

This is an excerpt from the book Watergate: The Hoax, by Ashton Gray, now on sale at Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and other fine book retailers. This is taken from Chapter 16, “The Sea Project, Ingo Swann, and a Damned Liar”:

Whatever he [L. Ron Hubbard] did in Tangier at the beginning of 1967, he was going to be coming back there. On this trip, he stayed in Tangier until nearly the end of February, when he flew to an old familiar place: Las Palmas, Canary Islands. He was there to meet up with his ship the Enchanter, which arrived there on 25 February 1967.

This event brings up an anecdote that is a classic example of the kind of uncorroborated gossip and garbage that is the stock-in-trade for the Hubbard hatchet-job “biographers” from Britain, all of them in league with the CIA and the Five Eyes. It’s embodied in the following melodramatic “account” of Hubbard’s arrival in Las Palmas to meet the Enchanter, told in Russell Miller’s Bare-Faced Messiah by one Virginia Downsborough, who opened herself to any smearer of Hubbard who wanted to probe her. She claimed to have been aboard the Enchanter, coming from Hull with a small crew—even though other sources cited in this book say the ship was in Clearwater, Florida, when purchased, and that Downsborough arrived later on a different ship, the Avon River. According to her, though, she and the Enchanter had already arrived when Hubbard got to Las Palmas, flying in from Tangier:

We found him a hotel in Las Palmas and next day I went back to see if he was all right, because he did not seem to be too well.

When I went in to his room there were drugs of all kinds everywhere. He seemed to be taking about sixty thousand different pills. I was appalled, particularly after listening to all his tirades against drugs and the medical profession. There was something very wrong with him, but I didn’t know what it was except that he was in a state of deep depression; he told me he didn’t have any more gains and he wanted to die. That’s what he said: “I want to die.” . . .

I moved into an adjoining room in the hotel to take care of him. He refused to eat the hotel food, so I got a little hotplate and cooked meals for him in the room, simple things, things that he liked. My main concern was to try and get him off all the pills he was on. . . .

I don’t know what drugs he was taking—they certainly weren’t making him high—but I knew I had to get him over it. I discussed it with him and gradually took them away. He didn’t carry on about it. He had brought a great pile of unopened mail with him from Tangier, a lot of it from Mary Sue, and I got him to start reading her letters. After about three weeks he decided he would get out of bed.

It’s oh-so-breathy, isn’t it? It’s been quoted and requoted and told and retold all over the Internet, all over the world, to “prove” what a fraud ol’ Hubbard was, taking all these drugs—about 60,000 different pills, don’t you know!—and being depressed, and lying in bed for three whole weeks. So much for the effectiveness of Scientology.

There’s one slight problem with Ms. Downsborough’s self-aggrandizing Florence Nightingale act: She and the miserable hack Russell Miller didn’t check the microfiche records for HASI, Inc., at the Arizona Corporation Commission. If they had, they would have discovered that on 28 February 1967—just three days after Hubbard met the Enchanter in Las Palmas on 25 February—he was nowhere near Las Palmas or any hotel there, hotplate or not; he was over 2,000 miles away, in the little burg of Crawley, West Sussex, England, where he and Mary Sue signed a notarized annual report for HASI, Inc. Crawley is 9.7 miles from East Grinstead, home of Saint Hill Manor. The annual report covered the fiscal year that had ended on 30 April 1966. [Below is a detail from that document, showing the date and signatures. —Ed.]

So the question becomes whether Ms. Downsborough is merely a self-aggrandizing muck-raking liar, or a damned self-aggrandizing muck-raking liar. (Miller unquestionably is the latter.)

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