I have no idea of your knowledge of the man himself, but he was the son of
a navy man (if memory recalls) and travelled extensively around the world.
He was, in fact, an engineer, but:

Now, man had been thinking for an awful long time about man.  I was in the
Orient when I was very young.  Of course, I was a harum-scarum kid; I
wasn't thinking about deep philosophical problems, but I had a lot of
friends - such a friend as Commander "Snake" Thompson.  He was a very
interesting man.  He signed his name Thompson by drawing a snake over the
top of the T.  He was quite unique.  I think the man is still very well
known by repute in the navy today, but he has been dead, I regret to say,
these very many years.

He had studied under Signmund Frued, and he found me a very wide-eyed and
wide-eared boy.  He had just come from Vienna, and his mouth and mind were
full of associative words, libido theories, conversion, and all the rest of
it.  He was a fascinating man.  He had been out into the Polynesian group,
and he had dug up ancient skeletons of a race nobody had ever suspected
before.  He had served as an intelligence officer in Japan during the First
World War.  He did his job so very well that he was court-martialed.

The old man had a tremendous influence upon me, and I'm very sorry that he
is not alive today.

I was brought back by my father summarily from my wanderings.  I had
neglected to go to high school...

The old man was very skeptical to a man studying atomic and molecular
phenomena would ever come up with any sort of an answer about human memory
storage, until I showed him one day that it was impossible for existing
knowledge of structure to be accurate, because the mind obviously could not
store memory... And there were no known waves or sizes of waves which
could, in themselves, come into the brain and be stored in some fashion...

In spite of the fact that I started out in the beginning trying to isolate
life force, I find myself still balked at a barrier.  Perhaps we will be
able to sense, measure of experience this thing life force - to put it on a
meter, perhaps pump into a corpse, who knows?  There's something there
about life force.  It seems to me, the further I go into the problem, that
religion had a lot to say in its favor.  I don't know where memory is
stored in the mind; I don't know where the personality is stored; I don't
know how these things come about.  But I do know the error, and the various
errors and their mechanics which cause the humand mind to think
incorrectly, aberratedly.

(end of quote)

Now, there is the matter of the e-meter, which you may or may not have
heard of.  Allegedly, there is an electrical field surrounding every living
thing, and the e-meter (which Hubbard did not invent, by the way), is
capable of detecting this field.  Now, I don't know how accurate or useful
or truthful all of this is, but the fact is, the e-meter does detect
something.  Holding the cans which are connected by wires to this thing,
the typical test is to have someone pinch you on the arm.  The needle on
the e-meter will bop back and forth.  Now, when asked to remember that
rise, you see the needle do the same thing.  On subsequent recalls, the bop
becomes less and less and eventually disappears.  I can tell you without
doubt that this is no trick, that I have seen examples under conditions
that belie this possibility.

(please continue)