely wounded in action and it is certainly true that the Veterans Administration have confirmed that he receives $160 a month in compensation for disabilities incurred during the Second World War. However the conditions listed as being `40% disabling' are: duodenal ulcer, bursitis (right shoulder), arthritis, and blepharo- conjunctivitis It is possible that some of these conditions could have arisen as the result of some wound or wounds, though no mention of them as such seems to be given in the VA records. It is probably also relevant to point out that a Navy Department spokesman has stated that `an examination of Mr Hubbard's record does not reveal any evidence of injuries suffered while in the service of the United States Navy'.

As for the alleged contribution to the United States' space effort, there doesn't seem to be much to back this up either. NASA could trace no recorded contribution to their own extra-terrestrial excursions, but among his followers Ron is often accredited with achievements in this sphere. For example, in a sycophantic piece in the Scientology journal Certainty, published shortly after the first successful satellites were launched, a Mr Tom Esterbrook wrote: `Ron spent five hours the other night trying to convince us that he had no hand in artificial moons. But you know who the favourite science fiction authors are in Russia? Jack London, H. G. Wells and L. Ron Hubbard.' Particularly popular in Russia, Esterbrook claimed, was Ron's nine-thousand-word article on `Moons' in the American magazine Air Trails published in 1946. `The Russkis could research it because they had read about it', he added, presumably implying that Hubbard's feature had triggered off the Soviet interest in Sputniks.

If this failed to convince fellow Scientologists of Hubbard's great (though modestly denied) contributions to astronautics, Esterbrook had more revelations up his sleeve. Why, he asks rhetorically, only `48 hours before the Russians launched the moon, 24 hours before the US stock markets crashed for guided missile companies', had Ron `unloaded a huge number of guided missile shares he owned?'. `Ron told people a week before the flying moon was launched', Esterbrook concludes. `"There's more than one way to shock US science into action".'

Hubbard, of course, is no more responsible for the fatuous adulation of his followers than is any other Messiah-figure. But there is a curious sidelight to all this which helps to put the whole discussion above in weird perspective. Who, you may ask, is the uncritical Mr Esterbrook who writes in such glowing terms about the Founder of Scientology's contribution to the US and Russian space efforts? The answer turns out to be rather complicated. According to a Scientology spokesman, the name Tom Esterbrook served as a blanket pen-name for various staff writers in The Auditor and Certainty. As he claims that `at least 10 people' had written under that pseudonym we will probably never be able to identify the author of the piece linking Hubbard with sputniks. Incidentally, one of the major users of the Esterbrook nom-de-plume was L. Ron Hubbard himself, as some senior members of the Scientology organization in those days knew quite well.

The plain fact is that for all Scientologists `L. Ron' is a legendary figure, a man endowed with talents and qualities above those of normal men. To them he is a philosopher of the first magnitude, a literary, artistic and scientific genius all in one. Most of all, he is a brave pioneer in the exploration of that great uncharted area of the universe, the human mind. He undoubtedly has charisma, a magnetic lure of an indefinable kind which makes him the centre of attraction in any kind of gathering. He is also a compulsive talker and pontificator - a conversation with Hubbard is anything but the two-way process so fundamental to Scientology. His restless energy keeps him on the go throughout a long day - he is a poor sleeper and rises very early - and provides part of the drive which has allowed him to found and propagate a major international organization. He smokes heavily and has had pneumonia twice which leads him to seek the sun wherever and whenever he can. Hubbard is also reported to suffer, or to have suffered, from exceedingly bad teeth and this, coupled with an apparent reluctance to spend much time in the dentist's chair, has plagued him with dental abscesses. Whether the infected teeth have anything to do with an ulcer condition mentioned in his US Naval Record file is open to question.

Even today, in his early sixties and a portly version of his former self, he is still equipped with the sustained dynamism that so many people find attractive in men and - quite reasonably - he enjoys the company of attractive women. He has had three wives, and a stormy relationship with at least two of these. His first wife, Margaret Louise Grubb, was born in Beltsville, Maryland, on 22nd September 1907 and bore him two children - the boy `Nibs' and a girl, Katherine May. Nibs, who was once one of the leading figures in the world of Scientology but has long since severed connections with the movement, recalls that his parents' domestic life was turbulent and unhappy. His father's Bohemian ways and fluctuating professional success led to long absences from hearth and home, and the family finances seesawed wildly from peaks of brief but considerable affluence to troughs of near poverty. On one occasion, typical of their slap-happy life, Nibs recalls that after a lengthy period when his father was almost totally broke and the family had been `living on beans' for weeks, he received a cheque from a publisher for 2,800 dollars. With the envelope still freshly opened, L. Ron went straight to the local boatyard and purchased a yacht on which he and his wife promptly set sail for Alaska. As the years passed, Hubbard spent longer and longer periods away from home - they lived near Seattle in the State of Washington - and relations with his wife steadily deteriorated. By 1947 a divorce was proposed and in due course Hubbard was remarried to Sarah Northrup, whose name figures prominently in the early Dianetics literature. By all accounts this marriage was a total disaster and his second wife was suing him for divorce in May 1951. She also claimed that Hubbard had attempted to abduct their thirteen- month-old baby girl, Alexis, and West Coast newspapers of the time are filled with sensational headlines such as `CULT FOUNDER ACCUSED OF TOT KIDNAP', and `HIDING OF BABY CHARGED TO DIANETICS AUTHOR'. So painful do the memories of these incidents appear to be that L. Ron has more than once denied that he was ever married to Sarah Northrup at all. For example in Dianetics: Axioms there is a curious reference to a woman who had `represented herself' as his wife and who had been `cured of a severe psychosis by Dianetics' but who, because of structural brain damage, would evidently `never entirely sane'. Later in the book he refers to her again, but this time describes her as `the woman who had been my wife'.

A more recent example of this apparent erasure of Sarah Northrup from his mind was revealed in a television interview for the Granada news feature World in Action. The World in Action team, in September 1968, pulled off a fine scoop by getting cameras aboard Hubbard's big boat in the Mediterranean and conducting a three-hour-long filmed interview with the man himself. Amazingly - or is it really surprising? - they left with thousands of feet of film but little extra information about Scientology or its founder. They did, however, record him denying that he had a second wife in between his first, who died, and the present one, Mary Sue.

In the same programme the Granada interviewer questioned an ex-Scientologist about how Hubbard's flock reacted when such evidence of error, if not of downright dishonesty, on his part was pointed out to them. It depended, came the answer, on how high up in the movement the people were and how recently recruited. Anyone who had been in Scientology for a long time, however, simply wouldn't dare to think in any terms other than those which fitted in with Hubbard's statements.

For them Scientology was the real universe, and Hubbard's statements were facts whether or not they conflicted with material in the `outside' world. In any language, in any part of the world, or in any part of history for that matter, such attitudes are tragic.

It is true that some of his statements would only be questioned by specialists. One good example is the claim that in 1938 the Soviet government - knowing that he was working on research of some significance - offered him the opportunity to take over the laboratories of Academician Ivan Pavlov, the great physiologist and discoverer of the conditioned reflex, with massive financial backing to complete his work under their auspices. This would seem an astonishing offer to say the least, though Hubbard refers to it in a letter he wrote to the late President Kennedy in 1962. However, few Scientologists would question it and most will presumably accept it at face value.

But what of the even more fantastic statements, some so ludicrous that one doubts one's eyes when reading them? There is no scarcity of raw material here, but one can hardly quote a better example than the famous visit to Heaven, an event described by L. Ron in a bulletin issued on 11th May 1963. Here he tells his readers that he has twice visited Heaven, once `43,891,832,611,177 years, 344 days, 10 hours, 20 minutes and 40 seconds from 10:02 1/2 p.m., Daylight Greenwich Time, 9th May 1963'. He found `the gates...well done, well built. An avenue of statues of saints leads up to them. The gate pillars are surmounted by marble angels. The entering grounds are very well kept, laid out like the Bush Gardens in Pasadena, often seen in movies.'

It seems to have been an insipid scene. On a second visit, eons later, the place had gone to seed: `The place is shabby', he tells us, `the vegetation is gone. The pillars are scruffy. The saints have vanished. So have the angels. A sign on one (the left as you enter) says: This is Heaven. The right has the sign Hell.'

Hubbard, as should by now be coming clear, is a highly skilled professional writer, capable of turning his hand to quite a range of topics and styles. His successes in the literary field, long before Dianetics was launched on an unsuspecting world, began in the 1930s when he began to churn out a vast series of pulp magazine fiction including Westerns (using the rather unsubtle pen-name of Winchester Remington Colt), adventure tales of one kind or another, and even romances of the True Love variety. He also had numerous stints in the movie script-writing mill of Hollywood when, at one stage, he was making 500 dollars a week helping to feed the public's ravenous appetite for the cinema. In the late thirties, when Hubbard was known as a minor literary figure in the Greenwich Village area of New York - somewhat given to wearing flowing cloaks and other strange attire according to acquaintances of the time - he began to generate under his own name, and also under the pseudonyms Kurt von Rachen and Rene Lafayette, a series of pacy science fiction stories which were to earn him an international reputation as one of the leading writers in this expanding field. The first of these was a short story called The Dangerous Dimension, which was followed by a novel, The Tramp. Both these stories were built around themes of paranormal human powers such as teleportation and the capacity of the mind to act on other human beings at a distance, which, as we shall see, are ideas inherent in the philosophy of Scientology itself. Another strain of Hubbard's science fiction consists of stories which are frequently classed by fans today under the heading `Sword and Sorcery', in which handsome, muscular and intelligent men incongruously armed with swords and magic powers, shoot round in space rescuing beautiful damsels in the teeth of opposition from pirate spaceships, dragons and wizard-scientists. In many of these - Kingslayer is a good example - one feels that one discerns in the hero Hubbard himself, complete with red hair a strong line of blarney. Other stories are more traditional SF of the period - such as Beyond the Black Nebula with a miniaturized army fighting a colossal battle against phagocytes in the stomach of a worm.

His prodigious output, according to his son `Nibs', was the envy of his fellow professionals for his technique was to lock himself away with a typewriter - he could type with two fingers at ninety words a minute - for a day or so and emerge with a complete, saleable manuscript on its very first draft! In such a fashion did he generate not only the novel, Fear, first published in 1943 which many critics consider to be his fictional masterpiece, but also the manuscript of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health which was to launch him into a fame extending far beyond the parochial boundaries of the world of science fiction. Significantly, however, Dianetics found its first platform in the pages of the leading science fiction journal of the day, Astounding Science Fiction. For some idea as to why this turned out to be such an effective platform we need to consider the role of science fiction at the time as a purveyor and percolator of uninhibited intellectual speculation.

To a large number of people, who have never taken it too seriously, science fiction conjures up visions of stories of the Flash Gordon kind - rockets engaged in orbital dogfights over the Martian moons with sinister bearded space tyrants, with names like Krang or Vargon, etc. In point of fact this kind of twenty-first century Western has not been the meat and drink of serious science fiction fans since the 1930s and is only to be met nowadays in books written for the most juvenile end of the scale.

From around about 1940, SF magazines fed their growing army of fans an increasingly sophisticated diet, their authors - many of whom were working scientists - cleverly playing with the technological developments of the time and extrapolating into the future. Their predictions on occasions could be too successful. A story published in Astounding Science Fiction 1943 so clearly anticipated the development of a nuclear fission weapon that its author received a visit from Federal Security forces suspicious that this might constitute a leak from the top secret Manhattan project. By the end of the war, when the average individual was only superficially aware of what had happened at Hiroshima and Peenemunde, science fiction fans were gaily devouring stories about the social problems of a world shattered by a nuclear war or reading learned articles about the payloads that could be landed on the moon with developments of the existing V2. The concept of a talking, thinking, dying computer - which seems to have rocked everyone so much in Kubrick's recent space opera 2001 - was old hat to fantasy fiction readers twenty years ago, and words like `psychokinesis', `artificial gravity', `analogue' and `digital' were part of their breakfast vocabulary.

Of all the magazines published in those halcyon days, there was none to match Astounding Science Fiction for the depth and quality of its material, and pace and sophistication of its writing. At one time its readership ran into the hundreds of thousands and it was known to be read by some of the leading scientists of the day. The man responsible for its success, and one of the most influential figures in the field, was the editor John Campbell Jnr. He was also the man who gave Hubbard his big break, and as such may be thought of as having quite a bit to answer for.

Campbell, who died in 1971, was originally a fantasy writer himself. He was also a competent and persuasive editor with a tolerance for the off-beat and the suspected crank, which led him to pull off some spectacular scoops and at the same time to sanction a good deal of nonsense. Traditionally the opening feature of the magazine was his leading article and for most readers this was the highspot of the journal. In these leaders Campbell would argue a controversial scientific, philosophical or even political point, cleverly tapping ideas and trains of thought which had hitherto lain dormant in his readers' minds. The issues raised might vary from scientific prejudice against ESP, to the possibilities of submarine farming.

To many of the young SF fans of the time, Campbell was the most important writer on earth, fertilizer of the intellect, liberator of the mind and father-figure all in one. His scientific training, though not exceptional was sound - he studied engineering at MIT and graduated at Duke University, later working for a brief period in the laboratories of Mack Trucks Inc. - and he numbered among his friends some of the best-known working scientists in the States.

For years Campbell had been an acquaintance of Hubbard's and had published some of the latter's excellent science fiction. Some time in 1949 he became sufficiently interested in the new philosophical and psychological ideas that Hubbard was kicking around to experiment with them, and was one of the first to learn that they were gravid with a dramatic new system of psychotherapy. He was also one of the first to benefit from this, for that same year he underwent a course in Dianetic processing, as it was then known, and found to his utter amazement that he had been apparently completely cured of the chronic sinusitis which had plagued him for years.

In Christmas of that year the tom-toms were beating out the message that Hubbard was about to come out with something sensational and in April of 1950 first details were given with an announcement in that month's issue of Astounding Science Fiction. In an enthusiastic preview Campbell wrote:

Next month's issue will, I believe, cause one full-scale explosion across the country. We are carrying a sixteen- thousand word article entitled `Dianetics...An Introduction to a New Science', by L. Ron Hubbard. It will, I believe, be the first publication of the material. It is, I assure you, in full and absolute sincerity, one of the most important articles ever published. In this article, reporting on Hubbard's own research into the engineering question of how the human mind operates, immensely important basic discoveries are related.

In the same eulogistic vein Campbell continued:

This is no wild theory. It is not mysticism. It is a coldly precise engineering description of how the human mind operates, and how to go about restoring correct operation tested and used on some two hundred fifty cases. And it makes only one overall claim: the methods logically developed from that description work. The memory stimulation technique is so powerful that, within thirty minutes of entering therapy, most people will recall in full detail their own birth. I have observed it in action, and used the techniques myself.

After such a build-up it was no wonder that the May issue of ASF practically sold out on publication day. The article itself is a strange piece of work, rattled off in a series of gasping phrases and peppered with exclamation marks, `like', as a contemporary critic remarked, `the commentary on a football match'. Its message, however, was unequivocal and simple. A dramatic breakthrough had occurred in psychotherapy. As the result of years of research and a number of important insights, new techniques had been discovered which sensationally struck at the roots of psychosomatic illnesses - and even some physical ones too. So effective were these techniques, all of which were bundled under the term Dianetics, that individuals could with a few hours of `auditing' (the name for the actual running of the treatment, which was later also given the somewhat unfortunate title of `processing') be rid of illnesses which had steadfastly resisted years and years of orthodox medical or psychiatric treatment.

Furthermore - and here the bait was offered at its most tempting - these techniques were simple, easily describable and easily taught. They were available to any more or less normal individual after a minimal amount of instruction. The article claimed (over and over again) that they worked, as doubters would demonstrate for themselves.

No more fertile ground could have been picked for the publication of such a piece. Telephone calls and mail flooded the offices of the publisher (2,000 letters in the first two weeks) and when Hubbard's book - Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health - was published by Hermitage House shortly afterwards, it moved into the best-seller list overnight. In essence it is a greatly expanded version of the original ASF article, somewhat, though not much more, cogently argued and enlivened by a number of `case histories'. It also included enough information to allow readers to practise the principles of Dianetics on each other and enough details of the philosophy of the system to titillate the curiosity of the tens of thousands of amateur psychologists who are traditionally among the ranks of science fiction fans.

For such individuals, eager for marvels and in many cases desperately interested in abnormal psychology, yet lacking the academic training to practise it, the advent of Dianetics signalled the onset of the Golden Era. Anyone could now practise psychotherapy with a skill and facility far superior to that of the blundering psychologists who had ruled the roost in the past. Even more convenient was the fact that one didn't have to spend tedious years at university or medical school, listening to dull lectures and swotting up stuffy tomes. A few hours of Dianetics and one was a working Dianeticist who could get results!

Such was unquestionably the image created by Hubbard's enormously successful book, and within weeks a Dianetic fad was sweeping the United States. In August Hermitage House reported that the book, at four dollars a copy, was still selling at the rate of a thousand copies a day, and even the leather- bound limited edition at twenty-five dollars a shot was sold out. How much of this, one wonders, could the author and originator have predicted as he battered away at his electric typewriter - a special one equipped with individual keys for `the', `and', etc., writing the book which was to sweep him to fame? He claims the manuscript was completed in three weeks, and its breathless style suggests that this could well be true. But what were the actual revelations which set the whole circus in motion and which still give it impetus today?

As it happens, the principles of Dianetics are disarmingly simple and economic, and they have a naive precision which, when backed by the hyper-confident pronouncements of the originator, make the newcomer fleetingly wonder where they can be wrong. A closer examination soon shows the precision to be superficial and the logic either incomplete or contradictory. Furthermore, in a number of cases, one sees that what are offered up as important new discoveries or major philosophical advances are merely props of psychological and psychoanalytic theory renamed in tempting new jargon.

The old Cartesian dichotomy of the distinction between mind and body is retained, and argued with great firmness. The mind controls the brain, in the manner of a signalman in a signal box, and this in turn controls the body. The mind itself is divided into two distinct entities, the analytic and the reactive. The former corresponds to the conscious mind of Freudian terminology and is likened by Hubbard, with his brushing acquaintance with electronic engineering, to a computer. This analytic mind works with great precision according to the data fed into it, and in a normal individual this will lead to a speedy and appropriate response to events in the external environment. Unfortunately the reactive mind - which bears some relationship to the Freudian unconscious - frequently intervenes to upset the apple cart, causing an individual to make a totally unsuitable response to a given set of circumstances. These Hubbard calls `aberrations' and they correspond in lots of ways to the neuroses and psychoses of orthodox psychopathology.

Now the cause of the aberrations is interesting. In normal circumstances, when the analytic mind is fully operational, it stores and computes all sensory input and reacts appropriately. But in moments of unconsciousness or great emotional distraction, the analytic mind ceases to function properly and the reactive mind, which has been brooding away cloddishly without much to do, momentarily comes into play. It immediately begins to record details of the experiences - generally alarming - which have caused the analytic mind's loss of consciousness, and stores them in the form of some unspecified kind of traces which are called `engrams'. With the return of consciousness and of `normal' functioning the analytic mind gets under way again, having `forgotten' its recent traumatic experience which is, however, firmly stored in the data banks of the reactive mind.

These engrams (this is not Hubbard jargon but a useful word culled from neurophysiology where it is used to denote the memory trace) are often very complex things consisting not only of the actual traumatic experience which caused unconsciousness - such as a punch in the teeth or a general anaesthetic - but also of all the sense data associated with it at the time it took place. For example, if someone is knocked down by a car the engram stored in the reactive mind will include the screech of brakes, the sound of the horn, the chatter of passers-by, the clang of the ambulance bell and even the feel of the pavement under the unconscious person's body.

The reactive mind then becomes a special kind of lumber room filled with unpleasant junk (again notice the similarities Freudian views of the unconscious) and, what is worse, it is junk which has some definite power. For throughout one's life the engrams remain, exerting their baleful influence when the environmental conditions replicate one or more of the original conditions of the trauma. A person might be constantly handicapped by some odd experience stored in the reactive mind which manifested itself in a neurotic or even physical complaint. In fact, it was one of the earliest claims of Dianetics that all neuroses, psychoses and possibly even major physical illnesses, such as cancer, were caused by engrams.

To this point one might feel that Hubbard's theory took matters little further than the idea of psychosomatic illnesses caused by repressed memories of physical or psychical trauma which Freud began to kick around nearly a century previously. But there is more to Dianetics than this, as the notion of the pre-natal engram demonstrates. Here again the idea is simple, if fantastic.

According to his `researches' Hubbard became convinced that engrams were laid down not only in the individual's childhood and adult life, but also in the period when the foetus was developing in the womb. At this time, while the analytic mind was still in the early stages of development, the reactive mind could register traumatic experiences. These might be beatings by the husband of his pregnant wife, or violent rows in which the threatening or cruel phrases uttered by either of the parties would be rigidly impressed in the data banks, to pop up with tiresome frequency during the individual's subsequent lifetime.

The peace which we normally feel is associated with foetal development turns out, according to the practitioners of Dianetics, to be a pretty illusory one. The wretched baby, it seems, is more or less continually being knocked unconscious, either by thumps, kicks, violent sexual intercourse or the mother bumping against furniture - all these incidents of course storing engrams in the receptive mind. The blandly literal way in which the reactive mind stores this material, later to reproduce it with crippling force, is illustrated by one case history involving the processing of a kleptomaniac. Routine hunting through the reactive data banks revealed a memory of the father beating the mother during pregnancy, shouting as he did so, `Take that! Take it, I tell you! You've got to take it!', thus inevitably storing these commands with the foetus for future reference in adult life.

The technique of the therapy is simple beyond all measure - or was in its early days. The patient simply lay on a couch in a relaxed state, prattling on with any fantasies that came to his mind as the result of the probing of the therapist, who in Dianetic and Scientological terms is known as the auditor. By suitable guiding the auditor would soon begin to pick up areas on which it seemed worth concentrating, and when the patient began to look or act disturbed - feeling weird pains in different parts of the body, sweating, moaning and groaning, or hysterically laughing - the auditor knew an engram was near. The confrontation of the patient with the memory has the effect of pushing it out of the reactive banks, whence it erased to free the individual of this particular aberration. This is the point at which the sinusitis disappears, the mysteriously backache vanishes, the acne of twenty-five years' standing fades away, or the stutter miraculously improves.

By many contemporary accounts - such as the case of Campbell himself - these manifestations of past traumas did yield dramatically to Dianetic therapy. Unfortunately after a variable period of time, which could be as short as a day but might be as long as a year or two, the symptoms, which should in theory have gone for ever, would often return in their former glory, and it became obvious that some model, a little less simple and all-embracing, would have to be dreamt up. Amazingly it took a long time for this realization to dent the Dianetic fad, and when it did Hubbard had other material to exhibit. But so rapidly did it get under way, and such was the immense aura of confidence given off by its founder and his converts, that literally hundreds of thousands of people - many of them the intelligent and well educated - were drawn into the movement.

When the author met Campbell in New York in 1969 he complained of his sinusitis and from time to time took penetrating sniffs at a pocket inhaler. The `cure' had evidently only been transient.