Peripheral LRH comments are likewise fascinating. In the first place, he explained, whole track research (when combined with the material record) suggested ancient populations to have been far greater than typically reckoned—at least five times the generally acknowledged figure and thus explaining, for example, the 160 cities once gracing a now relatively barren Sicily. Also habitually underestimated were troop strengths of the ancient world, since archaeological figures regularly neglected to factor in the five-to-one logistical backbone of armies. Thus, the pointed LRH remark, “The archaeologist makes a fundamental and fantastic error. When he counts the number of soldiers engaged in a battle, he omits the numbers of supply sergeants, clerks and, of course, ‘super generals’ who are sitting in back of the lines.” Then, too, and herein lay an overall LRH conclusion reflected in later essays on equitable administration for which he is equally famous, the ancient world had not ultimately succumbed to a barbarian onslaught; it had succumbed to internal strife and its own political mismanagement.

What else might be concluded from those extraordinary five weeks is, of course, a vast subject, and bears upon the virtually popular conceptions of the ancient world. It also, of course, bears heavily upon the ways in which we might learn about that world, and, in fact, Mission Into Time inevitably inspired several similar projects, including famed “psychic” experimentation at the Stanford Research Institute under United States Navy subsidy. Also, as suggested, the parallels to fellow Explorers Club member Stephan A. Schwartz’s Alexandria Project are far too striking to be ignored. Yet declaring the ultimate realm of adventure to lie within the human spirit, within a universe of the mind which “minute by minute opens and unfolds,” Ron himself put such matters aside, and returned to his primary track of exploration, the development of Scientology. Not that he would cease plowing keel into foreign seas or measuring distant horizons, but when speaking of exploration, he thereafter spoke of nothing less than discovering “the infinity of infinities.”

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