UFOs and Scientology

The third floor at the headquarters of Scientology in Clearwater, Florida is devoted to the investigation of UFOs.

UFOs, or rather flying saucers, factored in Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s life: he and his intimate friend, rocket-fuel scientist John Whiteside Parsons, associated with Naval Intelligence in the late 1940s and early 1950s and both became advocates for flying saucer technology which was being studied diligently by the Navy.

Parsons, who lived with Hubbard, was a founder of a government rocket project at California Institute of Technology that later became the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

(Hubbard’s book ‘Dianetics” – the premise for Scientology – was used by some commanders in the Army and Navy as a kind of training manual.)

Hubbard, a writer of pulp science fiction, in a meeting with George Adamski during 1951, shared ideas about flying saucers and the “messages” that Adamski and Hubbard had allegedly received from flying saucer entities.

(Hubbard’s associations with Parsons, Aleister Crowley – the occultist – and Adamski helped fuel Scientology’s aura of secrecy and cultism.)

Hubbard had always maintained a secret UFO subset to Scientology that he shared only with his inner circle.

And in recent years that subset has become an aspect of Scientology that only the “religion’s” serious initiates study.

The Clearwater laboratory and/or research center has accumulated documents related to UFOs from Naval personnel who are Scientology members.

L. Ron Hubbard always had a Navy connection, and some contact with the CIA. His wartime service was Naval, and “early biographies issued by Scientology say that he was flown home in the late spring of 1942 in the secretary of the Navy's private plane as the first U.S.-returned casualty from the Far East." [Los Angeles Times. THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY by Joel Sappell and Robert W. Welkos, June 24-29, 1990]

(Naval Research is the one United States government agency that remains committed to investigation of UFOs and has done so since early on in the phenomenon’s appearance.)

What Scientology believes UFOs are or what members know about them, is not available to outsiders and not even available to outer members of the “religion.”

But the inner core take UFOs seriously, and some even go so far as to say that L. Ron Hubbard didn’t die in 1986 but was transported aboard a UFO, “ascending” to the heavens where he exists even to this day.

Whether or not Hubbard knew more than most about UFOs can’t be determined by outside sources not connected to Scientology, and perhaps not even by most Scientology members.

But, again, as usual, UFOs impact another mysterious organization, and confound those who study the phenomenon.