In 1929 L. Ron Hubbard returned to the United States and returned to formal education by enrolling in George Washington University. At his father’s request he studied mathematics, engineering and attended the first American class on atomic and molecular phenomena. These subjects gave him the knowledge to continue searching for answers to his questions of the human mind and life and he became the first to bring a scientific method to age–old questions of existence. However, when he approached the Psychology Department of the university, he found they did not have the answers he was looking for and were not interested, as he later wrote:

“It was very obvious that I was dealing with and living in a culture which knew less about the mind than the lowest primitive tribe I had ever come in contact with. Knowing also that people in the East were not able to reach as deeply and predictably into the riddles of the mind as I had been led to expect, I knew I would have to do a lot of research.”