-Caveat Lector-
AL HUBBARD -- THE ORIGINAL "CAPTAIN TRIPS"
by Todd Brendan Fahey
[This investigative article originally appeared in the
November, 1991, issue of "High Times."]
Before Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ... before
Timothy Leary ... before Ken Kesey's band of Merry Pranksters and
their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests ... before the dawn of the
Grateful Dead, there was Alfred M. Hubbard: the Original Captain
Trips.
You will not read about him in the history books. He left
no diary, nor chatty relatives to memorialize him in print. And
if a cadre of associates had not recently agreed to open its
files, Captain Alfred M. Hubbard might exist in death as he did
in life -- a man of mirrors and shadows, revealing himself to
even his closest friends only on a need-to-know basis.
They called him "the Johnny Appleseed of LSD." He was to
the psychedelic movement nothing less than the membrane through
which all passed to enter into the Mysteries. Beverly Hills
psychiatrist Oscar Janiger once said of Hubbard, "We waited for
him like a little old lady for the Sears-Roebuck catalog."
Waited for him to unlock his ever-present leather satchel loaded
with pharmaceutically-pure psilocybin, mescaline or his personal
favorite, Sandoz LSD-25.
Those who will talk about Al Hubbard are few. Oscar Janiger
told this writer that "nothing of substance has been written
about Al Hubbard, and probably nothing ever should."
He is treated like a demigod by some, as a lunatic uncle by
others. But nobody is ambivalent about the Captain: He was as
brilliant as the noonday sun, mysterious as the rarest virus, and
friendly like a golden retriever.
The first visage of Hubbard was beheld by Dr. Humphry
Osmond, now senior psychiatrist at Alabama's Bryce Hospital. He
and Dr. John Smythies were researching the correlation between
schizophrenia and the hallucinogens mescaline and adrenochrome at
Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada, when an A.M. Hubbard
requested the pleasure of Osmond's company for lunch at the swank
Vancouver Yacht Club.
Dr. Osmond later recalled, "It was a very dignified place,
and I was rather awed by it. [Hubbard] was a powerfully-built man
... with a broad face and a firm hand-grip. He was also very
genial, an excellent host."
Captain Hubbard was interested in obtaining some mescaline,
and, as it was still legal, Dr. Osmond supplied him with some.
"He was interested in all sorts of odd things," Osmond laughs.
Among Hubbard's passions was motion. His identity as "captain"
came from his master of sea vessels certification and a stint in
the US Merchant Marine.
At the time of their meeting in 1953, Al Hubbard owned
secluded Daymen Island off the coast of Vancouver -- a former
Indian colony surrounded by a huge wall of oyster shells. To
access his 24-acre estate, Hubbard built a hangar for his
aircraft and a slip for his yacht from a fallen redwood. But it
was the INNER voyage that drove the Captain until his death in
1982. Fueled by psychedelics, he set sail and rode the great wave
as a neuronaut, with only the white noise in his ears and a fever
in his brain.
His head shorn to a crew and wearing a paramilitary uniform
with a holstered long-barrel Colt .45, Captain Al Hubbard showed
up one day in '63 on the doorstep of a young Harvard psychologist
named Timothy Leary.
"He blew in with that uniform ... laying down the most
incredible atmosphere of mystery and flamboyance, and really
impressive bullshit!"
Leary recalls, "He was pissed off. His Rolls Royce had
broken down on the freeway, so he went to a pay phone and called
the company in London. That's what kind of guy he was. He started
name-dropping like you wouldn't believe ... claimed he was
friends with the Pope."
Did Leary believe him?
"Well, yeah, no question."
The captain had come bearing gifts of LSD, which he wanted
to swap for psilocybin, the synthetic magic mushroom produced by
Switzerland's Sandoz Laboratories. "The thing that impressed me,"
Leary remembers, "is on one hand he looked like a carpetbagger
con man, and on the other he had these most-impressive people
in the world on his lap, basically backing him."
Among Hubbard's heavyweight cheerleaders was Aldous Huxley,
author of the sardonic novel "Brave New World." Huxley had been
turned on to mescaline by Osmond in '53, an experience that
spawned the seminal psychedelic handbook "The Doors of
Perception." Huxley became an unabashed sponsor for the chemicals
then known as "psychotomimetic" - literally, "madness-mimicking."
But neither Huxley nor Hubbard nor Osmond experienced
madness, and Dr. Osmond wrote a rhyme to Huxley one day in the
early 1950s, coining a new word for the English language, and a
credo for the next generation: "To fathom hell or soar angelic /
Just take a pinch of psychedelic."
* * *
Those who knew Al Hubbard would describe him as just a
"barefoot boy from Kentucky," who never got past third grade. But
as a young man, the shoeless hillbilly was purportedly visited by
a pair of angels, who told him to build something. He had
absolutely no training, "but he had these VISIONS, and he learned
to trust them early on," says Willis Harman, director of the
Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, CA.
In 1919, guided by other-worldly forces, Hubbard invented
the Hubbard Energy Transformer, a radioactive battery that could
not be explained by the technology of the day. The Seattle Post-
Intelligencer reported that Hubbard's invention, hidden in an 11"
x 14" box, had powered a ferry-sized vessel around Seattle's
Portico Bay nonstop for three days. Fifty percent rights to the
patent were eventually bought by the Radium Corporation of
Pittsburgh for $75,000, and nothing more was heard of the Hubbard
Energy Transformer.
Hubbard stifled his talents briefly as an engineer in the
early 1920s, but an unquenchable streak of mischief burned in the
boy inventor. "Vancouver" magazine's Ben Metcalfe reports that
Hubbard soon took a job as a Seattle taxi driver during
Prohibition. With a sophisticated ship-to-shore communications
system hidden in the trunk of his cab, Hubbard helped rum-runners
to successfully ferry booze past the US and Canadian Coast
Guards. He was, however, caught by the FBI and went to prison for
18 months.
After his release, Hubbard's natural talent for electronic
communications attracted scouts from Allen Dulles's Office of
Strategic Services (OSS). Also according to Metcalfe, Hubbard was
at least peripherally involved in the Manhattan Project.
The captain was pardoned of any and all wrongdoing by Harry
S. Truman under Presidential Pardon #2676, and subsequently
became *agent" Captain Al Hubbard of the OSS. As a maritime
specialist, Hubbard was enjoined to ship heavy armaments from San
Diego to Canada at night, without lights, in the waning hours of
World War II -- an operation of dubious legality, which had him
facing a Congressional investigation. To escape federal
indictment, Hubbard moved to Vancouver and became a Canadian
citizen.
Parlaying connections and cash, Hubbard founded Marine
Manufacturing, a Vancouver charter-boat concern, and in his early
40s realized his lifelong ambition of becoming a millionaire. By
1950 he was scientific director of the Uranium Corporation of
Vancouver, owned his own fleet of aircraft, a 100-foot yacht, and
a Canadian island.
And he was miserable.
"Al was desperately searching for meaning in his life,"
says Willis Harman. Seeking enlightenment, Hubbard returned to an
area near Spokane, WA, where he'd spent summers during his youth.
He hiked into the woods and an angel purportedly 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," says Harman. "But he hadn't the
faintest clue what he was supposed to be looking for."
In 1951, reading a scientific journal, Hubbard stumbled
across an article about the behavior of rats given LSD. "He knew
that was it," says Harman. Hubbard went and found the person
conducting the experiment, and came back with some LSD for
himself. After his very first acid experience, he became a True
Believer.
"Hubbard discovered psychedelics as a boon and a
sacrament," recalls Leary.
A 1968 memorandum states that Hubbard was at various times
employed by the Canadian Special Services, the US Justice
Department and, ironically, what is now the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms.
Whether he was part of the CIA mind-control project known
as MK-ULTRA, might never be known: all paperwork generated in
connection with that diabolical experiment was destroyed in '73
by MK-ULTRA chief Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, on orders from then-CIA
Director Richard Helms, citing a "paper crisis."
Under the auspices of MK-ULTRA the CIA regularly dosed its
agents and associates with powerful hallucinogens as a preemptive
measure against the Soviets' own alleged chemical technology,
often with disastrous results. The secret project would see at
least two deaths: tennis pro Harold Blauer died after a massive
injection of MDA; and the army's own Frank Olson, a
biological-warfare specialist, crashed through a closed window in
the 12th floor of New York's Statler Hotel, after drinking cognac
laced with LSD during a CIA symposium. Dr. Osmond doubts that
Hubbard would have been associated with such a project "not
particularly on humanitarian grounds, but on the grounds that it
was 'bad technique.'"
But Hubbard's secret connections did allow him to expose
over 6,000 people to LSD before it was effectively banned in '66.
He shared the sacrament with a prominent Monsignor of the
Catholic Church in North America, explored the roots of
alcoholism with AA founder Bill Wilson, and stormed the pearly
gates with Aldus Huxley (in a session that resulted in the
psychedelic tome "Heaven and Hell").
Laura Huxley met Captain Hubbard for the first time at her
and her husband's Hollywood Hills home in the early 1960s. "He
showed up for lunch one afternoon, and he brought with him a
portable tank filled with a gas of some kind. He offered some to
us," she recalls, "but we said we didn't care for any, so he put
it down and we all had lunch. He went into the bathroom with the
tank after lunch, and breathed into it for about ten seconds. It
must have been very concentrated, because he came out revitalized
and very jubilant, talking about a vision he had seen of the
Virgin Mary."
"I was convinced that he was the man to bring LSD to planet
Earth," remarks Myron Stolaroff, who was assistant to the
president of long-range planning at Ampex Corporation when he met
the captain. Stolaroff learned of Hubbard through philosopher
Gerald Heard, a friend and spiritual mentor to Huxley. "Gerald
had reached tremendous levels of contemplative prayer, and I
didn't know what in the world he was doing fooling around with
drugs."
Heard had written a letter to Stolaroff, describing the
beauty of his psychedelic experience with Al Hubbard. "That
letter would be priceless -- but Hubbard, I'm sure, arranged to
have it stolen.... He was a sonofabitch: God and the Devil, both
there in full force."
Stolaroff was so moved by Heard's letter that, in '56, he
agreed to take LSD with Hubbard in Vancouver. "After that first
LSD experience, I said 'this is the greatest discovery man has
ever made.'"
He was not alone.
Through his interest in aircraft, Hubbard had become
friends with a prominent Canadian businessman. The businessman
eventually found himself taking LSD with Hubbard and, after
coming down, told Hubbard never to worry about money again: He
had seen the future, and Al Hubbard was its Acid Messiah.
<cont'd in part 2>
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