L. Ron Hubbard. The Chromosphere Lectures, 1959:

Back in the day, the Hubbard Association of Scientologists in Phoenix, we were selling light years by the box to cure cancer and whatnot. Stuff the medicos wanted to cut out with skinny razors they called scalpels. Five light years to a box. $19.99 + postage.

We had plenty of sunshine there in Phoenix and Lancaster Dodd, an engineer like me, had designed an apparatus to trap five light years in a box and seal it up with waxed paper. Then me, being a nuclear physicist, would measure the kiloton pressure per light year second in the box, and certify each box with a HASI inspection sticker.

And we were doing a bang up job and people were being healed of cancers, bursitis, liver problems and so and so forth with our boxed light. This upset the American Medical Association and they brought in the postal inspectors and the Chief Scientist of the US Department of Plutonium.

The Chief Scientist of Plutonium says to me, “Hubbard they’re telling me you’re selling light years in a box and I’m here to tell you it can’t be done.”

So I says, “Well if light has no mass then I could put a million light years in a box or even a trillion, correct?”

And this fella puts on his thinking cap and gets to cogitating and so forth. And he takes out his slide rule and notebook and calculates. He then turns to the postal inspectors and says, “Dr. Hubbard is correct. There’s no limit to how many massless light years you can put in a box.”

Seeing as we wasn’t doing anything wrong, this official delegation from DC left. I’d taught them something that day about putting light years in boxes. But before he left, the Chief Scientist of Plutonium asked for my research papers and I give him a copy.

The Chief Scientist goes back to DC and he steals one of my discoveries in my research papers. He called it the laser. I had invented the laser by poking a small pinhole in a box of light years and they stole it from me.

And that’s my discovery. A laser works by putting light years inside a sealed box. And then kilotons of light pressure builds up. When you poke a pinhole in the box, all the light comes out through the pinhole as a laser beam. To control the lasing you just put a shutter over the pinhole. And that’s all a laser is.

I’ve been fighting crazy laser wars in space for quadrillions of years. Space is wild stuff. You can’t make it up.