Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

by Lawrence Wright

As for Hubbard himself, the board described him as “a man of restless energy” who is “constantly experimenting and speculating, and equally constantly he confuses the two.” “Some of his claims are that … he has been up in the Van Allen Belt, that he has been on the planet Venus where he inspected an implant station, and that he has been to Heaven. He even recommends a protein formula for feeding non-breast fed babies—a mixture of boiled barley and corn syrup—stating that he ‘picked it up in Roman days.’ ” Although Hubbard has “an insensate hostility” to psychiatrists and people in the field of mental health, the report noted, he is himself “mentally abnormal,” evincing a “persecution complex” and “an imposing aggregation of symptoms which, in psychiatric circles, are strongly indicative of a condition of paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of grandeur—symptoms common to dictators.”