Alfred M. Hubbard: Mystery Man

Welcome to LSD week at Horkheimer's Conceptualization of Critical Theory. This is Alfred M. Hubbard. He is one of the most mysterious men I have read about recently. Here are 10 facts about him, but are they all really true? Dunno. Everything I read about him has more question marks than answers. Lots of links are embedded below in case you want to read more. A warning: You can't poke at Alfred M. Hubbard without unleashing a swirling, busy, buzzing beestorm of Conspiracy Theories. I'm not sayin' they're right, I'm not sayin' they're wrong, there are just a lot of them. Mostly, as I read about him I kept wondering: Did somebody make this guy up?

1) When he was very young--late teens--Alfred M. Hubbard invented the Hubbard Energy Transformer, aka "atmospheric power generator," aka "perpetual motion machine," aka a "radioactive battery" that kept a boat moving for three days. There was a lot of excitement about this potential energy source, he sold half the patent for $75,000 to the Radium Chemical Company of Pittsburgh, PA, and then POOF it vanished.
2) During Prohibition, Alfred M. Hubbard was a prominent member of a gang of bootleggers in Seattle. A taxi-driver, he had a "ship-to-shore communication device concealed in his trunk" and used it to help safely smuggle booze in from Canada. He went to prison for 18 months. He also might have been a government Prohibition agent. See what I mean about confusing? By the time he came out of prison, it appears that he had joined the OSS (now the CIA).
3) Alfred M. Hubbard "smuggled weapons into Great Britain before America's formal entrance into World War II. He sailed ships under cover of darkness to Vancouver, where they were refitted as destroyers bound for England, and he avoided matters involving official neutrality—some eighteen months before Pearl Harbor—by becoming a Canadian citizen. As America's man in Canada, Hubbard handled millions of dollars, filtered through the Canadian consulate, which financed covert operations in Europe."
4) Alfred M. Hubbard made millions in uranium, had a Rolls Royce, an airplane, and lived on an island that he owned (Daymen Island, apparently) off the coast of Vancouver. This did not make him happy. It might make me happy, but it did not make him happy.
5) Alfred M. Hubbard got really, really, really happy because he got really, really, really into LSD. In fact, he got so very into LSD that he was apparently called the "Johnny Appleseed of LSD." He gave Aldous Huxley LSD, as well as 6,000 other people including--he claimed--the Pope. You can read more about this in a book titled Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens. At the same time, he really hated Timothy Leary. A lot.
6) Alfred M. Hubbard might or might not have worked for the CIA and been part of the CIA's notorious Project MKULTRA which you would really need to read about to believe--unless you are naturally wary of the government, have a suspicious mind, and/or already know about it. If you are interested, apparently a small amount of documentation exists about the project after "the fire."
7) Alfred M. Hubbard appears to have gotten his doctorate in biopsychology from the University of Kentucky--although everyone who has written about him seems rather skeptical about this "doctorate"--and he went to work at Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster, Canada where he used LSD to cure wealthy patients--some of whom were Hollywood (U.S.) movie stars and prominent politicians (e.g., members of the Canadian Parliament) of alcoholicism, drug addiction, and psychological burn-out.
8) His last big effort was to get funding to use LSD with people with cancer. That fell through.
9) He died in a mobile home in Casa Grande, Arizona when he was 81 years old.
10) Who the hell really was this guy? And, why hasn't somebody made a movie about him?