[49] In July 1940, Campbell magazine Unknown published a psychological horror by Hubbard titled Fear about an ethnologist who becomes paranoid that demons are out to get him—the work was well-received, drawing praise from Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and others.

[60] After Hubbard chose to stay in California rather than return to his family in Washington state,[64] he moved into the Pasadena mansion of John "Jack" Whiteside Parsons, a rocket propulsion engineer and a leading follower of the English occultist Aleister Crowley.

[69] During this period, Hubbard authored a document which has been called the "Affirmations", a series of statements relating to various physical, sexual, psychological and social issues that he was encountering in his life.

[75] In August 1947, Hubbard returned to the pages of Astounding with a serialized novel "The End is Not Yet", about a young nuclear physicist who tries to stop a world takeover by building a new philosophical system.

[79] Finally, in October 1947, he wrote to request psychiatric treatment: After trying and failing for two years to regain my equilibrium in civil life, I am utterly unable to approach anything like my own competence.

[82] Beginning in June 1948, the nationally-syndicated wire service United Press ran a story on an American Legion-sponsored psychiatric ward in Savannah, Georgia, which sought to keep mentally-ill war veterans out of jail.

[85] Hubbard claimed he had "processed an awful lot of Negroes"[86] and wrote of having observed a psychiatrist using the threat of institutionalization in a state hospital to solicit funds from a patient's husband.

Through Dianetics, Hubbard claimed that most illnesses were psychosomatic and caused by engrams, including arthritis, dermatitis, allergies, asthma, coronary difficulties, eye trouble, bursitis, ulcers, sinusitis and migraine headaches.

[103] He introduced a woman named Sonya Bianca and told the audience that as a result of undergoing Dianetic therapy she now possessed perfect recall, only for her to forget the color of Hubbard's necktie.

"[115] In June, Sara finally secured the return of her daughter by agreeing to a settlement in which she signed a statement, written by Hubbard, declaring that she had been misrepresented in the press and that she had always believed he was a "fine and brilliant man".

[129] In July, Hubbard published "What to Audit" (later re-titled Scientology: A History of Man), which taught everyone has subconscious traumatic memories of their past lives as clams, sloths, and cavemen which cause neuroses and health problems.

[65] In July 1968, the British Minister of Health announced that foreign Scientologists would no longer be permitted to enter the UK and Hubbard himself was excluded from the country as an "undesirable alien".

[191] It teaches that Xenu, the leader of the Galactic Confederacy, had shipped billions of people to Earth and blown them up with hydrogen bombs, following which their traumatized spirits were stuck together at "implant stations", brainwashed with false memories and eventually became contained within human beings.

[193] Church of Scientology couriers arrived regularly, conveying luxury food for Hubbard and his family or cash that had been smuggled from England to avoid currency export restrictions.

Following one incident in which the rudder of the Royal Scotman was damaged during a storm, Hubbard ordered the ship's entire crew to be reduced to a "condition of liability" and wear gray rags tied to their arms.

[199] Hubbard maintained a harsh disciplinary regime aboard the fleet, punishing mistakes by confining people in the Royal Scotman's bilge tanks without toilet facilities and with food provided in buckets.

[210] In October 1969, The Sunday Times published an exposé by Australian journalist Alex Mitchell detailing Hubbard's occult experiences with Parsons and Aleister Crowley's teachings.

[213] In mid-1972, Hubbard again tried to find a safe haven, this time in Morocco, establishing contacts with the country's secret police and training senior policemen and intelligence agents in techniques for detecting subversives.

[226][227] Paulette Cooper, a freelance journalist and Scientology critic, was subjected to at least at least 19 lawsuits, framed for sending bomb threats, and was urged to climb onto a dangerous 33rd-floor ledge by a roommate later believed to be a Guardian's Office agent.

[232] According to a former member of the Sea Organization pseudonymously named "Heidi Forrester", in late 1975 she met with a man fitting Hubbard's description who apparently performed a Crowleyite sex magick ritual called Dianism using her.

[189]: 126-7 On June 11, 1976, the FBI apprehended two Guardian's Office agents inside the US Courthouse in D.C., prompting Hubbard to move cross country to a safe house in California, and later a nearby ranch.

[235] On July 8, 1977, the FBI carried out simultaneous raids on Guardian's Office locations in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.[236][237] They retrieved wiretap equipment, burglary tools and some 90,000 pages of incriminating documents.

[259] After Korzybski founded an "Institute" to promote his teachings and began offering seminars, his ideas were incorporated into the science-fiction of Hubbard-associates Van Vogt and Heinlein, who envisioned futures where research into General Semantics had transformed some individuals into superhumans; Hubbard cited this fiction in a letter announcing the central principles of Dianetics: a book that promises to "make supermen".

Hubbard's son Nibs said that Aleister Crowley was his father's most important source of inspiration, and scholar Hugh Urban has written extensively about the occult roots of Scientology.

One sociologist argued that even at Hubbard's peak in the late 1930s, he was regarded as merely "a passable, familiar author but not one of the best", while by the late-1970s "the [science fiction] subculture wishes it could forget him" and fans gave him a worse rating than any other of the "Golden Age" writers.

[295] According to the church, Hubbard's entire corpus of Scientology and Dianetics texts are etched onto steel tablets in a vault under a mountain, on top of which a Hubbard-designed logo has been bulldozed, intended to be visible from space.

[301] Hubbard is presented as "the master of a multitude of disciplines" who performed extraordinary feats as a photographer, composer, scientist, therapist, explorer, navigator, philosopher, poet, artist, humanitarian, adventurer, soldier, scout, musician and many other fields of endeavor.

[308] On November 21, 1997, the Fox network aired an episode of X-Files spinoff Millennium titled "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" which satirized Lafayette Ronald Hubbard's biography in an brief opening narration about a character named "Juggernaut Onan Goopta" who dreamt of becoming a neuroscientist only to discover that "his own brain could not comprehend basic biology".

[315] Paul Thomas Anderson's 2012 film The Master features a religious leader named Lancaster Dodd, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is based on Hubbard and shares a physical resemblance to him.

Facing potential legal troubles, he flees California by stowing away on a ship captained by self-proclaimed nuclear physicist and philosopher Lancaster Dodd, leader of a movement called "The Cause".