become a millionaire, owner of a fleet of aircraft, a one-hundred-foot
yacht, a Rolls-Royce, and a private island off Vancouver. At some point
during the war Hubbard apparently returned to the United States, and he
joined the OSS shortly before the wartime intelligence agency became the
CIA.
A few other curious facts about the prepsychedelic Al Hubbard: He
was an ardent Catholic, with a pronounced mystical bent. And he was
unusually flexible in his professional loyalties, working at various times
as a rum- and gunrunner as well as an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms. Was he a double agent of some kind? Possibly. At
one time or another, he also worked for the Canadian Special Services,
the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Food and Drug Administration.
His FBI file suggests he had links to the CIA during the 1950s, but the
redactions are too heavy for it to reveal much about his role, if any. We
know the government kept close tabs on the psychedelic research
community all through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s (funding university
research on LSD and scientific conferences in some cases), and it
wouldn’t be surprising if, in exchange for information, the government
would allow Hubbard to operate with as much freedom as he did. But this
remains speculation.
Al Hubbard’s life made a right-angled change of course in 1951. At the
time, he was hugely successful but unhappy, “desperately searching for
meaning in his life”—this according to Willis Harman, one of a group of
Silicon Valley engineers to whom Hubbard would introduce LSD later in
the decade. As Hubbard told the story to Harman (and Harman told it to
Todd Brendan Fahey), he was hiking in Washington State when an angel
appeared to him in a clearing. “She told Al that something tremendously
important to the future of mankind would be coming soon, and that he
could play a role in it if he wanted to. But he hadn’t the faintest clue what
he was supposed to be looking for.”
The clue arrived a year later, in the form of an article in a scientific
journal describing the behavior of rats given a newly discovered
compound called LSD. Hubbard tracked down the researcher, obtained
some LSD, and had a literally life-changing experience. He witnessed the
beginning of life on earth as well as his own conception. “It was the
deepest mystical thing I’ve ever seen,” he told friends later. “I saw myself
as a tiny mite in a big swamp with a spark of intelligence. I saw my
frankie
(Frankie)
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