The article presents an overview of Scientology and especially L. Ron Hubbard (its founder).
Those interested in the Navy’s connection to UFOs will find clues to that connection in the article, but they will find much more about the founder of Scientology, and it’s not a pretty picture.
Just as Christianity is marred by the machinations of its early followers and Constantine, and psychology is saddled by the permutations of Freud to make psychoanalysis viable to his colleagues [See Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s “The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory” – Ballantine Books, NY, 1984/2003], Scientology is riddled by the flaws of its founder L. Ron Hubbard.
And ufology? Where has that artful and contrived discipline gone wrong?
Ufology has no definitive founder, but the progenitors of the faux “science” were (and are) men flawed by a lack of scientific acumen and a lack of intellectual credentials.
Whereas Freud has great insights about the human mind and behavior, he muddled those profound insights by fudging truths and facts to make his (psychoanalytic) movement palatable to psychologists and the Victorian populace of his time.
L. Ron Hubbard had no profound insights, but his movement (Dianetics and then Scientology) has been promulgated by a patina of distortions and concocted legends of his acolytes, just as happened with Christianity. [See Bart D. Ehrman’s “Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible…” – Harper One, NY 2009]
In Ufology, one can’t point to a single person who led the study of UFOs astray but one can point fingers at persons such as Phil Klass (a perverse skeptic), Stanton Friedman (a biased researcher), and a host of other “ufologists” who had or have an agenda that has little or nothing to do with truth or science but is, rather, a ploy for self-aggrandizement.
The raft of persons who’ve led the study of UFOs/flying saucers astray is too vast to list here, and most readers know to whom we refer.
The point is that movements are always corrupted by followers or instigators who have self-promotion as their premise or ignorance at their foundation.
Psychiatry, Scientology says, is a crock. And Scientology may be right. Psychiatry moved away from a therapy based on the study of the mental afflictions of people to an overly of symptomatic suppression with drugs or various kinds, a move away from the methodology of Freud and his followers.
Freud may have compromised his movement by altering the truth of child seduction but his methodology for getting at unconscious truths was remarkable and unique, even helpful to those afflicted by neuroses of a sexual kind.
But the little insight by Scientology about psychiatry and drug-therapy doesn’t offset the flawed premises of L. Ron Hubbard, as you will see by the New Yorker article.
And since Jeffrey Masson exposed the flawed, dishonest Freudian account of child seduction – the root of neuroses according to psychoanalysis, and Bart Ehrman (among others) exposes the flawed, distorted beginnings of Christianity, why has no one exposed the flawed roots of ufology?
Yes, skeptics of UFOs abound, and some in the UFO community have assailed the fraudulent in the UFO/flying saucer era, but no one has made as thorough assessment of the UFO crockery as have Dr. Masson of Freud or Bart Ehrman of Christ’s early devotees.
L. Ron Hubbard has been skewered, and Freud too, along with Jesus’s early disciples. But nowhere has anyone taken on the personalities that have tried to make ufology a valid enterprise, using lies and distortions in the process.
Is that because ufology is seen, intrinsically, as the canard it basically is? Or is it because no one has the intellectual stamina to assail a thing as ridiculous as ufology?
We think it is both…
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