L. Ron Hubbard’s earlier adventures lead straight to February 19th, 1940, the day he was honored with a place in the invitation-only Explorers Club.

Amongst other cited qualifications for admission were Mr. Hubbard’s additions to West Indies Coast Pilots, his mineralogical survey of Puerto Rico, and reports to the Department of Commerce resulting in the closure of some thirty hazardous airstrips.

Accordingly, L. Ron Hubbard flew the Explorers Club’s coveted flag during his next formal venture: the 1940 Alaskan Radio Experimental Expedition.

Conducted aboard the Magician, a thirty-two-foot ketch, the voyage called for the testing of a then-novel radio direction finder instrument between Puget Sound and the Alaska Panhandle. Described as the first real navigational improvement since the sextant, this experimental instrument stands as the linear antecedent to the Loran (Long Range Navigation) system, which was employed across all sea and air lanes until satellite technology arrived in the latter years of the twentieth century.

Also pertinent to the two-thousand-mile voyage was Mr. Hubbard’s recharting of an especially treacherous Inside Passage, and his ethnological study of indigenous Aleuts and Haidas.

Along the way, he not only roped a Kodiak bear, but braved seventy-mile-an-hour winds and commensurate seas off the Aleutian Islands. While amongst other trying moments came engine failures amidst thirty foot waves and an absolutely hellish passage through a raging gauntlet known as the Seymour Narrows—all while snapping rolls of thirty-five-millimeter film with a stereoptical lens for three-dimensional detail. Hence, the tattered condition of his first Explorers Club flag number 105.

Or as L. Ron Hubbard himself so succinctly put it: “What is life without challenge?”