Death was a subject that Hubbard rarely addressed, assuring Scientologists that it was of little importance: “If you had an automobile sitting out here on the street and you came out totally expecting to find this automobile there and it’s gone, it’s been stolen and so forth, you’d be upset,” he said in 1957, reflecting on the death of one of his close followers. “Well, that’s just about the frame of mind a thetan is usually in when he finds his body dead.” The thetan has to report to a “between-lives” area, Hubbard later explained, which for most of them is the planet Mars. There the thetan is given a “forgetter implant.” “The implant is very interesting,” Hubbard later wrote. “The preclear is seated before a wheel which contains numbers of pictures. As the wheel turns, these pictures go away from him.… The whole effect is to give him the impression that he has no past life.” The thetan is then sent back to Earth to pick up a baby’s body as soon as it is born. “The baby takes its first gasp, why, a thetan usually picks it up.” Sometimes there is a shortage of new bodies, and occasionally a thetan will follow a pregnant woman around waiting for the moment of delivery so he can pounce. Contrarily, when a body dies, it’s important for the thetan to be freed as quickly as possible—preferably by cremating the corpse and scattering the ashes in water, so that nothing clings together. “It’s very confused, this whole subject of death,” Hubbard observed. “It’s quite funny, as a matter of fact, the amount of this and that that is paid, the amount of flowers and that sort of thing which are shipped around at dead corpses after the thetan has shoved off, and so on. It’s very amusing.” He presented himself as an expert on the subject, claiming he had been pronounced dead but had come back to life on two or three occasions.
Hubbard suffered a severe stroke on January 16, 1986, at the Creston ranch. He realized that he was in his final days. He summoned Ray Mithoff, one of his most senior Messengers, to help him put his affairs in order and administer a “death assist.” He didn’t ask to see any of his family members; indeed, one of his last actions was to sign a will reducing their inheritance, except for a provision for Mary Sue, who received $1 million, which may have been a part of the agreement that had kept her from testifying against him. He had previously disowned his daughter Alexis, an embarrassing reminder of his bigamous marriage to Sara Northrup. Hubbard was in a nightgown, pacing up and down, saying, “Let’s get this over with! My head is hurting!” He signed the will with a shaky hand.
Hubbard also proclaimed Flag Order 3879, “The Sea Org & the Future,” in which he promoted himself to Admiral and retired the rank of Commodore. He instituted a new rank, that of Loyal Officer, after the stalwart members of the Galactic Confederacy who had imprisoned the tyrannical overlord Xenu. Hubbard appointed only two persons to serve at that level, Pat and Annie Broeker. They were an attractive couple, his closest advisers; he was clearly passing them the scepter. “I’ll be scouting the way and doing the first port survey missions,” Hubbard promised his followers. “We will meet again later.”
On Friday evening, January 24, 1986, Hubbard died in the Blue Bird bus that had served as his living quarters for the past three years. Ray Mithoff, Pat Broeker, and Hubbard’s personal physician, Eugene Denk, were at his side, along with a handful of acolytes and employees. His body had suffered the usual insults of old age, along with the consequences of obesity and a lifetime of heavy smoking. Dr. Denk had given him injections of Vistaril, a tranquilizer, usually prescribed for anxiety. Whatever powers Scientology was supposed to bestow were no more evident in the death of its founder than they had been in his life.
Late that night, a handful of senior executives and a couple of private investigators drove to a restaurant in Paso Robles, where they were met by Pat Broeker, who guided them to the Creston ranch. The site was so secret that none of the executives, including Miscavige, had ever actually been there. They arrived around four in the morning. Earle Cooley, a church attorney, took charge of the body. At seven thirty that morning, about twelve hours after Hubbard’s death, the mortuary in San Luis Obispo was notified. Cooley demanded an immediate cremation, but when the owner of the mortuary saw the name on the death certificate, she called the coroner. After learning that Hubbard had signed a new will the day before his death, the coroner ordered an autopsy, but Cooley was able to produce a document signed by Hubbard stating that an autopsy would violate his religious beliefs. The lawyer did permit the coroner to take a blood sample and fingerprints to verify that the corpse was actually Hubbard. Many questions would be asked, since Hubbard hadn’t been seen in public for nearly six years.
There was another problem that had to be dealt with quickly: how to explain Hubbard’s death to Scientologists. Broeker and Miscavige came up with a plan: Hubbard didn’t die, he had intentionally “dropped his body” in order to move on to a higher level of existence.
Miscavige told one of the other executives he didn’t want to see “any grief bullshit.” Sinar Parman, Hubbard’s former chef, arrived that morning, to help with cooking and logistics. He found Annie Broeker sitting on the floor of the cabin, with Miscavige’s wife, Shelly. Annie had obviously been crying. Meanwhile, he noticed Miscavige and Broeker in another room. “They were joking,” he recalled. “They were ecstatic. They’d never been so happy.”