Scientology’s ‘scripture’ includes a thoroughly debunked mammoth-meat hoax

 
David Miscavige and the Church of Scientology are doing their ecclesiastical best to play up the “religion” thing as much as possible these days. As their organization shrinks and comes under heavy fire from the media, they hold up their holy double-cross and proclaim that they are the victims of religious persecution.

It’s a cynical strategy that actually works for them among a certain set of the public. Even some intelligent folk, who ought to know better, come to Scientology’s defense, asking why it should be singled out from “other religions.”

Sadly, this farce will continue into the future, we have no doubt.

But in the meantime, we like to remind people what Scientology is really all about, and it’s not about David Miscavige’s popish fakery, it’s about L. Ron Hubbard’s space opera!

Scientologists, behind closed doors, are not doing catechisms hoping to get to heaven, they are doing what they believe is actual science that will unlock the secrets of the universe and grant them godlike superhuman powers, right out of science fiction.

We thought we’d bring you another reminder of that today, which was inspired by something a former church member mentioned recently over at Facebook. Her citation of a lecture sent us searching for it, and yeah, it’s fun stuff.

And it comes out of a lecture we’ve previously excerpted, when we looked at how Hubbard expressed pity for Christians who don’t realize they shouldn’t be praying to God when they ought to understand that they are god. And Hubbard talked about Scientologists with “OT” super powers being able to crush whole planets between their thumb and forefinger.

That lecture was 1963’s “The Free Being,” part of the vaunted “Saint Hill Special Briefing Course” which Hubbard spun together while he was in residence at Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, England.

David Miscavige may be playing down the SHSBC these days, but there’s no doubt its lectures are central to Hubbard’s vision of Scientology and are considered “scripture” by Scientologists.

So please keep that in mind as we take another plunge into “The Free Being.”

First, before we get to the section that was being discussed on Facebook, we wanted to share a brief passage that tickled us and that we felt we should share with you.

Now, as you listen to Hubbard in this brief Fair Use excerpt from the lecture, imagine yourself in the audience, trying to decide on the credibility and veracity of a man whom you will be asked to dedicate your entire life to, to entrust with your family, your finances, your future. And here in the middle of his lecture, while talking about the Galactic Confederation that our planet is a part of, Hubbard is explaining that the confederation is short on OTs, and so they tend to have a lot of influence. And then suddenly he reels off this example, something he claims he personally witnessed 12 trillion years ago…

OTs get peculiar. They get fitful. They get moody. I remember one time about 12 trillion years ago. It was some comedian on a stage, vast theater, pulled a gag about ‘create’ and that sort of thing, and made a wisecrack of one kind or another. An OT had to be subdued — he was up in the box, alongside the royal box, and he had to be subdued, one way or the other, but not till after he had torn down all the curtains and knocked down a four or five hundred-ton chandelier on the assembled meat-body multitude. Why? It just keyed him in. What could they do about it? Turn a sleep light on him and tell him to get solid and take him down to the hospital. That was their total-total ability to put this boy back together again. I consider it fascinating; I know — I was there. I was the guy they did it to.

We will point out again that the world’s cosmologists estimate the age of our universe to be about 13.8 billion years. While fundamentalist Christians speak of an extremely young Earth at only about 6,000 years old, Hubbard goes the other way, extending the age of the universe to, well, astronomical orders of magnitude.

And some 12 trillion years ago, L. Ron Hubbard ran amok in a theater and had to be subdued after being “keyed in.” What a card.

But that’s just the warm-up for what we really wanted to bring you today.

A little later, Hubbard continues to explain how a single OT and his superpowers can wreak havoc on a society or on a planet, so potent are his skills.

In fact, a Scientology OT can kill a planet, Hubbard claims, simply by removing its atmosphere. In fact, he says, there is evidence that such a thing has happened here on Earth in the past.

His proof? Flash-frozen mammoth steaks served at the Explorers Club in New York, which could only be possible because an OT ripped the air cover off of the planet at some point. Here, take a listen…

The people on Earth here don’t think that Scientology doesn’t work. They’ve been trained, however, against the vectors of it. They’ve been trained to destroy, to set something up — a fixed status of something — and then work a destructive means with it and to work out techniques of entrapment so people cannot leave certain social strata and economic strata of the society. This is the whole level of training. And you’re not up against Pavlov, Freud or any mental technology. You’re up against the social structure of the organization in which we exist at this moment. And you pose a tremendous threat to that social structure. You could tear it to pieces! In two different ways, one by the rehabilitation of tremendous power and force. That’s one way. That’s pretty easy. You make somebody OT and he’s good and mad on account of what they did to him in Chicago, and he pulls the air cover and that’s the end of this planet. Don’t think it hasn’t happened. Those mammoths that are up in the frozen tundra, with quick-frozen vegetables in their stomachs, must have been reduced down to about two hundred degrees minus, in a split second, because to freeze vegetables they have to be frozen in something like sixty seconds for them to preserve it. And here these millions of years later, the Explorers Club serves those things with fresh mammoth steak at its annual dinners! They serve them as vegetables-deep-freeze-quick-freeze; they’ve been packed up there in the ice ever since. They’re tropical! What are they doing under all that ice, man! It must have been done in sixty seconds. Can you think of any natural cataclysm that could take place in sixty seconds? They couldn’t have been transported from point A to point B. Somebody was good and mad and they pulled the air cover and gave the planet a reverse spin. They changed its axis just like that — Bang! Bang! There was just, somebody got mad. That’s all. So, that is the most direct force that is posed to this civilization by any technology such as we have. See, that is a real factor. People don’t even have to get mad. We just get together and say, “Well, I guess it’s best for the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics that this planet be de-aircovered.” Pfsst. That’s it. Frozen vegetables.

Well, that’s a colorful story, and his audience obviously ate it up. But in this case, we know what he’s referring to because in 1951 there was a famous case of the Explorers Club in New York supposedly serving “mammoth” steaks.

And, of course, it turned to be entirely bogus, as Jason Colavito, the master debunker of fringe nonsense, points out at his excellent website:

Legend has it that in 1951 the Explorers Club served meat from a frozen mammoth, as you can read in this 2014 Mental Floss article that takes the story at least somewhat seriously. But a new analysis of the preserved remains of that dinner (don’t ask why anyone kept the leftovers for 65 years) determined that the food was actually turtle, which had been passed off not as mammoth but as megatherium, an extinct ground sloth. The Christian Science Monitor misunderstood what a megatherium was in 1951 and reported that the food was mammoth, causing the legend.

As for the idea that the mammoth had frozen so quickly it had fresh vegetables in its stomach, Colavito also explains that there’s a long history of crackpots repeating that thoroughly debunked story as well. (Some flower pollen found in a mammoth carcass somehow became fresh flowers and then vegetables as the story got retold by various Creationists and other catastrophists.)

For Creationists, these badly mangled stories about flash-frozen mammoths have been used to argue that the Earth is extremely young. For Hubbard, they’re proof that OTs are so powerful they’re going around ripping the gaseous cover from the planet.

And for half a million bucks or so, you too can attain the power to de-atmosphere the world!

Line up, suckers!

 
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Chris Shelton on the Sea Org’s boot camp

Says Chris: “This week I sort of informally break down the Sea Organization’s boot camp, called the Estates Project Force. I don’t know if anyone has broken it down like this before, but I think you’ll enjoy hearing some of the insane indoctrination from Hubbard. Enjoy!”

 
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Bonus items from our tipsters

An update on that convention we told you about…

 
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Make your plans now!

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on January 11, 2018 at 07:00

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The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2017 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Undergound Bunker (2012-2017), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of L.A. attorney and former church member Vance Woodward
UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists
GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice
SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts

Other links: Shelly Miscavige, ten years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ