L. Ron Hubbard launched a 1967 private navy with ships like the Apollo, crewing them with untrained Scientologists on billion-year contracts while he lived in luxury. Despite earning $15,000 weekly from church funds against crew wages of $10, Hubbard enforced brutal discipline, throwing people overboard and utilizing a Nazi-modeled Messenger Organization. Following a 1973 accident that heightened his paranoia, he created the Rehabilitation Project Force for minor infractions, culminating in his 1975 return to land for Operation Goldmine, exposing a system of exploitation and alleged abuse. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Women Take Matters Into Their Own Hands00:01:27
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
The Sea Orc's Dangerous Conditions00:15:42
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
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10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, friends.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is once again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
We are two hours in change into talking about L. Ron motherfucking Hubbard.
You should listen to part one if you haven't already.
Don't drop into part three like a weirdo.
Although, these are kind of self-contained stories.
In part one, we talked about Hubbard's childhood, his incessant decades of lying, that time he accidentally bombed Metal in the Ocean a hundred times.
And then the birth of Dianetics.
Episode two, we talked about how Dianetics became a fad and then transitioned into Scientology, which eventually became a religion.
We also talked about the time Hubbard kidnapped his baby.
And now in part three, we're going to talk about L. Ron Hubbard's adventures with his own Navy.
Yay.
Yay!
In 1967, Lafayette Ron Hubbard, a 56-year-old grandfather and father of seven, whose only prior naval experience involved bombing an iron ore deposit, bought a small flotilla of ships, declared himself Commodore, designed uniforms, and launched an eight-year seaborne odyssey.
Wow.
Yeah.
He and his sailors were hunted by the French government, British journalists, the FBI, and God knows how many other state and national intelligence agencies.
The story I'm about to tell is one of those reasons I can't quite hate L. Ron Hubbard.
He was a monster, but he always went the extra mile.
Like, he always did the thing that made him a supervillain.
And in this case, it was buying his own Navy.
The world is so full of so many people like Steven Seagal, who we just talked about, who have their own vanity bands, like a rich personal pay artists to hang out with them so that they can pretend to be good.
That was not L. Ron Hubbard's way.
He bought a Navy.
Yeah.
Eric Prince is the only other guy I know who bought a Navy.
So good on both of them is what I'm saying.
Yeah, he's like doing the extra credit of being a piece of shit.
Yeah.
He is a piece of shit who does like the homework for an extra 10 points on the midterm.
L. Ron Hubbard.
So in September of 1966, Hubbard resigned as president of the Church of Scientology.
It was just for show.
He continued to direct his religion in secret, even as he bought a 40-ton schooner named the Enchanter.
Via the Hubbard Explorational Company, he bought two more boats, a 414-ton sea trawler and a 3,280-ton cattle freighter.
Hubbard paid for a few professional seamen to operate his navy, but the bulk of its sailors were Scientologists with no practical seafaring experience.
Just the type of person you want to have on your boat.
Well, I think most nautical experts will agree that amateurs are the best people to manage 3,280-ton boats.
Which is why our Navy is run entirely by amateurs.
That's right.
Yeah, it's a great idea.
One of these volunteer sailors was Virginia Downsborough, a New York auditor whose main qualification was a pretty good understanding of knots and the fact that she had owned a small sailboat as a child.
Hubbard put her in charge of refitting the Enchanter, which, again, was a 40-ton schooner.
Somehow, bit by bit, the Navy got patched up and underway, mainly because they had unlimited money to do all this with.
That does help.
You can be incompetent if you've got tens of millions of dollars.
If you are super rich, you can do whatever you want, as we find out.
As we find out.
So Virginia got the Enchanter, patched up, and sailed the boat down to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, where Hubbard was waiting for her in a hotel room.
He'd had a complete nervous collapse.
Him?
No.
El Ron Hubbard?
They have a nervous collapse?
The guy who kidnapped his own child?
Quote, when I went into his room, there were drugs of all kinds everywhere.
He seemed to be taking about 60,000 different pills.
I was appalled, particularly after listening to all his tirades against drugs in the medical profession.
There was something very wrong with him, but I didn't know what it was, except that he was in a state of deep depression.
He told me he didn't have any more gains and wanted to die.
That's what he said.
I want to die.
Yeah.
Maybe he read his own book.
Maybe he read Excalibur.
Hubbard may have been collapsing because all of these different national governments were investigating Scientology, but it was probably just an act because as soon as Virginia arrived, he beat a hasty recovery, which makes me think he just put on that whole thing as a show and then announced the development of a research accomplishment of immense magnitude.
His new brain baby was the material that would become the OT3 material of the Scientology curriculum.
This is what everyone knows from South Park and stuff, the story about Zenu and the volcanoes.
This is when he came up with that.
And he claimed the power of these revelations has caused him horrific injuries.
He said he'd broken his back, knee, and arm writing it.
Which is why he needed to be all fucked up when she saw him.
Right.
Writing is a context sport.
We all break a bone or two while writing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's pretty badass writing, typing for hours.
Virginia saw no evidence that he'd been injured at all, obviously.
In fact, as the boat got underway, she came to see a new side of her guru.
Ron used to like to sit up and talk half the night long after Mary Sue had gone to bed.
He had this intense ability to communicate, and it was fascinating to listen to him.
I was intrigued by the concept he presented of himself as being a constant victim of women.
He talked a lot about Sarah Northrup and seemed to want to make sure I knew that he had never married her.
I didn't know why it was so important to him.
I'd never met Sarah and I couldn't have cared less, but he wanted to persuade me that the marriage had never taken place.
When he talked about his first wife, the picture he put out of himself was of this poor wounded fellow coming home from the war and being abandoned by his wife and family because it would be a drain on them.
He said he had planned every move along the way with Mary Sue to avoid being victimized again.
Oh.
L. Ron Hubbard, victim of women.
Wow.
I mean.
And therefore a feminist icon.
Oh, absolutely.
I think he'd be the first to tell you that.
Oh, yeah.
I think he'd be the first to tell you that he invented feminism when he was sailing to Central America as a child.
Yeah.
As the Enchanters sailed away from Las Palmas, Hubbard drew maps and made the crew stop at random islands to search for gold that he said he had buried in past lives.
Hubbard took the Enchanter out on extended cruises around the Canary Islands to search for this gold.
Quote, he told us he was hoping to replace the Enchanter's ballast with solid gold.
I thought it was great fun.
The best show on earth.
Because he already has so much money.
He doesn't need gold.
He just wants to plate his boat in gold.
In the gold that he buried in his other lives.
The Avon River was refitted next and sailed out of port by a professional skipper named John Jones.
Jones was the only actual seaman on the boat.
Quote, my crew were 16 men and four women Scientologists who wouldn't know a trawler from a tram car.
I don't know a trawler from a tram car either.
No, but the important thing about this is that he's letting women on his boats now.
He is.
He is.
Feminist icon.
L. Ron Hubbard.
I was instructed not to use any electrical equipment apart from lights, radio, and direction finder.
We had radar and other advanced equipment, which I was not allowed to use.
I was told it was all in the org book, which was to be obeyed without question.
So, using Scientology Naval Tech, the boat rammed the dock as it was leaving and then immediately got lost.
The only reason they found their way eventually is that Captain Jones had a sextant and a watch, which was the only thing that stopped them from getting lost in the ocean.
A true seaman.
Yeah, a true seaman.
It's frustrating because you read the stories of these seamen, and they're all very talk about how crazy this is, but they're also all really misogynists.
So, like, they will be like, and he had all these guys that didn't know anything.
And it's like, okay, yeah, that's totally reasonable to be frustrated at a crew that's never sailed.
And they'll be like, and three of them were women.
That's not really the thing that is shocking to me about this story.
You need to add that detail.
Hubbard developed a new condition scale for his growing flotilla's discipline.
You remember he had his conditions, if he was his way of telling you you'd done something bad, you need to be penalized.
Right.
Penalized sailors would be ranked on a scale from a condition of emergency, which was a minor infraction, to a condition of liability, which resulted in the Scientologist losing pay and being locked in their bunk.
All liabilities were also required to wear that dirty gray cloth rag on their arm.
Okay.
Okay.
The next serious condition was treason, where the offendee lost his right to wear a Sea Org uniform.
Next came doubt, which essentially forced all other Scientologists to shun you, and then finally, enemy.
According to L. Ron Hubbard, anyone who was an enemy of Scientology may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist, may be tricked, sued, or lied to, or destroyed.
So wait, the scale of severity here starts with emergency.
Starts with emergency, which is not that bad.
No, which is pretty minor.
Yeah.
Then goes to liability, which is a little worse.
And then what's the third one?
Doubt.
Okay, doubt.
Which is where you get shunned.
And then in enemy, you're kicked off the boat and people can kill you.
Okay, so that makes perfect sense.
Makes perfect sense.
That, you know, doubt is really high up there, but emergency is a minor infraction.
I think that's why we call it the emergency room, and it's where you go when things that aren't very bad happen to you.
Right, but the doubt room.
The doubt room's fucked up.
You don't want to go to the doubt room.
People are dying in the doubt room.
Also, shout out to the movie Doubt.
But anyway, the movie based on L. Ron Hubbard's life.
I'm certain.
I'm certain he did not understand that.
The fleet gradually assembled, and the three ships were quickly joined by dozens of volunteers from other training centers in Scientology's vast domain.
These young people had joined the newly formed Sea Org and signed billion-year contracts to serve L. Ron Hubbard.
Many of them were couples.
Some even had children.
So, L. Ron Hubbard's Navy had a daycare, essentially.
Billion-year?
Yeah, that's the thing you focus on, huh?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, there's, again, there's a lot to unpack with everything that's said.
If you join the Sea Orc, you're so dedicated that you're not just going to serve Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard, who they refer to as LRH a lot of the time.
You're not just going to serve him in this life.
When you're reincarnated, you're still under contract.
Yes, okay.
And then the day, what was the daycare thing?
Well, there's a daycare on the boat because a lot of these people had kids.
Okay.
So there's a daycare on the boat in L. Ron Hubbard's Navy.
Well, that just seems responsible.
That just seems responsible.
The children watched each other.
And we're locked in a saloon.
Okay.
So on his boat, L. Ron Hubbard locked babies in a bar.
As I said, responsible.
Yeah.
Now, there was a note on the door of L. Ron Hubbard's child saloon.
It stated.
Okay.
I'm ready.
Are you?
It stated: a tutor will be provided for the children who will be assigned regular hours of work and play.
Anyone who deprives a child of his or her work or play will be assigned to a condition of non-existence.
And that's the worst one, or that's the least worst one.
It's just another penalty condition.
There were a shitload of conditions.
So if you stop a kid from playing or working, it goes non-existent.
Emergency.
I'm not 100% sure where all of these lie.
Yeah.
Non-existence, yeah, was another penalty condition.
Scientologists condemned to non-existence had to wear old clothes, stop bathing, wearing makeup, or styling their hair.
Men weren't allowed to shave.
Lunch was banned.
Most of L. Ron Hubbard's work as Commodore in this period was dreaming up ever more brutal punishments for Scientologists who made mistakes.
Okay.
Yeah.
What a forgiving man.
What a forgiving man.
With so many ways to punish you that he needs categories.
Yes.
On one occasion, a recruit watching the gangplank failed to spot that the ship's rubbing strike, which is a boat thing, I guess, had caught onto the edge of the dock.
It broke and a bunch of real sailors who were watching laughed at L. Ron Hubbard and his giant silly ship filled with cultist sailors.
In retribution, Hubbard assembled the crew and informed them that all of their thetans had sailing experience in their other lives.
The truth of the matter, he said, is that you have all been around a long time.
Stop pretending that you don't know what this is all about because you do know what this is all about.
So this is why you had to be so harsh on them when they fucked up.
They had had whole other lives as sailors.
Yeah.
They knew how to do this shit.
They knew.
And how dare them?
I don't predict anything like they didn't know.
I don't care if you're an education major now.
300 years ago, you were sailing the highest sea, so get your shit together.
Yeah.
I'm not going to peer into the logic of that too much.
I will say, if your experience sailing a ship was 400 years ago, you'd probably still need a refresher.
You sure.
You'd probably fuck some stuff up.
Yeah, refresher course.
Yeah.
I go a week without doing something and like it's a mess.
You know, you're like in Europe for two weeks and you don't drive a car for a while and you come back and you're just a danger to yourself and others.
Oh, yeah.
But he's just expecting these people to pick this shit right back up.
Unreasonable.
Unreasonable way to deal with past lives.
Anyway, Hubbard did hire more than one professional sailor to help crew the 3,200-ton boat that became the flagship of his fleet.
He hired three.
Okay.
That seems like enough.
Yeah.
One of them, Stanley Churcher, was the ship's carpenter.
He was placed in a condition of doubt for defying an order, encouraging desertion, tolerating mutinous meetings, and attempting to suborn the chief engineer.
He was soon sacked and he went to a British newspaper to tell his story.
He was on a Scientologist.
No, he's getting money.
Elron Hubbard was like, I got to hire some people who know how to do boat stuff.
Okay.
So a British magazine called People, Not the People, just another magazine called People, published this article under the title, Ahoy There, It's the Craziest Cruise on Earth.
The article is not well written.
Very frustratingly badly written.
But I found a copy.
That title, though.
Yeah, that title.
Ooh.
I have found a copy of the text on an anti-Scientology website that just put a copy of this old article up there.
It contains some interesting quotes from Mr. Churcher, which I'm going to read now.
Please.
Yeah.
Certainly, the captain of the vessel was none other than Mr. L. Ron Hubbard himself, a wartime officer in the United States Navy.
According to Mr. Churcher, he called himself Commodore and had four different types of peaked cap.
Churcher traveled with the Scotman, which was the name of the boat.
It had been the Scotsman, but then they re-registered it.
The British wouldn't let them sail the Royal Scotsman because it didn't meet it in Sierra Leone.
But when they registered it, they fucked up the name and wrote Scotman.
So then it was the Royal Scotman.
Love it.
Wonderful.
So Churcher traveled with the Scotman to Monaco and Sardinia and eventually Valencia, Spain.
Churcher didn't know much about why they were sailing around at first.
He was just in it for the paycheck, but it soon became obvious to him that something was wrong with this cult boat.
I began to suspect things were a bit odd the minute I met this captain.
He told me he thought I was a reporter and at first refused to have anything to do with me.
Only when he checked my seamen's logbook did he take me on.
Every day they went below for lectures, but we seamen were never admitted.
It was also blooming mysterious.
I tried to find out more.
I offered to give them seamanship lectures and they were so pleased at these that they gave me a free beginner's course in Scientology.
I was given a test on their e-meter, a sort of lie detector, and a woman officer asked me a lot of personal questions, including details of my sex life.
I could never make head or tail of their instructions, but I played along because it made life easier.
Hubbard's Millionaire Midlife Crisis00:03:55
So that's nice.
Wait, timeout.
Did he say Bloomin' in the middle of the day?
He did.
He was really British.
Yeah.
Or Australian.
One of the ones that said Bloomin'.
Okay, good.
He was some kind of cute foreigner.
It was adorable.
Churcher noted that the Scotman mostly seemed to act as a floating college for young Scientology students.
He was surprised at how young a lot of these people are.
Quote, some paired off in romances, but the oldest student was a woman of 75 who told me she was convinced that Mr. Hubbard would fix her up with a new body when she died.
So that's nice.
Gradually, the young Scientologists learned how to be half-decent sailors, although there were numerous near-misses, harbor scrapes, and destroyed engines as a result of their incompetence.
Again, they had infinite money, so that really makes it a lot easier to have an untrained crew sail a fleet of vessels around the world.
Man, if only the Titanic was.
Well, there's a good point.
Just had Scientologists aboard on, you know, future Scientologists, people in their, you know, past life.
That horrible fate wouldn't have happened.
And that's also another part of Lauren Hubbard's logic.
Because if he's expecting these people to be good at boats, because their past lives were good at, what if their past lives ran the Titanic?
You don't know.
How much are you vetting their past lives?
He's not doing it enough, that's for sure.
Fucking corpse resumes or something?
How do you do this?
Okay.
Hubbard spent all of his time on the boats in a stately cabin, mostly writing new source material for his religion and growing slowly more and more insane.
Mary Marin, a Scientologist who wound up joining the Sea Org, recalled these as pretty good times for the most part.
He used to stay up at night on the deck and talk to us into the wee hours about his whole track adventures, how he was a race car driver in the Markab civilization.
The Markab civilization existed millions of years ago on another planet.
It was similar to planet Earth in the 50s, only they had space travel.
Markabians turned out later not to be good guys, so it wasn't a compliment.
Their civilization was similar to ours.
LRH said he was a race car driver called the Green Dragon who set a speed record before he was killed in an accident.
He came back in another lifetime as the Red Devil and beat his own record, then came back and did it again as the blue streak.
Finally, he realized all he was doing was breaking his own records and it was no game anymore.
Good, okay.
Good.
Okay.
She goes on.
People would stand around listening to these stories for hours, very overawed.
At the time, it seemed like a privilege and honor to share these things, to hear him talking about things that went on millions of years ago like it was yesterday.
It was usually entertaining, but I sometimes found it very stressful to take it all in.
This powerful, booming outflow, and it was hard to get away.
One night I was getting dizzy and dared to ask if I could leave early.
I could hear my voice echoing in the cosmos as I said, if you'll excuse me, I have to go to bed, sir.
He said, okay, sure.
Oh, so he was a nice guy.
Well, that time.
Yeah.
But yeah, he had a boat full of young people that he could lie to in the world.
They believed it.
They had to.
Yeah.
They got on a boat and sailed around the world with water.
They're trapped.
They're trapped.
Trapped on a boat with a madman telling you about his past life as an alien race car driver.
I mean, okay.
I'm just curious about the psychology of people who are so impressionable that they buy all that.
They buy it and they like eat it up.
We live in LA.
You're going to find people within a block of us who believe raw unfiltered water is the healthiest thing to drink.
Right.
People believe crazy shit.
Yeah.
And then they're trapped in a boat.
Like it's really a great situation to be a cult leader.
The more I read about Hubbard's years at sea, the more certain I became that this was all just him going through the millionaire profit version of a midlife crisis.
Because that really seemed to be what he was doing.
After he assembled the entire fleet and got all the ships refitted, L. Ron Hubbard asked for 35 volunteers and then took them on the Avon River, his smallest boat, and sailed through the Mediterranean to find gold that he'd buried in past lives.
Wow, he does this a lot.
Why People Buy Crazy Shit00:04:02
He loves doing this shit.
He was doing it when he was a kid.
He just didn't say it was his in a past life.
He claimed to the crew that he'd been preparing all of his past lives to save the world with his revelations, but this incarnation was the first time that he'd gotten enough money and power to really have a chance of doing it.
So now he was going to collect all of the gold that his past self had buried in order to fund the next stage of Scientology.
He said he'd been the commander of a war fleet 2,000 years ago and had buried treasure under a temple nearby.
That was the first treasure-seeking mission that he sent his boat on.
And we're going to get into what happened in his third and final treasure journey.
But first, the treasures of ads.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Levé, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, it was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night.
Each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
Governments Investigate Scientology00:15:16
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
We're talking about L. Ron Hubbard, who has just launched his third treasure-seeking voyage, the second voyage where he said it's stuff buried by his past lives.
So yeah, one of his crew members who was on this voyage recalled, it was an electrifying idea.
We all thought it was high adventure.
Here was this guy who had cracked through the age-old mystery of the human condition, had dug into and uncovered every aspect of human shortcoming, now broaching into a new area, going to sea with a bunch of people in the Mediterranean and digging up buried treasure.
It didn't matter to me if it was true or not.
What mattered was being able to play a game that LRH had designed.
If it was important to him, I would do the best I could.
Okay, people are loyal.
And weird.
Kind of dumb.
Yep.
The story of the last however long we've been people.
So they didn't find anything anywhere, obviously.
They went to a bunch of different locations, sailing around while Hubbard would tell them lurid stories of his past lives and they would occasionally dig on random islands, never found anything.
I will say he's a well-traveled guy.
He's been around a lot now.
Been around?
He's been around.
Saw the world for sure.
And so the mission of like the sea thing is just to find treasure, it seems.
There's no mission.
This is just a thing they're doing.
Okay.
They were out there for eight years and there was no objective for any of this.
Amazing.
Yeah, it's just pretty incredible.
This all came to a head when they sailed to Corsica, where Hubbard said a secret space station had been secretly crashed there by him thousands of years ago.
The station was parked in a cavern and filled with pristine spaceships and equipment for their next operation.
I get the feeling he was telling them they were going to take over the world with these advanced spaceships and stuff.
They got near to where Hubbard claimed his secret space fleet was waiting, but then they got an urgent radio message from his wife telling him to come back to the rest of the fleet at Valencia.
So Hubbard and his crew ended their treasure searching without any actual treasure.
Again, I kind of suspect he ordered her to call him.
Right.
Don't you hate it when you're on the verge of finding your space station that's in a cave on a remote area, and then your wife calls.
She's like, get back here.
We need you.
And he's like, well, that's why my self-help book is called Find Your Own Hidden Space Station and don't let your wife call you to stop it.
You're so good at titles.
Titles are really important.
It's what sells a book.
That's right.
And the name Remington Winchester Colt.
Well, Remington Winchester Colt Ruger.
I can't use the same suit.
You got to add a gun on.
You got to throw one other gun onto there.
Of course.
Ruger McGlockowitz.
So, Hubbard had left his wife in charge of the Royal Scotman.
She had done before he left something inscrutable to displease him, and so he'd put her and the whole ship in a penalty condition.
There was even a filthy gray rag tied to the boat's funnel.
Oh, even the boat.
Even the boat's in trouble.
Yeah.
Boat shaving?
When Hubbard caught up, he was furious to find the boat anchored at night.
He shouted at his wife's ship through a bullhorn.
Well, well, here's a ship in liability that thinks it can anchor for the night.
Taking it easy.
It might be better training to keep your ship moving at night.
Or are you scared to keep going in the dark?
So he's like basically yelling at the boat.
He's like, how are you?
He's heckling boats now.
Oh, you think you're just going to sit there?
You're going to night drive, do you?
At this point, the crew of the Scotman were filthy, exhausted, and starving.
None of them had been able to wash for weeks.
It was several more weeks before Hubbard would grant them a reassessment of their status.
He eventually upgraded the boat's crew to non-existence and agreed to do a full inspection to see if they deserved a better condition.
When he checked over the whole ship, it had been freshly painted and polished, and Hubbard was apparently pleased enough that he moved on board, made the ship his flagship, and lifted the crew's sentence.
So that's nice.
He can forget.
Hubbard used less collective punishment after this point, but also more strict individual punishments.
According to Barefaced Messiah, depending on his whim, offenders were either confined in the dark in the chain locker and given food in a bucket or assigned to chip paint on the bilge tanks for 24 or 48 hours without break.
A third variation presented itself when Otto Roos, a young Dutchman, dropped one of the bow lines while the Royal Scotman was being moved along the dock.
Purple with rage, Hubbard ordered Roos to be thrown overboard.
No one questioned the Commodore's orders.
Two crew members promptly grabbed the Dutchman and threw him over the side.
There was an enormous splash when he hit the water, a moment of horror when it seemed that he had disappeared and nervous speculation that he might have hit the rubbing strike as he fell.
The rubbing strike, I guess.
It's a part of a boat.
Fortunately, Roos knew how to swim, and he was able to get back on board.
But after that, tossing people overboard became Hubbard's favorite punishment.
Oh, well, they were all Olympic swimmers in their past lives.
They all learned how to swim well.
I'll tell you that much.
Everyone just sort of went with it, and people were soon throwing their friends and spouses overboards at the whim of the Commodore.
Which is a little weird.
One Sea Org member recalled, it was not really possible to question what was going on because you were never sure who you could trust.
To question anything Hubbard did or said was an offense and you never knew if it would be reported.
Most of the crew were afraid that if they expressed any disagreement with what was going on, they would be kicked out of Scientology.
That was something absolutely untenable to most people, something you never wanted to consider.
That was much more terrifying than anything that might happen to you in the Sea Org.
We tried not to think too hard about his behavior.
It was not rational much of the time, but to even consider such a thing was a discreditable thought, and you couldn't allow yourself to have a discreditable thought.
One of the questions in a sec check was, have you ever had any unkind thoughts about LRH?
And you could get into very serious trouble if you had, so you tried not to.
So these guys were all doing auditing regularly.
They were hooked up to the e-manies, which they thought could tell if they were lying.
So people got nervous that if they even thought badly about L. Ron Hubbard, it would show up and they'd get in trouble.
I love a good mind control, you know.
That's really thought police religion.
It's the best.
He built a pretty good thought police religion.
Like, again, he's really good at the things he does, like, other than writing science fiction.
Back in the day when I had to do, like, Bringer shows as a stand-up, I couldn't get like three people to come to my shows.
And this guy gets, what, thousands?
Tens of thousands?
Maybe tens of thousands.
It's hard to say the exact numbers, but.
Oh, man.
He's good.
He's damn good.
Eventually, the fleet wound up at Corfu, a beautiful Greek island.
L. Ron Hubbard felt he'd finally found a government willing to put up with him because Greece had just had a coup and a military dictatorship had taken over.
He praised Greek democracy, which is ironic when it's just been overthrown by a military coup.
He also renamed his boats in honor of Greek mythology.
The Royal Scotman became the Apollo.
The Avon River became the Athena.
The Enchanter became Diana.
Around this time, the British government decided to bar L. Ron Hubbard from entry into the United Kingdom.
On the same day this was announced, a BBC film crew had managed to track the cult leader and his private navy down in Corfu.
They recorded an interview with L. Ron Hubbard.
It's fascinating.
In the first part of the interview, he claims that all of his crew are trained in judo to defend from pirates.
And then my favorite part is at one point in the interview, the interviewer asks him to just explain Scientology, just to give a very basic explanation of it.
And Hubbard fucking can't because it's nuts.
Anyway, we're going to play that right now.
So you get to see L. Ron Hubbard as the comedy.
If you couldn't explain it to the layman, you would have a very difficult time on it.
The subject name means skio, which means knowing how to know in the fullest sense of the word, ology, which is study of.
So it is actually study of knowingness.
That is what the word itself means.
The Scientists are not going to be to me that doesn't mean very much.
I understand that.
Love this journey.
It increases one's knowingness.
But if a man were totally aware of what was going on around him, he would find it relatively simple to handle any outnesses in that.
Even after three hours of talking, we never got an explanation from him that we could understand.
I love the journalist.
Love that journalist.
Yeah, it's a really fun interview.
It'll be up on our site.
I recommend giving it a listen.
While in Greece, the Sea Org working day started at 6 a.m. and ended at 11 p.m. after a 90-minute nightly speech by L. Ron Hubbard.
Yeah, you really got to like listening to that guy.
One Sea Org member recalled, We were always terrified of falling asleep.
LRH would be carried away dramatizing different topics and we'd be pinching each other to stay awake.
We were terrorized.
It was continuous stress and duress.
The course had not been going long before Hubbard decided that too many mistakes were being made during auditing and he announced that in the future those responsible for errors would be thrown overboard.
Everyone laughed at Ron's joke.
The next morning at the regular muster on the aft well deck, two names were called out.
As the students stepped forward, Sea Org officers grabbed them by their arms and legs and threw them over the side of the ship while the rest of the group looked on in amazement and horror.
So also, all of the residents of this Greek island are watching as every day people just get thrown off the side of this boat and it just becomes this like, what the fuck are they doing?
If you've ever spent time on a little Greek island, everyone is a sailor on those little islands.
Everybody knows it.
Everyone has a boat.
No one had ever seen shit like this.
Right.
Because it's the kind of thing you don't do unless you're a lunatic.
Yes.
Okay.
Oh, boy.
Many of L. Ron Hubbard's young students thought this was terrible, but none of them did anything about it.
Hannah Eltringham, another Sea Org member, recalled, I thought it was terrible, inhumane, and barbaric.
Some of the people on the course were middle-aged women.
Julia Salmon, the continental head of the L.A. Org, was 55 years old and in poor health, and she was thrown overboard.
She hit the water sobbing and screaming.
LRH enjoyed it without a doubt.
Sometimes I heard him making jokes about it.
Those were the moments when I came closest to asking myself what I was doing there.
But I always justified it by telling myself that he must know what he was doing and that it was all for the greater good.
People are amazing.
Yeah, the justifications that they have to do to watch a man throw an elderly sick woman off the edge of a fucking cruise liner, essentially.
And then watch him like cackle about it.
Cackle about it?
You're being horribly mistreated, made to work for like 19 hours a day or something crazy like that.
And then, yeah, oh, man.
Well, in fairness to Hanna, her passport and everyone else's passport was kept in the safe by L. Ron Hubbard.
Okay, so they couldn't even like to get away from the corner.
So he couldn't even really leave.
No.
No, their passports in the safe.
Yeah.
Hubbard tried to bribe Greece in much the same way he tried to bribe Rhodesia, promising to build many new schools for his students on Corfu and turn the island into a mecca of Scientology.
But the Greeks didn't really want that to happen.
So eventually they kicked him out of their country.
For three years, L. Ron Hubbard's fleet sailed around the Atlantic Ocean with no particular destination or goal.
They never stayed anywhere longer than six weeks.
Okay.
One crew member recalled, LRH said we had to keep moving because there were so many people after him.
If they caught up with him, they would cause so much trouble that he would be unable to continue his work.
Scientology would not get into the world, and there would be social and economic chaos, if not a nuclear holocaust.
Right.
I forgot this component of it, that he was just on international waters to escape all of the legal problems.
The fact that multiple governments were now after him.
Okay, I forgot about that part, and now this is starting to make more sense.
Yeah.
But even so.
He explicitly took to the high seas because there's no law there.
Yes.
Which is why you go to the high seas.
Yeah.
Every time I'm on the high seas, it's because I'm, you know, fleeing the law.
In 1969, the Apollo sailed into Casablanca, and the U.S. consul asked politely what the fuck they were doing, because a lot of U.S. citizens were on this boat and had been for years now.
He was concerned by the impossibility of getting a clear answer from anyone about what was happening on these boats.
By this point, the ships were all registered in Panama, and they were claimed to be part of like a corporate venture.
But like everyone knew something was fucking weird was going on.
So the U.S. consul asked the Panamanian consul to try and figure out what was happening.
The Panamanian consul found the vessel badly damaged because he got to inspect it and believed everyone on board was in grave danger.
He couldn't actually get in touch with L. Ron Hubbard because the Commodore was locked up in a luxury hotel and would not take phone calls.
Oh, cool.
Well, why not?
While he sailed around the Atlantic, L. Ron Hubbard had plenty of time to refine his theories about the international communist conspiracy he now believed was trying to destroy him and his important work.
He based his plan off of something called the Tanyaka Memorial.
Have you ever heard of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
No, no, I don't think so.
A lot of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories trace back to it.
It was created by Russians, essentially czarist Russian secret service operatives created this fake list that's supposedly a plan of Jewish people conspiring to take over the world.
The Tanyaka Memorial was that, but for Japanese people.
It was a fake Japanese plan for world domination that I think was created in like the 1930s.
Hubbard became convinced that this document held all of the information about the secret international communist conspiracy to destroy him for reasons that are unclear to me.
I do not understand how he made these logical leaps.
I have not read a satisfying explanation as to what happened.
Which is surprising because he's such a reasonable guy.
And so logically consistent.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anyway, Hubbard told his followers that the dastardly members of the World Federation of Mental Health were in cahoots with the U.S. and British spy agencies in a crusade to destroy him.
I love him.
He's great.
He's charming.
All of the psychiatrists are against him because he's the only one who knows how not to be crazy.
Yep.
Get on his boat!
Over his years at sea, Hubbard did change his mind about the Tanyaka Memorial conspiracy, and it morphed from an international communist conspiracy to an international Nazi conspiracy.
Sometimes his ex-wife was at the center of the Nazi conspiracy.
Sometimes he said she was a Nazi.
Now, is this the ex-wife whose daughter he kidnapped?
Yes.
Or is this the one that...
No, Polly's the lucky ex-wife.
She really lucked out by him just abandoning the family.
Turns out he's a great guy to just have abandon you quietly.
Yes.
If you're going to be abandoned quietly by the father of your two children.
Make sure it's El Robert.
I guess there may not be a message there.
There may be no lesson in any of this.
No.
Commodore Hubbard continued to run his Scientology empire while he was at sea.
He received 40 to 50 telex messages every day from various Scientology facilities.
Ex-Wife at Center of Nazi Conspiracy00:03:34
He got weekly reports about the religion's income.
He told his Sea Orc, each of whom earned $10 a week, that his income was even less than theirs, but he was actually receiving about $15,000 a week in church funds, as well as an undisclosed amount of money from various show corporations and bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
His estimated net worth at death was around $600 million, to give you some idea of how much money he bilked out of this faith.
And each of the members on these ships was earning, what did you say, $10 a week?
A week, yeah.
Oh.
Well, it's not slavery then.
Right.
It's not slavery if they're making $10 a week.
Yeah, they're okay.
It pays better wages than the U.S. prison system.
Does it?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Well, okay.
That's not bad.
That's good.
I mean, no, it's all bad.
Everything's bad.
Everything's horrible.
Welcome to this podcast.
Hubbard and his wife each had a stateroom and a suite on the promenade deck of their big cruiser.
There were several separate offices and rooms.
They were all only for the family.
The family had a special chef and their own food separate from the rest of the crew who lived in dorms that are generally described as smelly and cockroach-filled.
Oh.
Those who weren't lucky enough to have a private room slept in giant communal dorms of 50 to 100 people.
Wait.
Yeah.
Oh, no.
Oh, yeah.
100 people in one room.
One big old room.
Okay.
Sometimes not allowed to bathe because they'd all done something bad.
So 100 people not able to bathe, working on a boat in the heat of the day for weeks at a time.
Because they're in doubt or whatever.
Because they're in doubt or non-existence.
Whatever the fuck condition.
Yeah.
Sounds gross.
Sounds like a gross boat ride.
Yeah, that sounds horrifying.
Now, in all fairness, you can find recollections of this time from people who were there and say it was a very happy period.
There's a lot of negative.
There are also some people who loved it.
I found one such account on a site called Scientologedia, which appears to be an independent but Scientologist-run Wikipedia page.
Okay, so a good source, a reliable.
I don't know about that.
Like, it's certainly not unbiased, but I also think it would be impossible for all these people to have stayed if they weren't enjoying parts of it.
And everyone says there were parts of it that were fun.
And there must have been some people who liked this.
People with better jobs, sure, because the guy that I found, Ian Robert Waxler, was like Hubbard's personal chef for a while.
And essentially that was one of the things he did, but he had a private room on the same deck that Hubbard had.
So it seemed like it was a nice time for him.
So he wasn't living with 99 other people in the same belt.
All right.
He says there were a lot of really good parties, which maybe there were.
He claims Hubbard's cabin was small and unair-conditioned, and Hubbard was a small old man sacrificing his comfort for the goodness of his faith.
Okay.
I have to tell you, I feel a sense of sadness and humility when I think of looking at this small, barren, steel-walled cabin when he could have very easily been living in a luxurious villa surrounded by servants.
This was not at all LRH's priority.
That he spent any of his later years in nicer Palm Springs-type residences would surely be expected for even a moderately successful person in California.
So.
He also stated that he was, you know, Hubbard's personal chef, and he noted that Hubbard was not at all demanding.
He was modest and humble.
But he also says he could be somewhat eccentric appearing.
As, for example, the only dish detergents allowed must not have any aroma or any strong scent or perfume.
If his dishes or clothes were watched and such, the odor became offensive to his keen sense of smell.
In addition, you better not cut up his food with a knife used to cut an onion because LRH would immediately let you know.
Okay.
So it sounds like he really was kind of persistent.
So he was, in a past life, a basset hound.
Yeah.
Because the smells were just too much.
I guess, I mean, he clearly didn't have trouble making everyone else be really gross and smelly.
Personal Chef Reveals Eccentric Habits00:03:56
I can't really parse together what was going on in his head for that.
We'll get back to, actually, when we get back, we're going to talk about the Commodore's Messenger organization, which was the preteen girls who...
Oh, I can't wait.
Oh, yeah.
He did with that.
You know what?
Less horrifying than you're going to think.
Okay.
Way weirder, though.
Oh, no.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
But not in a sex way.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's a real whiplash moment for you, Caitlin.
I'm going to let you do our ad pivot because pivot.
All right.
Hey, folks, check out this ad and then we'll be back in a moment.
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We're back.
Yay.
We just broke for ads, but in reality, we went to a boat, sailed around the world, found some gold, lost it.
Real whirlwind.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But now we're back.
Starting in 1970, L. Ron Hubbard established the Commodore's Messenger Organization.
The Messengers were the most faithful and dedicated Scientologists.
They basically moved around the ship acting as the Commodore's voice.
According to Barefaced Messiah, the Messengers, mainly pubescent girls, soon recognized and enjoyed their power as teenage clones of the Commodore.
In their cute little dark blue uniforms and gold lanyards, they were trained to deliver Hubbard's orders using his exact words and tone of voice.
If he was in a temper and bellowing abuse, the messenger would scuffle off and pipe the same abuse at the offender.
No one dared take issue with whatever a messenger said.
No one dared disobey her orders.
Vested with the authority of the Commodore, they came to be widely feared little monsters.
Okay.
Yeah.
So what's it called?
Like the singing grams?
Like when you like on Valentine's Day, they're like, here's a nice song and we sing and you get some like chocolates.
Flowers.
Telegrams?
Singing telegrams?
Something like that.
Yeah, I forget what they're called.
Maybe I'm making this up.
Maybe I'm L. Ron Hubbard and I'm just inventing stuff out of here.
You're Hubbard in.
But so it's like that.
But pre like teen girls who are just like screaming and imitating LRH.
Yeah.
We're calling him that now, huh?
Like a Scientologist.
It's just, it takes so long.
It's so hard to say L. Ron Hubbard over and over again.
There's too many.
Also, every time I hear L. Ron, I you think of L. Ron from the Red Rock.
L. Ron from Mortal Kings and like the Council of Elrond and yeah.
Very different characters.
Very different characters.
Actually, L. Ron did create.
All those elves at Rivendell were that was a sea org?
Yeah, he was lost in the woods.
Right.
Woods org.
Woods org.
Oh, if only it had been a woods org.
So messengers worked in six-hour shifts, and Hubbard was surrounded by them every hour of every day.
They kept minute-to-minute logs of his life from this point on.
When he was asleep, they sat outside his stateroom.
When he smoked cigarettes, they caught his ashes.
They also took down every message.
Anyway, we have a lot of data on L. Ron Hubbard as a result of these people.
Okay.
Now, as that quote noted, many of these messengers, maybe most of them, were teenage girls.
Doreen Smith was 12 when she joined the Apollo.
She'd been born into the faith, and Doreen pretty quickly became a messenger.
She and other messengers interviewed were insistent that while male members of the crew did repeatedly try to have sex with them, L. Ron Hubbard never did.
Oh.
Yeah.
When I heard that he had a bunch of preteen girls doing his every bidding on his boat in international waters, I was like, oh, he's just molesting the hell out of some kids.
I can't find any evidence of that.
Okay.
It's weird.
Like, you would.
Yeah.
That's incur.
But then also the fact they're like, yeah, but every other man did try to statutory rape me.
Of course, creepy shit went on.
Yeah.
I guess he was not the kind of creepy you'd expect.
Okay.
Which is, again, one of the reasons why you get a little bit more into this guy because he's not molesting tons of children.
Which is...
Reason to really respect the hell out of him.
It's not even doing the minimum.
It's like doing below the minimum.
Right.
Well, he wasn't a child molester.
Kidnapped a baby once.
But he didn't try to have sex with any preteens.
Keith Ranieri of Nexium both molested, allegedly, a 12-year-old and kidnapped a couple of babies.
Oh, boy.
Let that be a lesson to the creepy cult leaders listening in.
If you want to create a cult, you can be a monster.
Just don't molest kids.
That's not a good message.
I should stop trying to find messages in this story.
Speaking of messages, let's talk about the messengers some more.
So, Doreen later said in an interview, I once asked him why he chose young girls as messengers.
He said it was an idea he had picked up from Nazi Germany.
Okay.
Oh, well.
Whirlwind.
He said Hitler was a madman, but nevertheless a genius in his own right, and the Nazi youth was one of the smartest ideas he ever had.
With young people, you had a blank slate and you could write anything you wanted on it, and it would be your writing.
That was his idea, to take young people and mold them into little hubbards.
He said he had girls because women were more loyal than men.
Oh, yeah.
You know, women be loyal.
Women be loyal.
When I think of loyalty, I think of a teenage girl.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The most loyal.
She's never, you know, telling secrets behind anyone's backs or anything like that.
No, no.
Almost as loyal as teenage boys.
Well, you wouldn't want teenage boys to be your messengers.
Another messenger, a girl named Tanya, insisted he never tried anything with me.
And as far as I know, he never did with any of the other girls.
He didn't sleep with Mary Sue.
We thought perhaps he was impotent.
I think he got his thrills just by having us around.
So maybe there was something gross going on and he just couldn't get it up anymore.
Oh, maybe.
Maybe he would have molested kids.
Wait, is Mary Sue his third person?
His wife?
Yes, their wife.
All right.
So it's possible, that's another theory, that he totally would have molested these kids, but his dick was broke.
Well, you know, when your brain is just so creative and filled with such wonderful stories, another part of your body is going to be compromised.
Exactly.
So, yeah, that makes sense.
That's why Stephen King is famously terrible at sex.
Although, again, L. Ron Hubbard, decent at fucking.
I get, yeah.
For a while.
But we've heard that from, what, one account?
One account.
Okay, so that's not enough to convince me.
Yeah, that's one account more than most cult leaders have.
Oh, that's true.
That's true.
All right.
Whatever the case.
He had apparently lost that ability at this point.
It is kind of weird that in this Me Too era, the one guy that I can't find a story of sexually assaulting unwilling people is fucking L. Ron Hubbard.
Surprising.
Shockingly.
Yes.
Really would have expected him to be top of that list.
Right?
Especially because he was teaching men how to rape their wives while they slept or something.
Yeah.
And again.
He's not in the clear on this.
There's so much research to do in this guy.
I may have just missed something, but I am unaware of him doing that particular terrible thing, which is shocking to me.
Yeah.
That said, I do want to note, while I didn't find any allegations of horrific child sexual abuse, I did find allegations of horrific child abuse in L. Ron Hubbard's Space Navy.
Okay.
Xenu.net, an admittedly anti-Scientology site, has collected several anecdotes from people who were on these voyages, including one from Hannah Eltringham.
She says, quote, he put this little four and a half year old boy, Derek Green, into the chain locker for two days and two nights.
It's a closed metal container.
It's wet.
It's full of water and seaweed.
Smells bad.
But David was sitting up on the chain in this place on his own in the dark for two days and two nights.
He was not allowed to go to the potty.
I mean, he had to go in the chain locker on his own, soil himself.
He was given food, and I never went near it, the chain locker while he was in there.
But people heard him crying.
That is sheer total brutality.
That is child abuse.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it's definitely child abuse.
Again, he's a monster.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I assume there were other kids that that happened too.
This is just one story of the world.
Yeah, that's rarely like an isolated incident thing.
He had a room for locking up children.
Was this on the Apollo or the Scottish?
I think this is on the Apollo.
The Apollo was the Scottman.
I know, there's a lot of names here.
There was a mysterious death aboard the Apollo.
I'm surprised there weren't a lot more.
Yeah.
In February of 1971, Susan Meister, a 23-year-old Scientologist from Colorado, joined the Apollo.
On May 5th, she wrote an eager letter home to her family.
I just had an auditing session.
I feel great, great, great, and my life is expanding, expanding, and it's all Scientology.
Hurry up, hurry, hurry.
Be a friend to yourselves.
Get into this stuff now.
It's more precious than gold.
It's the best thing that's ever, come along.
Love, Susan.
Roughly a month later, on June 15th, she wrote another letter, clearly influenced by Ron's paranoia.
I can't tell you exactly where we are.
We have enemies who do not wish to see us succeed in restoring freedom and self-determination to this planet's people.
If these people were to find out where we were located, they would attempt to destroy us.
On June 25th, 10 days after that letter, she locked herself in a cabin and shot herself on the head with a .22-caliber revolver.
She was found later that day in her bunk wearing a dress her mother had sent her as a birthday gift.
She wrote a letter, but we don't know what it said because it wound up in the church's possession along with her body.
They buried her in Monaco before her father could arrive.
Hubbard went into damage control mode.
The church's official stance was that Susan was a drug addict with a history of suicide attempts.
And also, they said they'd found naked photos that she'd taken.
So clearly she was an unstable individual.
Pretty classic playbook.
It's her fault.
It's her fault.
She had a naked picture of herself.
It's her fault.
In early 1972, L. Ron got sick.
This may have had something to do with the fact that he had spent years living in boats and not seeking any regular medical or dental care.
He's probably got like scurvy on the ass.
He's drinking.
He's a drunk old man who lives on a boat and doesn't go to doctors.
He had some health problems.
Oh, geez.
And yeah, I'm surprised there weren't more deaths because, I mean, he's throwing people overboard on a regular basis.
There weren't more deaths.
Right.
Yeah.
Unless there were and they just got completely covered up.
That's possible.
Or something.
I'm only aware of this one, but, you know, I can only do so much reading.
Sure.
The Apollo's medical officer was a guy named Dinkalki with six months of nursing experience under his belt, so there wasn't a lot of great medical care on board the Apollo.
When he got the gig and started working closely with Hubbard, he was surprised to learn that LRH had started seeing a doctor during port visits and had started taking painkillers and antibiotics.
I thought that as an operating thetan, he would have total control of his body and of any pain.
When he discovered I hadn't got him the painkillers, he flew off the handle and started screaming at me.
So this guy learned that he didn't get all the painkillers that Hubbard had asked for because he was like, why does he need painkillers?
He has total control of his body.
Right.
So Hubbard got angry at him because he didn't need painkillers.
Morocco was Hubbard's favorite place in the early 1970s.
He set his sights on it as a possible worldwide headquarters for his new faith, but then he was mildly implicated in a failed attempt to unseat the Moroccan king.
And again, his fleet had to flee to the open ocean.
Ah, jeez.
Tale is old as time.
So while all this is happening, while he's at sea for years, eight years.
Yeah.
Scientology is still spreading on land, right?
Yeah, and he's managing it from a telex machine on his boat somewhere in the ocean.
Okay, got it.
In the mid-1972, the French government launched an investigation into the Church of Scientology while several of their ships were docked for engine repairs.
In a panic, Hubbard fled to the east coast of the United States and spent 10 months in a New Jersey hotel watching daytime TV and drinking way too much brandy.
Hmm.
Kind of sounds fun.
Yeah.
He saw a doctor and a dentist, though.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
So he's finally getting medical attention for his scurvy.
And his rotten teeth.
Right.
His teeth were real fucked up.
Ugh.
When he returned to his fleet 10 months later, he seemed to be in much better health.
But in late 1973, L. Ron Hubbard had a motorcycle accident in the Canary Islands.
What the fuck was a man that age doing riding a motorcycler?
His good mood disappeared.
He began instituting new punishments again and created a whole new unit for Scientologists who were being punished.
The Rehabilitation Project Force was a shocking development to many Sea Org members.
One of them, Hannah Eltringham, recalled that it sounded pretty much like a slave labor camp to her.
Those weren't the words he used, but that was the impression given, where the unwanted, those found wanting, seriously wanting, were sent, and they were to be kept in this with no rights, no freedoms, no privileges of any kind.
Pretty much the only rights they were allowed was a little bit of sleep each day, food leftovers, the harshest treatment.
So, he builds a task force full of penalized people where they all have to work.
They all had to wear black coveralls, basically, over their whole body and like the heat of the day in the Mediterranean summer.
They all slept together in the cargo hold with no ventilation.
Yeah.
So the RPF became the place nobody wanted to be, and the place that you went if you annoyed the Commodore or if you annoyed his messengers, because they had the right to send you to RPF too.
So there were a bunch of 12-year-old girls who could just throw people in Scientology prison if they got angry.
Yeah, I respect that.
You know, women in charge.
Good.
Yeah.
Great.
Yeah.
Not just women in charge, girls in charge.
Small children.
Yeah, small children.
In charge.
Taking it back.
One crewman at this time remembers of L. Ron Hubbard after the accident.
He became much more paranoid and belligerent.
He was convinced there were evil people on board with hidden evil intentions, and he wanted to get them all in the RPF.
The RPF was used as an incredible daily threat over everyone.
If he could smell something cooking from the Vince, whoever was the current Vince engineer would be assigned to the RPF.
If the cook burned his food, RPF.
If a messenger complained about someone, RPF.
His actions definitely became more bizarre after the motorcycle accident.
You could hear him throughout the ship screaming, shouting, ranting, and raving day after day.
He was always claiming the cooks were trying to poison him, and he began to smell odors everywhere.
His clothes had to be washed in pure water 15 times, using 13 different buckets of clean water to rinse his shirt so he wouldn't smell detergent on it.
So his behavior somehow became more erratic and unreasonable after this motorcycle accident.
Someone who's doing what he had already been doing, how does it get worse from there?
I just can't even... I'm going to guess just because of chronic pain.
Yeah?
Like, you're already a crazy, off-balance guy, and then you're dealing with chronic pain.
You just become more of an asshole.
Yeah, I mean, but it's already, like, dialed up to an 11.
Like, I don't know how you get worse from there.
It's incredible, but his life is like a perpetual motion machine of just being shittier, because that's the only thing he ever does, is get worse.
Yeah.
It's almost impressive.
Great.
Yeah.
He's like a mountaineer for being a piece of garbage.
Like, climbing the Mount Everest of being shitty to the people around him.
Some crewmen, including Jim Dinkalki, the guy who'd worked as his doctor, basically, even though he was only a nurse, saw the RPF as a reaction to Hubbard's realization that his son Quentin, who had been largely raised at sea by this point, was homosexual.
Dinkalki said, human emotion and reactions is the way humans were, and he didn't specifically regard humans very highly.
He liked the idea of the doll bodies that were in other civilizations.
Doll bodies didn't have human emotions and Reactions.
They were, I guess, like spock, you know, just very analytical.
You just get the job done.
No emotion there.
Love is not a sentiment that's known or cared for.
And to me, that's the tragedy because he put that, I feel, into the organization, into the way of being in the organization.
He saw his son's homosexuality as a betrayal.
And his son Quentin eventually killed himself years after this.
So he saw it as an attack, and that may have been what made him punish everyone else on the boats.
As the voyage went on, Hubbard's often teenaged messengers grew to hold all of the power on board.
They also had the ability to force people into the RPF, as I'd stated.
Multiple people compared it to like a Lord of the Fly sort of situation in the last couple of years of the crew, just these kind of crazed teenage girls, because again, they're spending all of their time around the craziest man who's ever lived.
Right.
And they have ultimate power and they're 12.
So it's just bad.
Yeah, and a lot of them grew up in the church and then possibly also on this boat.
Yeah, yeah.
At this point, they've spent their whole lives in the church.
They're just completely detached from reality, living on a boat in the ocean with total power.
Yeah.
It went mad.
He did, however, get sick of this in 1975 and he came ashore in Florida.
He said it was because he needed his flag base to be on dry land in order to more efficiently bilk money out of people.
He called his ship the Apollo flag as well.
And the Scientology headquarters is called Flag Now.
It's possible that he was just too old and infirm to stay at sea.
For whatever reason, in August of 1975, he launched Operation Goldmine, a plan to buy numerous hotels and churches in and around the town of Clearwater, Florida, in order to establish it as a Scientology mecca.
Teens Detached From Reality On Boat00:05:24
Because, you know, Florida is the one piece of land beyond the reach of all man's laws.
I had intended originally to go into his whole life in this podcast.
Yeah.
He has another 11 years.
Oh, wow.
We'll get to that at some point.
The end of L. Ron Hubbard is another story because he hasn't even started making movies.
He has all of this other insane shit happen.
Yeah.
Okay.
It gets so much wilder.
But this is the end of his time at sea.
Okay.
And this is all the time we have to talk about L. Ron Hubbard this week.
Wow, what a journey it's been.
Did you learn a lot?
Oh, yeah.
I feel like I was a part of Sea Org for eight years.
Yeah, that's what it takes.
That's how I feel.
Well, now you can understand a little bit of how those people suffered.
Yeah.
Yes.
My three hours of being on this podcast is definitely compares.
Wow.
I felt like eight years ago.
Wow.
That was so much information.
I am stupefied.
That is the right reaction to all of this, L. Ron Hubbard.
There we go.
Okay.
Well.
That's the story.
I got nothing else.
So to recap, he's a feminist icon.
Feminist icon, L. Ron Hubbard.
Mining for gold.
Gold miner, L. Ron Hubbard.
He loves boats.
He defeated two Japanese submarines.
Which were just deposits of iron ore.
One deposit of iron ore.
One.
Yeah, yeah.
And he generally treated everyone around him with respect and never told a lie in his life.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Honest man, L. Ron Hubbard.
Wow.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thank you so much.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for talking about this fucking cuckoo crazy ass.
So many pages.
I've had fun.
Good.
I feel a little mad, like crazy.
Yeah.
Madness is seeping in.
I'm going to drive to Marina Del Rey, break onto a boat, and just drink all night.
Yeah.
Sounds like a great plan.
Sounds like a great plan.
You can call me Commodore.
Why not call yourself Admiral also?
Seems like a cooler name.
Yeah.
Is one like a higher ranking than the other?
I think Commodore might be higher than Admiral.
I don't even know.
I don't think we have Commodores in our fucking Navy.
Right.
But I don't know.
I don't know.
He decided Commodore sounded cooler.
I get.
Yeah.
Yeah.
L. Ron Hubbard.
The counselor.
Council of Alron.
Yes.
Plugs.
You can follow me on social media, Twitter and Instagram and the like at Caitlin Durante, spelled C-A-I-T-L-I-N.
D-U-R-A-N-T-E.
You can listen to my podcast, The Bechtel Cast, spelled B-E-C-H-D-E-L.
We talk about the portrayal of women in film.
And you can follow that on Twitter at Bechtel Cast.
And I do comedy shows and stuff like that.
So check out my website, CaitlinDurante.com, and to see my upcoming show dates.
And other than that, you can find me at my new cult that I'm starting.
Also, for anyone who's keeping track of my name anagrams, maybe perhaps fans of the Daily Zeitgeist or of Bechtel Cast already, you might know that my name anagrams to a bunch of stuff, including trained in a cult.
Oh, cool.
Yes.
Nice.
So there you have it.
Well, I'm Robert Evans.
This has been Behind the Bastards.
If you want to support this show and give me the money that I need to buy my own Navy and sail around the Caribbean, no child abuse this time.
Some elder abuse.
You can buy our t-shirts on tpublic.com, Behind the Bastards.
We have I Love 40% of you shirts.
We have EJ Stalin shirts.
Buy them up.
I'm sure we'll get an L. Ron Hubbard good at sex shirt up in there soon.
Seems like a great idea to me.
You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at BastardsPod.
You can find us online at behindthebastards.com.
You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
I've got a book, a brief history of vice.
Buy it.
I'm just so tired right now.
We're all very tired.
I love about 40% of you.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
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Murder Mystery At City Hall00:01:24
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