Early witness Don Rogers on Hubbard and ‘prior lives’: ‘Nothing but a parlor hypnosis trick’

 
Today we have the second and third letters sent in the mid-1980s by Don Rogers, an early witness to Dianetics, to author Jon Atack, who has generously allowed us to make them public for the first time. Please see historian Chris Owen’s introduction to these letters in yesterday’s first installment.

—————-
THE ROGERS LETTERS

September 6, 1984

Dear Jon,

This is a fast answer to your letter of Aug 21, lest it get buried before I have time for larger thoughts.

I first met LRH at his own residence in Elizabeth in August, 1949, although I had talked to both him and Sarah over ham radio the year before when I was home and they were visiting at John Campbell’s house.

Alexis was born in the spring of 1950, delivered by Joe Winter at a hospital on the shore, I think a bit north of Bay Head, a small hospital in a small town, possibly Point Pleasant. Joe was living in Sea Girt at that time. It was done without anesthetics, and she was reported to be very alert, calm, healthy, curious baby.

I worked on the rewrite of the book which became The Original Thesis in the fall of 1949, and possibly into 1950. It wasn’t really a rewrite, just heavy editing, to improve English and style (unity, coherence and emphasis). I did only about the first half. At that time there were only four dynamics; Ron added the rest later, I always thought to improve sales. And as I said, I recommended that he copyright it, and he said that he did.

Art Ceppos was one of the original board of the HDRF, but eventually resigned, as did Joe Winter. Joe wrote two books of his own on his experiences and views, and went into practice in NYC while living in Leonia, NJ. I don’t know what happened to Marge and Joey after Joe died. Nor what happened to Peg Campbell, Joe’s sister and John’s second wife. I heard she went back to Michigan a few years after John died, but I don’t know what town.

To reconstruct, I left the Western Electric in June, 1950, with two weeks’ vacation, so my separation date was July 1. Since it was a Monday, they gave me that day free, and I left in the middle of June instead of going back for one day. I took one week vacation and reported at the HDRF in Elizabeth on what must have been June 24. I got the same pay as at WECo. When I got there, there were professional teaching and clinical auditing both going on, but I am not sure that the four-week professional course had jelled yet. If not, it did soon afteward, perhaps within a month or three.

I have no knowledge of US Marshals and the Phila lectures. I have been told that at that time there were Federal warrants out for LRH as a result of the doings in Wichita at the time Hubbard College started and the Dianetic Foundation was burgled, and possibly in some strange connection with the move from Elizabeth. Also that in another Federal suit about a dianeticist and another dianeticist’s daughter, the judge in Phila found out about the Wichita case, and subpoenaed LRH for that trial, because it would be so interesting to have him there. Never got him.

Ron audited people to find out what would happen if….., so practically all of the auditing he did was research. He was impatient of experiment protocols; his viewpoint was not that of the scientist but that of the engineer: Let’s get something that works, and it will speak for itself! And his nearly total eidetic recall didn’t need a notebook or case records. Besides auditing, there were many tests on the help or hindrance of chemicals to the preclear. Benzedrine, niacin, folic acid, glutamic acid, etc. Some of this was the GUK project. I wrote an article on it which he wouldn’t publish; I wonder if I still have it. He did lots of research which I saw or participated in, as long as you are willing to call his methods of discovery research. And he told about lots more, done in an asylum in Georgia, with a friend in San Francisco, etc. Joe prescribed for the Benzedrine. Benzedrine seemed to help in some heavy prenatal stuff; Dexadrine did not. Joe tried to get the corresponding levo compound but it was not made and available. Years later, Ron concluded that running deep and heavy stuff was bad before the preclear had been built up to where he was strong enough to handle it. You could spin him. So the chemical assist idea died out. Perhaps he had in the back of his mind that chemicals would be prescribing, and treading on medical toes. Anyway, I gave a lot of pills to auditors at Elizabeth for their preclears, and got reports back which I passed on to Ron. I remember bogging down three cases with folic acid.

On the other hand, when I heard him lecture in LA in the fall of 1950, he attributed values in pantothenic acid to my researches in Elizabeth, although I never tried it. In another lecture, I think in Elizabeth, he credited me with conversion to Christian religion as a result of processing; it never was true, and I remain a passive atheist, or perhaps an independent natural humanist.

I am pretty sure that it was in the spring of 1951 that the professional course moved to New York. The move was made to escape a possible shutdown by the American Medical Association invoking laws on practicing medicine without a license. We were running scared as the paranoid atmosphere built up.

I’m fascinated by your remarks on a splinter movement. How can I get in touch with it?

Also about the books by Horner, Berner and others. Where can I order them?

Thanks for the beer info. I’ll try.

I have files of the early stuff. The dianetic Auditor’s Bulletin. The Bulletin. The Dianamic. The Flash Answer. And some other periodicals. Not necessarily complete files. For example, the best article by Welgos on running out hypnosis was in the Flash Answer, much better than the later one in the DAB, but I don’t have it. I also have dozens of booklets issued by Welgos and others, sometimes more than one copy. And the Foundation publications from Wichita, etc. Over four file drawers up in the attic, and a couple of shelves down here, altogether. I have it in my will that all this stuff, including unpublished manuscripts, goes to AE Van Vogt if he wants it, and to the University of Sterling [Stirling] in Scotland if he doesn’t. What if neither does? It would be a shame to burn it. I need another legatee, in case I kick the bucket sooner than I intend to.

Enough for now.

Very truly yours,

Donald H. Rogers

PS: Thanks for the court opinion. What is Mary Sue doing now? I wondered why Gerry never got back to me about Elizabeth and where the offices were. What are chaps like Jack Horner doing for a living? DHR

 
July 29, 1985

Dear Jon,

This is in reply to your letter of July 11, 1985. Please keep this letter confidential, like the others.

Please give me Helen O’Brien’s address, or mine to her; I’ll call her up. I tried about a year ago to find her, but guess she is no longer in the Phila area. I was trying to find an HDA I could trade work with after Perry Appleton left the area.

I’ll be glad to go over your history chapter and give you my best memories relating to its accuracy. And I’ll try to do it quickly not to hold you up.

I have Helen’s book, bought it when it came out. It impressed me that there is a hidden giant, a much more intelligent, discerning, educated and cultured mind than I had had any idea of. I met her in Phila, I think the day I went with Jack Coriell to one of Ron’s lectures, but I never had any opportunity to get to know her. I don’t remember much of what she wrote, either.

I never met Perry Chapdelaine, but he is famous for auditing Ron Howes to a more-or-less clear. Feel free to give him my address. That reminds me that I’ve tried a couple of times to find Howes, with no luck.

I have written to Ron lately, but being careful not to mention you or your activities. I will continue so. I’ve been in touch with some of the local Scientology people, being desperate for auditing. They gave me a free case analysis, and the result of the pink test was about 70 across to com, where it went down to 40. This says that I’m ready for New Era stuff, which is very expensive, and they don’t consider me material for the best “book” auditing. They might be right. I’ve been completely out of touch with Sci since its inception, and not believing what appeared about clears, but now it looks as if there may really be some of them around. If it’s a race between clear and the undertaker, I’d like to get there first. Of course, they are using a new definition of clear, which means no reactive mind, but not necessarily with eidetic recall. I have always wanted both.

I’d be interested in your own involvement, and why you are ambiguous about it. For me, there is a trail of broken promises, which I think came from Ron not realizing how much farther he had to go with research. And, of course, perhaps feeling that the end justified the means occasionally. And who can say that it never does? That concept is implicit in the concept of the greatest good for the greatest number. I’m working on that trail of promises.

Myself, I’ve had thousands of hours of auditing; some good and some bad, but it was all time well spent, as without it I would not be the person I am today, and might even have succumbed to defeat or illness.

May I state in a new way something that is axiomatic in engineering tho not in these words. The engineering department is on the quest for the ideal washing machine, or whatever, and it is up to the sales department and the management to wrest from Engineering this year’s model, for practical sales to and use by the public, while the idealists keep on working toward next year’s model and an infinite series thereafter. You can also accuse General Motors and most of American industry of experimenting on the public, whereas in reality, like the Italian vegetable peddler, they were giving the customer “the best I got.” Draw your own parallel to Ron’s work.

Now I’ll answer your numbered questions, by the numbers:

1. [Atack’s question: In “Doctor’s Report…” Winter said that when he first wrote to Hubbard in July 1949, Hubbard wrote back and told him that there was no text in existence on Dianetics. Before Winter went to NJ in October, a text had been provided. Was this the manuscript which later became Dianetics: The Original Thesis? And if so, was it before, after, or during your editing of that book?] I did not see that first book manuscript until Bay Head, after the 1949 summer was over and Ron had traded houses with the man who owned that one and the one in Elizabeth. When Joe showed in Bay Head, he had a copy; Ron had lent him one and he had closed the office and helped his secretary type copies. At my suggestion, Ron copyrighted it as an unpublished book; it should be possible to get that date out of the US copyright office, even without providing an exact title. I judge that it was the only book he copyrighted that year. One could also see it in the Library of Congress. In it there were only four dynamics, engrams were called impediments, etc. I think Joe contributed the word Engram, just as John W. Campbell coined the word anaten and I contributed the distinction between dramatizing the action of an engram and dramatizing the ideas in words in the engram, and the later idea of free feeling and bound feeling.

2. [You say that Ron told you that he and a friend in San Francisco had worked out the principles for a new religion. Was the friend Arthur Burks? Did Ron say whether this friend was a Science Fiction writer?] Ron never mentioned the friend in San Francisco by name or occupation. I don’t have any idea.

3. [I agree that ‘reverie’ was certainly a hypnotic technique. You give the idea that this developed out of something more overtly hypnotic. If so, what?] In August, Sept, Oct, we were using light trance hypnosis techniques, complete with counting down and cancelers. This was in the original book, I’m sure. Ron discovered by the time he was writing DMSMH that this was not necessary, and began to talk reverie.

4. [‘DMSMH’ goes into some detail about the endocrine system. Was this discussion the result of Winter’s study of that field (he mentions that he studies this in Illinois before joining Hubbard)?] In his practice Joe Winter had specialized in the endocrines. At Bay Head he talked freely of endocrine cases; he also contributed ideas and work with chemicals which might help auditing. The concept of the one-shot clear was always around some corner, hopefully. I still have some benzedrine from Joe’s prescription from those days; sometimes it seemed to help. I remember a year or so later some auditor saying that his preclears could run pain better if they took aspirin to dull it. There was also a guk project at Elizabeth in 1950. I wrote up a report on it for publication, but Ron wouldn’t have that, I suppose because the results were indeterminate. The principal ingredient of guk was glutamic acid, but there were also a lot of vitamins, etc. Ron got the idea from the mother of the man (Frank ______ ) who married Sonia Bianci, the girl who went to L.A. with Ron to demonstrate as a clear at the Hollywood Bowl in 1950. She had a lot of thyroid extract in it, which Ron wisely left out.

5. [How many people were employed at Elizabeth in its heyday?] I don’t really know how many people were on Elizabeth staff. Joe Winter never was. Ron was at least part of the time. There must have been thirty or more at one time, including secretarial, accounting, editing and publishing, teaching, and a gang of auditors, including staff auditors to audit the staff. Maybe it peaked about forty, maybe not that high. I could try a list of names:

Don Rogers, Eileen Judge, Parker Morgan, his secretary, Jack Maloney, his secretary, about three to five correspondence typists and clerks, Ann Deffebach and her sister, Paul Koontz, Jonathan Koontz, Waldo Boyd, Carol ____ (the guy who did the Flash Answer pub), Tom Mahoney and the other psychologist Irv Sokolov, Peg Kearny, the doctor (I think his name may have been Randolph), Jim Elliot, and a lot of group teaching auditors. Ron was not there after about September 1950 when he went to L.A. to give the course there; I was there myself during the month of September, but I returned; he did not.

Do you know about the whole Elizabeth school being moved to New York in 1951 to escape a real or imagined attack by the NJ Medical Ass’n, who might have closed it down for teaching medicine without proper qualifications. Through the courts by due process, of course, but with adverse publicity.

6. [How many people took a course there?] That’s a tough one. I would guess that over its history, including the time in New York, Elizabeth must have turned out somewhere around 200 or 300, HDA’s. I never had a figure. Jack Maloney would probably know; he ran the office. He may still be living; there is an unlisted phone for some Maloney in Rumson, NJ, but mail might not reach him without a street address, in a town of 7000 people. I used to talk to him every few years.

7. [Is Helen O’Brien right to say that the Dianetics boom was coming to a close by the Spring of 1951?] I would say yes, the boom was coming down in early 1951. Too many unfulfilled promises, I would say. Ron announced Scientology in April or May in a speech which I did not attend but heard of afterward.

8. [Is it true that Art Ceppos withdrew ‘DMSMH’ from sale? If so, do you know when?] My understanding is that Art Ceppos did not actually withdraw DMSMH from sale, but that he held back on pushing it. Ron fought his refusal to push it for all it was worth, tried to buy back the copyright, and finally bought it a few years later. If you looked at the book list of Hermitage House, you would see that this was an oddball, not respectable to the academic community, like the rest of the list. I went with others to one meeting with Ceppos on taking over the copyright.

9. [You say that Ron started to attack the Executive Committee at Elizabeth towards the end: “You never knew what he would do to create the next turbulence.” Could you give me any examples of this?] In the spring of 1951 he kept Elizabeth broke by drawing out money to use in L.A. He moved out of a house he and Sarah rented in Rahway and went to Calif without shutting off the water, so that Maloney was tied up with repairs after the pipes froze. Same with a house at Palm Springs where the shrubbery died from not being watered, and Jack kept getting the bills to replace it. He called with peremptory instructions to bring back all the D.A. Bul’s which were loaded for the Post Office, open them and add a stuffer about the opening of the clearing house at S. Hoover St., L.A. and a new technique to crack all hitherto uncrackable cases. It was he who instructed the move of the school to New York. It got so we would look at each other and wonder what he was going to do next, not that it was all intended to keep us off balance. I do remember one phone call where he asked me to spend more money on research so that hardship would push Parker and Jack to work harder at making it! I guess I didn’t believe it and gave him only lip service on it.

I remember the time he came back on a flying visit to Elizabeth and hid out in a hotel, to which Miles Hollister took me on some pretext. There he was in a room, with Parker Morgan sitting there. When Ron thrust a resignation under my nose and told me to sign it, with, I think, some physical intimidation, I got mad and told him he made it awfully hard for me to do a job for him when I couldn’t get communication out of him; I refused. And all the while Ron was shaking his fist, there was Parker, the lawyer, hollaring “it’s duress” and that I didn’t have to do it. Nuts to Parker’s legalisms! I was mad. Stirring times. I don’t think Ron realized that he could have chopped me off the payroll whether I resigned from the Board of Directors or not, and that with no control over my own job tenure I would have gone out like a lamb and got myself another job. Or he could have said politely, “Look fellas, thanks for the help up to now, but now I’d like to take over and run it myself without your help; I think a smaller board will be more maneuverable and I’d like to try it that way.” I would have resigned and left quietly. But he had to use the cloak and dagger approach.

10. [You mentioned the girl that Ron may well have been living with in LA in late ’50. Her name was Barbara, was her surname Suter, or Schnader (I’ve been told both)?] I’m not sure of the name of the girl in L.A. It may have been Sutler.

11. [According to Hubbard ‘past lives’ were a controversial issue at both the Elizabeth and the Wichita Foundations. The first mention I have of them is in a lecture dated 28th June ’50. I’ve been told that the Board at Elizabeth issued an order saying that any student running past lives would be thrown out. I’ve also been told that Hubbard himself approved of this Board order, but was forced to accept past lives because of the preponderance of auditors who were finding them. Can you elaborate?] Before I ever heard the mention of prior lives there was one private occasion on which I saw Ron run someone back into the past and up into the future, just to show that it could be done. I saw it as nothing but a parlor hypnosis trick, but you can’t keep a school of auditors and students from experimenting among themselves. One day sitting in the car outside of the Elizabeth building Ron asked me if I had any prior lives, and I obligingly ran one for him, made to order, or perhaps I should say made up to order to propitiate him.

I suspect that the whole problem was that Ron was requiring the running of prenatals, and they are not always what ought to be run next to advance the case. Perhaps a restimulated preclear seeks any port in a storm. Myself, I ran an awful lot of fake prenatals to keep the world happy and to fulfill my tacit agreement to be a good preclear in order to enter the glorious world of clear.

I don’t know whether to call it a Board order, but a strong effort was made by Ron and all of us to play down prior lives and get on with the business at hand. They were a time-wasting digression.

12. [Wallis says that a ‘Board of Evidence’ was established at Elizabeth in November ’50 to investigate practitioners who were not licensed by the Foundation. This had something to do with so-called Black Dianetics, apparently. Can you tell me anything about this?] There was once an ethics board at Elizabeth, concerning itself mostly with trivial and/or fictitious matters; I wasn’t the only one running fake engrams. Ron introduced the idea of pain drug hypnosis, possibly in all seriousness because he saw a threat, and possibly because he wanted to enturbulate. Anyway, there were accusations, etc, and it was not a constructive atmosphere. By that time, however, I think there was no longer an ethics board. Our board reminds me of the one in Washington in 1977 when I visited, which was concerning itself with some poor devil who swiped a pack of Kools out of a carton which was in the shipping room ready to go to Ron, and making a federal case of it. If you put low-toned people on an ethics board, they will always find something to accuse someone of, and we didn’t have any high-toned people. You see one of the promises was that you could hire low-toned people and clear them to get a superior staff. It didn’t work out.

13. [Wallis talks about an experiment at the LA HDRF where ‘pain-drug-hypnosis’ was used on a volunteer. Auditors there allegedly failed to recover the incident. Do you know anything about this?] I know of no such incident. I do know of a student project at L.A. where it was arranged to anesthetize one of the students and recover the message he was given while unconscious, in order to convince some hospital doctor or interne that pentothal unconsciousness could actually be penetrated by dianetic techniques. The subject was a tall guy named John; I forget his last name. I never found out whether they got any results, and I think I would have if they did.

14. [When you started working on what was to become the Electrometer, were you aware of earlier work on ‘psychogalvanometers’? (Jung was using some such instrument before the First War).] Oh yes. The psychogalvanometer was in all the psychology books of the time. I was trying to hire an experimental psychologist to do experimental work with it at Elizabeth, but found it hard. I guess it was a matter of academic credentials and the odor of charlatanism. I wasn’t really working on such an instrument. The thing I had was from an early attempt to measure bio potentials, such as the eeg measures on the head and the ekg on the torso. It had nothing to do with skin resistance. But since the tube drew a little grid current through the handles, it had a slight spurious E-meter effect, moving the pointer about 1/16″ when the holder went through a big engram. Before I had figured out whether this might lead anywhere, I mentioned it to Gene Benton, and he and another guy told Ron about it and then came around to the house one day to borrow it in a hurry to show him. He got his E-meter development elsewhere. Partly, I guess, from Volney G. Matheson.

15. [Helen O’Brien said in her book that someone she knew had left the Elizabeth HDRF because of massive discrepencies in the books. Do you know anything about this?] I never heard of anything wrong with the Elizabeth books, or of any pecuniary dishonesty there, and I think I would have heard about it if there was. Transfers of money to L.A. were perfectly legal, because it was a sister non-profit corporation.

16. [When exactly did Ron disappear to Cuba? He was accused of kidnapping Alexis, do you know anything about that?] While I was in Wichita in May, 1951, Don Purcell chartered a plane and brought Ron back from Cuba, where he had been I think two or three months, I think with Richard DeMille. I don’t know anything about his ever kidnapping Alexis, or even charges of it.

17. [Were you at the Hubbard College Lecture in March ’52?] I was never at Hubbard College. I left Wichita about the end of May, 1951 and came home to Fanwood, NJ, and got a job in Utility Electornics in East Newark. I corresponded with Don Purcell for years, though.

18. [Are you still in touch with anyone who was involved in Dianetics?] Yes, I am still in touch with several. I think Ron will probably answer my last letter. I am in touch with Jack Coriell, Elizabeth HDA. Almost out of touch with Perry Appleton, Elizabeth HDA, who has not answered my last two letters. I was in touch with Jack Maloney until a few years ago, and I can find him or his wife in Rumson, I’m sure. I have tried and failed to trace Jim Elliot, tho I never went to Cleveland to hunt for traces in person. I feel still in touch with Van Vogt, although we communicate seldom. My tracing of Parker Morgan led me to conclude that he died a few years ago when his name disappeared from the lawyer registries. Don Purcell died. I tried once to find the Koontz brothers by phone around Delray Beach, FL, but no luck and no idea where else to look. Waldo Boyd is on the west coast; he had a letter in one of the SF mags a few years back, with an address. John Campbell died. Joe Winter died; I don’t know where Marge and Joe, Jr., went. Peg (Winter)(Kearny) Campbell disappeared; I think she went back to Michigan, but lost touch entirely. I talked with Art Ceppos about something a few years ago at Hermitage by phone. I think I know how to reach both Judge Street, who has cut himself off from the crowd, and Liz and Bruce Byall, who were stuck in 1950 techniques the last time I saw them when I was out on the coast maybe ten years ago. It’s been a long time and a fluid population, you lose people you don’t keep close track of. I’ve thought of tracing Dick Weigand in Idaho, although I never knew him. I don’t know where to find Gene and Peggy Benton, unless she turns up in the directory of the Am Psych Assn; perhaps neither of them became an HDA, although they both were on Elizabeth staff at one time or another. I am in touch with Nora (Chrouch)(Lawrence) Combs, HDA. Her husband Larry Lawrence died. I think I can find Dick Saunders, HDA, and his wife, Ann Deffebach, HDA, who were both on Elizabeth staff, and Ann would know where to find her sister, also HDA and staff. I have tried to trace Jim Shipp, of Wichita staff, and the famous Ron Howes. No luck. I could probably think of others, if I took more time.

Lately one of the Scientology clears I have been in touch with gave me a new thought. In connection with some flaw in organization performance, Ron said that something was not his doing, but organization staff. When asked why he permitted it, he said that you couldn’t build self-determination unless you encouraged (or was it let) people to be self-determined (implying that you had to accept their mistakes as part of it.) This was employment and delegation, of course, and not therapeutic method. Maybe we are seeing something that looks like change in him, and maybe he had it under cover all the time. You guess, if you can keep up with him.

Also, please tell me some about yourself. How did you get into Scientology, where are you on the grade chart, how did you happen to break with their establishment?

Donald H. Rogers

 
——————–

Make your plans now!

HOWDYCON UPDATE

Wow, we’re now less than two months out, and Chee Chalker is working hard to make sure things are going to run smoothly at this year’s HowdyCon in Chicago, June 21-23. As in past years, we’re looking forward to meeting readers of the Bunker, culminating in Saturday night’s main event.

The biggest difference this year is that our Saturday night event is separate from that evening’s dinner. Chee is setting up an inexpensive pizza dinner that you don’t need to pay for ahead of time, after which we’ll walk over to the theater where our event, hosted by Chicago Fire star Christian Stolte, will take place. Because it’s a separate event, we’re asking that you pay $10 each to get into the Saturday night event, which will help us recoup what the Bunker paid for the venue. (We have never made a penny on our HowdyCon meetups, we only try to break even.)

Please email your proprietor (tonyo94 AT gmail) in order to reserve your spot for Saturday night’s main event. Seating is limited, and we’re going to have some really interesting people on stage and they may make a few announcements that you don’t want to miss.

 
——————–

——————–

Posted by Tony Ortega on May 9, 2018 at 07:00

E-mail tips and story ideas to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Our book, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, is on sale at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. We’ve posted photographs of Paulette and scenes from her life at a separate location. Reader Sookie put together a complete index. More information can also be found at the book’s dedicated page.

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

Our non-Scientology stories: Robert Burnham Jr., the man who inscribed the universe | Notorious alt-right inspiration Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jewish DNA | The selling of the “Phoenix Lights” | Astronomer Harlow Shapley‘s FBI file | Sex, spies, and local TV news