With colorful flimflam roots uncannily similar to those of William Leonard Pickard, Alfred Matthew Hubbard—boy scientist, rum runner, soldier of fortune, and international man of mystery—made the propagation of psychedelics his life’s work. His efforts earned him the titles “Johnny Acidseed” and “Captain Trips,” and established his place forever in the pantheon of psychonauts.
Like Pickard, Hubbard started out as prodigy, barely out of high school before he patented a contraption that purported to power everything from vehicles to light bulbs by extracting energy out of thin air.
The year was 1920. Though only nineteen at the time, the Kentucky wunderkind persuaded gullible newspaper reporters from coast to coast to print article after article about his discovery. “Boy Inventor Drives Boat with Mysterious Electric Air Engine—Experts Scoff,” read a headline in the Washington (DC) Herald ; “Boy Inventor Heads $5 million Company,” proclaimed the Oregon Daily Journal.
A decade later, the millions had vanished, as did Hubbard Universal Generator Inc. The now-penniless boy genius apprenticed himself to a Seattle bootlegger. In a sensational federal bribery scandal that involved a boatload of booze and a US senator, Hubbard became the prosecution’s star witness. His testimony sank the Senator but saved Hubbard from jail. Alas, the lure of easy bootleg money lingered. Six years later, a California jury convicted Hubbard of smuggling $1 million in Mexican liquor into the US. He got two years in federal prison.
Upon his release, Hubbard reinvented himself. Approaching middle age, he bought part ownership in a San Pedro fishing vessel, called himself Captain Al Hubbard and adopted the self-pro-claimed rank of Master Mariner. He moved to British Columbia, invested in a Canadian uranium mine, and earned enough to lease a small island off the coast of Vancouver where he chartered yachts and lived like a millionaire.
And yet, like the very successful Aldous Huxley, Captain Al felt empty inside. What exactly was the meaning of life? His chance meeting with Humphrey Osmond changed everything, just as it had for Huxley. Hubbard took Humphrey’s mescaline and became an evangelist.
In 1955, Captain Hubbard bought a PhD from a Chattanooga diploma mill and reinvented himself again, this time as Dr. Al Hubbard. He began crisscrossing the country, proselytizing like Professor Harold Hill. He wore a buzz cut, a tight-fitting khaki outfit akin to a Boy Scout uniform, and carried with him a pistol and omnipresent brown leather satchel that became the stuff of psychonaut legend: Captain Al’s pharmacy-in-a-briefcase.
Exactly how he acquired his endless supply of psychedelics remained a mystery. Some believed he had CIA connections; others thought his Boy Scout uniform got him past the Marine Guard at the Pentagon and into the Defense Department’s secret stash. But regardless of his sources, most subsequent psychonauts credit Captain Al with turning on America.
“We waited for him like a little old lady for the Sears Roebuck catalog,” recalled Dr. Oscar Janiger, the Beverly Hills psychiatrist who was responsible for dosing Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson, Otto Preminger, Rita Moreno, and dozens of other celebrities during the 1960s.
Before his death in 1982, Hubbard allegedly introduced more than six thousand psychiatrists, politicians, actors, and artists to LSD, including such notables as Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy, Time magazine publisher Henry Luce, his playwright wife Claire Booth Luce, crooner Andy Williams, and Dr. Timothy Leary himself.
“He blew in with that uniform laying down the most incredible atmosphere of mystery and flamboyance, and really impressive bullshit!” Leary effused.
Claiming to know everyone from the Pope to the President, Captain Al disarmed all he met, preaching the acid gospel like an overcaffeinated used-car salesman.
“On the one hand he looked like a carpetbagger con man,” said Leary, “and on the other, he had the most impressive people in the world in his lap.”
While there were other voices10 joining Captain Al’s crusade, Dr. Timothy Leary clearly succeeded Hubbard as psychonaut-in-chief. A dozen years before Richard Nixon canonized him “the most dangerous man in America,” Leary was an unexceptional psychology professor who’d been bounced from his untenured post at Harvard along with Dr. Richard Alpert, another tweedy academic seduced by psychedelics. Both dropped Hubbard’s acid, expanded their minds, tie-dyed their wardrobes, and set out to change the world.
Harvard president Nathan Pusey deemed them both expendable. Getting their graduate TA’s high was tolerated in 1963; dosing undergrads was not. Following their extensive experimentation with students, Pusey showed them the door.
After they were banished, Leary and Alpert moved to the Hudson Valley estate of Bill and Peggy Hitchcock, the freewheeling brother and sister heirs to a fortune amassed by Gulf Oil founder William Larimer Hitchcock and multimillionaire financier Andrew Mellon. Leary and Alpert turned the Hitchcocks’ sixty-four-room Millbrook mansion into an upscale ashram, then proceeded to amplify Al Hubbard’s acid gospel a thousand-fold. The Hitchcocks charged rent of $1 a year. From their new digs, Leary and Alpert launched a revolution.
As famously chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, novelist Ken Kesey11 paid Millbrook a visit in 1964 that was meant to link West Coast psychonauts with the East. The acid summit fizzled when Leary was too busy tripping with his girlfriend to meet the author and his busload of Merry Pranksters.
But Leary and Alpert more than made up for the faux pas. They subsequently welcomed Humphrey Osmond, psychologist/author
R. D. Laing, Beat laureate Allen Ginsberg, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, and a host of other dignitaries. All made the pilgrimage; all spread the gospel.
“Jet setters, celebrities, curious aristocrats,” Leary recalled. “A weekend at Millbrook was the chic thing for the hip young rich of New York. At the same time, we entertained biologists from Yale, Oxford psychologists, Hindu holy men.”
By 1967, the Hitchcocks wearied of notoriety. Lawmen came snooping,12 house guests got busted (including Leary), and the blue-blood brother and sister finally invited Leary and Alpert to leave—but by then, the two ex-professors had become undisputed standard bearers of the psychedelic movement.
Alpert moved to India, changed his name to Ram Dass,
