This speaks for itself, but there is definitely the possibility of revenge because he did not get any of the money.
So, even with this first hand testimony, it is very hard to decide what this all means.
When somebody speaks out because he wants the truth to come out that disregards the old maxime of “follow the money.”
It is becoming more and more difficult to investigate L. Ron Hubbard by direct eye witness accounts as time goes by and those eye witnesses go slowly extinct.
The second best, or third if you count talking to the master himself, is to look at the deeds and effects.
Actor Jason Beghe’s account of his tenure as a scientologist sheds a very revealing light. It is interesting for this author personally as his early experiences are very similar to Mr. Beghe’s. This ‘jumping into with both feet’, no need to be convinced or sold – very familiar!
This author had his real convincing experience on OT TR0 on the communication course. His experience was a bit delayed – probably – because at that time the ‘comm course’ in Frankfurt, Germany left out OT TR0 and started directly with TR0. So, your’s truly had to finish the course first and he did it with a bang – a big win on co-auditing. This rudimentary auditing was the de-factor internship of that introductory course. It was, by today’s standards, a serious ‘squirrel’ course, but still enough to convince this author to jump in and look past all those strange things that turned him off – like the personal cult of the master through the display his portrait in each and every room of the mission. The second course then contained OT TR0 and this is where your’s truly went exterior and no more convincing was required.
But back to Jason Beghe. Grab a beer and some snacks because this is a long film…
The very first testimonial is already breaking with the rules that I established for this site, namely that we only let eye-witnesses speak.
Jamie DeWolf could have met his met his great grandfather, but probably did not, and so his experience with Mr. Hubbard is not a personal one, so it should not count, but due to the close relationship, and because it’s a good performance, I want to let Mr. DeWolf speak. Just keep in mind that all this is twice removed hear-say…
Mr. DeWolf talks about his Grandfather, L. Ron Hubbard Jr., and we can find out what he had to contribute in his interview with Penthouse.
With this interview, we could be possibly much closer to the truth, but it’s a magazine article and many of us know that the press can not necessarily be trusted to be truthful. A video-taped interview would be better but in our modern age of sophisticated video editing I have to admit that I would not have the means of deciding if this would in fact not be a doctored video.
Now, let’s look at the other extreme of the views on Mr. Hubbard, the official version of the LRH biography. There is quite a bit of a difference, which is not surprising because an event is always filtered through the mind of the observer. This is a known fact for police investigators trying to extract the so-called truth of the eye witnesses of an accident.
A last point of view, offered here is the Wikipedia article on L. Ron Hubbard. This author has a bit of experience trying to publish an article on Wikipedia, that was not clean cut scientific but a bit on the controversial side. There can be an editing war raging behind the scenes and I can only imagine that the currently resulting article is the result of raging battles between the Church of Scientology and its critics.
The discussion page of this article reflects this to some degree, containing pleas to semi-protect this page to curb vandalism.
Either of the views described here could be right, but the truth lies probably somewhere in the middle. Under the principle of “follow the money,” this author tends to believe the ‘official’ story less, because having a glowing hero is better for business. The other side of the battle also has a big financial stake – what if mental illness can be easily cured – what would become of the billion-dollar industry of psychiatry? These two camps might have similarly strong motives, but if I read remarks of his peer writers describing him as broke and always after money while the official version is that he did selfless humanitarian work, then the humanitarian work seems to be less likely.
But then again – these peer remarks might as well be invented…