In 1967, the IRS yanked Scientology's tax-exempt status which it had enjoyed since 1954. This would lead to an ongoing battle between the Church of Scientology and the IRS that would drag on for more than two decades before ending in a most stunning way.

Hubbard is a conman and a crook. Almost nothing that he has said about himself is true. His claims of engineering and mathematics degrees from Columbian University (not Columbia), George Washington University and Princeton are bogus. He did attend these schools and he did take some engineering and nuclear physics classes but his grades were atrocious—all D's, E's, and F's. His claim of receiving a Ph.D. from Sequoia University is true. Sequoia University, however, is nothing more than a P.O. Box whose renter hands out mail-order degrees. Even then Hubbard's degree was honorary and his own name appears as a member of the Sequoia staff. In other words, Sequoia University is another Hubbard scam. He awarded himself an honorary doctorate.

While he had commanded a submarine chaser in WW2, his attempts to follow his father as a distinguished naval officer were a failure. He was relieved of his command after engaging a magnetic deposit on the ocean floor in a fierce battle. New editions of Dianetics state that Hubbard was once "teaching inexperienced naval crews to survive the ravages of a world war" and there is a certain amount of truth to this. After being relieved of his command, Hubbard was reassigned to a ship headed to a war zone. Hubbard applied for a transfer to the Princeton School of Military Government, which he received, and so got out of seeing any action. He spent only two months at the school. That's how he teaches inexperienced soldiers to survive the ravages of a world war: weasel out of it and let others do the fighting and then take credit for it afterwards. In the Navy, playing sick or finding excuses not to pull your own weight is called "malingering." Hubbard was the classic malingerer.

His personal life is sordid. He married Louise "Polly" Grubb in 1933. They had two children. He abandoned them in 1945 and obtained a divorce in 1947. The trouble is, he married Betty Northrup in 1946 and so was a bigamist. When one of his several sons expressed anger at his father over his behavior, Hubbard magnanimously disowned him. He saw his daughter only a few times.

When Hubbard founded his Sea Organization, a group of yachts that sailed the oceans endlessly looking for treasure Hubbard claimed he'd buried in a previous life (they never found anything), he was attended to by girls not even quite in their teens who wore miniskirts and high heels and waited on him hand and foot. He also claimed that the Nazis and the Communists were after him. He proclaimed himself an admiral. His temper tantrums were legendary. Some of the more attractive women who sailed in the Sea Org were pressured into having sex, he called it "sex magic," with him (one described him as almost painfully slow). One woman in the Sea Org committed suicide by shooting herself. He rarely bathed during this time, was fat, impotent, and his teeth were rotting. Nor was his untoward behavior confined to his last years, he was known as a heavy drinker and drug- and spousal-abuser in the fifties and had made claims to have visited heaven, Venus, and the Van Allen Belt in 1963.

Hubbard also launched Operation Snow White. He ordered his intelligence service, under Mary Sue's command, to break into government offices and steal documents related to him and to Scientology. They did this so well that, in 1977, the FBI raided the headquarters of Scientology in Clearwater, Florida and confiscated 48,149 documents that the group had stolen. For pulling off the most extensive infiltration of the federal government in U.S. history, nine people, including Mary Sue, were given heavy fines and Mary Sue was sentenced to prison for a year. During this time, Hubbard went into hiding and abandoned Mary Sue completely. To this day, she will not talk about Hubbard or the inner workings of the Church of Scientology.

Hubbard spent his last years in Creston, California living in a motor home that sat on a ranch he owned. There he died on January 24, 1986 at the age of 74 (even now, nobody's sure he really died there).

Ron DeWolf claims, to the contrary claims of Scientology's leaders, that his father ritually abused him regularly. Since Betty Northrup reported the same treatment back in 1951, we can be sure Hubbard was indeed abusive and a truly unbalanced individual. Quite possibly, he was a psychopath (Atack believes Hubbard was "a classic psychopath"). One Sea Org officer claims to have seen Hubbard molest a young boy while they were in North Africa in 1966 (where the Sea Org actually attempted to take over Morocco). Then again, Hubbard claimed to have once been "a marshal to Joan of Arc," an apparent reference to the cruel and sadistic pederast Gilles de Rais. Now that I believe!