Subject: Chris Owen on Hubbard's Sci Fi cosmology (old essay) [1] ESSAY: Sci-Fi Scientology Feb 17, 2000 Chris Owens OT-3, schmOT-3. You can find many vintage examples of Hubbardian sci-fi lunacy in his earlier Saint Hill Special Briefing Course lectures, some of which make OT-3 look positively sensible. The SHSBC was a series of over 500 lectures delivered at Saint Hill Manor between 1961 and 1964. According to the Scientology blurb, "this era represents one of the most exhilarating periods in the history of Scientology." If Hubbard's statements are anything to go by, they also represent one of the silliest periods in Scientology (and that's saying something!). Let's begin. Remember the OT-3 DC-8 space planes? Turns out they're "space wagons": "Now, science fiction writers following the cue of some chap, I've forgotten his name now, Einstein, Beinstein, something like that, who said that MC squared over C wouldn't go, man, and that the speed of light could not be excessive. And actually I was looking up some speed tables the other day, and a trillion light years per day is not full throttle on a space wagon. So there's traffic between galaxies and there's traffic between islands of galaxies and other islands of galaxies. Interesting." [Hubbard, "The Helatrobus Implants", SHSBC-266, lecture of 21 May 63] Interesting isn't the word for it. Since the entire universe is thought to be only some 12 billion years old, it's not likely to be much more than about 12 billion light years across (there is a cosmological "horizon" which will prevent us from ever seeing that far). Hubbard's "space wagons" were able to go at some 41½ billion light years an hour, which would allow them to cross the universe in under 20 minutes. Not bad! As a self-declared nuclear physicist and "Buck Rogers Boy", Hubbard naturally had the self confidence to declare that "Einstein was dead wrong. He only contributed to the ignorance by which you get trapped. Space wagons used to travel trillions of light years per day. Teleportation is a pipe dream. You just unmock a body here and mock it up there." [Hubbard, "The Free Being", SHSBC-281, lecture of 9 July 63] I really do wonder what he would have made of quantum physics and the strange ability of particles to be in two places at once. Then again, it's probably a question best left unanswered. He'd also have a thing or two to say about the scientists who've recently proposed that homo sapiens is likely to be the only (allegedly) intelligent form of life in the galaxy. According to Ron The Astronomer, space is in fact teeming with intelligent though usually malevolent races. You even get a choice. Everyone on a.r.s. knows about Xenu and Teegeeack (aka Earth, 75 million years ago). But how many have heard the truth about Sun 12? "This society belongs, nominally, to the Espinol United Stars, or the Espinol United Moons, Planets, and Asteroids: This Quarter of the Universe is Ours. This is Sun 12. There has been no command post occupied for this system, now, since 1150 AD, at the time when a group on Mars was finally abolished and vanished. You notice that at that time there was a sudden resurgence in science and learning. It became an uncontrolled civilization, and no one has been paying any attention to the dumping that has been going on since. Nobody took any interest in this system, and [it has] been running wild ever since that time. ... This planet is evolving unusually fast, because, for one thing, it is being used as a dumping ground. It is on the periphery of the galaxy. Sun 12 is handy to other galaxies and to the center of this galaxy. It is still being used as a dumping ground. For that reason, this planet has a very heterogenous society and lots of trouble, because no one is guiding it. Most planets have some guiding thetan." [Hubbard, "The Free Being", SHSBC-281, lecture of 9 July 63] One wonders whom Hubbard envisaged as being Earth's future "guiding thetan". The reason there isn't one is apparently because "This is Sun 12 and it is a rim, tiny, microscopic, terribly insignificant little bunch of space dust. Not to do it down particularly but compared to other systems, galaxies, confederations and that sort of things and other possessions of confederations and so forth, this is nothing. That's why it's left alone." [Hubbard, "The Helatrobus Implants", SHSBC-266, lecture of 21 May 63] There are quite a few instances when Hubbard's imagination breaks free from the mouldering confines of rationality, logic or fact. I particularly like the tale of the 43rd Battle Squadron of the Galactic Fleet: "Here is a datum: That particular implanting outfit was located down towards the center of this galaxy and was founded 52,863,010,654,079 years ago. It was destroyed 38,932,690,862,933 years ago by the 79th wing of the 43rd Battle Squadron of the Galactic Fleet. It was a wildcat activity. They used to drag Magellanic clouds out of the center hub of the galaxy, let them follow lines of force and come over a system, and then send planes in with speakers. The place would be caved in for thousands of years as a result of radioactive clouds." [Hubbard, "The Time Track", SHSBC-265, lecture of 16 May 63] What Ron The Astronomer apparently failed to realise was that the Magellanic clouds are actually galaxies - a cluster of small irregular galaxies lying not at the "center hub of the galaxy" but between 150,000-200,000 light years out. They are not "radioactive", save in very small quantities; the heavy radioactive metals are produced in cosmically insignificant quantities by supernovas. This was not exactly rocket science and had been known about for decades, ever since the pioneering work of Edwin Hubble (of Space Telescope fame) back in the 1920s. Nor was this an isolated mistake by Hubbard. Like a dog returning to its vomit, a few days later he went back to the subject of the Magellanic clouds to explain how they were used. Big mistake for him; highly entertaining for everyone else. What follows is one of my favourite Hubbard passages: "...early on, conceiving that free thetans were very dangerous and should be shot down in their tracks, people such as this group in Helatrobus started laying in implants and picking people up and weakening people down and doing all this sort of thing and all this nonsense and worked on it very hard. Planets were surrounded suddenly by radioactive cloud masses. And very often a long time before the planet came under attack from these implant people, waves of radioactive clouds, Magellanic clouds, black and gray, would sweep over and engulf the planet, and it would be living in an atmosphere of radioactivity, which was highly antipathetic to the living beings, bodies, plants, anything else that was on this planet. And so planetary systems would become engulfed in radioactive masses, gray and black. And the earmarks of such a planetary action was gray and black - gray towering masses of clouds. These Magellanic clouds would not otherwise have come anywhere near a planetary system." After the onslaught of the Magellanic clouds came the little orange talking bombs: "Now, when a system had been engulfed - and they had it on their timetable - they would send ships in. And they had little orange- colored bombs that would talk, and speech and so forth was frozen into electronic capsules. It was all very clever. The utter insanity, you see! This makes it so incredible nobody believes it, you see, and that was one of their greatest protections. Why would anybody go to this much trouble? So the clouds would talk. And here you'd have a gray cloud going by and it'd be saying, "Hark! Hark! Hark!" you see? "Watch out! Look out! Who's there? Who's that?" You know? Sounds like a fun house ... They had some means of contracting a beam. Traction beam. These guys were pretty smart electronically, way advanced. And [the thetan would] resist it. But in a year or two, why, he'd run into another one of them, and again he'd resist it. And a while later he'd run into another one of them, and again he'd resist it. And then he ... finally, he hasn't got his attention on it and he's already been weakened down and he's collapsed a bit himself already, and he's beginning to worry. And the beam goes tsccup! and pulls him up into the sky, encloses him in a capsule and there he goes. One of the ways this was done: a small capsule evidently could be placed at will in space. It shot out a large bubble, the being would grab at the bubble or strike at it and be sucked at once into the capsule. Then the capsule would be retracted into an aircraft. Very interesting technology. All of this assaulted his credulity. He couldn't understand what was happening. Nobody had ever seen anything like this before. Puzzled him." It's easy to relate to that. But what did the Helatrobites want with captured thetan? "... They'd ship him off, and anywhere between the next month or six months or something like that they would shoot him into this period of the implant area, and fix him on a post in a big bunch of stuff ... put him on a post and wobbled him around and ran him through this implant of goals on a little monowheel. Little monowheel pole trap. And it had the effigy of a body on it ... Now, the Helatrobus implants (call them the heaven implants for the public), these things were preceded, then, by a tremendous period of unrest. You could imagine what would happen on a planet which has been going along its peaceful ways minding its own business - no trouble, no wars, nothing like that - and suddenly its clouds turn into radioactive masses. Well, maybe there wasn't a great deal of trouble for a while, but then all of a sudden you'd have these orange bursts suddenly coming down out of these clouds, representing God and chariots, or something, you know, and all kinds of rumors being thrown around, and talking, this and that. After that period, the planet would be almost totally in revolt. No organized government was possible, people were going out sacrificing themselves, everybody was in a terrific state of gloom or fantastic warfare, they would fight anybody they laid their eyes on because they didn't know what was happening. Trying to hold the fort during any period such as that was well nigh impossible ... You had a very worried thetan by that time." [above three passages from Hubbard, "State of OT", SHSBC-268, lecture of 23 May 63] Wouldn't you be worried in such a situation? The Helatrobites were evidently not very nice people - from what Ron says, classic "1.1s" (backstabbers): "... This interplanetary nation called Helatrobus - little pipsqueak government, didn't amount to very much. They had gold crosses on their planes, like the American Red Cross or something of the sort. And everybody thought they were nice, ineffectual people. Nobody could trace down who was doing all of it. They had developed some technology. This technology probably was not totally unknown around about the place, but nobody put it together or combined it with an energy which was peculiarly commanding upon a thetan. Now, that energy was cold energy. And that's probably the big mystery about - you wonder what this energy was. Actually it's frozen energy. It's based on the fact that certain energies do not thrive in sub- sub-subzero temperatures. And this is a cold energy action, so therefore your pcs get very cold and get very hot and so on while running it." [Hubbard, "State of OT", SHSBC-268, lecture of 23 May 63] There might have been alternative explanations for Hubbard's preclears' hot and cold flushes, but he was obviously not a man to let the mundane explanation get in the way of the exotic. The Helatrobites were minor players, however, compared to the eighty trillion-year-old Marcab or Galactic Confederacy, of which the infamous Xenu was the "supreme rulah" [sic]. Hubbard's interest in the Marcabs was that they used to rule Earth, or Teegeeack as it was in those days: "This planet is part of a larger federation - was part of an earlier federation and passed out of its control due to losses in war and other such things. Now, this larger confederacy - this isn't its right name, but we have often called it and referred to it in the past as the Marcab Confederacy. And it has been wrongly or rightly pointed to as one of the tail stars of the Big Dipper, which is the capital planet of which this planet is. [sic] ... In the last ten thousand years, they have gone on with a sort of a decadent, kicked-in-the-head civilization that contains automobiles, business suits, fedora hats, telephones, spaceships - quite interesting, but a civilization which looks an almost exact duplicate, but is worse off than the current U.S. civilization." [Hubbard, "Definition of an Auditor", SHSBC-291, lecture of 6 Aug 63] The Marcabs are still around and pose an ever-present danger which every Scientologist must be aware of. "Captain" Bill Robertson, a Scientologist who eventually became too loony even for Scientology (quite an achievement), reputedly used to station observers on the roof of the Edinburgh org each night to watch for the incoming Marcab invasion fleet. Hubbard too was on the lookout: "Scientologists, every once in a while, hearing me talk like this, feel even more in danger. They say, "Boy, those guys are liable to land here tomorrow," you know? Of course, I pull this every once in a while. Diana suddenly appeared on my right side last night while eating dinner (and I didn't even know she was in the room, you see?), and just out of the corner of my eye, I saw a pair of white spots that looked like the spats a spaceman uses, you know? And for a split second I said, "Well, here they are," you know?" [Hubbard, "Definition of an Auditor", SHSBC-291, lecture of 6 Aug 63] Tin foil hats at the ready! It's better seeing Marcabs than pink elephants, I suppose, though both probably came from the same place. The Marcabs also had peculiar tastes in recreation, which Hubbard explained in another SHSBC lecture: "It was about nineteen thousand years ago, twenty thousand, thirty thousand, forty thousand, In the Marcab Confederacy they had a race- track. And you were probably there. And you either have attended its races or had something to do with it, because you find it on most cases ... They had turbine-generated cars that went about 275 miles an hour. They ran with a high whine. I notice they've just now invented the motor again. And they had tracks that were booby-trapped with atom bombs, and they had side bypasses. The tracks were mined, and the grandstands were leaded-paned. And the audience - it got to be kind of a "no audience." You never could see the audience." (Perhaps because they'd all been blown up by the atom bombs on the track?) "And oh, they had loose-sand sections and they had slick-oil asphalt and they had ice sections and loose gravel. Any kind of hazards you could think of. A mountain that you went up to the top of and fell off; you know? And just - there were just more drivers killed. There was more blood pouring on that track, you see, all the time. I mean it was always goofed up. Ten, twelve thousand years, this was the favorite sport of the Marcab Confederacy, apparently ... You've probably often wondered what that needle-like pinging was in the back of your neck. Well, you probably wound up on the track some time or another as a driver or something of the sort ... The Marcab Confederacy's medicine was so excellent that an individual just couldn't die out of it. That was all. They would drag you back and fit an arm on, fit a leg on, fit a nose on, fit an eye in. They could give you artificial voices and artificial vision and artificial digestion and artificial everything else. The next thing you know, there wasn't even an original part left including you, you see?" Hubbard himself had been a Marcabian racing driver and recalled his numerous past lives with increasingly improbable racing names: "And [I would] just go in there and be the Silver Streak, you know? The Silver Streak. You know, so many laps in so many seconds, you know? Track record! Track record. I'd get bored with it and do what I went down there to do anyhow. Work it out in such a way that it really wasn't my fault for knocking myself off, you see? And take one of these cars and wham it into the grandstand or some such place, see, and that'd be the end of that body. And nobody could argue with it, see? Medical science could do nothing after that ... But after a while this got rather bad because - [I would] come down the track and I'd be the Red Comet, see, driving around. Get to walking in and out of the lobby, and I'd see this picture here of the Silver Streak. And I'd look at this, "Track record so-and-so, so-and- so, so-and-so. Aaah, who's this guy," you know? ... So anyhow, a few lifetimes later, why, things would be going along pretty good, and the mock-up would be all patched up, and I'd think I was due for a new issue or something like that, and I'd wind up down at the racetrack. Total nom de plume identity - my own identity totally masked, you know, and go in there as the - the Green Rocket! And as the Green Rocket, you know, be going errrr-vrooom! you know, that sort of thing. And one day walking through the lobby, "The Red Comet. The Silver Streak. Nyah, who are these bums? Track record so- and-so and so-and-so and leaped six cars. Six cars." ... I'd just keep going back and beating my own record, see? And I finally would just be exhausted, you know? You know, the Green Rocket. The Red Comet. The Silver Streak. You know? The Gold Bomb, you know? Oh! Whoo!" [Hubbard, "Create and Confront", lecture of 3 January 1960] Whoo, indeed. With Hubbard claiming to be an expert in 27 separate fields of activity, it's surprising he didn't add "Marcabian racing driver" to the list. The Marcabs evidently have a lot to answer for. Apart from Xenu and his galactic genocide, Marcabian implanting has caused a lot of destruction resulting from the rampages of angry thetans. Says Hubbard, "I wish I had a nickel for every implant station that's ever been destroyed. I've known thetans to make a career out of it. In fact, I've knows thetans to tilt a planet ten or fifteen degrees, with the equivalent avalanches and glacial epochs and so forth, or pull the air cover of a civilization just because it went on implanting. In fact, there's a lot of things happen because of this. Why? Because somebody was implanting ... Look at the amount of time and effort and energy expended. Why, in any given day the appropriation of the U.S. armed forces is probably less than the Marcabian appropriation for the maintenance of implant stations." [Hubbard, "Rightness and Wrongness", SHSBC-299, lecture of 27 Aug 63] One would imagine that this might be the case, given the relative scale of resources of one country on one small planet versus a Galactic Confederacy... The Marcab implants were of a peculiarly vicious nature. When the Marcab Invasion Force arrived on the scene, it implanted thetans with the dreaded Train GPMs: "The implanting is done from a huge train station. The announcer, through speakers on the platform, gives continual running fire of wrong dates and directions, and orders to depart and return to this point, and "you don't know when this happened to you." A lot of hellos and goodbyes and false information. The being is put in a railway carriage quite like a British railway coach with compartments. Speakers are to the right and left in the compartment." (Presumably this explains the abject condition of Britain's railways. They're all a restimulated Marcabian implant. This is one Hubbardism I *can* believe.) "The train is backed up rapidly through eight pairs of stands (eight on either side of the track, sixteen in all.) These spray white energy against the side of the carriage. None of the white energy touches the pc ... At the start of each goal (or pair perhaps) a face may come up and say "You still here? Get out. Get off this train. We hate you." And from the speakers "This happened to you yesterday, tomorrow, now. This is your departure point, keep coming back. You'll be meeting all your friends here. When you're killed and dead keep coming back. You haven't a chance to get away. You've got to report in. This happened to you days ago, weeks ago, years ago. You don't know when this happened to you. We hate you. Get out. Don't ever come back." There's a lot more of this including how you'll be pulled and pulled when you're dead until you come back. A lot of wrong dates are also thrown in." [Hubbard, "Routine 3N - The Train GPMs - The Marcab Between Lives Implants", HCO Bulletin of 24 Aug 1963] Remember, people, that this is all *religious scripture*. Sci-fi? Not a bit of it! Has a lot -- you say, well, this is science fiction. No. No, no. No. The only part of science fiction there are, is the mistakes the science fiction writers have made while writing about their own past. They've made a lot of errors there. [Hubbard, "The Helatrobus Implants", SHSBC-266, lecture of 21 May 63] All of this weirdness came well before 1967's OT-3. It built on "work" which Hubbard had done more than a decade previously in which he determined that "entheta beings" called Targs were keeping virtuous thetans prisoner on planet Earth. As I explained in an essay last month, Hubbard came up with these bizarre theories through a process of stream-of-consciousness free association and guided "recollection". Dug up from the archives, winded up and released on ARS. ..... There are four things about all of this which constantly amaze me. 1 - that Hubbard had the nerve to spout such bizarreness in the first place; 2 - that people were willing to hang onto his every word without at any point standing up and saying "this is bollocks"; 3 - that people *still* fork out large sums of money to buy this stuff. It takes all sorts, I suppose... Chris Owen - chriso@OISPAMNOlutefisk.demon.co.uk |