Davis explained, “Anyone who saw ‘J.F.K.’ remembers a scene on the Mall where Kevin Costner’s character goes and meets with a man named Mr. X, who’s played by Donald Sutherland.” In the film, Mr. X is an embittered intelligence agent who explains that the Kennedy assassination was actually a coup staged by the military-industrial complex. In real life, Davis said, Mr. X was Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty, who had worked in the Office of Special Operations. (Oliver Stone, who directed “J.F.K.,” says that Mr. X was a composite character, based in part on Prouty.) In the eighties, Prouty worked as a consultant for Scientology.
“We finally got so frustrated with this point of conflicting medical records that we took all of Mr. Hubbard’s records to Fletcher Prouty,” Davis told me. “He actually solved the conundrum for us.” According to Davis, Prouty explained to the church representatives that, because Hubbard had an “intelligence background,” his records were subjected to a process known as “sheep-dipping.” Davis explained that this was military parlance for “what gets done to a set of records for an intelligence officer. And, essentially, they create two sets.” He said, “Fletcher Prouty basically issued an affidavit saying L. Ron Hubbard’s records were sheep-dipped.” Prouty died in 2001.