L. Ron Hubbard:
Founder of Dianetics and Scientology

Upon his return to the United States, he entered the Swavely Preparatory School in Manassas, Virginia, and then Woodward School for Boys in Washington, D.C. Following graduation from Woodward, he enrolled at George Washington University where he studied engineering. What had been kindled in Asia, however, an appreciation of a vast spiritual heritage, was not to be extinguished, and he was soon embarked upon a search for what he then termed “the Life essence.”

To that end, he enrolled in one of the nation's first nuclear physics classes where he examined the possibility that life might be explained in terms of small energy particles. It opened but a small crack in the door, but it was methodology such as this that led him to become the first 20th-century thinker to take a wholly scientific approach to inherently spiritual questions.

These George Washington University days were further significant as marking the start of Mr. Hubbard's professional writing career. As he later explained, however, the university held nothing for him in the way of an avenue for his larger quest, so he left to embark on several ethnological expeditions, first to various islands in the Caribbean and then to Puerto Rico, where he conducted that island's first mineralogical survey under United States rule. These expeditions would later be most noted in terms of ethnological work among Haitian Voodoo cults and the Puerto Rican Jiberaro.