Going Clear

by Lawrence Wright

  All of Hubbard’s senses were painfully acute. Each day, every room he inhabited had to be dusted to the point that it would pass a white-glove test. He was fanatically clean but also hypersensitive to soap, so that his clothes had to be rinsed up to fifteen times, and even then he would complain that he could smell the detergent. His chef had to switch from cooking on stainless steel to Corningware because Hubbard complained of the taste of metal in his food. These stories were traded among his disciples as more evidence of his superhuman powers of discernment.

  ACCORDING TO SEVERAL Sea Org members, while he was in Las Palmas, Hubbard fell in love with another woman—Yvonne Gillham, the ship’s public relations officer. (She would later go on to start the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood.) She had a wide smile, large hazel eyes, and a short pixie haircut, bearing a resemblance to Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Gillham combined a down-to-earth personality with a touch of class that came from growing up in the high society of Queensland, Australia. Inevitably, Hubbard demanded that she accompany him on the high seas. Gillham had three young children at Saint Hill, and she had only joined the Sea Org on Hubbard’s pledge that they could stay with her, but Hubbard’s desire for her had become a prison, one that she was too loyal to escape.

  Yvonne Gillham in a head shot she used during her modeling career, circa 1952

  Hubbard was fifty-six years old in the fall of 1967, when he set sail with his youthful crew. There was no destination or purpose other than to wander. Hubbard was by now portly, ruddy-faced, and jowly; his swept-back, once-red hair had turned strawberry blond. His eyes, which have been described as blue or green by various observers, were actually gray, like seawater, casting an odd flatness over his aspect. Two strong lines transected his face: a deep furrow between his eyebrows, matching the notch below his nose and the cleft in his chin, and his duckbill lips, which were his most prominent feature. Once aboard, he dressed in various naval uniforms befitting his self-appointed station as Commodore of the fleet, with lots of braid and crossed anchors on his cap.

  There were three ships in Hubbard’s navy. In addition to the Avon River, there was a schooner called the Enchanter, and the 3,200-ton flagship, a flat-bottom cattle ferry originally called the Royal Scotsman, which was renamed the Royal Scotman because of a clerical error in the registration. The smokestack was emblazoned with the initials “LRH.”

  Hubbard spent most of his time in the air-conditioned captain’s cabin on the promenade deck of the Royal Scotman, surrounded by windows to take in the ocean vistas. He rarely drank on the ship, except perhaps to take the chill off on a cold night on the bridge. Drugs were nowhere in evidence. His days were largely solitary, passed in auditing himself and writing policy papers. His office on the top deck was called the Research Room. It was behind a pair of highly polished wooden doors with brass handles. The floor was a bright red linoleum covered with Oriental rugs; there was a massive mahogany desk and a huge mirror above a fireplace. Crew members passing by on the upper deck could see him writing with his usual rapidity on foolscap, using a green pen for policy bulletins and a red one for the “tech”—that is, his vast corpus of coursework and procedures that comprised Scientology’s spiritual technology. His restless leg would be jiggling as his hand raced across the page, faultlessly, in handsome, legible script. For other writing, he turned back to his typewriter. “I think he was doing automatic writing,” said Jim Dincalci, one of his medical officers. “The pages would be flying. When he came out of it, he would blink his eyes, as if coming awake, and he did this thing with his lips, smacking.”

  Hubbard and Mary Sue would dine in his office between eight and ten p.m. Sometime after three in the morning, Dincalci would give Hubbard a massage and he would go to sleep. After that, everyone on the ship had to be quiet until Hubbard awakened, sometime before noon, and remain absolutely mute while he was auditing himself on the E-Meter.

  In Hubbard’s opinion, the device operated just below the level of conscious awareness; it somehow knew what you were thinking before you did. It was eerily compelling. Anything that registered on the meter was seen as being significant. The trick was divining what the needle was saying. Sometimes the reaction was so violent that the needle would pound back and forth like a berserk windshield wiper—you could hear it snapping against the pins at either end. Hubbard called this a “rock slam.” Anyone who registered such a reaction was deemed psychotic and certain to have committed crimes against Scientology; if that person was in the Sea Org, he would be punished automatically, the crime to be sorted out later.

  After initially resisting the concept of past lives, Hubbard became passionately interested in the subject. “We Come Back” was the motto of the Sea Org. Hubbard began recalling many of his own previous existences, which the E-Meter validated. He claimed to have been a contemporary of Machiavelli’s, and he was still upset that the author of The Prince stole his line “The end justifies the means.” He said he had been a marshal to Joan of Arc and Tamburlaine’s wife. He told stories about driving a race car in the alien Marcab civilization millions of years before. He came to believe that in some of his past lives on this planet, he had buried treasure in various locations, so he launched an expedition to unearth his ancient hoards. He called it the Mission into Time. He selected a small crew to go on the Avon River. Because he wanted to keep the mission secret, he had two long rafts fashioned, which could be rowed ashore under cover of darkness and pulled up on the beach near where he imagined his ancient treasure was buried. When Hana Eltringham saw she wasn’t on the list, she wrote Hubbard, pleading to be included, saying she would be willing to perform any duty. To her surprise, Hubbard appointed her chief officer.

  One very dark, overcast night in 1968, the Avon River dropped anchor on the western coast of Sicily, in the bay of Castellammare del Golfo, beside a steep promontory topped by an ancient watchtower. Hubbard gave his “missionaires” a treasure map he had drawn up based on his past-life recollections. The crew set out in one of the rafts toward the rocky shoreline, lugging ropes, shovels, and metal detectors. Giggling and tripping over each other, they scrambled up a ten-foot cliff. It was so dark they couldn’t see more than a foot in front of their faces. Each had a hand on another’s shoulder as they picked their way through stands of cactus along the rocky outcropping. At one point, the leader of the expedition bumped into a cow. The cow started mooing, then a dog barked, and a light went on in a house nearby. Everyone stood dead still until the scene quieted down. Finally, the clouds parted enough for the moon to shine through. The missionaires found some old bricks they thought might have been the ruins of a castle beside the watchtower. The metal detectors found nothing.

  Hubbard decided to come along the next day to inspect the site himself. “Yes, yes, this is the place!” he said excitedly. He explained the absence of treasure by saying that it must have been hidden in a portion of the ruined castle that had fallen into the sea.

  The expedition moved on to Sardinia, where Hubbard claimed to have had an affair with the priestess in a temple—“liaisons in the moonlight,” he told his enchanted missionaires—when he was a Carthaginian sailor. “We had a lot of good-looking girls in Carthage but they didn’t come up to her.” The Avon River next stopped in Calabria, on the toe of Italy, where Hubbard had buried gold in his days as a tax collector in the Roman Empire. None was found, however.

  Near Tunis, where the missionaires hoped to dive on the ruins of an ancient underwater city, Hubbard found fault with the captain of the Avon River, Joe van Staden, and booted him off the ship. Eltringham was sitting at her desk on the ’tween deck when Hubbard called her into his office and told her she was the new captain of the four-hundred-ton trawler, starting in the morning. Eltringham went back to her desk and put her head in her hands. She was twenty-six years old. Everything she knew about sailing she had learned from Hubbard. To his credit, he had been a good teacher. He had taken a dozen members of the original Sea Org crew and taught them the semaphore code, how t
o navigate using a sextant, and basic laws of the sea. But she knew nothing about running the engine room, or operating the electronics on the bridge, or docking a ship. Half an hour later, Hubbard stuck his head out of his office and beckoned to her. He was holding an E-Meter. Standing in the doorway where everyone could see them, Hubbard handed her the cans. Then he screwed up his eyes and demanded, “Recall a time you were last a captain.” As Eltringham closed her eyes and began to free-associate, Hubbard watched the needle on the E-Meter.

  “What’s that?” he asked, when the needle suddenly dropped.

  “That was sometime on a ship somewhere and the ship was sinking,” Eltringham responded.

  “Okay, go back earlier.” A moment later, he asked her again, “What’s that?”

  “That’s just a lot of confusion. I’m in a cabin with a lot of other people. Something urgent is going on.”

  Hubbard asked her to talk more about it. Eltringham began to see the incident more clearly. “We were in some kind of spaceship,” she said. “We were under attack and—oh my God!—I can see a planet down there! And the planet’s on fire! And something is shooting at us and—oh my God!—the spaceship exploded!”

  Hubbard asked her to tell the story several more times to destimulate the incident. Then he asked Eltringham how she was feeling.

  “I’m fine, sir.”

  Hubbard screwed up his eyes again. “Do you have any other thoughts about it?” Eltringham realized that he was looking for a floating needle, but she wasn’t able to give it to him.

  “Okay, one more question. Are you a loyal officer?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that,” Eltringham said. “I’m loyal to you, and I’m an officer.”

  Hubbard said, “All right, that’s as far as we’ll go this time.”

  Eltringham walked up on the deck and tried to take in what Hubbard meant. Suddenly it came to her. Hubbard wasn’t talking about the present. He was referring to the time in her visualization. Some catastrophe must have happened. Eltringham realized that it must have been her planet that was being attacked, and she had been trying to save it.

  A few minutes later, Hubbard came up on deck and stood beside her. She turned to him and said, “Yep, you’re right, sir. I was a loyal officer. I am.”

  Hubbard beamed.

  THE AVON RIVER WAS traveling down the east side of Corsica when Hubbard gathered his crew and read them a new revelation. Nearby, in the north of Corsica, there was an underground space station, he said. He even provided the coordinates. There, a secret doorway would open by a palm print on the lock—but only one person’s hand would do the trick. Hubbard smiled suggestively, without saying whose hand that would be. The rock face would slide open, revealing an immense cavern harboring a mother ship and hundreds of smaller craft, all fueled and ready to go.

  The space station would remain undiscovered, however. Word arrived that the Royal Scotman had run into trouble with the port authorities in Valencia, where Hubbard had hoped to make a permanent base. He furiously abandoned the expedition and ordered the Avon River to make haste to Valencia before the Royal Scotman was forcibly expelled from the Spanish harbor. The crew was bitterly disappointed that they would miss uncovering the space station. “If there’s time, we’ll come back,” Hubbard promised.

  After making amends with the port captain in Valencia, Hubbard threw a party to report on the Mission into Time. He was loud and affected, in what Eltringham privately called his “full pantomime mode.” Such moments made her cringe. She hid in the back of the crowd. She genuinely revered Hubbard, but when he was strutting in front of his acolytes, he could become comically self-important, a parody of himself. His eyes rolled, his body language was inappropriate and weird, and his hands flew around meaninglessly in odd directions. Sometimes he spoke with a British accent or a Scottish brogue. In her opinion, his performance was ridiculous, but also disturbing. If the man she regarded as a savior was a “nut case,” what did that say about his teachings? What did it say about her, that she idolized him while at the same time harboring these illicit feelings of shame? No one else seemed to share these warring perceptions. She felt very much alone.

  Hubbard regaled the crowd with the story of his romance with the temple priestess in Sardinia when he was a Carthaginian sailor. “The girl would say, ‘Hey, how are YOU?’ and all the other guys didn’t stand a chance for a while. If you’ve got enough war vessels and you’re making enough dough, girls usually say this.”

  He said he had recently remembered a secret passageway into the temple. “Missions were sent ashore to survey and map the area to see if they couldn’t discover this old secret entrance to the temple.” If they found it, that would prove the truthfulness of his past-life recollections, what he called the “whole track memory.”

  “And now,” he said, “I’m going to call on Hana Eltringham to tell you whether or not it was a positive result.”

  Mortified, Eltringham stood in front of her colleagues and ratified Hubbard’s findings. “We did find the tunnel,” she said, mentioning a ditch that the missionaires had found, which had a tile base. “So that was totally proven and accurate.”

  THE ANTICIPATION SURROUNDING the release of OT III was intense, so when Hubbard finally made it available to a select group of Sea Org members, in March 1968 aboard the Royal Scotman in Valencia, a thrill radiated through the entire crew. The saga of Hubbard’s research in Tangier and Las Palmas led them to think that this was the breakthrough that would lead to the salvation of the planet. They—the Sea Org—would be the vanguard of this movement, newly empowered by the revelations that Hubbard promised.

  In a lecture aboard the ship, Hubbard said that in researching OT III, he had uncovered two “incidents”—which, for him, meant implants—that prevented thetans from being free. Incident One was a kind of Garden of Eden fall from grace that occurred four quadrillion years ago, which is when Hubbard dates the origin of the universe. Before Incident One, thetans were in a pure, godlike state. Suddenly, there was a loud snap and a flood of light. A chariot appeared, trailed by a trumpeting cherub; then darkness. This incident marked the moment when thetans became separated from their original static condition and created the physical universe of matter, energy, space, and time (MEST). In the process, they lost awareness of their immortality.

  Incident Two is central to the OT III saga. This one took place seventy-five million years ago in the Galactic Confederacy, which was composed of seventy-six planets and twenty-six stars. “The world we live in now replicates the civilization of that period,” Hubbard said. “People at that particular time and place were walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute.… The cars they drove looked exactly the same, and the trains they ran looked the same, and the boats they had looked the same. Circa nineteen-fifty, nineteen-sixty.”

  A tyrannical overlord named Xenu ruled the Confederacy. “He was a Suppressive to end all Suppressives,” Hubbard told his followers. Xenu had been chosen by a kind of Praetorian guard called the Loyal Officers, but they realized that their leader was wicked and they decided to remove him. Xenu had other plans, Hubbard said. “He took the last moments he had in office to really goof the floof.” Xenu and a few evil conspirators—mainly psychiatrists—fed false information to the population to draw them into centers where Xenu’s troops could destroy them. “One of the mechanisms they used was to tell them to come in for an income-tax investigation,” Hubbard related. “So in they went, and the troops started slaughtering them.” The preferred method was to shoot a needle into a lung, paralyzing the thetan with an injection of frozen alcohol and glycol. The frozen bodies were packed into boxes and loaded onto space planes, which resembled the DC-8 jetliner. “No difference—except the DC-8 had fans—propellers—on it and the space plane didn’t.” In this fashion, billions of thetans were transported to Teegeeack, the planet now called Earth, where they were dropped into volcanoes and then blown up with hydrogen bombs
.

  Thetans are immortal, however. Freed from their corporeal incarnations, they floated along on the powerful winds created by the explosion. Then they were trapped in an electronic ribbon and placed in front of a “three-D, super colossal motion picture” for thirty-six days, during which time they were subjected to images called R6 implants. “These pictures contain God, the Devil, angels, space opera, theaters, helicopters, a constant spinning, a spinning dancer, trains and various scenes very like modern England. You name it, it’s in this implant.” The implant included all world religions and “a motion picture studio” complete with screenwriters.

  Xenu didn’t have much time to gloat over his victory. Some Loyal Officers remained, scattered around the galaxy. There was a civil war, and within a year, the Loyal Officers had captured Xenu and locked him up in an electrified wire cage buried in a mountain. “He is not likely ever to get out,” Hubbard said.

  Because Teegeeack was a dumping ground for thetans, it became known as the Prison Planet, “the planet of ill repute.” The Galactic Confederacy abandoned the area, although various invaders have appeared throughout the millennia. But these free-floating thetans remain behind. They are the souls of people who have been dead for seventy-five million years. They attach themselves to living people because they no longer have free will. There can be millions of them clustered inside a single person’s body. Auditing for Scientologists at OT III and above would now focus on eliminating the “body thetans”—or BTs—that stand in the way of spiritual progress.