Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [228]
Footnotes
* The issue of Time published on May 6, 1991, bore the cover story "Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power," which accused the church of "Mafia-like tactics"; it remains one of the most scathing exposés of the church ever written. In response, Scientology sued Time and the reporter Richard Behar for libel, and lost, though the suit cost the publisher, Time Warner, millions of dollars.
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* Hubbard, an avid Boy Scout, became an Eagle Scout at the age of twelve, making him the youngest Eagle Scout in the country at the time, according to the Church of Scientology.
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* Staff at the New York Times would later tell the biographer Russell Miller that they had no record of ever buying any photographs from Hubbard or making any agreement to do so.
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* The Church of Scientology has long held that L. Ron Hubbard had two war records, one possibly used as a front. In the official record released by the U.S. Department of the Navy, Hubbard's achievements are meager. But church officials have explained this by stating that most of what is in the record is falsified to cover up Hubbard's more sensitive and covert activities as a member of naval Intelligence.
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* In 1969, in response to an investigation by the London Sunday Times into Hubbard's relationship with Parsons, the Church of Scientology issued a statement explaining that Hubbard had been sent to 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue by U.S. Naval Intelligence, assigned to infiltrate and break up a so-called black magic cult. The church gave as evidence the fact that the Agape Lodge ultimately dissolved and that a number of high-ranking physicists associated with Parsons were ultimately put on a U.S. "enemies list" and stripped of security clearance. A few historical facts support this claim: by the 1940s, a widespread anti-cult campaign was sweeping the country, and numerous groups and individuals suspected of cult activity, including Parsons, had been investigated by the FBI. But, as many of Hubbard's critics have pointed out, no evidence substantiates the claim that he was assigned intelligence work, and though, because of his odd activities, Parsons's FBI file had grown quite thick, he retained top-secret security clearance until his death in 1952. Hubbard is not mentioned in connection to Parsons in any FBI papers.
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* No evidence has been found in Hubbard's medical records to suggest he was ever crippled or blinded in World War II, or at any other time.
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* Though Hubbard had been discharged from active duty in the navy, he remained a commissioned officer until October 30, 1950.
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* With the halcyon days of the Parsonage at an end, Parsons and Marjorie Cameron moved into a smaller house in Pasadena. In 1952, at the age of thirty-six, Parsons was killed in a mysterious chemical explosion in his garage. It was, as many have noted, a fitting way for a black magician to die.
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* Polly filed for divorce in 1947, still unaware that Hubbard had remarried. Later that year, he scandalized his parents by bringing Sara to Washington, where they settled, briefly, into the house he and Polly, and their two children, had once shared. The divorce was finalized in 1948.
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* This is an actual scientific term defined by Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary as "a hypothetical change in neural tissue postulated in order to account for persistence of memory called also memory trace."
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* In his first edition of Dianetics, Hubbard acknowledged "fifty thousand years of thinking men without whose speculations and observations the creation and construction of Dianetics would not have been possible," giving particular credit to "Anaxagoras, Thomas Paine, Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, Socrates, René Descartes, Plato, James Clerk Maxwell, Euclid, Charcot, Lucretius, Herbert Spencer, Roger Bacon, William James, Francis Bacon, Sigmund Freud, Isaac Newton, van Leeuwenhoek, Cmdr. Joseph Thompson (MC)