At the end of an unnamed private road in Red River County, on a brisk fall day in 2019, Texas fire marshals approached the site of an explosion. Chunks of concrete littered the ground, while smaller debris hung in the surrounding trees. An aluminum door, blown off its hinges, had come to rest 50 feet from the site of the blast: an underground bunker that had been dug deep into the East Texas soil.
Before descending a small ladder into what was left of the bunker, the team of investigators set up a ventilation hose to clear the air. Inside, they found signs of people preparing to live for months below ground — cans of propane, a supply of ready-to-eat meals, and a fully furnished bathroom and bunkroom. The steel kitchen cabinets were blasted open and covered in blood splatter. By the stairs, near the escape hatch, investigators found the bodies of three people — Michael Bower, the bunker’s owner, along with his friends Perry Fetterolf and Misty Marple.
An investigator later asked Bower’s wife, who had discovered the scene, what the purpose of the bunker had been. “Doomsday,” she replied.
Hours after news of the explosion broke, Ron Hubbard, the founder and CEO of Atlas Survival Shelters, set up a camera in his cluttered office and recorded a video for YouTube. Wearing a camo T-shirt and a MAGA hat, Hubbard was fuming. The 62-year-old has amassed 594,000 subscribers for his videos, whether he’s testing his Remington pistol or taking viewers on a tour of one of the luxury bunkers he has installed in the mansions of the rich and famous, from the Kardashians to the Tate brothers. But his most heated videos are the ones where he passionately bashes his chief rival, Rising S Bunkers. Both firms are based in Texas, about an hour apart, and both claim to be the largest bunker manufacturer in America, catering to well-heeled preppers eager to ride out the apocalypse in comfort.
Now, in the wake of the explosion, Hubbard blasted Rising S, which had built the Red River bunker. “They don’t know what the hell they’re doing,” he said. “They’re friggin’ idiots.” Investigators were unable to determine the cause of the catastrophe. But Hubbard was convinced, without evidence, that a propane tank was responsible for the explosion. “You can’t put propane in a bunker or it’s gonna kill you!” he raged. As the video went on, Hubbard grew more incensed, until he was shouting like a revival preacher.
“Today is our September 11,” he said. “The government is going to step in, and they’re probably going to regulate these bunkers.” Then he added what sounded like a sales pitch for his own product. “Guys, if you’re going to put in a bunker,” he warned, “you better do it pretty damn quick.”
The video marked an inflection point in one of the most bitter and bizarre feuds in the annals of American business. In the years since Hubbard’s salvo, the war between Atlas and Rising S has grown ever more contentious, encompassing multiple court battles, accusations of arson and murder, and fantastical tales of FBI double agents. There’s a lot at stake in the bunker wars: Estimates put the global market for underground bunkers at more than $23 billion, and it’s projected to grow to $36 billion by the end of the decade. Some 20 million Americans consider themselves preppers, and four in 10 adults believe we’re living in the end times. Whoever controls the market for bunkers stands to make a killing off of humanity’s fear of being killed off.
In the bunker business, paranoia is profit. But what happens when the paranoia inflicts the bunker builders? Representatives for Rising S, firing back at Hubbard, call him a “sociopath” who twists the truth to rile up his cultlike following of fans. As Rising S sees it, the conflict with Hubbard is less a feud than an unwarranted barrage from a delusional rival. But wherever the truth may lie, the dispute has wound up smearing both companies and dividing the prepper world into competing camps. As a former employee at Rising S puts it to me, “It’s impossible to wrestle with a pig and not get muddy.”
The feud, at least as Hubbard tells it, began in 2012, when Rising S purchased several domain names related to Atlas. Suddenly, if you searched for “atlasshelter.com,” you were instead directed to Rising S’s website. Rising S also published a series of articles on its website criticizing some methods Atlas used to construct its bunkers.
The moves pissed Hubbard off. At the time, he was working to establish himself as the face of the booming bunker movement. After graduating from college with a degree in welding and launching several metalworking businesses, he had caught the prepper bug and developed a bunker in the back of his shop. It turned out to be a savvy business move. Aided by his self-promotion on YouTube, bunker sales took off.
I meet Hubbard outside his sprawling factory in an industrial park in the town of Sulphur Springs, filled with dozens of bunkers in various stages of production. Some are shaped like ridged cylinders; others look like extra-large shipping containers with facades of black latticed steel. They have names like BombNado, FireNado, and GarNado (which is designed to be concealed under a garage). Most cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but custom builds can go for several million. Flying in front of the warehouse are the flags of some of the countries where Atlas does business, including South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Saudi Arabia.
Hubbard, a big man with intense blue eyes and a five-o’clock shadow, greets me gruffly. “You don’t look like Business Insider,” he says. “You look like Rising S.” He suspects I’ve been sent by his enemies to spy on him, just as he fears that his office — which features a flag depicting the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, alongside the words “Fight, Fight, Fight” — has been bugged. “They’re probably listening to us now,” he tells me. A camo shotgun leans against his desk. Out of fear that Rising S will order a hit on him, he refuses to maintain a permanent home, changing hotel rooms every few days. But he does own a bunker — a cylindrical culvert-pipe model that he lived in for three days during the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012.
With the feud underway, Hubbard’s archnemesis became Rising S CEO Clyde Scott, a Texas good ol’ boy who raises guard dogs and drag races at a local track. Unlike Hubbard, Scott was born into a family of preppers. They lived off the land and “did everything except wear tinfoil hats,” Scott once recalled on a podcast. After early brushes with the law, including a 2004 assault charge that was later dismissed, he started a company installing small storm shelters as a bulwark against Texas tornados. But over time, as his clients requested more and more elaborate designs, he wound up crafting doomsday bunkers under the name Rising S, in homage to Jesus, “the rising son.” Scott enjoyed filling the bunkers with traps and hidden passages. “I watched ‘Scooby-Doo’ a lot as a kid,” he told the podcaster. (Scott could not be located for comment.)
For a while, an uneasy detente existed between the two rivals. Hubbard maintained an open line of conversation with Scott’s cousin and business partner Gary Lynch, and the two shared tips and discussed other competitors. “A Chinese TV crew might be calling you,” Hubbard texted Lynch at one point. “Do not give interviews to any TV and news from China. They will just copy you and me.”
“I do not give any interview to any communist country,” Lynch texted back, “because they cannot even buy shelters.”
But in 2019, six months before the explosion in Red River, Hubbard dropped a bombshell, releasing two videos aggressively attacking Rising S. The first, titled “Lady in Minnesota and Her Horrible Rising S Shelter,” features a woman who says her bunker began leaking shortly after it was installed. “This wouldn’t handle a moose so much as a nuclear blast,” Hubbard says while touring the bunker. The second video tells the story of a Texas man named Steve Prewit who was arrested on federal gun charges shortly after Rising S installed a bunker for him. In the video, Prewit accuses Scott of being a government informant who ratted him out to avoid prison time for himself — a characterization that Hubbard accepts uncritically.
Rising S responded by filing a defamation suit against Hubbard. The company said it had nothing to do with Prewit’s arrest, and accused the woman in Minnesota of causing her bunker leak. That October, the feud escalated further when Hubbard blamed Rising S for the three deaths caused by the bunker explosion. The families of the three people filed wrongful-death lawsuits against Rising S, which wound up being settled out of court, Rising S says.
Scott, who had avoided posting about the feud, issued a video response titled “The TRUTH About Rising S Company.” Over oddly cheerful music, without getting into any specifics about the feud or the explosion, he said he would be taking the high road. “This is my first time even mentioning that I know what’s going on with one of my competitors calling names and telling lies,” he said. “We’re not gonna engage in that.”
A few days after Scott released his video, an event occurred that Hubbard viewed as a possible new salvo in the bunker war. Jue Wang, Hubbard’s video editor, was shot to death after leaving Hubbard’s office, which at the time was in Los Angeles. His body was found in his car in a nearby residential neighborhood, with a gunshot wound to his torso.
The shooting is still under investigation, and there is no evidence that it was related in any way to Hubbard’s dispute with Scott. But Hubbard quickly released an eerie video showing Wang at work on a computer in Hubbard’s office, editing what he said was Wang’s last video before he was killed. “I’m not accusing them of murder,” Hubbard said of Rising S. “I’m just saying, he was killed in the midst of all these videos being produced. The guy might have followed him from my office and thought it was me and shot the wrong guy. I don’t know.”
A few months later, Hubbard released a video called “RON Gets His Concealed Carry after the murder of HIS Youtube Editor.” In it, Hubbard visits a shooting range and fires off several rounds from his .45. “If I go down,” he declares, “I’m gonna go down screaming and fighting like hell, and I’m not going to go down unarmed.”
In late 2021, Hubbard announced on YouTube that a judge in the defamation case had ordered that he take down several of his most incendiary videos about Rising S. Later in the video he invited his army of subscribers to repost them so they would live on even after they were wiped from his YouTube channel. His die-hard fans were happy to oblige.
“Ron Hubbard probably has a little bit of Tony Stark in him,” says William Cleveland, an Atlas enthusiast who reposted one of the videos. “Combine Elon Musk with Ron Hubbard, and you’d probably have Tony Stark.” Cleveland doesn’t think he could ever afford one of Hubbard’s bunkers, but he says “it would be neat” to own one.
His office was ablaze, flames shooting from the windows. He pulled out his phone and started filming. “Someone set my building on fire to shut me up,” he muttered.
Fans of Rising S, or at least enemies of Ron, also joined the fray. In March 2020, a mysterious YouTube personality who goes by the nom de guerre Bringing the Truth began releasing anti-Atlas videos, speaking in a Southern accent artificially deepened by a voice modulator. Their second video accused Hubbard of a cardinal sin in the bunker community: inadvertently revealing the location of his customers’ bunkers by posting photos of them that are trackable via metadata. Bringing the Truth also created a website called Atlas Bad Shelters, which accuses Hubbard of ratting out his own customers to the IRS and copying Rising S’s bunker designs. (“That’s them making fake news,” Ron responds.)
On March 24, 2022, Hubbard drove up to his factory amid the sound of sirens and the smell of charred copper. His office was ablaze, flames shooting from the windows. He pulled out his phone and started filming. “Someone set my building on fire to shut me up,” he muttered.
The fire took out most of the office, including what Hubbard describes as his most prized possession, his collection of bird bands, a hunting accessory. In a video that Hubbard recorded that night, one of the factory workers says he saw a man throwing something at the office just before the fire started, which Hubbard suspects may have been a Molotov cocktail.
“I think it was Brad Dancer who did this,” Hubbard tells me, naming a Rising S employee. “Just my gut feeling.” He shared his suspicion with a federal fire investigator, texting the agent a smiling photo of himself alongside this message: “I think I found your arson. Brad Dancer. He works at Rising S. I bet everything he did it.”
The investigator did not respond to Hubbard’s text. Dancer denies any involvement in the fire, and there is no evidence linking Rising S to the blaze. I later call the fire station in Sulphur Springs and ask about Hubbard’s theory. “He has a lot of theories,” the guy responds, laughing.
Midway through our interview, Hubbard’s voice suddenly gets very low and serious.
“I hope you don’t fuck me and stab me in the back. I’ll sue the fuck out of your magazine. I’ve got more subscribers and followers than y’all got,” he says. “I’ll go on Joe Rogan and fucking tear your magazine up if you try to even fuck with me.” Later, he tells me he is horrible at getting his lawyers to sue people.
Hubbard portrays his feud with Rising S as a cosmic struggle between good and evil. When we talk, he compares Rising S to the devil and Charles Manson. At one point he compares his popularity favorably to Jesus, at another, he describes himself as Batman. When I mention that I’ve already spoken with Rising S, he seems hurt. “But he’s the bad guy, I’m the good guy,” he says. “Why would you reach out to the bad guy first?”
Despite Hubbard’s fervor, the war doesn’t appear to have had much of an impact on the shop floor. When I visit the following day, the factory is buzzing with dozens of workers. One recalls a time when Hubbard couldn’t find his cellphone and became convinced it had been stolen and sold to Rising S. But most of the employees seem comparatively uninvested in the feud. Michael Ivie, a recent hire, is more interested in discussing chemtrails and the three city-states that run the world — London, the Vatican, and Washington, DC. “All three of them have obelisks,” he observes.
Even with the ongoing court case, Hubbard kept posting. He has now published more than 15 videos about Rising S. They’re among the first results to show up in Google searches for the company. They have recently accumulated several one-star Google reviews, either from disgruntled customers or Hubbard’s fans.
Peter Stanton, who wanted to add a tornado shelter to his home in Arkansas, wound up being dissatisfied with both companies. He commissioned a shelter from Rising S, but felt the company overcharged him for the project, which he says soon began leaking. Once the money had changed hands, Stanton found it difficult to reach Rising S for assistance. When he came across Hubbard’s videos blasting Rising S and contacted him for help, Hubbard tried to sell him on an expensive remodel. “I think it’s a bunch of people who are trying to take advantage of people who are afraid of what’s going on in the world,” Stanton says. “They say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re Christian and we’re going to help you.’ But they’re just trying to milk people for money.”
But Hubbard’s videos seemed to have achieved the desired effect. When Rising S fired off a video in November 2023 that appeared to compare Hubbard to the cult leader Jim Jones, it got 600 views. Hubbard’s shots at Rising S, in contrast, chart in the hundreds of thousands.
Early last year, Rising S finally withdrew from the field of battle. Scott, who one former employee says was worn out by the war with Hubbard, sold the company to Brad Dancer. The new owner says his first order of business was to bury the hatchet with Hubbard — “and not in his skull,” he jokes, as we smoke cigarettes outside the Rising S factory in Murchison. Dancer forbade his employees from talking negatively about Atlas. “I’ve told my guys if I ever catch them bad-mouthing another company, I will fire them on the spot,” he says. “It was a pissing match between two grown men, and I don’t give a fuck about it.”
Dancer, a slim man with a goatee and a mop of blond hair under a trucker cap, is wearing a shirt with several buttons undone, revealing a chain with a rooster hanging at the end. He says Rising S was less conciliatory under Scott and his cousin Gary Lynch. “Their bark and bite is pretty nasty,” he tells me. “That’s all it is — it’s ‘my dick’s bigger than yours.’ Mine’s average, so I don’t give a fuck.”
I never felt like it was a war. I’ve always felt like, it’s time to make motherfuckin’ money.
Rising S owner Brad Dancer
Hoping to let bygones be bygones, Dancer says that he voluntarily dismissed the defamation lawsuit that Rising S had launched against Atlas, which had been inching its way through the courts. “I feel sorry for him,” Dancer says of Hubbard. “If you have to go through life looking over your shoulder, being scared. I never felt like it was a war. I’ve always felt like, it’s time to make motherfuckin’ money.” At the moment, the Rising S factory is much quieter than Atlas — there are only two bunkers under construction.
It’s not clear, however, that Hubbard will agree to the cease-fire. After my visit to Rising S, he sends me a photograph of me sitting in his office that he took during the interview. “I am missing the check that was on my desk yesterday for $10,825,000,” he texts. “Did you touch it?”
“No, definitely not,” I reply.
Dropping the matter, Hubbard asks me how my interview with Dancer went. I tell him that Rising S has extended an olive branch.
“Bullshit,” Hubbard texts back. Rising S, he points out, still owns his domain names. He believes they probably burned down his office and killed his editor. He wants to be awarded “everything they’ve got” — and even then, the war seems likely to continue.
“I just want to see justice done,” he says. “I believe they need to be locked up.”
Guthrie Scrimgeour is an investigative journalist based in Washington, DC, covering wealth and power.
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