“I believed in satanism,” L. Ron Hubbard’s son said when asked what his religion was when he lived with his sci-fi writer father in Port Orchard. “There was no other religion in the house!”
At the time, L. Ron Hubbard mostly made money writing pulp stories about cowboys. But after a 1937 dentist appointment in Bremerton, where he believed he’d died while under the gas and had come back to life with a glimpse of how reincarnation works, Hubbard started to become more spiritual.
According to his son, Hubbard started performing bizarre experiments, including giving the 10-year-old boy bubble gum laced with phenobarbital, a potent anti-seizure drug, just to see what would happen. The adults in Hubbard’s orbit were not spared, either. His second wife included “scientific experiments” as one of the reasons she divorced him.