Aides indulged his eccentricities and egotism. L. Ron Hubbard enjoyed being pampered. He surrounded himself with teen-age followers, whom he indoctrinated, treated like servants and cherished as though they were his own children. He called them the "Commodore's messengers." " 'Messenger!' " he would boom in the morning. "And we'd pull him out of bed," one recalled. The youngsters, whose parents belonged to Hubbard's Church of Scientology, would lay out his clothes, run his shower and help him dress. He taught ...

Deep in hiding, Hubbard kept tight grip on the church. Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard often said that man's most basic drive is that of survival. And when it came to his own, he used whatever was necessary — false identities, cover stories, deception. There is no better illustration of this than the way he secretly controlled the Church of Scientology while hiding from a world he viewed as increasingly hostile. Hubbard was last seen publicly in February 1980, in the ...

Scientology is determined that the words of L. Ron Hubbard shall live forever. Using state-of-the art technology, the movement has spent more than $15 million to protect Hubbard's original writings, tape-recorded lectures and filmed treatises from natural and man-made calamities, including nuclear holocaust. The effort illustrates two fundamental truths about the Scientology movement: It believes in its future and it never does anything halfheartedly. In charge of the preservation task is the Church of Spiritual Technology, which functions as archivist for ...

What is Scientology? Not even the vast majority of Scientologists can fully answer the question. In the Church of Scientology, there is no one book that comprehensively sets forth the religion's beliefs in the fashion of, say, the Bible or the Koran. Rather, Scientology's theology is scattered among the voluminous writings and tape-recorded discourses of the late science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the religion in the early 1950s. Piece by piece, his teachings are revealed to church members ...

As L. Ron Hubbard told it, he was 4 years old when a medicine man named "Old Tom" made him a "blood brother" of the Blackfeet Indians of Montana, providing the inspiration for the Scientology founder's first novel, "Buckskin Brigades." But one expert on the tribe doesn't buy Hubbard's account. Historian Hugh Dempsey is associate director of the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Canada. He has extensively researched the tribe, of which his wife is a member. He said that blood brothers ...

The Church of Scientology today is run by a high-school dropout who grew up at the knee of the late L. Ron Hubbard and wields power with the iron-fisted approach of his mentor. At 30, David Miscavige is chairman of the board of an organization that sits atop the bureaucratic labyrinth known as the Church of Scientology. This organization, the Religious Technology Center, owns the trademarks that Scientology churches need to operate, including the words Scientology and Dianetics. The Religious Technology ...

In 1981, St. Martin's Press was offered a sure thing. L. Ron Hubbard, the pulp writer turned religious leader, had written his first science-fiction novel in more than 30 years. If St. Martin's published it, Hubbard aides promised the firm, subsidiary organizations of Hubbard's Church of Scientology would buy at least 15,000 copies. "Battlefield Earth," priced at $24.95, was released the next year in hardcover, rare for a science-fiction title. Despite mixed reviews, the book quickly sold 120,000 copies — enough ...

Imagine that a biographer is rummaging through an old trunk. He discovers a previously unseen letter from George Washington to Martha. He unfolds the brittle pages. "Martha, I must tell you, I was fibbing when I said, 'I cannot tell a lie.' " When that hypothetical biography is published, will you, the book buyer, get to read the Founding Father's confession? Hard to say. Last month the Supreme Court refused to review an appeals court ruling that copyright law strictly limits ...

The storage facility on Sunset View Ranch, now owned by The Church of Spiritual Technology, will be used to preserve the religious and philosophic writings for generations to come of the late L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. Michel Ouelette, 40, formerly of Montreal in French-speaking Quebec, Canada, who said he is manager of the 3,000-acre ranch, explained the purpose of the Church of Spiritual Technology over coffee in the handsomely remodeled former Ben Walker residence, now called ...

The Church of Spiritual Technology may need a permit for its vault to store church documents. According to Thomas Conlon, county planning director, the church said state geologists have told it no permit is needed to excavate on Walker Mountain for the vault. Conlon said the matter is now under review. Michel Oullette, spokesman, said earlier the church has 45 members and the vault was needed to store church records or documents. Unconfirmed reports say excavation has started and the vault ...

The Church of Spiritual Technology began buying land in The Mattole in 1980 and is paying taxes on the more than 3,000 acres it owns there, according to reports in the County Assessor's office. The county apparently has given permission to the church to build its "quasi-public archival storage facility" for church documents and a new "primary residence" on the land on which two ranch houses already exist. One, the former Ben Walker home, has been remodeled for the present caretaker. ...

The Church of Spiritual Technology, which owns some 3,000 acres in The Mattole, has a membership of 45 people; this, according to Michele Ouelette of "the Los Angeles area," who represents himself as a spokesman for the church. Those associated with the church are reluctant to speak, giving rise to rumors, many of them. The church is not L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology, as many thought, according to Ouelette, nor is it the Church of Science and Technology, as reported ...

Two recent decisions by federal courts cast judges in the odd role of telling authors how they should write history and biography. These decisions deserve more attention than they have received from scholars, and from journalists as well. Russell Miller's "Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard" is a biography of the founder of the Church of Scientology. Mr. Hubbard, who died in 1986, bequeathed the copyrights on his writings to his church, which licensed them to New Era ...

Was Lafayette Ron Hubbard, founder of Dianetics and the inspiration behind the Church of Scientology, a profoundly gifted man destined for sainthood? Or was he a fraud who routinely lied about his accomplishments in order to bilk millions from his followers? Even after his death in 1986 at the age of 75, Hubbard's writings on Scientology — often slightly updated versions of earlier "discoveries" — continue to be published and some two million followers remain faithful. The media, too, continues to ...

TAMPA — You shouldn't be reading this story. The tale of Margery Wakefield vs. the Church of Scientology is supposed to be a secret. Church officials say so. So does a federal judge. In fact, Wakefield could go to jail for talking about the 12 years she spent as a member of the cult, which has its spiritual headquarters in Clearwater. Wakefield, 41, is talking anyway, braving the threats of Scientology lawyers and testing the patience of a U.S. district judge. ...

EVEN the strongest stomach at this summer's American Booksellers convention must have heaved in protest when comely goons hired by Bridge Publications, the publishing arm of the Church of Scientology, marched up and down the aisles of the auditorium literally setting ablaze a book by L. Ron Hubbard — a "hot" author, get it? — a man who is said to have improved the lives (If not the careers) of such celebrities as Sonny Bono and John Travolta. Judging from their ...

Initially labeled a blues-rock singer, Edgar Winter went on to record popular hard-rock albums like "Frankenstein," "They Only Come Out at Night" and "Shock Treatment" during the 1970s. Winter has been out of the spotlight lately, but he has kept busy touring with former Doobie, Brothers singer Michael McDonald as well as singer-songwriter Leon Russell. He also performed on David Lee Roth's rendition of Winter's 1974 hit "Easy Street." Recently Winter returned to the recording studio to record in album titled ...

NEWKIRK, OK – A proposed drug treatment and rehabilitation center which could be in operation on Indian land at the former Chilocco Indian School north of Newkirk by June 15th may be part of a notorious religious cult. Narconon was approved for a 75-bed facility by the State Health Planning Commission in January of this year as part of The Chilocco Development Authority. The projected cost is $400,000 for renovation and the five Indian tribes involved are projected to receive $16,000,000 ...

SAN LUIS OBISPO — The once-contested multimillion-dollar estate of Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard has been settled, and control of it was given to the top church official Hubbard had named as executor. Superior Court Judge William R. Fredman on Tuesday ordered the estate turned over to Norman F. Starkey, who besides his position in the church was a longtime friend of Hubbard. The estate is valued at more than $26 million, but the value of the assets that ...

Eldridge Broussard Jr.'s face screwed into a grimace of such anger and pain that the unflappable Oprah Winfrey seemed unnerved. It hurts to be branded "the new Jimmy Jones" by a society eager to condemn what it doesn't understand, the founder of the Ecclesia Athletic Assn. lamented on TV just a few days after his 8-year-old daughter had been beaten to death, apparently by Ecclesia members. At issue were complex questions of whether the group he had formed to instill discipline ...

To the Editor: Modern journalism seems to have developed a nearly terminal case of "tunnel vision" — only believing things that are "controversial," "horrifying," "absurd" or "sexy." Things which conflict with this journalistic "formula" are either ignored or ridiculed. Such is the sad fate of staff writer Patrick Lackey's June 26 review of a book ostensibly concerning the late American author and founder of the Scientology religion, L. Ron Hubbard (Bare-Faced Messiah, by Russell Miller). The book itself also suffered this ...