Never losing sight of his main quest, he continued his research with expeditions to pioneer lands. He would eventually study 21 races and cultures while searching out the “common denominator of existence” In early 1938, he made a breakthrough of magnitude: he isolated the common denominator of existence: SURVIVE. That man was surviving was not a new idea. But that this was the single basic common denominator of existence was. That all life was ultimately and only attempting to survive — this was entirely new. L. Ron Hubbard originally presented this discovery in a manuscript known as Excalibur, however he chose not to publish this as it did not include an actual therapy for improvement.

L. Ron Hubbard had many exploratory achievements through these years, and in 1940 he was admitted to the famous Explorers Club in New York among the leading ethnologists of that time. Expeditions during these years were carried out under the much sought after Explorers Club flag — particularly a voyage in 1940 to Alaska where he carried out landmark studies of Pacific Coast Indian tribes and also pioneered a long range navigation system which was used along all sea and air lanes right into the later decades of the twentieth century.