Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(39)
After initially resisting the concept of past lives, Hubbard became passionately interested in the subject. “We Come Back” was the motto of the Sea Org. Hubbard began recalling many of his own previous existences, which the E-Meter validated. He claimed to have been a contemporary of Machiavelli’s, and he was still upset that the author of The Prince stole his line “The end justifies the means.” He said he had been a marshal to Joan of Arc and Tamburlaine’s wife. He told stories about driving a race car in the alien Marcab civilization millions of years before. He came to believe that in some of his past lives on this planet, he had buried treasure in various locations, so he launched an expedition to unearth his ancient hoards. He called it the Mission into Time. He selected a small crew to go on the Avon River. Because he wanted to keep the mission secret, he had two long rafts fashioned, which could be rowed ashore under cover of darkness and pulled up on the beach near where he imagined his ancient treasure was buried. When Hana Eltringham saw she wasn’t on the list, she wrote Hubbard, pleading to be included, saying she would be willing to perform any duty. To her surprise, Hubbard appointed her chief officer.
One very dark, overcast night in 1968, the Avon River dropped anchor on the western coast of Sicily, in the bay of Castellammare del Golfo, beside a steep promontory topped by an ancient watchtower. Hubbard gave his “missionaires” a treasure map he had drawn up based on his past-life recollections. The crew set out in one of the rafts toward the rocky shoreline, lugging ropes, shovels, and metal detectors. Giggling and tripping over each other, they scrambled up a ten-foot cliff. It was so dark they couldn’t see more than a foot in front of their faces. Each had a hand on another’s shoulder as they picked their way through stands of cactus along the rocky outcropping. At one point, the leader of the expedition bumped into a cow. The cow started mooing, then a dog barked, and a light went on in a house nearby. Everyone stood dead still until the scene quieted down. Finally, the clouds parted enough for the moon to shine through. The missionaires found some old bricks they thought might have been the ruins of a castle beside the watchtower. The metal detectors found nothing.
Hubbard decided to come along the next day to inspect the site himself. “Yes, yes, this is the place!” he said excitedly. He explained the absence of treasure by saying that it must have been hidden in a portion of the ruined castle that had fallen into the sea.
The expedition moved on to Sardinia, where Hubbard claimed to have had an affair with the priestess in a temple—“liaisons in the moonlight,” he told his enchanted missionaires—when he was a Carthaginian sailor. “We had a lot of good-looking girls in Carthage but they didn’t come up to her.” The Avon River next stopped in Calabria, on the toe of Italy, where Hubbard had buried gold in his days as a tax collector in the Roman Empire. None was found, however.
Near Tunis, where the missionaires hoped to dive on the ruins of an ancient underwater city, Hubbard found fault with the captain of the Avon River, Joe van Staden, and booted him off the ship. Eltringham was sitting at her desk on the ’tween deck when Hubbard called her into his office and told her she was the new captain of the four-hundred-ton trawler, starting in the morning. Eltringham went back to her desk and put her head in her hands. She was twenty-six years old. Everything she knew about sailing she had learned from Hubbard. To his credit, he had been a good teacher. He had taken a dozen members of the original Sea Org crew and taught them the semaphore code, how to navigate using a sextant, and basic laws of the sea. But she knew nothing about running the engine room, or operating the electronics on the bridge, or docking a ship. Half an hour later, Hubbard stuck his head out of his office and beckoned to her. He was holding an E-Meter. Standing in the doorway where everyone could see them, Hubbard handed her the cans. Then he screwed up his eyes and demanded, “Recall a time you were last a captain.” As Eltringham closed her eyes and began to free-associate, Hubbard watched the needle on the E-Meter.
“What’s that?” he asked, when the needle suddenly dropped.
“That was sometime on a ship somewhere and the ship was sinking,” Eltringham responded.
“Okay, go back earlier.” A moment later, he asked her again, “What’s that?”
“That’s just a lot of confusion. I’m in a cabin with a lot of other people. Something urgent is going on.”
Hubbard asked her to talk more about it. Eltringham began to see the incident more clearly. “We were in some kind of spaceship,” she said. “We were under attack and—oh my God!—I can see a planet down there! And the planet’s on fire! And something is shooting at us and—oh my God!—the spaceship exploded!”
Hubbard asked her to tell the story several more times to destimulate the incident. Then he asked Eltringham how she was feeling.
“I’m fine, sir.”
Hubbard screwed up his eyes again. “Do you have any other thoughts about it?” Eltringham realized that he was looking for a floating needle, but she wasn’t able to give it to him.
“Okay, one more question. Are you a loyal officer?”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Eltringham said. “I’m loyal to you, and I’m an officer.”
Hubbard said, “All right, that’s as far as we’ll go this time.”
Eltringham walked up on the deck and tried to take in what Hubbard meant. Suddenly it came to her. Hubbard wasn’t talking about the present. He was referring to the time in her visualization. Some catastrophe must have happened. Eltringham realized that it must have been her planet that was being attacked, and she had been trying to save it.