>> True Information: The truth from Mr. Hubbard, which is supported by his service record, is that he was in New York City, in a cigar store on 8th Avenue when he heard the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

In stating “according to Hubbard,” Wright shows his research is shoddy. This inaccurate story appears to come from Wright using incomplete portions of a transcript of the testimony of Captain Thomas Moulton, Mr. Hubbard’s Executive Officer aboard the sub chaser PC815 in 1943. Wright excerpted the testimony in 1985 of Captain Moulton concerning Mr. Hubbard’s whereabouts on December 7th, 1941. Yet Wright omitted that several pages earlier in the transcript Captain Moulton—in replying to a question concerning the whereabouts of Mr. Hubbard when Pearl Harbor was bombed—stated, “I don’t know. I seem to remember he told me it was—it was on a destroyer, but I wouldn’t swear to it after all of this time.”

So in truth, Captain Moulton qualified his testimony, expressing his lack of certainty about a comment made to him more than 40 years earlier, and then relayed what he recalled. It never was, as Wright claimed, “according to Hubbard.”

L. Ron Hubbard always maintained he was in New York when he heard the news about Pearl Harbor. In a public lecture on December 27, 1951 entitled “Miracles in Dianetics,” which has been publicly available for years, Mr. Hubbard said the following:

“I have yet to receive a major piece of news from a newspaper. Somebody stopped me and told me. I walked out of the—a little cigar store on Eighth Avenue in New York and a bum was standing there, and he’d just had access to a radio. And he stopped me and he said, “Pearl Harbor is being bombed!” I imagine that by radio and so forth, the number of people who were at radios at that moment were not too many, but the amount of news which suddenly spread from those radios by word of mouth was tremendous.”

Supporting this statement is information in L. Ron Hubbard’s Naval records (a copy of which Wright claims to have). The record shows that on December 7, 1941, Mr. Hubbard was on active duty in New York at the District Intelligence Office of the 3rd Naval District. The office was located at 90 Church Street in Manhattan, blocks from Eighth Avenue. The next day, December 8, 1941, he left New York for San Francisco and duty in the Philippines.

This is another example of Wright’s sloppiness. He had the actual information available to him, supported by documents in his possession, but ignored Mr. Hubbard’s actual statement in favor of a flawed 40-year-old recollection about which the individual making the statement conceded he was uncertain.

>> Moulton Deposition on Pearl Harbor

“In 1930 I enlisted in the Fleet Marine Corps Reserve, 20th Regiment, Company G, and because my papers read in error and because no oath or birth certificate was involved, the error was perpetuated, whether correctly or not I cannot state.”

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