ADVENTURER/EXPLORER

If L. Ron Hubbard’s name has become synonymous with grand exploration, it is only a consequence of having explored so many far-flung lands through his greater quest for the answers now found in Scientology. The goal had never been adventure per se, but merely, “I have gone through the world studying man in order to understand him and he, not my adventures in doing so, is the important thing.” Nor had he ever intended to make a legend of himself and, in fact, had only rarely discussed these matters. Finally, let us understand that the whole of Ron’s existence was an adventure and what appears here are but selections and accounts of key endeavors. Yet with all that established and remembering, as he so neatly phrased it, “What is life without challenge?” let us proceed with a few biographical notes Ron himself passed on to readers of Adventure magazine in the fall of 1935.

“I was born in Nebraska and three weeks later went to Oklahoma.” His next move was to Montana, about which he later quips, “I showed some signs of settling down, but I think this is merely rumor.” Proceeding from this, and before the age of six, came several notable adventures, including an extraordinary friendship with a Blackfoot medicine man and eventual acceptance as a tribal blood brother.

By the age of nineteen, Ron had traveled a quarter of a million miles, from Montana to Guam and D.C. to Hong Kong (he criss-crossed the Pacific four times), encountering Cantonese pirates at sea and British intelligence officers on land, among other colorful figures. His first formal exploratory voyage took him to the rim of an active volcano and the second to West Indies gold mines. All the while, and beyond mere wanderlust, these voyages took him closer to the development of Dianetics and Scientology technology; his mainline adventure towards that unknown land of “terra incognita,” the mind.

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